I find the opinion below very interesting relative to "The
Bio-Networking Architecture: A Biologically Inspired Approach to the
Design of Scalable, Adaptive, and Survivable / Available Network
Applications."
< http://netresearch.ics.uci.edu/bionet/publications/mwang-saint2001.zip
>
vs.
I won't quote out of context, so this archive link is where I extracted
the dialog of opinions about "Free labor: producing culture for the
digital economy." (see below, after the 3th paragraph)
< http://www.nettime.org/nettime.w3archive/nettime.200004 >
It is not difficult to imagine a future where billions of people
regularly access applications running inside the global network as part
of their daily lives. To make this future a reality, network
applications must overcome three critical challenges. First, they must
scale to handle the enormous demand placed upon them. Second, they must
adapt to dynamic user demand and network conditions. Finally, network
applications must survive partial failures and remain available to their
users.
Over millions of years of evolution, large scale biological systems,
such as the bee or ant colony, have developed mechanisms that allow them
to scale, adapt, and survive. Consider the bee colony. Bee colonies
scale to a large number of bees because all activities of the hive are
carried out without centralized control. Bees act autonomously,
influenced by local conditions and local interactions with other bees.
When building the hive, bees are guided only by the structure of the
partially completed hexagonal cells around them. There is no master bee
that controls the building of the hive. The bee colony also adapts to
dynamic conditions, often to optimize its food gain relative to energy
expenditure. When the amount of honey in the hive is low, a large number
of food gathering bees leave the hive to gather nectar from the flowers
in the area. When the hive is nearly full of honey, most bees remain in
the hive and rest. The bee colony is survivable because it is not
dependent on any single bee, not even the queen bee. Therefore, the
colony can still survive after a predator kills a number of bees. In
fact, the desirable characteristics of the bee colony, scalability,
adaptability, and survivability, are not present in any single bee.
Rather, they emerge from the collective actions and interactions of all
the bees in the colony.
We believe that the challenges faced by future network applications have
already been overcome in large scale biological systems and that future
network applications will benefit by adopting key biological principles
and mechanisms.
Free labor: producing culture for the digital economy
Tiziana Terranova
Department of Cultural Studies
University of East London
East Building, 4 University Way
E16 8RD
T.Terranova@uel.ac.uk
http://www.btinternet.com/~t.terranova/
course tutor of the MA in Multimedia: Production, Theories, Cultures
< http://www.uel.ac.uk/multimedia/masters >
Free labor: producing culture for the digital economy
Tiziana Terranova
The real not-capital is labor. (Karl Marx Grundrisse )
Working in the digital media industry is not as much fun as it is made
out to be. The NetSlaves of the homonymous Webzine are becoming
increasingly vociferous about the shamelessly exploitative nature of the
job, its punishing work rhythms and its ruthless casualisation
(http://www.disobey.com/netslaves/). They talk about "24-7 electronic
sweatshops", complain about the 90-hours week and the "moronic
management of new media companies". In early 1999, seven of the fifteen
thousands 'volunteers' of America On Line rocked the info-loveboat by
asking the Department of Labor to investigate whether AOL owes them back
wages for the
years of playing chathosts for free . They used to work long-hours and
love it; now they are starting to feel the pain of being burned by
digital media.
These events point to a necessary backlash against the glamorization of
digital labor, which highlights its continuities with the modern
sweatshop and point to the increasing degradation of knowledge work. Yet
the question of labor in a 'digital economy' is not so easily dismissed
as an innovative development of the familiar logic of capitalist
exploitation. The NetSlaves are not simply a typical form of labor on
the Internet, they also embody a complex relation to labor which is
widespread in late capitalist societies.
In this paper I understand this relationship as a provision of 'free
labor', a trait of the cultural economy at large, and an important, and
yet undervalued force in advanced capitalist societies. By looking at
the Internet as a specific instance of the fundamental role played by
free labor, this paper also tries to highlight the connections between
the 'digital economy' and what the Italian autonomists have called the
'social factory' . The 'social factory' describes a process whereby
"work processes
have shifted from the factory to society, thereby setting in motion a
truly complex machine" (Negri 1989). Simultaneously voluntarily given
and unwaged, enjoyed and exploited, free labor on the Net includes the
activity of building websites, modify software packages, reading and
participating to mailing lists and building virtual spaces on MUDs and
MOOs. Far from being
an 'unreal', empty space, the Internet is animated by cultural and
technical labor through and through, a continuous production of value
which is completely immanent to the flows of the network society at
large.
Collective minds
The collective nature of networked, immaterial labor has been simplified
by the utopian statements of the cyberlibertarians. Kevin Kelly's
popular thesis in Out of Control, for example, is that the Internet is
a collective 'hive mind'. According to Kelly, the Internet is another
manifestation of a principle of self organization which is widespread
throughout technical, natural and social systems. The Internet is the
material evidence of the existence of the self-organizing, infinitely
productive activities of
connected human minds . From a different perspective Pierre Levy draws
on cognitive anthropology and poststructuralist philosophy, to argue
that computers and computer networks are sites which enable the
emergence of a 'collective intelligence'.
Levy, who is inspired by early computer pioneers such as Douglas
Engelbart, argues for a new humanism, "that incorporates and
enlarges the scope of self-knowledge and collective thought" . According
to Levy, we are passing from a Cartesian model of thought based upon the
singular idea of cogito (I think) to a collective or plural cogitamus
(we think).
In Levy's view, the digital economy highlights the impossibility of
absorbing intelligence within the process of automation: unlike the
first wave of cybernetics which displaced workers from the factory,
computer networks highlight the unique value of human intelligence as
the true creator of value in a knowledge economy. In his opinion, since
the economy is increasingly reliant on the production of creative
subjectivities, this production is highly likely to engender a new
humanism, a new centrality of
man's [sic] creative potentials.
Especially in Kelly's case, it has been easy to dismiss the notion of a
'hive mind' and the self-organizing Internet-as-free market as euphoric
capitalist mumbo jumbo. One cannot help being deeply irritated by the
blindness of the digital capitalist to the realities of working in the
hi-tech industries, from the poisoning world of the silicon chips
factories to the electronic sweatshops of America OnLine, where
technical work is downgraded and workers' obsolescence is high . How
can we hold on to the notion that cultural production and immaterial
labor are collective on the Net (both inner and outer) without
subscribing to the idealistic cyberdrool of the digerati?
We could start with a simple observation: the self-organizing,
collective intelligence of cybercultural thought captures the existence
of networked immaterial labor, but also neutralizes the operations of
capital. Capital, after all, is the unnatural environment within which
the collective intelligence materializes. The collective dimension of
networked intelligence needs to be understood historically, as part of a
specific momentum of capitalist development. The Italian Autonomists
have consistently engaged with this relationship by focusing on the
mutation undergone by labor in the aftermath of the factory. The notion
of a
self-organizing "collective intelligence" looks uncannily like one of
their central concepts, the "general intellect", a notion that the
autonomists "extracted" out of the spirit, if not the actually wording,
of Marx's Grundrisse. The "collective intelligence" or "hive mind"
captures some of the spirit of the "general intellect", but removes the
autonomists' critical theorization of its relation to capital.
In the autonomists' favorite text, the Grundrisse, and especially in
the "Fragment on Machines", Marx argues that "knowledge - scientific
knowledge in the first place, but not exclusively - tends to become
precisely by virtue of its autonomy from production, nothing less than
the principal productive force, thus relegating repetitive and
compartmentalized labor to a residual position. Here one is dealing
with knowledgeŠ which has become incarnateŠ in the automatic system of
machines" . In the vivid pages of the
"Fragment', the "other" Marx of the Grundrisse (adopted by the social
movements of the sixties and seventies against the more orthodox
endorsement of Capital ), describes the system of industrial machines as
a horrific monster of metal and flesh:
The production process has ceased to be a labor process in the sense of
a process dominated by labor as its governing unity. Labor appears,
rather, merely as a conscious organ, scattered among the individual
living workers at numerous point of the mechanical system. Subsumed
under the total process of the machinery itself, as itself only a link
of the system, whose unity exists not in the living workers, but rather
in the living, (active) machinery, which confronts his individual,
insignificant doings as a mighty
organism.
The Italian autonomists extracted from these pages the notion of the
"general intellect" as "the ensemble of knowledgeŠ which constitute the
epicenter of social production" . Unlike Marx's original formulation,
however, the autonomists eschewed the modernist imagery of the general
intellect as a hellish machine. They claimed that Marx completely
identified the general intellect (or knowledge as the principal
productive force) with fixed capital (the machine) and thus neglected to
account for the fact that
the general intellect cannot exist independently of the concrete
subjects who mediate the articulation of the machines with each other.
The general intellect is an articulation of fixed capital (machines)
and living labor (the workers). If we see the Internet, and computer
networks in general, as the latest machines-the latest manifestation of
fixed capital-then it won't be difficult to imagine the general
intellect as being well and alive today.
However the autonomists did not stop at describing the general intellect
as an assemblage of humans and machines at the heart of postindustrial
production. If this were the case, the Marxian monster of metal and
flesh would just be updated to that of a world-spanning network where
computers use human beings as a way to allow the system of machinery
(and therefore
capitalist production) to function. The visual power of the Marxian
description is updated by the cyberpunk snapshots of the immobile bodies
of the hackers, electrodes like umbilical cords connecting them to the
matrix, appendixes to a living, all-powerful cyberspace. Beyond the
special effects bonanza, the box-office success of The Matrix validates
the popularity of
the paranoid interpretation of this mutation.
To the humanism implicit in this description, the autonomists have
opposed the notion of a "mass intellectuality", living labor in its
function as the determining articulation of the general intellect. Mass
intellectuality - as an ensemble, as a social body - "is the repository
of the indivisible knowledges of living subjects and of their linguistic
cooperationŠ an important part of knowledge cannot be deposited in
machines, butŠ it must come into being as the direct interaction of the
labor force" . As Virno
emphasizes, mass intellectuality is not about the various roles of the
knowledge workers, but is a "quality and a distinctive sign of the whole
social labor force in the post-Fordist era" .
The pervasiveness of the collective intelligence both within the
managerial literature and Marxist theory could be seen as the result of
a common intuition about the quality of labor in informated societies.
Knowledge labor is inherently collective, it is always the result of a
collective and social production of knowledge . Capital's problem is how
to extract as much value as possible (in the autonomists' jargon, to
'valorize') out of this abundant, and yet slightly untractable terrain.
Collective knowledge work, then, is not about those who work in the
knowledge industry. But it is also not about employment. The
acknowledgement of the collective aspect of labor implies a rejection of
the equivalence between labor and employment, which was already stated
by Marx and further emphasized by feminism and the post-Gramscian
autonomy . Labor is not equivalent to waged labor. Such an understanding
might help us to reject some of the hideous rhetoric of unemployment
which turns the unemployed
person in the object of much patronizing, pushing and nudging from
national governments in industrialized countries (accept any available
work or elseŠ.) Often the unemployed are such only in name, in reality
being the life-blood of the difficult economy of 'under the table',
badly paid work, some of which also goes into the new media industry .
To emphasize how labor is not equivalent to employment also means to
acknowledge how important free affective and cultural labor is to the
media industry, old and new.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Jul 19 2001 - 12:57:17 PDT