Re: [P2P-F] sharing, essence of things, technological determinism, economic determinism, and neoliberalism
Hello Martin, On Fri, Jan 7, 2011 at 1:09 AM, j.martin.pedersen < [email protected]> wrote:
I agree to most of what you say, on some levels, but the point here is about what some lawyers and philosophers call starting point: It is typical of neoliberal economics to start with the "thing" as opposed to the social.
I don't know which philosophers you are referring to. However I would reject this approach as an unnecessary expansion of what neoliberalism stands for. Accordiong to this logic a claim such as 'Digital technologies will ultimately lead to communism' would have the thing as starting point and as such be neoliberal. Isn't this sort of absurd? One might well argue that this statement is false, even silly - fair enough, it probably is. But it is not neoliberal. Another example: 'Digital technologies have brought about new social practices which in turn have created havoc in the creative industries.' This statement starts with the thing, moves on to the social in a determining way, and concludes with an economic situation. In my view it would be very difficult to argue against this claim. It seems to me that this is a correct statement. How can it be neoliberal? I suppose I am reacting to strongly to this because I find myself struggling with issues regarding determinism. I have - like you and like most sociologists and anthropologists - always made a case for the primacy of the social (should we call this social determinism?), but with the rise of the information age/ the network society/the digital economy this very familiar position started to erode a litte bit. It is an interesting question why * social* sciences insist so stongly on the primacy of the *social*, or on * social* determinism. It is like a natural reflex. I wonder if this has something to do with a protection of disciplines. Obviously, if people concede that the social can sometimes and in some situations be determined by the thing, disciplines such as sociology and anthropology lose ground and relevance Helpful to avoid economic determinism is Marx and his notion of mode of production, which combines technology (productive forces) and social relations (property relations, power relations etc.). Talking about a digital mode of production then refers to technologies and to the social struggles over competing economic alternatives, which are fought for between various political groups at the moment.
So, yes, you can and should distinguish between technological and economic determinism, and in this case both are at play: firstly the economic determinism, where the thing is foregrounded, then the technological determinism where the essence of the thing determines how it should be organised. Both of which background the social.
My point is merely that social aspects come first: you can easily share a car if you don't see it as an extension of your penis or fundamentally constitutive of your identity (both of which are promoted through advertising), I just throw you my keys. If I am not a very selfish and ego-centric person there is likely no problems sharing it all.
And access does matter, as far as I am concerned, as does the labour and resources and energy that is required for cyberspace to exist: these are enormous social actions and systems that have to continually be sustained. Access also costs the world. So from the perspective of the displaced peasant (where minerals are mined or a river dammed), sharing a poem digitally is really a bummer - cyberspace is huge enterprise, where the materiality is somewhat hidden. The same goes for the electricity system: there is no apparent change when I flick the switch in my house - your house still has light - so why should I not have the light on all the time, in all rooms? Install another lamp or two? Also, if I download your poem from your website a thousand times a second, then noone else can share it. The similarities are striking, I think, but not very surprising once we understand cyberspace as a huge industrial machine and not merely some immaterial appearence.
I completely agree with this. But as you say, the materiality behind the digital world is somewhat hidden. That is why it is so hard to get an idea about the external costs (monetary costs, environmental costs, etc.) of this. How can we start to calculate and evaluate these costs?
In solidarity with labour and with an ecological consciousness, the poem
is hard work to share digitally.
Sorry I cannot engage further with this. My partner has had a little child and I am drowning in stuff and responsbilities as well joy and wonder.
Congratulations. Enjoy the moment! andreas
Dear Andreas, Thanks for your very useful and cogent contributions. I have a question on social determinism. My own take on this is 'integrative', i.e. to take into account all aspects of a studied phenomenom, (inter)subjective, (inter)objective, and see how these aspects interact with each other; this basically puts the issue of determinisms 'between brackets', or, if you like, is agnostic about the ultimate determinations; nevertheless of course, in this four quadrants, various determinisms do exist, for example, certain technologies do act as enabling affordances, protocollary designs do allow/disallow certain actions, in the intersubjective field, I follow Allan Page Fiske's lead that the new digital sharing platforms re-introduce 'communal shareholding',i.e. a social logic where, as Stefan Meretz said elsewhere, giving and taking are disconnected, or as I would say, you may exchange with the whole as an option, if you want. But obviously, this communal shareholding exists with the larger 'materiality' (as martin would insist) of an existing class society. My position has always been that emancipatory forces can use and leverage the existing communal shareholding, as a way to change/transform the existing larger class society within which it exists. So if you like, it's like pitting two different social determinisms against each other, Michel On Fri, Jan 7, 2011 at 6:03 PM, Andreas Wittel <[email protected]>wrote:
Hello Martin,
On Fri, Jan 7, 2011 at 1:09 AM, j.martin.pedersen < [email protected]> wrote:
I agree to most of what you say, on some levels, but the point here is about what some lawyers and philosophers call starting point: It is typical of neoliberal economics to start with the "thing" as opposed to the social.
I don't know which philosophers you are referring to. However I would reject this approach as an unnecessary expansion of what neoliberalism stands for. Accordiong to this logic a claim such as 'Digital technologies will ultimately lead to communism' would have the thing as starting point and as such be neoliberal. Isn't this sort of absurd? One might well argue that this statement is false, even silly - fair enough, it probably is. But it is not neoliberal. Another example: 'Digital technologies have brought about new social practices which in turn have created havoc in the creative industries.' This statement starts with the thing, moves on to the social in a determining way, and concludes with an economic situation. In my view it would be very difficult to argue against this claim. It seems to me that this is a correct statement. How can it be neoliberal?
I suppose I am reacting to strongly to this because I find myself struggling with issues regarding determinism. I have - like you and like most sociologists and anthropologists - always made a case for the primacy of the social (should we call this social determinism?), but with the rise of the information age/ the network society/the digital economy this very familiar position started to erode a litte bit. It is an interesting question why *social* sciences insist so stongly on the primacy of the * social*, or on *social* determinism. It is like a natural reflex. I wonder if this has something to do with a protection of disciplines. Obviously, if people concede that the social can sometimes and in some situations be determined by the thing, disciplines such as sociology and anthropology lose ground and relevance
Helpful to avoid economic determinism is Marx and his notion of mode of production, which combines technology (productive forces) and social relations (property relations, power relations etc.). Talking about a digital mode of production then refers to technologies and to the social struggles over competing economic alternatives, which are fought for between various political groups at the moment.
So, yes, you can and should distinguish between technological and economic determinism, and in this case both are at play: firstly the economic determinism, where the thing is foregrounded, then the technological determinism where the essence of the thing determines how it should be organised. Both of which background the social.
My point is merely that social aspects come first: you can easily share a car if you don't see it as an extension of your penis or fundamentally constitutive of your identity (both of which are promoted through advertising), I just throw you my keys. If I am not a very selfish and ego-centric person there is likely no problems sharing it all.
And access does matter, as far as I am concerned, as does the labour and resources and energy that is required for cyberspace to exist: these are enormous social actions and systems that have to continually be sustained. Access also costs the world. So from the perspective of the displaced peasant (where minerals are mined or a river dammed), sharing a poem digitally is really a bummer - cyberspace is huge enterprise, where the materiality is somewhat hidden. The same goes for the electricity system: there is no apparent change when I flick the switch in my house - your house still has light - so why should I not have the light on all the time, in all rooms? Install another lamp or two? Also, if I download your poem from your website a thousand times a second, then noone else can share it. The similarities are striking, I think, but not very surprising once we understand cyberspace as a huge industrial machine and not merely some immaterial appearence.
I completely agree with this. But as you say, the materiality behind the digital world is somewhat hidden. That is why it is so hard to get an idea about the external costs (monetary costs, environmental costs, etc.) of this. How can we start to calculate and evaluate these costs?
In solidarity with labour and with an ecological consciousness, the poem
is hard work to share digitally.
Sorry I cannot engage further with this. My partner has had a little child and I am drowning in stuff and responsbilities as well joy and wonder.
Congratulations. Enjoy the moment!
andreas
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I suppose I am reacting to strongly to this because I find myself struggling with issues regarding determinism. I have - like you and like most sociologists and anthropologists - always made a case for the primacy of the social (should we call this social determinism?), but with the rise of the information age/ the network society/the digital economy this very familiar position started to erode a litte bit. It is an interesting question why /social/ sciences insist so stongly on the primacy of the /social/, or on /social/ determinism. It is like a natural reflex. I wonder if this has something to do with a protection of disciplines. Obviously, if people
I find myself agreeing somewhat with Doug Engelbart, inventor of the mouse, who said we shape our tools and our tools then shape us. He talks of co-evolution of the human and their tools. We might call this "mutual determinism". When he says "shapes us", I presume "us" includes social relations. E.F.Schumacher (Small is Beautiful) went further and I strongly agree with him too. He wrote (in Work) that when we adopt a technology (shaped by someone else, presumably), we absorb the ideology (mindset, value-system) that comes with it. Schumacher believed that many technologies come embedded with ideologies, and those who think they can import a technology without also importing the ideology that comes with it are mistaken. This is probably more "technologically deterministic" than Engelbart, but I think E.F.Schumacher is correct, for some technologies at least. In fact, I did an analysis of the Internet, using Schumacher's perpective, and found several embedded mindsets/value-systems that Internet users are *forced* to absorb, often without realizing it. (For the complete piece, see http://www.scu.edu/sts/nexus/summer2005/VerzolaArticle.cfm) Let me just list three: 1. the universal dependence of Internet technology on the English language, down to the microcode inside microprocessors, forces us to learn English. If you learn the Anglo-Saxon tongue, you are bound to acquire the Anglo-Saxon taste. Learn the language, pick up the culture. 2. the automation mindset: to replace people with machines. This might make sense in a country rich in capital (though that's still debatable), but less so in countries rich in labor. When we replaced muscle-work with machines, we became less physically fit, what would happen as we replace mental-work with machines? 3. a built-in bias (in fact, subsidy) for global players and globalization.This is best seen in the Internet cost structure of flat rates regardless of distance. A 1mb file sent to a colleague using the same ISP costs as much as a 1mb file sent to someone at the other side of the globe. Yet the latter uses much more network resources (servers, routers, communication channels, etc.) than the former. So local players are charged higher per unit resource than global players, a subsidy for globalization that is built into the Internet, as designed today. So, do we reject the technology then? Schumacher's 1970s response was intermediate/appropriate technology. Today, Schumacher remains relevant, through the vocabulary might be different; I would say that we must also get involved in the redesign of the technology. This is why the talk about an alternative Internet on this list interests me a lot. I would not bind myself a priori to a fixed perpective that "things" determine social relations or that social relations determine "things". I would explore these perspectives on a case-to-case basis, and make use of whatever new and useful insight can come from either (or both). Greetings, Roberto
Dear Roberto, I think we can see technology design as a terrain of struggle, i.e. as a compromise between owners and initiators, designers and engineers themselves, and the wider public of users who transform either the usage or the tool itself. THis would mean that for each of the neoliberal effects that you are mentioning, I would place counter-trends which are actually potentially emancipatory, i.e. 1) the internet is multi-lingual and can be used as a counter-force to anglo-saxon language domination (the stress by david de ugarte and lasindias.net on language-based phyles) 2) the internet reintroduces the importance of creative living labour and the possibility to redesign the whole production process through shared design, giving a whole new meaning to automation in the service of local productive communities 3) the internet can be a tremendous force for relocalization and re-empowering local communities (see http://delicious.com/mbauwens/P2P-Neighborhoods) This is just to mention your three points, The effects you mention are therefore not inherent to the technology, but to socially dominant usage, which depends on the balance of forces in the wider society Michel On Sat, Jan 8, 2011 at 11:07 PM, Roberto Verzola <[email protected]>wrote:
I suppose I am reacting to strongly to this because I find myself
struggling with issues regarding determinism. I have - like you and like most sociologists and anthropologists - always made a case for the primacy of the social (should we call this social determinism?), but with the rise of the information age/ the network society/the digital economy this very familiar position started to erode a litte bit. It is an interesting question why /social/ sciences insist so stongly on the primacy of the /social/, or on /social/ determinism. It is like a natural reflex. I wonder if this has something to do with a protection of disciplines. Obviously, if people
I find myself agreeing somewhat with Doug Engelbart, inventor of the mouse, who said we shape our tools and our tools then shape us. He talks of co-evolution of the human and their tools. We might call this "mutual determinism". When he says "shapes us", I presume "us" includes social relations.
E.F.Schumacher (Small is Beautiful) went further and I strongly agree with him too. He wrote (in Work) that when we adopt a technology (shaped by someone else, presumably), we absorb the ideology (mindset, value-system) that comes with it. Schumacher believed that many technologies come embedded with ideologies, and those who think they can import a technology without also importing the ideology that comes with it are mistaken. This is probably more "technologically deterministic" than Engelbart, but I think E.F.Schumacher is correct, for some technologies at least.
In fact, I did an analysis of the Internet, using Schumacher's perpective, and found several embedded mindsets/value-systems that Internet users are *forced* to absorb, often without realizing it. (For the complete piece, see http://www.scu.edu/sts/nexus/summer2005/VerzolaArticle.cfm) Let me just list three:
1. the universal dependence of Internet technology on the English language, down to the microcode inside microprocessors, forces us to learn English. If you learn the Anglo-Saxon tongue, you are bound to acquire the Anglo-Saxon taste. Learn the language, pick up the culture.
2. the automation mindset: to replace people with machines. This might make sense in a country rich in capital (though that's still debatable), but less so in countries rich in labor. When we replaced muscle-work with machines, we became less physically fit, what would happen as we replace mental-work with machines?
3. a built-in bias (in fact, subsidy) for global players and globalization.This is best seen in the Internet cost structure of flat rates regardless of distance. A 1mb file sent to a colleague using the same ISP costs as much as a 1mb file sent to someone at the other side of the globe. Yet the latter uses much more network resources (servers, routers, communication channels, etc.) than the former. So local players are charged higher per unit resource than global players, a subsidy for globalization that is built into the Internet, as designed today.
So, do we reject the technology then? Schumacher's 1970s response was intermediate/appropriate technology. Today, Schumacher remains relevant, through the vocabulary might be different; I would say that we must also get involved in the redesign of the technology. This is why the talk about an alternative Internet on this list interests me a lot.
I would not bind myself a priori to a fixed perpective that "things" determine social relations or that social relations determine "things". I would explore these perspectives on a case-to-case basis, and make use of whatever new and useful insight can come from either (or both).
Greetings,
Roberto
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Hi Michel,
1) the internet is multi-lingual and can be used as a counter-force to anglo-saxon language domination (the stress by david de ugarte and lasindias.net <http://lasindias.net> on language-based phyles)
Indeed, the Internet looks multi-lingual. It is in fact said that in a few years, there will be more Chinese language users than English on the Web. But this is the visible language that end-users see. However, HTML, C++, Java, PHP, Perl, etc. down to the assembly language of CPUs and their microcode -- the hardware language inside those CPUs -- all use English mnemonics. (I keep in my library a curious book ISBN 5-8206-0030-4 in Russian, about Unix. Throughout the book are Unix keywords including standard directories and filenames in English.) One has to learn some rudimentary English to master the technology. The technology itself plants the desire to learn the language. (By the way, Schumacher's book was entitled Good Work, not Work as I wrote in my earlier post.)
3) the internet can be a tremendous force for relocalization and re-empowering local communities (see http://delicious.com/mbauwens/P2P-Neighborhoods)
Yes, but all those who are using the Internet for local work are being forced to subsidize global communications. The bias/subsidy for globalization is there all the time, without additional effort, whether a user is aware of it or not, because technology itself masks the fact that long-distance communications actually costs more per unit resource than local communications -- even on the Internet. If Internet charging reflected this distance-dependent costs we would even be more inclined towards local communications than international ones. A long-time ago, I kept asking ISPs, why not charge by distance? The typical answer I got was that it was much harder to implement. Perhaps, as you say, it is "not inherent" in the technology, but it is so deeply embedded that it is as good as built-in. And the flat charging leads to the bias/subsidy I'm pointing out. I agree with you that we can work to overcome these. But the fact that we have to suggests that the design itself contains a built-in bias. This is the reason I'm all for an alternative Internet. But its designers must be very conscious about the biases they are building into the alternative technology. There is actually a mature technology that has the opposite bias (for localization) which is also so embedded in the technology that it forces the use of the local language and the focus on local interactions. This is low-power FM. That LPFM is not more widespread than it should is due mainly to the institutional bias against it, in favor of the Internet. The detailed comparison I made between the Internet and LPFM (the technology for most community radios) can be found here, p.169: http://rverzola.files.wordpress.com/2008/01/infoeconomy-verzola.pdf. Another example of building in a bias: I've been hoping that China would make a DVD player with a built-in burner (for sharing) and browser (for browsing HTML files mirrored on DVD), to encourage copying as well as local swapping of discs, a face-to-face social interaction, in contrast to the impersonal anonymous exchanges on the Internet. Greetings, Roberto
The effects you mention are therefore not inherent to the technology, but to socially dominant usage, which depends on the balance of forces in the wider society
Michel
On Sat, Jan 8, 2011 at 11:07 PM, Roberto Verzola <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
I suppose I am reacting to strongly to this because I find myself struggling with issues regarding determinism. I have - like you and like most sociologists and anthropologists - always made a case for the primacy of the social (should we call this social determinism?), but with the rise of the information age/ the network society/the digital economy this very familiar position started to erode a litte bit. It is an interesting question why /social/ sciences insist so stongly on the primacy of the /social/, or on /social/ determinism. It is like a natural reflex. I wonder if this has something to do with a protection of disciplines. Obviously, if people
I find myself agreeing somewhat with Doug Engelbart, inventor of the mouse, who said we shape our tools and our tools then shape us. He talks of co-evolution of the human and their tools. We might call this "mutual determinism". When he says "shapes us", I presume "us" includes social relations.
E.F.Schumacher (Small is Beautiful) went further and I strongly agree with him too. He wrote (in Work) that when we adopt a technology (shaped by someone else, presumably), we absorb the ideology (mindset, value-system) that comes with it. Schumacher believed that many technologies come embedded with ideologies, and those who think they can import a technology without also importing the ideology that comes with it are mistaken. This is probably more "technologically deterministic" than Engelbart, but I think E.F.Schumacher is correct, for some technologies at least.
In fact, I did an analysis of the Internet, using Schumacher's perpective, and found several embedded mindsets/value-systems that Internet users are *forced* to absorb, often without realizing it. (For the complete piece, see http://www.scu.edu/sts/nexus/summer2005/VerzolaArticle.cfm) Let me just list three:
1. the universal dependence of Internet technology on the English language, down to the microcode inside microprocessors, forces us to learn English. If you learn the Anglo-Saxon tongue, you are bound to acquire the Anglo-Saxon taste. Learn the language, pick up the culture.
2. the automation mindset: to replace people with machines. This might make sense in a country rich in capital (though that's still debatable), but less so in countries rich in labor. When we replaced muscle-work with machines, we became less physically fit, what would happen as we replace mental-work with machines?
3. a built-in bias (in fact, subsidy) for global players and globalization.This is best seen in the Internet cost structure of flat rates regardless of distance. A 1mb file sent to a colleague using the same ISP costs as much as a 1mb file sent to someone at the other side of the globe. Yet the latter uses much more network resources (servers, routers, communication channels, etc.) than the former. So local players are charged higher per unit resource than global players, a subsidy for globalization that is built into the Internet, as designed today.
So, do we reject the technology then? Schumacher's 1970s response was intermediate/appropriate technology. Today, Schumacher remains relevant, through the vocabulary might be different; I would say that we must also get involved in the redesign of the technology. This is why the talk about an alternative Internet on this list interests me a lot.
I would not bind myself a priori to a fixed perpective that "things" determine social relations or that social relations determine "things". I would explore these perspectives on a case-to-case basis, and make use of whatever new and useful insight can come from either (or both).
Greetings,
Roberto
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On 08/01/11 16:07, Roberto Verzola wrote:
I find myself agreeing somewhat with Doug Engelbart, inventor of the mouse, who said we shape our tools and our tools then shape us. He talks of co-evolution of the human and their tools. We might call this "mutual determinism". When he says "shapes us", I presume "us" includes social relations.
Engelbart likely ripped that from Winston Churchill, who said that "We make our buildings and our buildings make us". Anyway/However, the use of the word "determine" in the context of making political decisions socially, in council with one another within communities, has nothing much to do with "determinism", which is a philosophical concept (dating back to Aristotle) often used in sociological debates and which is a doctrine, very simply put, that "every event has a cause". In other words, to socially determine (and perhaps I should have used another term, such as "decide upon") has nothing to do with (social vs. technological) determinism debates, but all to do with political realities: the processes through which people make decisions. That is to say: in a community, that community should decide how they want to share their things, not the essence of the things in question. If a community decide to share their cars, but keep poems to themselves, then that is their decision. It should not be imposed upon them that cars are difficult to share, so they *shouldn't* be shared, and that poems are easy to share, so they *should* be shared. And this is, for the record, not so far fetched, as there are cultures in which certain forms of knowledge and their representations in the forms of various practices and artefacts are not shared freely, even though they easily could be, and that is because they fulfil certain cultural functions that glue the given society together. That said, please do continue the determinism debate, which is always (mildly) interesting on an intellectual level, but which doesn't get much further, to my mind, than Winston Churchill got to, and as such brings us back to the political question concerning decision making: In retrospective observations - and in the predictions that prophetic/opportunistic analysts can derive from them - no matter whether the social or the technological was the determining factor of some outcome (and we seem to agree that it is rather a recursive chaos than either of the two), the crucial point is that communities are in (or ought to be in) charge of making their own decisions (which they can do as they see fit with reference to whatever debates they like). Alternatively, of course, if one wants to insist on the essence of things as of primary importance, then the most important essence of all things, I would say, is that they are first and foremost *social things*, produced socially, with social (and environmental) costs, needs and so on, and as such should be decided upon socially. At any rate, as far as I am concerned, social vs. technological determinism is a displacement debate that keeps us from the "real questions", --- as Andrew Feenberg puts it: "What human beings are and will become is decided in the shape of our tools no less than in the action of statesmen and political movements. The design of technology is thus an ontological decision fraught with political consequences. The exclusion of the vast majority from participation in this decision is profoundly undemocratic": Transforming Technology: A Critical Theory Revisited (Oxford University Press, 2002: 3) -m
participants (4)
-
Andreas Wittel -
j.martin.pedersen -
Michel Bauwens -
Roberto Verzola