Category: political

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To Save the World… Preface by Bernard Stiegler for Michel Bauwens’ new book

Michel Bauwens, peer-to-peer activist and founder of the Peer-to-Peer Foundation, has a new book out, in French, entitled Saving the World: Towards a post-capitialist society with peer-to-peer. In the book Michel, with his collaborator Jean Lievens, argues that a new distributed and de-centralised economic model is necessary to shake up the world and  drive us towards a post-capitalist society. In a wide-ranging, impassioned and ambitious, perhaps idealistic, diagramming of a new mode of living and working Bauwens reaches for a different way of performing economics and the political.

The book has a preface by Bernard Stiegler that has been shared on the Peer-to-Peer Foundation website and so I have translated it. I have offered this to the foundation and I would be pleased if it is of use to them or to anyone else. The copyright of the text remains under the license attributed to the original book.

Preface by Bernard Stiegler

To Bauwens, M. and Lievens, J. 2015. Sauver le monde. Vers une société post-capitaliste avec le peer-to-peer, Editions Les Liens Qui Libèrent. [Saving the World: Towards a post-capitalist society with peer-to-peer]

Over the course of the next twenty years, automation will instigate the decline of a society founded on salaried jobs: 49% of jobs will disappear in the United States, 43% in Great Britain, 50% in Belgium, 56% in Italy and Poland[1]. This huge transformation, resulting from the integration of digital automation, constitutes the horizon for the argument put forward here by Michel Bauwens. He has studied and promoted the new model of production made possible by digital technologies and founded in peer-to-peer relations, which thereby surpasses the proletarianisation that has hitherto been the basis for industrial capitalism – here, proletarianisation principally signifies the loss of knowledge.

Like Ars Industrialis and the Institute for Research and Innovation, the P2P Foundation sets out the principle that digital reticulation is no longer a model based on the functional opposition between production and consumption. Rather it is based on the constitution of communities of knowledge developed through relations between peers – that is to say, on the reconstitution of knowledge (of life skills [savoir vivre], know how [savoir faire], and theoretical knowledge [savoir théoriser]) which have been systematically dismantled over the last 250 years. This discourse affirms the possibility of salvation: it attempts to save the world. Such claims will no doubt be scoffed at by sceptics of all persuasions – they are deniers, who, like climate sceptics, are still trying to ‘convince the Marquise that everything is fine’ [2]… against all available evidence.

The evidence is the profound collapse of social cohesion in every industrial society on Earth and the devastating effects on those societies on the margins of industrialisation. Nothing is being done in the short period of time we have available in the near-future to address these issues, and this damage will only cascade like an uncontrollable chain reaction. This situation arises through what we have called, since the beginning of the 21st Century, the Anthropocene.

The Anthropocene constitutes an unsustainable acceleration of entropic becoming–to the extent to which it perturbs the meteorological, oceanographic, atmospheric, hydrological and demographic equilibriums while depleting fuel as well as social, psychic and physical or cultural energies–which threatens a world which it should, in fact, be saving.

A real salvation implies a radical change in the organization of work, of social and economic relations, which take into account the changes already accomplished by digitisation beginning with the emergence of the World Wide Web and which goes beyond the state of affairs that these relations have installed, to understand the global domination of the increasingly sprawling reticular industries, stemming from the California model of Silicon Valley, so well described by Evgeny Morozov in “the rise of data and the death of politics” [3].

The present model of voluntary or involuntary contribution imposed by the data economy exploited by the “Big Four”, and by those prospering within their ecosystem, is not only unjust but also bankrupt and hyper-proletarianising: Far from deproletarianising individuals it remotely controls them, as they increasingly rely on mimetic technologies driven by an intensive calculation through algorithms, processing massive data sources in real-time, which form a new kind of “crowds”, in the sense that Freud discusses the crowd psychology of Gustave Le Bon [4].

This is possible because bottom-up networks capture value and hyper-standardise behaviour (they hyper-proleterianise in this sense) storing and monopolising them through top-down processing of data produced by the crowds, mobs and other reticulated masses sublimated by intensive computing. I believe, like Gert Lovinck, that in this respect the emergence of social networks in the first decade of the 21st century constitutes a dangerous turn as the dynamics of peer to peer submit to statistical models that perpetuate herding behaviour through user profiling and our many algorithmic doubles.

The transition to a true peer-to-peer economy, however, is, in time, inevitable for four reasons:

1. In the current system based upon wage labour, stemming from Fordism and regulated by the Keynsian belief in the redistribution of purchasing power through employment (despite neoliberalism first weakening the system by reducing wage redistribution and now through speculative devices) a massive process of automation will engender a systematic insolvency and lead to a collapse of consumer capitalism.

2. On top of the destructive effects of the macroeconomic system, the anthropocene will itself generate telluric toxic effects that may only be countered by the promotion and maintenance of new forms of negentropic potential.

3. Thales, “the first geometrician”, initiated the canon of rational thought (logos) in the peer to peer model, which Socrates furthered through dialogic practices, and as the principle of development for the Greek city, as a process of collective individuation based on the maximum expression of the possibilities of psychic individuation for every citizen – this installing knowledge and the culture of knoweldge at the heart of collective being, exactly the opposite of the decomposition of knowledge that is today pushing towards what some have called the functional stupidity [5] of cognitive capitalism.

4. Only knowledge has the capacity to produce new negentropic potential, and only social organisations based on systemic enhancement and culture made possible through reticular parity will enable a move beyond the anthropocene, to “save the world”, and enter into what would therefore be called the “neganthropocene”.

At Ars Industrialis and IRI, we think that this requires a new model for the redistribution of the extraordinary gains in production made possible by a full and widespread automation, which must be taken as a template for new ways of organising work amongst peers.

This is why we advocate a [citizens’] contributory income, granted to everyone, in order to cultivate their abilities (as suggested by Amartya Sen) and provided that they regularly use those abilities in contributory projects, themselves supported by mutual credit granted by contributory banks, and within the most diverse forms of socialisation: associations, public services and businesses. The modalities of realising such approaches should be experimented within the areas which will make the choice [of which economic system to pursue], in particular in order to maximally expose their younger generations to the consequences of automation, and the possibility of producing capacities to exceed it.

Automation, with the failure to appropriate free time in order to increase knowledge in all its forms (life skills [savoir vivre], know how [savoir faire], and theoretical knowledge [savoir théoriser]), can only drive through a mortifying acceleration of entropy. By contrast, deproletarianisation is a reconstruction of knowledges, which are individual and collective capacities and which transform any time saved through negentropic possibilities.

This is why, for us, it seems essential to confirm and realise the opportunities created by Michel Bauwens through his extraordinary practical and theoretical knowledge of the dynamics of peer to peer, and respond to the “Web We Want” initiative [6] launched by Tim Berners-Lee in March 2014, by proposing a new model of architecture based on the valorisation of interpretable and incalculable singularities – calculation being the entropic reduction of the singular into the particular.

Notes.
1. These figures have been suggested by Jeremy Bowles (Bruegel Institute), as a part of a study conducted by the Oxford Martin School by Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne, and featured in the Belgian newspaper Le Soir on 19th July 2014: http://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/downloads/academic/The_Future_of_Employment.pdf

2. I am fairly sure this refers to a comical jazz song, “Tout va très bien, Madame la Marquise“, recorded in 1936 by Ray Ventura’s band The Collegiate Five, in which the Marquise is told over the phone by various servants that everything is fine at home, excepts for a series of disasters. It has been suggested the song is a metaphor for France’s lack of concern for the approach of WWII –Trans.

3. Evgeny Morozov, “The rise of data and the death of politics”, The Observer, 20th July 2014, http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jul/20/rise-of-data-death-of-politics-evgeny-morozov-algorithmic-regulation

4. This has been demonstrated by Thomas Berns and Antoinette Rouvroy in “Gouvernementalité algorithmique et perspectives d’émancipation: le disparate comme condition d’individuation par la relation?” [Algorthimic governmentality and perspectives on emancipation: disparity as a condition of individuation by relation?] Reseaux v.31 n.177: pp. 163-196 (2013) [ http://works.bepress.com/antoinette_rouvroy/47/ ]. I am developing, myself, this analysis in The Automatic Society, to be published by Fayard.

5. Mats Alvesson and André Spicer “A stupidity-based theory of organizations”, Journal of Management Studies v.49 n.7: pp. 1194-1220 (2014) [ http://jourhavandesociolog.se/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/joms1072.pdf ].

6. For information on the Web We Want initiative see: https://webwewant.org/ –Trans.

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Translation> Bernard Stiegler on holidays and the need to ‘deprogram’

Following on from the interview with the philosopher Bernard Stiegler about what he perceives to be the coming end of salaried employment, I spent some of the early hours of this morning (more baby-induced sleeplessness) reading and then translating a short interview with Stiegler about holidays and the need to deprogram. The interview appears on the website for Philosophie magazine.

In the interview, Stiegler argues (as he has elsewhere) that we are increasingly under pressure to ‘synchronise’ – to conform to particular patterns of thought and behaviour–especially consumerism – in the ongoing struggle of capitalism to find ever-more profit. This synchronisation, he says, is led by the ‘programme industries’ – mass media and so on – that want us to mindlessly submit to consumerism and commodification (through systems like Facebook). What is engendered is a form of ‘programming’, as an exercise of ‘psychopower’, which is something like the forms of ‘control’ envisaged by Deleuze (and drawn upon by Stiegler previously).

Stiegler’s answer to this is to identify the need to ‘deprogram’, using techniques of the self (following Foucault). He goes on to provide an example of what he does on holiday–which sounds suspiciously like work to me, but then its all about the otium, the pursuit of knowledge while free from the pressures of subsistence.

This is a fairly quick translation, so please read it as such. As usual clarifications and original French terms are in square brackets. All emphasis follows the original text.

Bernard Stiegler: “On holiday we attempt to rediscover the consistence in our existence”

The question of time extends throughout his body of work and through book after book, this philosopher sketches a picture of a society under the growing infleunce of the programme industries. The final stage of capitalism is the control and snychronisation of “available brain time”. This process in which the individual is standardised may cause a depression and violence without precedent, but philosophy can help to establish responses.

 

PM. What characterises the experience of time today?

B.S. Our era is characterised by synchronisation. The programme industries are attempting to synchronise all of our consciousnesses; a control over the life of the soul through television which establishes a pyschopower characteristic of our times. This process of synchronisation has its roots in the late 18th century, with the mechanical reproduction of the workers’ gestures through automation, in the service of what Michel Foucault described as biopower. Spread by the grand industrial revolution of the 19th century, synchronisation led to what Karl Marx describes as proletarianisation, the worker becomes proletarian. If a worker contributes to the creation of new forms of production, industrialisation makes work a form of slavery and establishes, instead, what Gilbert Simondon calls a loss of individuation for the worker. The movement that is individuation is no longer in the worker, Simondon says, but in the machine that replaces him as a “technical individual“. Wherever you go now, you have the same models of production and distribution. This globalisation comes at the price of a synchronisation of modes of life and thought. Today, this becoming is extended throughout all aspects of life and destroys the singularity of existence through consumerism, which liquidates life skills [savoir-vivre]. Within a decade, with a catastrophic evolution of television, the symbolic itself became an object of consumption and became un-symbolic: we no longer participate in the diachronisation of languages; we parrot Newspeak. The programme industries proletarianised symbolic production, and they destroyed singular and collective time.

PM. In this context, are holidays still possible?

BS. The latin term otium is often translated as “leisure”, it is what the Greeks called skholè, from which we get the work skoleion, which becomes “school”. School is for those who have been released from the obligation of providing for themselves and who can spend free time, without which no real expertise [connaissance véritable] is possible. Otium in Latin and skholè in Greek describe free-time for contemplation, through which we learn to live through a desire for truth: the possibility of reaching a time that is not given to subsistence (the time of slaves and proletarians), but which also is not given to existence (the time of the agora, of political debate). However, to establish lives [des existences], we must reach for what exceeds them and what I live to call consistencies [les consistances] – which the Greeks called idealities.

In this context, holidays must become an otium for the people. During a holiday, and holidays are a special case, we primarily try to deprogram – and to rediscover the consistency in our existence [la consistance dans son existence], for example through a change of scenery. However, human life is always programmed [programmée]. There are cosmic programmes, vital programmes, and socio-ethnic and symbolic programmes. These programmes are a condition of the social. But, these programmes can and should be reprogrammed, or suspended. Trigano, Disney and others have understood that this is a huge market, it is accordingly becoming more and more difficult to deprogram.

PM. How do you deprogram yourself?

BS. To deprogram oneself necessitates keeping to very specific schedules, which are what Foucault, once again, described as techniques of the self, echoing Seneca. Holidays are a moment to practice such programmes. Myself, I use relaxation as a form of deprogramming. When I go on holiday, I work early and write all morning. Then, I swim, a lot, until that state when physical exertion stimulates a rush–because the brain produces a lot of endorphins. Swimming thus becomes a journey within oneself, during the course of which I run back through my memory of everything I wrote several hours earlier. Then I lie in the sun, drained, and I let my mind empty, since this is how unlikely thoughts can arise: something un-programmed emerges from all of this. Then I return to writing: I note all that has arisen – first in the water, then in the sun – all through rereading and annotating what I wrote in the morning.

Under the sun, I sense that this mass of hydrogen that has been combusting for several billion years is a cosmic programme that intervenes in my physiological programmes – muscles, brain, various organs – and which, in this intervention, produces a difference, a change of programme which allows me to write another kind of programme: a book in which I comment generally on other books.

Books, when they are good, are thus deprogramming programmes, unlikely programmes, like poems, in which there must be, wrote Paul Claudel, “a number that prevents counting”.

Interview by Michel Eltchaninoff
Notes

SK–The sense in which ‘programme’ is used here plays on the double meaning of scheduling (of time, performance etc.) and codified instructions (for computers), but both have a sense of the rendering discrete the phenomena being programmed.

 

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Culture & technology – the text of my ‘provocation’

The video recordings of the two panel sessions for the Provocations of the Present event at the OU earlier this month have been posted online (links at the bottom of this page). The event was an enjoyable opportunity to engage with a range of contemporary concerns in cultural geography and a moment of reflection on the politics of such concerns – refracted through engagements with Doreen Massey’s work (it was, after all, the ‘6th annual Doreen Massey event’) and Peter Jackson’s Maps of Meaning (which, as Phil Crang observed, is in its ‘silver jubilee’ year, having been published 25 years ago).

The panelists were asked to offer a ‘provocation’ in advance of the event that would be posted to the Geography Matters Facebook page in order to promote discussion. We were instructed to write short provocations that made punchy points – a difficult task for a wordy academic(!) but this is my contribution:

All culture is in some way technical: it is an expression of technicity, understood as the ways in which technologies (in their broadest sense) are intimately enfolded into our experience of the world. How does this challenge or (re)configure understandings of ‘the human’ in human geographies? What kinds of politics does such an understanding of culture either reveal or elide?

In the talk I gave at the actual event I developed some of these themes in two ways: first, I asked how contemporary forms of mediation might prompt cultural geographers to think about popular culture and the ways we study it; and: second, I questioned what kinds of assumptions about ‘the human’ are we making when we talk about the ‘non-human’ or the ‘post-human’, and how does this influence how we talk about technology in relation to culture.

So, à propos of nothing apart from making this text do something more than be read aloud, here is what was basically a script of my talk:

Provocation:

As the introduction to the event highlights, in the conclusion to Maps of Meaning Peter Jackson offers the provocation that continues to resonate in contemporary debates around cultural geography, whether we are debating affect and emotion, identity and difference or the human and non-human:

If cultural geography is to be revitalised, … ‘It can only be by an engagement with the contemporary intellectual terrain – not to counter a threat, but to discover an opportunity’ (Jackson 1989: 180; Stedman Jones 1983: 24).

I want to address the kinds of discovery we might engage in, and in particular focus on two ‘provocative’ questions about what counts in the study of cultural geography. These carry with them the implications of the earlier provocation I was invited to post to Facebook that: all culture is in some way technical: it is an expression of technicity, understood as the ways in which technologies (in their broadest sense) are intimately enfolded into our experience of the world.

So, the first question I will pose is in relation to ideas about popular culture; and the second is in relation to the status of the human in cultural (human) geography.

My first provocation, then, is: should cultural geography be more vulgar? Which can be phrased differently as: how might we better accommodate geographies of ‘popular culture’ in our cultural geographies?

In a recent essay on the recurring accusation of ‘vulgar Marxism’, Makenzie Wark articulates several ways in which the epithet of vulgar gets used and I want to discuss a couple here.

First, vulgarians too readily align themselves with the interests of the working class, or to put it in Clive Barnett’s words, “the implication is that, by even suggesting that there may be some relationship between the higher things in life (opera, literature, fine wine and so on) and base considerations like work, causal explanation itself is guilty of bad taste”.

Second, vulgarians don’t think in great revolutionary leaps but rather in more modest durations. We might think here about the mundane and the everyday, and the micro- spatio-temporalities of repetitive and taken for granted tasks.

What then, might it mean to do ‘vulgar’ cultural geography?

One might argue that the first twenty-something years of ‘new’ cultural geography are founded on readings: reading various landscapes and other spatial formations as texts – as the Duncan’s and others asked of us in the late 1980s. This, of course, speaks to a particular understanding of the medium and the expression of culture: a deliberative cogitation on particular constellations of meaning. One might argue that this implicitly goes hand-in-hand with a particular aesthetics of literature, when asked to ‘read’ landscapes it is analogous to reading Charles Dickens or Milan Kundera, and not Dan Brown or EL James. We apparently ought to aspire to an ‘unbearable lightness’ and not ‘fifty shades’ of cultural geography.

To attend to the everyday and to the popular one might suggest that different media and forms of expression of culture can become more suitable analogies. What does it mean to think in terms of television, radio, the smart phone and the tablet? So, perhaps a range of different sensibilities of watching, listening or touching needs to be added to reading. Such sensibilities might be more accommodating to recent proposals of atmospheres, not least by Ash and Anderson, in addition to landscapes of meaning and sensation. I am thinking in particular here of recent work by geographers that has been described as post-phenomenological (for example, see Ash & Simpson’s forthcoming piece in Progress in Human Geography).

Our techniques for thinking are intimately tied to the mediums through which we express thought and so, to pursue the metaphor, as increasingly ‘multimedia’ scholars we might well supplement the reading of landscapes as text with the watching of, listening to and touching forms of spatial experience as image and sound and haptics.

The subtitle to this event: what culture for what geography? Is for me pregnant with an additional question, so my second point of provocation is the question what do we mean by the “human” in human geography as it is discussed today? and in particular how might this relate to the various ways in which we figure things as not or perhaps after whatever it is we mean by human?

We have all variously framed our research in relation to different formulations of ‘the human’ – humanistic geographies, and their critique; the non-human; the post-human, but the category of the human can still be left as assumed. Such assumptions behind this prefixed ‘human’ condition and constitute how we understand and describe experiences of spatiality. So, this strikes at the heart of a key, ongoing, concern for cultural geography and the contribution we as cultural geographers can continue make.

Specifically, I want to raise this in terms of the implications of our various uses of the non-human, the post-human and invocations of technology.

As others, including Castree and Nash, have observed the assumptions that ‘the human’ carries with it are expressed in binaries – the normative human and its others. Nevertheless, by proposing a prefixed, non- and post- human we risk slipping back into reaffirming the category of the ‘bracketed off’ or ‘exceptional’ human, and so need to remain vigilant.

In particular, technology has been packaged up into the ‘non-human’ and particularly ‘post-human’ whereby the implication is that particular kinds of technology are entirely separate from us, humans, and can be seen to have ‘effects’ upon us and our societies. This is acutely evident in relation to digital technologies through forms of spatial imagination that can imply servitude to an autonomous and powerful technical master on the one hand and a gateway to the transcendence of material form on the other. While geographers have been rightly critical of these simplistic binaries of human/technical, there remains a common habit of referring to technologically mediated activities as somehow extra-spatial, as virtual, in contra-distinction to a ‘real’.

I have argued recently in Progress in Human Geography that, rather than propagating a peculiar human exceptionalism, we can understand ‘the human’ and technology as existing in a co-constitutive relation that can be called ‘technicity‘. There isn’t the one without the other. So, for example, rather than appeal to an amorphous alternate realm from which digital technologies draw their agency, we can instead study the particular spatial formations in which agency and technicity are generated.

Geography is, in this way, well placed to inform and enhance social scientific research concerning digital technologies, particularly in relation to the articulation of spatial experience and knowledge.

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Kay Anderson: “Mind over matter? Decentering the human in human geography”

Kay Anderson gave the Cultural Geographies lecture at the 2013 AAG conference offering a reading post-humanist work in human geography and pushing theorisations of what is or counts as ‘human’ in human geography. Anderson also points to the ways in which the ‘materialist turn’ intersects with culture-nature work within geography and the ways this has expanded the ontological remit of more-than-human geographies. Worth a watch, for those (like me) who missed the conference…

Also, worth thinking about how this work intersects with the ways in which interrogations of material politics are being pursued particularly in (British) human geography e.g. the Politics & Matter group and work on ‘immunitary geographies‘.

Via ANTHEM.

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Nancy – ‘the political and/or politics’

Daniel Ross pointed, on twitter, to the text of a presentation by Jean-Luc Nancy in 2012 addressing the theme of ‘the political and/or politics’ – which ends with an interesting distinction or divergence between two versions of ‘co-‘ living: a co-mmunal and a co-llective ‘with’ (in the sense of ‘being-with’):

If, today the economic, judicial, religious and cultural spheres – and with these spheres the semantics of their names –, all together or each in its turn, are racing out of control in a way that is inflationary and even exorbitant and ruinous, it is because “politics” or “the political” harbors a discrepancy or an internal distortion between two values which are henceforth foreign to each other – let us say, an existential value and a social value or, in other terms, a value in accordance with the community and another in accordance with collectivity . To be clear , the tw o values are related and interdependent. Yet that difference of the values of the same co- – of that same “with”, which is the with of being, even more than a “being- with” – and thus that self-differentiation of the co- is precisely that which prevents it from coagulating into a mass and a destiny.

Worth a read, available here: Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities [PDF].

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Reblog > Deleuze in Southend-on-Sea (Tony Sampson)

In a very cogent performance of Deleuzian theory through a discussion of Southend-as-assemblage, Tony D. Sampson (author of, amongst other things, Virality) gave one of the opening talks of Club Critical Theory, a really lovely idea for bringing about public engagement with critical theory–resolutely beyond the ‘ivory towers’ (or concrete slabs in some cases) of academia. Definitely worth a read:

Deleuze in Southend-on-Sea

Applying Deleuze to Southend in the context a Club Critical Theory discussion is a doubly difficult task. To begin with Deleuze introduces a new vocabulary that sits atop of an already complex layer of philosophical debate. We will need to grapple with complexity theory and a strange incorporeal materialism. Then there are personal reasons that make this task problematic relating to my own situation here as a Southender. Deleuze, for me, represents an escape from certain aspects of my early working life in Southend at the local college and particularly my time spent in what we referred to then as the School of Media and Fascism. Deleuze was part of my escape plan from this horror, so returning to Southend with him in mind presents all kinds of problems, but let’s put those aside for a moment and see where Deleuze in Southend takes us.

Read more>>

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Fred Turner talks about his “Democratic Surround”

Fred Turner (STS Assoc. Prof. at Stanford), author of From Counterculture to Cyberculture, has written another book examining the development of theories of what Turner calls ‘the democratic personality’ by Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson and others into an alternative form of propaganda to encourage opposition to fascism, described as the Democractic Surround, which serves as the title of the book. Turner describes some of the important themes of the book in conversation with Howard Rheingold (who is, incidentally, one of the people that appears in From Counterculture to Cyberculture). Charting movements between American anthropology (through Mead et al.), European avant grade arts (the Bauhaus refugees) and their subsequent absorption into the American cultural milieu in the form of the Black Mountain College (and so John Cage), Turner skilfully weaves an interesting narrative.

For those interested, there is a review essay by Fred Turner of Peter Mandler’s Return From the Natives, on Public Books, which examines the influence of Boas’ ‘school’ of anthropology on war-time (WWII) propaganda.

You can also see Stanford’s form of ‘propaganda’ in the shape of the promotional video they created for Turner’s book…

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Questioning the ‘gamified’, ‘pop-up’ city

It seems to be de rigueur to offer ‘smart’, compelling projects or visions of a particular kind of participation in the fabric of the contemporary city through the buzz- concepts/ words of ‘gamification’ or ‘pop-up’. I just want to offer a quick observation of the political problems that might identified with these ideas.

First, gamification proposes that what are considered to be otherwise mundane tasks should be rendered entertaining by introducing the ‘mechanics’ of a game into their operation. This seems principally to be the use of simple, reproducible functions such as attributing ‘points’ for given actions and introducing competition by creating a leaderboard. This, perhaps, in part stems from the ease with which one can, using digital media – especially through apps on mobile phones,  reductively quantify a given action and then create a system for comparing those numbers. However, this is neither a meaningful representation of or intervention in those activities apparently being ‘gamified’.

At best ‘gamification’ is running a simplified (reductive) model of a system alongside given activities and pretending the two converge or at least are someway related or relevant. At worst it is the automisation of people in a servile relationship with a mechanism for data acquisition that has been integrated into a system or set of practices that they need or (used to) enjoy. For, more often than not, ‘gamification’ happens in order to facilitate the capture of information about a group of people using a system or service. In this way it can be argued that gamification is, following Ian Bogost, a form of deception. Indeed Bogost argues, following Harry Frankfurt, that if “bullshit is used to conceal, to impress or to coerce”, then “gamification is bullshit”. “Unlike liars, bullshitters have no use for the truth. All that matters to them is hiding their ignorance or bringing about their own benefit” (Bogost). Given this understanding of gamification, these ‘mechanics’ are not opening out participation but are rather attempting to subjugate people. The darker and more cynical end of that argument is that, in fact, gamification is a means by which you enrol people into a form of unpaid work as the producers of data desirable to the authors of the system, which is rather like what Maurizio Lazzarato has called ‘immaterial labour‘.

I am certainly not arguing against creating playful systems – I am all for systems that take play seriously, for example see Hello Lampost and other creative and playful interventions into urban experience. I delight in the unexpected and serendipitous and value things that may facilitate that, but reducing that to ‘flat pack’ suites of algorithms to be crowbarred into pre-existing systems is, for me, rather undesirable.

Second, the ‘pop-up‘ model of business is the short-term injection of a business in an otherwise unused or perhaps unusual space, for example: an empty shop or a tent on municipal green space. This is often couched as the use of otherwise ‘wasted’ spaces and perhaps an enabling of a fledgling or experimental business through low-cost accommodation. Or, as ‘Popup Britain’ has it, to: “offer a co-working, co-funded space for brands to experiment with physical retail, test the market and gain face-to-face customer feedback”. Now, shrugging off the marketing speak, these things may be true, but it seems common sense that when commercial occupancy rates climb again councils and landlords will be far less willing to provide such space, the experiments then end and the risky workers are ousted.

My main issue with this model is not the risk of post-austerity commercial revanchism (although that may well be a real risk) but the rehashing of precariousness as a good. The assumption appears to be that small or new business owners must wilfully make themselves precarious, or in the case of ‘cultural’ pop-ups that the staff should be happy to offer their services for a token cup of coffee etc., and remain precarious labour (which seems to have been the case in some of the pop-up things I’ve been in).

Now, there is a realpolitik to this – I understand that regardless of the precarity pop-ups still represent an opportunity for some artists and social enterprises that otherwise may not exist. Nevertheless, once the rents and occupancy return should these artists and social enterprises simply be expelled from the revived thoroughfares and forgotten?

So, it’s not the control and use of desirable-again spaces, that is merely symptomatic of the broader issue. ‘Pop-ups’ seem to me to be founded on the assumption that it is not only ok but desirable to create a whole class of precarious creative worker and that, rather than reward them, we should enforce that precariousness and package it as desirable.

To inject a smidgeon of theory, both ‘gamification’ and ‘pop-ups’ could be critically understood, at their worst, as strategies of ‘proletarianization‘ (following Bernard Stiegler) – a curtailment not only of skilled knowledge (savour faire), and the time to cultivate it, but also of the development of life skills (savour vivre) amongst the populace – creating unthinking consumers. A traditional Marxian critique would also possibly identify both ‘gamification’ and ‘pop-ups’ as the constitution of a form of ‘surplus labour‘ and maintaining a ‘reserve army of labour‘.  This is not the realisation of a grand evil plan by the big Other, ‘the bankers’ or ‘the bourgeoisie’, but rather a logic, which has developed with and through capitalism, that we have all internalised and recapitulated and in some way indentured ourselves with.

A couple of questions arise then: Surely gamification has a limited shelf-life before it becomes passé? How long will people subject themselves to quantification and competing against one another for less-than-meaningul ‘points’? Are pop-ups simply using precarious cultural labour as window dressing for vacant shops? Both of these questions point to a third: Who or what counts in these processes and how can they be taken seriously?

It is possible to imagine creative and interesting ways of living together but, I would argue, just because certain (short-term) strategies are popular it doesn’t necessarily mean we should all jump in.