Category: digital economy?

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Reblog> Does Academia.edu Mean Open Access Is Becoming Irrelevant?

A really interesting post by Gary Hall on his blog around what ‘open access’ means and how we negotiate what might be understood as the ‘attention economy’ of academia in relation to the ways in which sites like academia.edu and research gate leverage the ‘respectability’ of our work and our collective need to find audiences in order to generate valuable metadata. As Hall argues:

 In this world who gate-keeps access to (and so can extract maximum value from) content is less important, because that access is already free, than who gate-keeps(and so can extract maximum value from) the data generated around the use of that content, which is used more because access to it is free.

I heartily recommend reading the whole piece…

Does Academia.edu Mean Open Access Is Becoming Irrelevant?

brief discussion took place this month on the Association of Internet Researchers air-l listserve concerning a new book from the publishers Edward Elgar: Handbook of Digital Politics. Edited by Stephen Coleman and Deen Freelon, this 512 page volume features contributions from Peter Dahlgren, Nick Couldry, Christian Fuchs, Fadi Hirzalla and Liesbet van Zoonen, among numerous others. The discussion was provoked, however, not by something one of its many contributors had written about digital politics, but by the book’s cost: $240 on Amazon in the US. (In the UK the hardback is £150.00 on Amazon. Handbook of Digital Politics is also available online direct from the publishers for £135.00, with the ebook available for £40.) As one of those on the list commented, ‘I’d love to buy it, but not at that price’ – to which another participant in the discussion responded: ‘I encourage everyone to use the preprint option to post their piece on ssrn.com and academia.edu, perhaps others have other open access suggestions (e.g. Institutional Repositories of individual universities)’. Now, to be fair, the idea that is implied by this suggestion – that the Academia.edu platform for sharing research represents just another form of open access – is a common one. Yet posting on Academia.edu is far from being ethically and politically equivalent to using an institutional open access repository.

Read the whole post here.

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Critical reflection on the ‘sharing economy'(?)

“Sharing is caring“, The Circle – David Eggers.

“the question of work time outside employment is posed with renewed vigour, having been totally ignored by the law reducing the working week to thirty-five hours, just as it ignored the exhaustion  of the consumerists industrial model, a model within which production and consumption constitute a functional opposition, but one that has now become obsolete”, For a New Critique of Political Economy – Bernard Stiegler.

I have had a bunch of tabs open in my browser with they intention of writing something about the ‘sharing economy’ and how one might begin to ask questions of the kinds of words we use to variously describe reconfigurations of labour/work in relation to peer-to-peer, precarious work, casualisation and (perhaps) the slow dissolution of labour movements but (as one can easily guess) I just don’t have the time to make something coherent about this… so here’s some notes, off the top of my head, with some pointers to things that may be worth reading…

In the Grauniad (as it struggles to contend with a Labour party that is significantly to the left of it) there was a piece by Alex Hern arguing that the term the ‘sharing economy’ should “die”. His argument is that what the ‘sharing economy’ supposedly denotes is no kind of sharing but rather the continuation of unequal labour relations between those with wealth and those in need of work – an example is TaskRabbit: a system to hire temporary labour, such as caterers, cleaners or someone to stand in the queue for the latest iPhone (probably without needing to ensure competitive remuneration, because people who are willing to stand in a queue for you are probably in a precarious position).

I have some sympathies with the argument  – it’s a reworking of the ‘precariat’ argument, best expressed by Guy Standing, in which the rejigging of the economy has created a new class of worker that is reliant upon ‘precarious’ (temporary, difficult and unpredictable) forms of work. However, reducing it to worrying over terminology seems to miss a broader point: regardless of what you call it, any attempt at novel economic activity will attract those who seek to be exploitative.

Before going on to think about how to address this state of affairs, it is worth noting that some have tried to think about how/why we are in such a situation. Izabella Kominska (on the FT website) offers a good overview of some of the ways in which economists have thought about post-Fordism ~ the kinds of automation that are (and are not) happening in manufacturing, the movements of labour (offshoring etc.) and why we don’t have the amount of leisure time and levels of productivity promised by greater automation.

Indeed, in order to extract more profit in an economy of apparently ever-increasing abundance many argue that it is only through business/industry clawing back a more exploitative relation with the labour force that they can continue to extract the levels of profit to which we have all become accustomed. We can look to the likes of the Italian post-Fordists, such as Berardi, Lazzarato, Terranova and Virno; to net critics such as Morozov; and to Bernard Stiegler for articulations of these latest forms of proletarianisation [you don’t have to agree, I’m just pointing out this is an argument that contextualises the ‘sharing economy’]. It is in this context of a decline in the amount of work – a decline of ‘careers’ and a growth of ‘jobs’, that Melissa Gregg articulates the need to rethink our words for labour and to critically think about what might underlie the push for a ‘sharing’ economy.

It is in this context that one might formulate a critique of the ‘sharing economy’ –– the talismans of this novel form of economic practice, the likes of Uber, TaskRabbit and Airbnb, all extract value out of people either rendering their traditional working capacities more ‘flexible’ (or precarious) or by those people seeking to monetise other parts of their lives, e.g. where they live, the stuff they own, or their ‘leisure time’.

The proponents of these kinds of work argue that this offers ‘flexibility’ – work when you want, how you want etc. but one might counter this with the argument that as flexible labour you have to be opportunistic and so you are precisely not working when you want but rather when there is a demand for your work.

Likewise, many of the kinds of ‘work’ that are offered through the ‘sharing economy’ platforms necessarily constitute unequal power relations. The two principal actors in the contract of ‘sharing’ work are not equal: the ‘sharing’ systems rely on creating competition, and thus a ‘scarcity’ of work such that the ‘customer’ has choice and the ‘worker’ doesn’t. The third actor, the platforms themselves, are also seeking to extract value out of the ‘sharing’ of labour by acting as the mediator, which means the system itself is always geared to the creation of a margin.

Seen as a precarious form of work, the ‘sharing economy’ has been labelled otherwise as the ‘gig economy’ and there’s been some interesting discussions about what such work means to us in terms of our mental and physical health. For example, these two pieces in the FT:

The silent anxiety of the sharing economy
New ‘gig’ economy spells end to lifetime careers

Both of which have lots of links to follow up.

The other aspect of an emerging critique of the ‘sharing economy’ is precisely the ‘platform‘ nature of the kinds of systems that are seeking both to further and to profit from these apparently new forms of work. As sebastian olma suggests in a piece for the Institute of Network Cultures:

These are digital platforms that roughly do two things: either making the old practice of re- and multi-using durable goods more efficient or expanding market exchange into economically uncharted territory of society.

Olma argues (as do other) that what these platforms do is render available to the market things that have not been previously…

They stand for a digitally enabled expansion of the market economy, which…is the opposite of sharing.

This is what Sascha Lobbo (amongst others – Gary Hall is good on this) has argued constitutes not a ‘sharing economy’ but a ‘platform capitalism’. Rather than marketplaces, platforms are a kind of generic connective infrastructure, what Olma calls an ‘ecosystem’, that connects customers and companies to anything, not just specific goods or services. He argues that

While it is absolutely true that internet marketplaces and digital platforms can reduce transaction costs, the claim that they cut out the middleman is pure fantasy.

the old ‘middlemen’ [sic.] are replaced by more powerful gatekeepers: “monopolies with an unprecedented control over the markets they themselves create”, through the quasi-autonomous systems (what get popularly referred to as ‘algorithms’) that facilitate such things as Uber’s “surge pricing“. In this way every transaction becomes an auction, which is tipped in the favour of the platform, and the worker is rendered always to some extent precarious.

Indeed, the reality of working in such systems is not only possibly very stressful, as argued in the FT piece linked a bit earlier, but also doesn’t even necessarily offer the positive outcomes that the proponents claim. As Sarah Kessler, a Fast Company journalist, noted in her extensive report of her attempt to become one of the ‘sharing economy’ workforce:

For one month, I became the “micro-entrepreneur” touted by companies like TaskRabbit, Postmates, and Airbnb. Instead of the labor revolution I had been promised, all I found was hard work, low pay, and a system that puts workers at a disadvantage.

This critique presents some interesting challenges to those who espouse alternative modes of working and performing economic activities, such as the P2PFoundation, and Stiegler’s push for an ‘economy of contribution‘ through Ars Industrialis. However, the ‘platform capitalism’ of Uber et al. is not the only way to run such a system.

Rather than resort to a gatekeeper model we might alternatively look to the (supposedly) radical transparency of the blockchain – in this way I’m left with some (probably quite muddled) questions:

  • What kind of economy/ economics is performed when the transactional infrastructure is decentralised?
    • Can you actually do without an intermediary (‘middleman’ [sic])?
    • Does a blockchain infrastructure facilitate enough of a commons to make a ‘no transaction cost’ economy possible?
  • Can we reduce ‘sharing’ to an issue of the negotiation of trust (not to be exploited), solvable by the blockchain?

There must be more/better questions but my brain is fried… I hope that this is at least useful for me to return to as a set of loose notes and perhaps even useful for others vaguely interested in such things. Likewise, as usual, if you’re better informed and want to pitch in – please do leave comments 🙂

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The Human Face of Cryptoeconomies – @furtherfield exhibition

I just wanted to flag this excellent exhibition about to start at Furtherfield (in London). It involves the Museum of Contemporary Commodities alongside a lot of other great work and will very much be worth visiting.

The Human Face of Cryptoeconomies

17 OCTOBER – 22 NOVEMBER 2015

Featuring Émilie Brout and Maxime Marion, Shu Lea Cheang, Sarah T Gold, Jennifer Lyn Morone, Rob Myers, The Museum of Contemporary Commodities (MoCC), the London School of Financial Arts and the Robin Hood Cooperative.

Furtherfield launches its Art Data Money programme with The Human Face of Cryptoeconomies at Furtherfield Gallery in the heart of London’s Finsbury Park.

The Human Face of Cryptoeconomies presents artworks that reveal how we might produce, exchange and value things differently in the age of the blockchain.

Appealing to our curiosity, emotion and irrationality, international artists seize emerging technologies, mass behaviours and p2p concepts to create artworks that reveal ideas for a radically transformed artistic, economic and social future.

Visit the Furtherfield website for more information.

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Reblog> New paper: Locative media and data-driven computing experiments @syperng & @robkitchin

A really interesting paper by Sung-Yueh Perng, Rob Kitchin and Leighton Evans, definitely worth a read.

New paper: Locative media and data-driven computing experiments

Sung-Yueh Perng, Rob Kitchin and Leighton Evans have published a new paper entitled ‘Locative media and data-driven computing experiments‘ available as Programmable City Working Paper 16 on SSRN.

Abstract

Over the past two decades urban social life has undergone a rapid and pervasive geocoding, becoming mediated, augmented and anticipated by location-sensitive technologies and services that generate and utilise big, personal, locative data. The production of these data has prompted the development of exploratory data-driven computing experiments that seek to find ways to extract value and insight from them. These projects often start from the data, rather than from a question or theory, and try to imagine and identify their potential utility. In this paper, we explore the desires and mechanics of data-driven computing experiments. We demonstrate how both locative media data and computing experiments are ‘staged’ to create new values and computing techniques, which in turn are used to try and derive possible futures that are ridden with unintended consequences. We argue that using computing experiments to imagine potential urban futures produces effects that often have little to do with creating new urban practices. Instead, these experiments promote big data science and the prospect that data produced for one purpose can be recast for another, and act as alternative mechanisms of envisioning urban futures.

Keywords: Data analytics, computing experiments, locative media, location-based social network (LBSN), staging, urban future, critical data studies

The paper is available for download here.

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Excellent piece on why smartphone ownership is not a measure of poverty

I saw this piece in the New Statesman thanks to retweets on Twitter.

In the article No, having a smartphone doesn’t mean you’re not poor on “The Staggers” column/blog Liza Cucco, manager of Hackney Food Bank, clearly articulates why using smartphone ownership, and even internet access, as a measure of poverty is a red herring:

Successfully navigating 21st century Britain without interconnectivity is near to impossible; I know this, because despite stereotypes, many foodbank clients don’t actually have smartphones or even email addresses. Those who do have smartphones are not ignorant, they are savvy, choosing to allocate very limited resources to the ubiquitous multi-tool of our time, keeping essential streams of communication open. The moment a phone can’t be topped up or a contract must be cancelled is devastating to a person’s opportunity.

…

Regular internet access is essential to register for benefits, apply for most jobs (and respond in timely manner to emails offering interviews), to access course information in your studies, manage your bank account, communicate with your child’s school or make an appointment at your doctor’s surgery. In our immediate society, you are expected to be available at all times. Constant access may seem a necessity to a businessman, but it is just as important, if not more, to a cleaner on a zero-hours contract who must be available for work at the last minute, navigating to anywhere they need to be and keeping on top of online timecards to ensure they are paid for their work.

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Reblog> The Facebook Liberation Army at Discovery Festival: live deleting of facebook accounts

From the Institute of Network Culture blog… This is a nice playful response to the ways in which we can see uses of social media as ‘work’:

The Facebook Liberation Army at Discovery Festival: live deleting of facebook accounts

On Friday 25 September the Facebook Liberation Army made fresh calls to arms at the Discovery Festival in the science centre Nemo, Amsterdam.

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Armed with pamphlets, zines and instructions on how to leave Facebook the resistance came disguised as Mark Zuckerberg. Many new rebels were enlisted in the Facebook Liberation Army and alternatives to social media platforms were discussed.

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As well as offering advice on alternatives to Facebook the army also presented zines from The immaterial Labor union – a collective aimed to galvanize the workers of Facebook – initiated by Lidia Pereira. The evening was a resounding victory with even some people deciding to deactivate their Facebook accounts right their and then, serving to go on with their lives without negotiating Facebook’s terms of service.

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Character assassinations? There’s an app for that…

Interesting article on the Washington Post  site, tweeted by David Murakami Wood (above), that talks about a service/app called “Peeple” that seeks to be a “Yelp for people” – to enable us to ‘rate’ and ‘review’ one another… A market-driven death-knell for treating one another like ‘people’ (rendering the name rather ironic) and another attempt to pull a further aspect of ‘ordinary’ life into the attention economy. This is an attempted renegotiation of the ‘normative’, what Daniel Miller and Sophie Woodward, in their book Blue Jeans, describe as the sense in which “the expectation that actions within a social field are likely to be judged as right or wrong, appropriate or inappropriate, proper or transgressive”. What if reviewing one another became ‘normal’..?(!!) *sigh*

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Reblog> Here’s why visions of ubiquitous connectivity aren’t going to be realised any time soon

Interesting post from Mark Graham on his blog…

Here’s why visions of ubiquitous connectivity aren’t going to be realised any time soon

The last few months have seen a wealth of stories about visions to connect the world. Facebook, Google, large international organisations, states, and even Bono, dream of a world in the near future in which we are all hooked into the network.

In the midst of all of this, I found a comment made by Jimmy Wales particularly interesting.

This hope of the inevitability of ubiquitous connectivity is one that is widely reproduced by other policy makers, technologists, and thought leaders.

However, it is a hope that needs to be unpacked. There are two ways in which this hypothetical future in which everyone is connected could be brought into being.
The first one of these futures is a world where everyone can afford access. But as we demonstrated in our research about the global affordability of broadband, dropping prices is unlikely to be a sufficient strategy. There will remain billions of people making a subsistence living, for whom even extremely cheap access is unaffordable.  The average Mozambican worker, for instance, would need over one and a half year’s salary to pay for one year’s worth of broadband access.

In other words, Jimmy Wales’ prediction won’t happen simply by lowering prices.
Broadband_Affordability-1024x723
The second future is the one promoted by the likes of Mark Zuckerberg. One in which large corporations sponsor free (and importantly, limited) access for billions of people in return for attention monopolies. This brings a very different sort of Internet into being: one in which winners and losers, centres and peripheries, are already pre-selected by those who control your access.

What this all ultimately means is that it seems unlikely that any sort of open Web will be ubiquitously available in the near future. Simply lowering the cost of access will continue to leave out the very poorest; and handing over the project of connecting the disconnected to large technology firms will leave us with a very different (and far less desirable) sort of Internet.

To read a bit more about visions of connectivity, here are two of my recent papers:

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Two theme issues to explore: ‘Culture Digitally’ and ‘Digital Labour’

Just a quick post to flag two very interesting theme issues of journals that have been shared on Twitter recently:

So, in the above order:

As Nancy Baym highlights, the journal Social Media + Society has a theme issue edited, or as they suggest: curated, by Tarleton Gillespie and Hector Postigo on the theme of ‘Culture Digitally’, which is also the title of the group blog to which they both contribute.

As Aphra Kerr highlights, the journal Critical Studies in Media and Communication has a theme section on Digital Labour.

Between them, both have lots of contributions that look really interesting and worth exploring!

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Jean Lievens introduction to Michel Bauwens’ Sauver le Monde

Earlier this year I posted rough translations of both Bernard Stiegler’s Preface and Dirk Holeman’s Postface to Michel Bauwens and Jean Lievens’ book Sauver le Monde: Vers une société post-capitaliste avec le peer-to-peer [To Save the World: towards a post-capitalist society with peer-to-peer].

I’ve translated a bit more now and I make this translation available, for free, to the publishers to do as they wish with it. I hope it helps in some small way…

These are the first few pages of the book following the Preface, in two short sections: Introduction and About this book.

As usual, clarifications or original French are in square brackets and I welcome any comments or suggestions – although I’m not trying to offer an ‘authoritative’ translation…

Introduction

“We do not live in a changing age, but rather a change of age”
Professor Jan Rotmans
(Professor of the Theory and Management of Transition,
Erasmus University Rotterdam)

It would be pointless to try to convince the reader of a book entitled To Save the World that life on Earth, as we understand it today, is in peril. Following a recently published study in the journal Nature Climate Change, more that half of terrestrial plants and the habitats of around a third of animals will disappear because of climate change if greenhouse gas emissions continue to increase at the current rate. Scientists at the renowned Global Footprint Network (an international laboratory of ideas that measures ecological sustainability using ‘ecological footprints’) have calculated that, at present, we will need a planet and a half to maintain the current global economy. Furthermore, the growth rate required to maintain this system until 2053 would require the global economy to quadruple. In this case, we would need six planets. One does not need to be genius to understand that endless growth on a finite planet is a scientific nonsense and we are heading for a crash. Faced with this bleak perspective for the future, there are different ways to react: simple denial, to resign ourselves to it, or to attempt to do something about it.

To change the world, we can draw inspiration from the past, but we need a new way of addressing the challenges of the future. Michel Bauwens brings us such a vision. Not the visions, but a vision. The title of this book thus reflects a certain arrogance inconsistent with his character. Indeed, very intelligent people are often very modest, because they are very conscious of their own limitations. But who is Michel Bauwens? Beneath the title “The most stimulating Belgian thinker is an unknown philosopher” in the newspaper De Morgen (on the 23rd March 2012) presents him as follows:

“Do you know Michel Bauwens? Perhaps not. This 54-year-old cyberphilosopher is not well known. Bauwens is the first Belgian to figure in a list of the 100 most influential people in the world. He finds himself in the illustrious company of people such as Mahatma Ghandi (9), Martin Luther King (24), The Dalai Lama (28), Thomas Malthus (55) and John Kenneth Galbraith (70). Bauwens occupies 82nd place, a few rungs above Eleanor Roosevelt (87).”

The list referred to in De Morgen, “The (En)Rich List”, is a table of 100 people established by the Post Growth Institute, an international group of scientists that lobby for a sustainable society in which prosperity can be created without a need for economic doctrine [besoin de croissance économique]. The list of the “most enriching people” is a foil [clin d’Å“il – literally “a wink”, could be translated to ‘a nod’] to the 100 “richest people” in the world, published annually by the American financial magazine Forbes.

Cyberphilosopher, futurologist, economist, researcher, conference convener, entrepreneur”¦ These are some of the epithets given to Michel Bauwens by journalists. Wikipedia designates him as a “peer-to-peer theorist”, and he describes himself in this book as a commentator and thinker attempting to forge a coherent link between the theories, hypotheses and explications of peer-to-peer, and to do so in the most ethical way possible.

So what is ‘peer-to-peer’ (abbreviated to P2P)? This is a term not well known or understood outside of the world of IT enthusiasts and geeks, nevertheless the collaborative economy, forged through networks of peers, has rapidly gained in popularity throughout our countries. A year before the publication of that short article in De Morgen, the Dutch-language Belgian newspaper De Tijd (on the 23rd April 2013) published a detailed interview with Michel, across a double-page spread. Little by little, he has gained notoriety even in his country of birth. As is often the case, local recognition comes on the back of an international breakthrough, and not vice versa. It is well-known that: “No one is a prophet in their own country” [«Nul n’est prophète en son pays» – this is an idiom that some suggest traces back to the apostles Luke and Matthew].

About this book

This book is the outcome of twelve Skype interviews, of around an hour each, between January and February 2014. If I had arranged twelve more hours, if someone else had interviewed Michel, this would have been a different book. In any case, our aim is to share with you some ideas at the heart of peer-to-peer, production between peers, in the hope of inspiring you to further your understanding through other lectures, books and studies. As this book contains a number of important new and uncommon terms (for example, you may have already struggled with the term ‘peer-to-peer’ in the subtitle of this book), we have created a glossary that is situated at the end of the book.

Personally, I think that politicians, whether on the right or the left, have a tendency to see the future [l’avenir] through the rear-view mirror. Just as Marxism is an ideological construct of the 19th century, liberalism and nationalism find their origins in the 18th century. From a historical perspective these ideologies each have respective values but they no longer offer a response to the enormous difficulties that confront us today. This is also expressed in the way that politicians are unable to offer solutions. Not only because the political class tends to defend the status quo and their vested interests but also because many of the problems can only be solved at a global scale and thus local authorities are powerless. This certainly does not mean that nothing is possible at a local level, quite the contrary. On those occasions when everything is paralysed at national and international levels, only local level action allows real progress. This is reflected in particular by increased urbanisation (since the beginning of the 21st century more than a half of the global population has lived in towns and cities), or what Eric Corijn calls the emergence of “urbanity” as new form of post-national society, but also by the development of peer-to-peer mechanisms through which a number of people take their fate into their own hands by launching new projects from within the very institutional framework with which they have often clashed. In the face of the pessimism of the political world, there is optimism within the science of peer-to-peer. This is why solutions will come first from civil society.

We live in an era of enormous possibilities, but also of contradictions and gigantic obstacles to the full realisation of those possibilities. Machines have releaved us of a large part of manual labour (and increasingly of intellectual labour), but the automisation of production processes has not translated into the redistribution or the reduction of working time. Financial markets, often governed by mathematical algorithms upon which no one has a grip, have a greater impact than governments upon our lives. Our parliaments vote for laws that render collaboration and sharing illegal. Our economic model is founded upon the absurd idea of material abundance and immaterial rarity. We behave as if the world was limitless and exploit it to the utmost, to the point of jeopardizing the survival of the human species. Furthermore, we use copyright and patents to build artificial barriers around human knowledge to complicate sharing and collaboration as much as possible. Yet, from the society of the industrial revolution emerged new models and ways of working, heralding a new society. Thus, today, in the words of the Dutch Scientist Jan Rotmans: “We do not live in an era of change but in a change of era”.

The emerging model of peer-to-peer, inspired by the open source movement, seeks to circumvent the false logic of material scarcity and the artificial scarcity of the immaterial. In the apparent tangle of new phenomena such as the collaborative economy, peer-to-peer networks, open source, crowd-sourcing, FabLabs, micro-factories, the “maker” movement, urban agriculture and so on, Michel Bauwens sees a model that leads us to a post-capitalist society, in which the market finally submits to the logic of the commons (the common good). This book is a first attempt to articulate ideas concerning peer-to-peer formulated by Michel Bauwens. It is not simply the result of the reflections of a single person but rather the collective inteilligence of a growing minority of active pioneers who are developing and revealing thousands of projects and experiences amongst peers. Hopefully they will be an inspiration for all who are active in this area and work to build a new world, starting with what affects us directly.

Jean Lievens
9th July 2013