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.
Microsoft viral search
Mark Graham linked, on twitter, to an MIT Technology Review article concerning recent work conducted by MS Research around the theme of ‘viral search’ – the ways in which ideas spread across social networking systems. This work has also been demonstrated in poster presentations, including the presentation documented in the video below. Just on a brief reflection, it is interesting that the visualisations demonstrate the multiple emergence of ‘contagious’ trends – lots of separate people will initiate parallel waves of re-tweeting of a particular story, picture or video. Of course, there’s no way of knowing what the initial impetus for tweeting may have been for tweeting, so there may also be cross-media contagion taking place that is not picked up by this system.
Perhaps this also signals a need to critically examine the implicit authority of ‘big’ data sets – just as it does with maps. The base data, whether it be cartographic or social, assumes an authority by virtue of its apparent completeness, accessibility (at least to those who can pay), and sheer scale. Nevertheless, certain characteristics may be favoured, or silenced, by the nature of the organisation and representation of the data. No platform is totally neutral…
Joanna Zylinska on Facebook and the ‘ethics of mediation’
I am really happy that the DCRC have been able to invite Professor Joanna Zylinska to visit the Pervasive Media Studio to give a talk, on the 19th of March 2013. As well as being a great editor at Culture Machine, Prof. Zylinska has written significantly about ethics in relation to processes of mediation and how we might rethink where agency lies in the increasingly complicated human-technical relations of our everyday lives.
Prof. Zylinska will talk about how our understandings of what counts as ‘human’ are being changed by the capacities of new media technologies that extend our abilities beyond our bodies. Drawing on material from her recent book Life After New Media: Mediation as a Vital Process (MIT Press, 2012, co-written with Sarah Kember) Zylinska will explain what she is calling an ‘ethics of mediation’, which she argues is an increasingly important part of our ethical understanding of contemporary everyday life. She will ask: what happens when we understand physical things as intimately interconnected by networks of energy and information? What systems of morality are made possible or necessary when more and more of our lives are mediated by social networking systems such as Facebook?
To learn more about Prof. Zylinska’s work and to listen to this fascinating talk please join us at the Pervasive Media Studio on the 19th of March.
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””
To ‘re-enchant the world’
In the book of interviews Économie de l’hypermatérial et psychopouvoir, Philippe Petit offers an introduction to Stiegler’s philosophical project. Within that preface, entitled ‘The wager of sublimation’, Petit quotes a sentence from Réenchanter le Monde (forthcoming as The Re-enchantment of the World: The Value of the Human Spirit vs Industrial Populism), suggesting it is a kind of article of faith, not necessarily a political programme as such but an ‘appeal to the people of Europe’:
“We, humans, at the beginning of the 21st century, we know that we must become more lucid, more spiritual and more accountable than ever before, and we know at the same time that humanity has never been so blinded, dazed and irresponsible” (taken from Économie de l’hypermatérial et psychopouvoir, p. 13 – my translation).
I’m looking forward to seeing how the rest of ‘The Re-enchantment of the World’ sets out of the Ars Industrialis project. I’ve only read bits but the book of interviews also seems to be well worth a read. As transcribed interviews the prose is much more concise than some of Stiegler’s other work and it offers some good explanation of Stiegler’s political arguments.
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:
- Economic actors are no longer separated as producers on one side and consumers on the other
- The value produced by contributors is not totally monetisable, it is a ‘positive externality’
- 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:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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:
- an infrastructure: systems for sharing and publishing knowledge online (such as: CMS, wikis);
- 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);
- 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.).
Digital Studies
The purpose of this post, a slightly revised version of an original on the technophilia blog, is to outline an initial reading of ‘digital studies’ in relation to the philosophy of Bernard Stiegler and examine its possible application. On 18th April the Digital Cultures Research Centre hosted a visit by Christian Fauré, a technologist and philosopher, who is a founding member of the Ars Industrialis association. That week also saw Bernard Stiegler, another founding member of Ars Industrialis, deliver a keynote at the World Wide Web international conference, held by the W3C international conference committee, in Lyon (France). In both talks we are introduced to what has been termed “Digital Studies”, by Ars Industrialis in conjunction with the Pompidou Centre’s Institute for Research and Innovation (Institut de Recherche et d’Innovation – IRI) [1].
Continue reading “Digital Studies”