Category: digital economy?

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Bots book up top restaurant tables

The BBC carried a story in their technology section today about coders writing custom bot scripts that search for restaurant reservations and book tables before those looking for themselves can respond.

The story comes from a blog post by a chap called Diogo Monica, in Silicon Valley (where else), who noticed that tables at a good restaurant he likes were getting booked up by bots and so he decided to write one for himself. The BBC story narrates how:

The code emailed Mr Monica when other diners cancelled reservations or SBP released more tables. While the code helped him get a table now and then it quickly became ineffective. Close scrutiny of the [restaurant’s] website revealed why.

“I found myself looking at it and noticed that as soon as reservations became available on the website (at 04:00), all the good times were immediately taken and were gone by 04:01,” he wrote.

As with many other time sensitive transactions, in this fairly rudimentary software domain of online reservations a veritable arms race has ensued in the creation of more sophisticated and more rapid software programmes. The fairly arbitrary rules of booking, with automated update timings etc., become the terrain for battle. Where once the ‘who you know’ at the restaurant or in the right social circles would secure you a good table at the most desirable location and time it seems to have transformed, in some cases, into the ‘what you know’ of online booking systems code. As Mr Monica suggests:

“As for tactics, think of this war like high-frequency trading,” he said. “The people with the best algorithms/optimisations will have an edge over everyone else.”

Bonkers.

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Facial tracking to be built into screen-based advertising in the UK

For those with an interest in such things, this has been a long time coming. The company Quividi, who have been hawking their facial tracking system for a little while now, have teamed up with Amscreen, the owner of a network of advertising screens in convenience stores, petrol stations etc, to measure, in real-time, the attention paid to adverts screened in particular places. The problematic of the ‘attention economy‘, or the commodification of our capacity for attention within particular settings–mostly online, is being brought into more everyday settings as so-called ‘smart’ technologies become smaller and cheaper.

Here’s the thinly veiled sales pitch the BBC ‘Click’ programme were only too happy to share:

Which contains a lot of the footage Amscreen have filmed themselves for their own corporate video celebrating this new venture. Here’s Quividi’s own video explaining (and selling) how their technology works:

In the UK, already a highly surveilled country, there may be little reaction other than a shrug of the shoulders. However, should one wish to counter this kind of technology there have already been some nice experiments with forms of camouflage. Probably the best known example is the CV Dazzle project by Adam Harvey (for a Masters project in the NYU Interactive Telecommunications Programme). It would be entertaining if this became a sort of avant-garde fashion for make up…

CV Dazzle, facial recognition camouflage

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A comprehensive list of data sources and services

Reblogged from Thinking Culture:

Via Rob Kitchin on Twitter, the Visualising Data blog has an entry that is described as ‘A big collection of sites and services for accessing data‘. The post contains a comprehensive list of the data sources, and analysis tools, that are available. These are also helpfully categorised under headings. This is a really important development that could prove to be a key resource for researchers and students who are looking to use digital or ‘big’ data in their research. Here is the description of the list from the post:

‘This collection presents the key sites that provide data, whether through curated collections, offering access under the Open Data movement or through Software/Data-as-a-Service platforms.‘

Read more…

As David suggests, this looks very handy.

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Stiegler – Open data and the economy of contribution

I recently came across an interesting interview with Bernard Stiegler on the ‘Views on the digital’ (Regards sur le Numerique)  blog by Microsoft France, from 2011. The interview focusses on the rise of open data, as a movement and a phenomenon.

Stiegler suggests that ‘open data’ is a singular and important aspect of a ‘change of epoch’ taking place through the sociotechnical capacities of internetworked digital technologies. It is the capacities for making information public and sharable that we realise with and through digital technologies that are making possible a social and political shift. This is, of course, not without risk — in Stiegler’s terms these new capacities for becoming (or in his terminology – transindividuation) are pharmacological, the particular ways in which they play out in the world can be both a ‘poison’ and a ‘cure’ (following Plato’s argument that writing is a pharmakon). Elsewhere, Stiegler argues that such an economy of ‘pharmka’ is a therapeutic — it is possible to resolve the poison/cure relation either way — that is not dialectical (i.e. an opposition) but rather a composition of tendencies that emerge in the relations of a milieu.

Open data, as ‘grammatised’ (discrete) forms of externalised memory (or hypomnemata), are compositional not least because of their ‘openness’ to use and reuse. Metadata, as the organisational forms that facilitate the composition of complex structures of information, generate the possibility of new organisational forms (a new ‘organology’ in Stiegler’s terms) that facilitate the ‘pollination’ of new ideas through forms of collective intelligence. These are the bases for what Stiegler considers to be the positive economic (therapeutic) model that he describes as the economy of contribution.

An economy of contribution facilitates a ‘de-proletarianisation’ of those contributing to the economy by maximally recognising their contributions, above and beyond the short-term imperative for financial profitability. This enables all of us to re-engage of capacities for critical knowledge, our life skills (savoir vivre), our practical capacities and techniques (savoir faire), and ultimately our care for one another and for our shared world. It is through (open) metadata and clever digital systems that such recognition of ‘positive externalities’, Stiegler argues, can be achieved. All of this is not easy, as the activitist association that Stiegler heads-up, Ars Industrialis, acknowledge in their manifesto, but that doesn’t mean to say its not worth pursuing…

Readers may also find of interest two other interviews with Stiegler I have translated: Bernard Stiegler: “We are entering an era of contributory work” and Overconsumption and the economy of contribution.

I hope this is of interest to people. It is a fairly quick translation so it may need a little more work and, as usual, I’ve added some clarifications in square brackets. All of the emphasis is original.

Bernard Stiegler: Open data is “an event of a magnitude comparable to the appearance of the alphabet”.

To accompany the reflective workshop concerning the phenomenon of open data that we organised for the 17th of March [2011], we are sharing a series of articles, reports and analyses around the question of the liberation of data. We offer to you here an interview with Bernard Stiegler, philosopher and director of the Institute for Research and Innovation (IRI, Pompidou Centre) concerning the values of the open data movement.

RSLN: What does the development of open data represent in the great adventure of the digital?

Bernard Stiegler: This is the culmination of a major rupture already well under way, and which has never been previously seen. All of the technologies monopolised by the culture industry, in the broadest sense of the term, for a century, are now moving into the hands of the citizens.

It is an event of a magnitude comparable to the appearance of the alphabet which, as a technics of publication, which is to say that which renders public, is the basis of the res publica, just like what took place after Gutenberg and the Reformation, generalising access to the printed word and knowledge.

Today, all industrial, cultural and scientific digital activities leave a digital trace that everyone can use thanks to tools which are becoming increasingly accessible. This is more than a major issue: this is a change of epoch. And to think about the phenomenon of open data, which is a singular aspect of this change, it is necessary to consider metadata: which is what makes data active.

RSLN: Open data is only part of this revolution…

Bernard Stiegler: Every one of us now is not only using digital tools, but participates through their practices in the production of metadata. However, metadata have played an important role in human destiny since prehistory: in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries clay tablets were discovered that were covered with cuneiform that describes the content of other tablets – these are the first known index systems: the first metadata.

Whoever masters the production of metadata has a power over collective memory: it can condition public debate and learning. With the digital, what was once top down production becomes bottom up, which changes the production and dissemination of knowledge, which is no longer the sole preserve of established powers (political, religious, industrial…) – the typical example of this transfer [of agency] being Wikipedia.

Of course, the movement is very disorganised and remains little analysed, furthermore, while some [people] consciously create metadata, many do not realize that they are made the objects of calculation via the cookies that “deposit” themselves on their computers or [they] self-index themselves on the web via Facebook or their blogs.

Different ideologies

RSLN: How can this disorder become virtuous?

Bernard Stiegler: The design of the society of tomorrow will depend on recognising the importance of this phenomenon. If this is insufficient, we will lay ourselves open to a veritable automation of society, in which only a few have control. It is therefore imperative to deliberate in a public and reasoned way.

It is in the context of this new democratic possibility that open data is constructed. A large number of powers hold data that they do not want to give up because their power is based on the retention of that very same information. At the same time, we know that secrecy may be necessary – whether protecting private life, or enabling the avoidance of war, and inscribing in the real-time of decision-making a time of delay which allows a moment of reflection.

Nevertheless, democracy is always linked to a process of publication – which is to say a rendering public – which makes possible a public space: of letters, print, broadcast, digital. The critique put forward by Plato of the use of writing by the Sophists shows us that this equally brings dangers.

A total re-establishment of public affairs will have to take place – and here we must not let this take place at the sole initiative of the economic world, which is to say only by private interests, the recent economic crisis shows us that they never coincide with the public good.

RSLN: The nascent open data movement nevertheless seems to meet very different objectives and sometimes even very different ideologies?

Bernard Stiegler: That is true. So, for Barack Obama and Al Gore, who advises him, it undoubtedly leads to the reconstruction of a critical power inspired by the Enlightenment and the “founding fathers” against the hegemony of the cultural industries. While in the neo-liberal spirit of David Cameron in Great Britain, the aim is instead to bypass the public services.

RSLN: Indeed, can the development of Open Data withstand the demand for profitability, which is not evident in the short term?

Bernard Stiegler: I have put forward the model of an economy of contribution, which takes into account what economists call positive externalities, where we come to value activities that take place outside of the market, and which also lead to development and empowerment, in the sense of Amartaya Sen. [For example,] During the baby boom period, the educational work of mothers which was conducted outside of the economic sphere was fully taken into account – and I do not think we can monetize this activity by turning it into a “service”.

Collective intelligence has become the main economic value. The best ideas are born in the fertile soil and common knowledge that are not generally in the model of immediate profitability but are a kind of “pollination.”

The result is much more interesting than what we can impose through a Jacobin state [a centralised republic] or large corporations, whose intelligence should [instead] be in the service of valuing and supporting new ‘green shoots’. The role of public power is, especially in the realm of public-private partnerships, to foster the creation of spaces that can support the recovery process.

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Bernard Stiegler: “We are entering an era of contributory work”

The website Rue89 have published an interesting and accessible interview with Bernard Stiegler on the theme of an economy of contribution. In the interview Stiegler offers some general observations and examples of how contributory work might function. I have made a quick translation of the interview, below, I hope it is of interest. As ever, please do offer comments, corrections etc.

Continue reading “Bernard Stiegler: “We are entering an era of contributory work””

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Careful making – Stiegler’s Economy of Contribution

Following on from the fairly rapid translation I made of the Fondation Macif interview with Stiegler, a few emerging thoughts have been rattling around that I thought I’d post here. I want to think about the centrality of an ethos of care to Stiegler’s proposition of the economy of contribution and the kind of ethics this suggests for Stiegler’s philosophy. Continue reading “Careful making – Stiegler’s Economy of Contribution”

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Stiegler – overconsumption and the economy of contribution

The French activist organisation Fondation Macif have recently published a short interview with Bernard Stiegler, in French, that I have translated below. In the interview Stiegler briefly restates his theory of proletarianisation in relation to (over)consumption and, in response, the creation of an economy of contribution.

My main interest in (quickly) translating this short piece is Stiegler’s ongoing development of the economy of contribution and the examples he uses to explain it. Stiegler regularly uses the example of open source code and software as a basis for the economy of contribution. Here, for example, the economy of contribution is further elucidated through 3D printing technology. We might think of these technologies as examples of the ‘hyper material‘ character of matter Stiegler suggests should form the basis of rethinking production.

I have followed the convention of including my additions/clarifications or original French in square brackets. I would also like to note that I am not entirely confident about the use of the verb ‘idealise’ here and would welcome comments [please refer to the original interview in French].

Interview: People consume more because they idealise less and less

Initiator and chairman of the philosophical group Ars Industrialis*, the philosopher Bernard Stiegler answers our questions concerning the logic of overconsumption and the emergence of a model that he describes here as the economy of contribution.

Q. Individuals consume more and more, not to meet their own needs, it seems, but for their desires. What has happened?

B.S. We must go back 100 years. The industrial capitalist system, to live, wrestles against the satisfaction of [achievable] needs and therefore must produce innovation [1]. This is the emergence of Fordism and what economist Joseph Schumpeter called ‘creative destruction’, that is to say, constant innovation. A recent example: in 1994, France Telecom completed an investigation to see if people need a mobile phone. The answer was overwhelmingly no. Today, 79% of the population are equipped with them. Why? Because we constructed a need. Edward Bernays, nephew of Sigmund Freud and one of the first thinkers of marketing, theorised this process in 1920. He knew that to push people to consume, you must capture their desires. And for this we need to create processes for identification. This coincides with the advent of cinema and television. On the screen, Humphrey Bogart who smokes lots of cigarettes and encourages tobacco consumption later gave his name to a verb ‘to Bogart’ – to chain smoke. Consumer capitalism is organised to artificially produce desires for things that people do not need – or that are even harmful to them.

Q. What are the implications of our tendency for overconsumption?

B.S. People consume more and more because they idealise [2] less and less. Desire is a social production, which transforms our drives [pulsions] for life, death, aggression, in a relation of idealisation, of sublimation. Where a drive consumes its object, a desire invests in taking care. Transforming drives through social investment is a long process of education that begins at birth. Today, industry consumes our attention and destroys that same capacity to desire by short-circuiting education. We are no longer able to invest in ourselves over time. We live impulsively in the immediacy of the present.

Q. You even say that consumption is an addiction.

B.S. I work with many psychiatrists, addictologists [addictologues], and we agree on this point: the consumption process has engendered an addictive society. A few years ago, a survey showed that 56% of French people did not like the TV they watched. This is exactly like what writer William S. Burroughs said: “I hate heroin, it destroys me but I cannot do without it.” People are totally dependent. A part of themselves totally rejects what other parts cannot do without. The problem is that people need to exist and they can no longer find a way to exist in this society. The relationship with consumer goods has become a vicious circle based on an intrinsically deceptive relation of ephemeral rewards which creates an existential vacuum.

Q. What is the risk of placing consumption at the heart of the project of society?

B.S. The system became insolvent and fell back upon addictions that destroy all of the forces of knowledge because consumerism is based on the functional opposition between production and consumption. We know nothing of what we consume, which we buy on credit and which once we have paid is fit for the bin. All of this in a context where social structures have virtually disintegrated, where the school has great difficulty in channeling the attention of young people, and where those who feel isolated and desocialised become the majority. When we created Ars Industrialis, we argued, eight years ago, that the crisis was inevitable: you cannot build a society on addiction.

Q. Which economic model can therefore replace the one we know?

B.S. This is the economy of contribution. Such an economy depends upon the investment and empowerment of the citizens. It breaks with Fordism, because it is based on “deprolaterisation” [déprolatérisation]. For Marx, the workers are proletarianised when their expertise [savoir-faire] is replaced by machines which they then [must] serve. In the 20th century, it is the consumers who are proletarianised: they lose their life skills [savoir-vivre]. Proletarianization is not financial impoverishment, but the loss of knowledge of how to live [savoir-vivre]. Consumers no longer produce modes of living for themselves, which are proscribed from them by brands. Amartya Sen, the Nobel Laureate, speaks of “incapacitation”. He has described this process in a comparative analysis between the life expectancy of people in Harlem and that which is paradoxically higher amongst the population of Bangladesh as the latter, which have not been subjected to consumerism, have preserved their social relationships and their capabilities [capacités], that is to say their knowledge [savoirs]. The economy of contribution is what consists in the reconstitution of such capabilities.

Q. Who are the pioneers of this economy of contribution?

B.S. The economy of contribution emerged thirty years ago. It has mostly developed thanks to the web and, industrially, with free software. In the domain of energy [production and consumption], the Smart Grid gives rise to a model of decentralised and re-localised energy production and contributes to the recovery of knowledge, accountability and public “recapacitation” – to return to Amartya Sen. It is the same with the Fab Lab (Fabrication Laboratory, Ed.) developed by MIT (the Massachusetts Institute of Technology). These local laboratories make invention accessible to all by providing digital fabrication tools, the best known being the 3D printer. More generally digital technologies encourage the development of new knowledge communities. These are new industrial models and [also] indications that we live in a transitional phase, where the challenge is, in France, for the present government, to design a critical path for our society – a path where we invent real growth based on the development of knowledge [savoirs], and which exceeds the consumerist model that has become fundamentally toxic and alienating.

* An international association for an industrial politics for technologies of mind/spirit [or, following Christian Fauré: an activist association that promotes an intervention in the development of contemporary digital technoculture].

Notes

1. The phrasing of “lutter contre la saturation des besoins et donc produire de l’innovation” here may point to the economic theory of the ‘law of diminishing marginal utility‘, in the sense that the more that a consumer object is (re)produced the less value is invested in any one of the individual objects – thus creating the demand for innovation. Following this logic then, the diminishing value upsets the settled balance of needs being statisfied by a given product or service thereby opening a space for the ‘new creation of wealth’. See Joseph Schumpeter’s theorisation of ‘Creative Destruction‘, to which Stiegler also alludes in the following sentence.

2. The use of ‘idealise’ here probably follows Stiegler’s reading of Freud, where idealisation can be understood as ‘healthy’ forms of narcissism – attributing exagerated positive qualities to the self or an other. This also relates to Steigler’s reading of Lyotard, insofar as the diminution of ‘idealisation’ highlighted here is perhaps analogous to a diminution of desire and a tendency to carelessness that undermines the libidinal economy. See: Stiegler’s For a New Critique of Political Economy and The Decadence of Industrial Democracies.

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The Economy of Contribution

This post offers a translation of the entry for ‘the economy of contribution‘ given in the Glossary on the Ars Industrialis website. I am not a skilled translator but I trust that this work offers something useful to those with an interest in such things. The economy of contribution forms a central trope of Bernard Stiegler’s critique of political economy and represents one of the tenets of his activist work with the association Ars Industrialis.

An ‘economy of contribution’, according to the definition given below, is not a radical break with the system of capitalism-in the vein of the historical attempts to create communism-rather it is a system that works within and alongside the contemporary market economy. This resonates with some of the theorisations of peer-to-peer as a political economic system (see, for example, my interview with Michel Bauwens). The aim of an economy of contribution is thus to use and adapt new technical affordances to facilitate different, perhaps broader, means of creating and sharing value.

There is not a great deal of literature available in English by Stiegler, or Ars Industrialis, that develops the concept of the economy of contribution (but see: For a New Critique of Political Economy in particular) and from the literature available it seems, to me, that it is a concept in progress-it is in the process of development within the writings and activist activities of both Stiegler and Ars Industrialis. Thus, it is an interesting provocation to both those with an interest in the study and critique of political economy and, of course, those interested in Stiegler’s work.

What follows is the translated ‘Glossary’ entry. It contains clarifications of translations, or the original French, in square brackets. It also includes five endnotes, four of which come from the original entry, although [2] has been adapted to point to the English translation of The Decadence of Industrial Democracies. The first note [1] contains some of my notes concerning what might be meant by ‘disintrestedness’.

NB. (04/12/12) Translator of a significant amount of Stiegler’s work Daniel Ross has very kindly given me some feedback on the translation and I have corrected it accordingly. In particular, I incorrectly translated the second paragraph of the section headed The economy of contribution (function and calculation), where it is important to note, following Dan, that “Stiegler is correcting capitalism’s error of mistakenly founding itself on an alleged general equilibrium of private decisions”. Also, Dan suggests that désintéressement may refer more to ‘selflessness’ than ‘disinterestedness’ – I’ve left my note in, however, because I find it an interesting juxtaposition.

The Economy of Contribution

The economy of contribution is principally characterised by three traits:

  1. Economic actors are no longer separated as producers on one side and consumers on the other
  2. The value produced by contributors is not totally monetisable, it is a ‘positive externality’
  3. It is as much an economy of existence (as the production of ‘savoir vivre‘) as it is an economy of subsistence

The economy of contribution takes place, in the manner of a general economy, alongside the market, public and gift economies: Through regulation by prices, public decision making and by the principle of reciprocity, the economy of contribution replaces regulation by the interactions of participation (both quantitative and qualitative) within an activity. However, the economy of contribution does not exclude alternative means of production and exchange, but rather combines with them, accommodating the rules of monetary exchange, and is concerned with investment decisions, especially those which lead to the production of public goods. Gifting is one such possible modality of participation.

The contributor is neither the consumer, the taxpayer or the (co-)sponsor. Whereas the market economy is interested in the producer in terms of profit maximisation, and the consumer in terms of desirability [ophélimité] or as a function of utility; the public economy occupies itself with the functions of redistribution and bailing out market failures; and the gift economy is embedded in a circular relationship between gift-giving and gift-receiving (making-to-receive [donner-recevoir-rendre]); the economy of contribution raises the alternative figure of the contributor, who is characterised by participation in chosen activities, the creation of social value and an interest in selflessness [désintéressement 1].

The mobilisation of resources [in an economy of contribution] takes into account four main features:

  1. The production model, which must deal with finite natural resources and the cumulative nature of resources related to cognitive activity. This dimension leads to a redefinition of the system of production and the installation of this system in a psycho-techno-social milieu.
  2. The relationship between the function of contribution and the consolidation of solidarity, beyond the safety net of the welfare state. It is important here to link protection and creativity within a dynamic form of solidarity, requiring the ipso facto revision of the system of redistribution.
  3. The requirement to establish a new system of scale. This raises the question of measurement, and presupposes the development of a new basis of calculation and new accounting standards.
  4. The territorialisation function of contribution which implies a redefinition of the effects of agglomeration [centralisation?] and a reassessment of public policy.

The economy of contribution is situated in an general ecosystem of production and circulation of wealth that can be described through a ‘general organology'[2]. It is the source of collective creative practice and new measures of scale, at a time when digital technologies have intensified the exchange of information.

The economy of contribution (function and measurement)

The function of contribution is to the economy of contribution what the functions of production, embodied as supply and demand, as instruments, are for neoclassical [economic] theory: it shows how resources are allocated between different possible uses, between different activities, and between different participants. However the nature of contribution [as an economic function] guides us away from the economic fetishes [l’éconisme] of the self-fulfilling preference curves for consumers and supply curves for producers of mainstream economic theory.

For the same reasons, it [contribution] should not be confused with the process of adjustment of quantities and prices in different markets, and is therefore not reducible to the conditions of formation of a purported ‘general equilibrium’ [modeling prices for a whole economy] – before becoming a calculable model – of private decisions.

Conjugation within its market and nonmarket activities also makes [contribution] irreducible to a single conversion into a monetary equivalent that gives shape to the market as the cost of work with regard to production and desire with regard to consumption. On the contrary, the function of contribution introduces us to the construction of a general economy, where the mobilisation of resources and productive services is carried out according to objectives agreed in a deliberative manner, thus in terms of societal development. Contribution refers to both a microeconomic dimension, as a modality of the actions of participants in organizations, and a macroeconomic dimension, as a principle of political economy-oriented collective creation and societal value, and hence as a condition of terminating the economic cycle.

Microeconomic guidance of the function of contribution can facilitate an enriched form of economic analysis, highlighting the links with innovation, creating new activities and externalities.

The economy of contribution and the internet

The hyperconsumerist essence of the concept of the creative economy, supported by the work of John Howkins (which is closest to what has been called “cognitive capitalism”[3]), must be surpassed by societies and territories of contribution based on collaborative cultural technologies. If the Internet makes possible an apparently contributory economy – typified by free and open source software – it is because it is a technical environment in which the recipients are put in the position of senders: it is dialogical[4]. The Web (2.0 or 3.0) therefore contributes to an economy of contribution as it is:

    1. an infrastructure: systems for sharing and publishing knowledge online (such as: CMS, wikis);
    2. mechanisms for desire: in the classical industrial system, consumption drives desire – which, however, deteriorates and decays tendentiously and inevitably into drives[5] – while in the case of Web 2.0, desire operates around personal creativity and work shared in online spaces (YouTube, Flickr, MySpace, Wikis in general);
    3. digital technology which empowers and enables the development of the economic model (in the same way that the tourism boom was made possible by advances in transportation technology, web technologies allow the appropriation of read / write content).

But the rapid success of the internet will only be a truly economic success (in both senses of the term) if it makes itself the subject of a public industrial policy, moving beyond the spectacular dynamics of new industrial enterprises emerging in this contributory milieu, currently dominated by search engines and social networks.

Notes

1. Disinterestedness, here, may refer to the aesthetics proposed by Kant, wherein disinterest is a level of perception that facilitates ‘true’ judgement: ‘A state of mind in which no biases are present, no memories or beliefs make any affect on the aesthetic pleasure you get from viewing a piece of art or an object'(Aesthetics in ‘Kant’s Aesthetics and Teleology‘, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). Perhaps, then, an ‘interest in disinterest’ might be aesthetic values derived principally in affective registers. This would fit with the three traits of the economy of contribution defined at the beginning (trans.)

2. See Stiegler’s description of a ‘general organology’ in The Decadence of Industrial Democracies (trans.).

3. Cf. Christian Azaïs, Antonella Corsani, Patrick Dieuaide, eds., Vers un capitalisme cognitif. Entre mutations du travail et territoires, with a preface by Bernard Paulré and a postface by Christan Palloix, L’Harmattan, 2001. In this collection, see in particular Pascal Jollivet, “Les NTIC et l’affirmation du travail coopératif réticulaire”, pp. 45-63. Cf. also Le capitalisme cognitif. La nouvelle grande transformation, Yann Moullier Boutang, Amsterdam, 2007.

4. For this concept cf. the Glossary entry on Associated/Disassociated Milieu (in French -trans.).

5. For more, cf. the Glossary entry on desire (and drives) (in French -trans.).

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Alexander Galloway on Deleuze & computers

I am indebted to @furtherfield for posting a link to the blog communication+1, which has a YouTube video of Alexander Galloway giving a talk, at the at the University of Massachusetts Amherst (December 2nd, 2011), on ‘Deleuze and Computers’.

The inimitable Galloway identifies Deleuze’s “Postscript on the Societies of Control” as a highly significant piece of thinking about life in a digitally mediated society.  The talk is really interesting and I have reproduced below most of the post from communication+1, including the YouTube video:

Abstract:
Could it be? Could it be that Deleuze’s most lasting legacy will lie in his “Postscript on Control Societies,” a mere 2,300 word essay from 1990? Such a strange little text, it bears not the same Deleuzean voice so familiar from his other writings. Cynics will grumble it falls short of the great books of ’68-’69 or the radical collaborations with Félix Guattari during the 1970s. In the “Postscript” he indicts capitalism by name. He raises his wrath against corporations and television shows. Yet his frame includes the culture at large, not just the mode of production. He talks about snakes and surfers and other features of the dawning millennium. He references such figures as Roberto Rossellini, Paul Virilio, Franz Kafka, and most importantly Michel Foucault. He tells us exactly what is wrong with the business sector, as well as with the prisons, schools, and hospitals. It reads almost like a manifesto, the “Manifesto on Control Societies.” In this talk we will investigate the last few years of Deleuze’s life, a period in which he elaborates, however faintly, an image of what it means to live in the information age.

This talk was made possible by the UMass Graduate School, the University Libraries, UMass Free Culture, and the Department of Communication.

Recorded by JC Sawyer, produced by Zach McDowell

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This summer/autumn I will be…

I have written anything on this blog for quite a while so I thought I’d redress the deficit (a word for our times!) of content by simply explaining what I’m up to.

I’m hoping to give a talk at the UK lab of a prominent technology company, concerning research conducted with Patrick Crogan on the economy of attention.  Through meetings with key researchers at that company, the visit will also inform my research fieldwork in Silicon Valley in September/October. More of which shortly…

I will attend the Royal Geographical Society’s annual international conference in September. I’m giving two papers and serving as a committee member in the RGS History & Philosophy of Geography Research Group. The first paper, co-authored with Matthew Wilson (U. Kentucky), concerns the material practices of using location based services. The second paper addresses the tension between contemporary understandings of neural plasticity and the commodification of human attention, especially in relation to pervasive media.  Both of these papers will be subsequently submitted to journals to be considered for publication. I’ll put up details on this blog as and when this happens.

During the months of September and October 2011, I will carry out in-depth fieldwork investigating understandings of the future of computing and associated innovation practices within research and development facilities in Silicon Valley (California). The research is funded by a British Academy Small Grant.  This is research that will follow on from my PhD work. The exciting advance with this project is that the data gathered will inform knowledge exchange activities with the Pervasive Media Studio network of artists and small/start-up technology companies. This work will also lead to further conference papers and publications. Stay tuned!