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<table border=0 cellspacing=0 cellpadding=0 width="100%" class="header-part1"><tr><td><div class="headerdisplayname" style="display:inline;">Subject: </div>Information-Commodification</td></tr><tr><td><div class="headerdisplayname" style="display:inline;">From: </div>"J.N." <jugg@ziggo.nl></td></tr><tr><td><div class="headerdisplayname" style="display:inline;">Date: </div>01/29/2014 08:20 AM</td></tr></table><br>
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<h1 class="headline" id="headline"
data-permalink="http://dismagazine.com/disillusioned/discussion-disillusioned/56968/mckenzie-wark-information-commodification/"
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letter-spacing: -1.55px;">McKenzie Wark |
Information-Commodification</h1>
<div class="byline" style="color: rgb(156, 161, 166); font-size:
13px; line-height: 1.4em; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-top: 8px;
text-align: justify;">Marvin Jordan</div>
</div>
<div class="entry" style="text-align: justify; font-size: 14px;
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<p style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.5em; text-align:
justify; margin: 20px 0px;"><em>McKenzie Wark has written A
Hacker Manifesto, Gamer Theory, Telesthesia and other books on
net criticism and contemporary culture. He has produced a<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><a
href="http://rhizome.org/editorial/2013/may/17/guy-debord-giveaway/"
target="_blank" style="color: rgb(59, 89, 152); outline:
none; text-decoration: none;">3D-printed limited edition Guy
Debord action figure</a><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>to
celebrate the launch of his recent book, The Spectacle of
Disintegration, and currently teaches Culture and Media at The
New School.</em></p>
<p style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.5em; text-align:
justify; margin: 20px 0px;"><a
href="http://dismagazine.com/uploads/2014/01/Ken-Wark.jpg"
style="color: rgb(59, 89, 152); outline: none;
text-decoration: none;"><img class="size-full wp-image-56988
aligncenter" alt=""
src="mailbox:///home/rene/.thunderbird/70j3ho1q.default/Mail/pop.ziggo-2.nl/shadowlist?number=71411736&rendition=image240&part=1.2&filename=Ken-Wark.jpg" style="border:
none; display: block; margin: 0px auto 20px;" height="500"
width="500"></a></p>
<div class="narrowtext" style="width: 600px; margin: 0px auto;">
<p style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.5em; text-align:
justify; margin: 20px 0px;"><strong>Marvin Jordan</strong><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I noticed that you
have been actively engaged in<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><a
href="http://www.publicseminar.org/2013/11/accelerationism/#.UsdsN2RDuDk"
target="_blank" style="color: rgb(59, 89, 152); outline:
none; text-decoration: none;">recent debates surrounding
Accelerationism</a><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>—
its historical and political significance in the context of
our contemporary digital economy. Could you break down the
basic tenets of Accelerationism, assuming it to be a more or
less singular, unitary ‘movement’? Is it an effective mode of
historicizing the internet?</p>
</div>
<div class="narrowtext" style="width: 600px; margin: 0px auto;">
<p style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.5em; text-align:
justify; margin: 20px 0px;"><strong>McKenzie Wark</strong><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>The good thing about
the accelerationists is the attempt to think historically
again, to think and write with a certain scale and sweep.
Roughly speaking, there’s two camps: those like Nick Land who
think capitalism will speed up and evolve into something else
out of its own internal differences; those like Benjamin Noys
who think that capitalism has to be confronted and negated
from without by a radical social force. Where I differ from
both schools of thought is that both seem to think this can
still be described as ‘capitalism’. But what if the leading
edges of the social totality were already something else?
Still a commodity economy, to be sure, but one based less on
land or products than on commodified information. I think it’s
worth trying to use language more speculatively to come up
with more adequate ways of describing what is emerging. That
was what I was trying to do ten years ago in what I think of
as my ‘accelerationist’ book,<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><em>A Hacker Manifesto</em>.</p>
</div>
<div class="narrowtext" style="width: 600px; margin: 0px auto;">
<p style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.5em; text-align:
justify; margin: 20px 0px;"><strong>MJ</strong><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>You have written that
“We need a new language to describe emergent forms of
commodity economy. It’s not neo anything or post anything.
It’s not late capitalism or cognitive capitalism. Modifiers
won’t do. It’s based on an ontological mutation: the
historical production of the category of information.” Given
your analysis, does the concept of class struggle retain any
relevance today? What form does it take in the context of an
immaterial, digital landscape?</p>
</div>
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<p style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.5em; text-align:
justify; margin: 20px 0px;"><strong>MK</strong><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>To talk about the
biopower of postfordist neoliberal late capitalism seems to me
a complete failure of language. Just sticking some modifiers
on the old terms doesn’t really capture the strangeness of the
times. It helps to imagine that there was one other past
mutation in the commodity economy. It shifted from the
enclosure of the commons as private property, to the
industrial production of the thing as private property.
There’s a leap in the form of abstraction there. Not just land
and its produce but labor and its produce can be commodified,
rationalized, quantified, and so on. Perhaps what we are
living through is a second great mutation in the commodity
form, from product to information. In Marx’s day, steam and
iron were the technical means by which industrialization could
proceed. In our time, the integrated circuit is driving a
whole new means to capture value, and no longer just from
actual work. The commodification of play is another side to
this new form of the commodity economy, as I tried to argue in
my book<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><em>Gamer
Theory</em>. The question would be then whether new kinds of
class relations emerge out of making information private
property. Are there new haves and have-nots? Not that this
class division over information replaces those over land and
industry, but is rather layered on top of them, perhaps even
controlling them.</p>
</div>
<p style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.5em; text-align:
justify; margin: 20px 0px;"><a
href="http://dismagazine.com/uploads/2014/01/algo-trading.jpg"
style="color: rgb(59, 89, 152); outline: none;
text-decoration: none;"><img class="size-full wp-image-57360
aligncenter" alt=""
src="mailbox:///home/rene/.thunderbird/70j3ho1q.default/Mail/pop.ziggo-2.nl/shadowlist?number=71411736&rendition=image240&part=1.3&filename=algo-trading.jpg" style="border:
none; display: block; margin: 0px auto 20px;" height="425"
width="800"></a></p>
<div class="narrowtext" style="width: 600px; margin: 0px auto;">
<p style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.5em; text-align:
justify; margin: 20px 0px;"><strong>MJ</strong><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>There seems to be a
renewed interest in the relationship between surplus value and
affect as it is structured in social media. Last year, when
Facebook’s IPO capitalized at $104 billion, people were
naturally<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><a
href="http://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2012/02/15/facebook-is-not-a-factory-but-still-exploits-its-users/"
target="_blank" style="color: rgb(59, 89, 152); outline:
none; text-decoration: none;">wondering where that valuation
came from</a><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>—
that is, people who were active participants in the
development of Facebook’s infrastructure (liking, sharing,
etc), yet who did not pocket a penny of its massive profit. Is
it still exploitation if the work consists of enjoyment?</p>
</div>
<div class="narrowtext" style="width: 600px; margin: 0px auto;">
<p style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.5em; text-align:
justify; margin: 20px 0px;"><strong>MK</strong><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I’m agnostic about the
category of surplus value. I think of it more like a social
scientist than a philosopher. If it explains something, then
use it; if it doesn’t, then don’t. I’m more interested in
Marx’s goals than his tools, about which there is often
something of a fetish. A way to think about what I call the<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><em>vectoral class</em>,
the ruling class of our time, is that it is based on unequal
exchange of information. Facebook ‘gives’ you information,
about your friends and so forth. But it extracts far more than
it gives. It gives data but extracts metadata. The same is
true of Google. It’s increasingly a form that you find in all
sorts of businesses.</p>
</div>
<div class="narrowtext" style="width: 600px; margin: 0px auto;">
<p style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.5em; text-align:
justify; margin: 20px 0px;">What is interesting is that it is
no longer exclusively based on paid labor time. Google and
Facebook make money out of our activities whether those
activities are work or not. They pay us in the recognition of
our desires rather than in cash. But what they manage to
extract is information that has enormous value, at least as
this economy measures it. They have information that is a kind
of private property. Only Google knows what Google knows. They
have managed to turn our free cooperative sharing of
information as<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><em>gift</em><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>into metadata as
private property. That’s why I say we won the battle to free
data, but we lost the war, which is the privatization of
metadata. It is, if you like, a new kind of exploitation.</p>
</div>
<div class="narrowtext" style="width: 600px; margin: 0px auto;">
<p style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.5em; text-align:
justify; margin: 20px 0px;"><strong>MJ</strong><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Your historiographical
work on the Situationist International sheds critical light on
how their activities embody a kind of proto-cybernetics and
their research typifies a “street ethnography.” Yet if you
open any dictionary and look up the word “avant-garde,” you
will almost always find it to be associated primarily with
art. Why do you think the notion of avant-garde as art has
become so utterly irrelevant today?</p>
</div>
<div class="narrowtext" style="width: 600px; margin: 0px auto;">
<p style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.5em; text-align:
justify; margin: 20px 0px;"><strong>MK</strong><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>It’s art that’s
irrelevant, not the avant-garde. This is a boring age for art,
mainly because of how boring the collectors are. These days
collectors actually want to buy contemporary art. How boring
can you get? It’s like they are buying fantastically expensive
bespoke IKEA furniture for their homes. Now, art is not a bad
day job if you can pull it off. I don’t begrudge anyone trying
to make a living at it, like any other day job. But as day
jobs go, it has no more glamour or dignity than doing public
relations or corporate law. Not to mention academia! We’re all
servants of the most boring and clueless ruling class in a
century.</p>
</div>
<div class="narrowtext" style="width: 600px; margin: 0px auto;">
<p style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.5em; text-align:
justify; margin: 20px 0px;">Avant-gardes, on the other hand,
are always interesting, but they are not really about art,
whatever some silly art school textbooks might say.
Avant-gardes are about media, about social relations, about
property-forms, but they are only ever incidentally or
tactically concerned with art. The most interesting ones
around at the moment might be about pharmacology or
horticulture or even ‘business models’.</p>
</div>
<p style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.5em; text-align:
justify; margin: 20px 0px;"><a
href="http://dismagazine.com/uploads/2014/01/7605.jpg"
style="color: rgb(59, 89, 152); outline: none;
text-decoration: none;"><img class="size-full wp-image-57491
aligncenter" alt=""
src="mailbox:///home/rene/.thunderbird/70j3ho1q.default/Mail/pop.ziggo-2.nl/shadowlist?number=71411736&rendition=image240&part=1.4&filename=7605.jpg" style="border:
none; display: block; margin: 0px auto 20px;" height="432"
width="700"></a></p>
<div class="narrowtext" style="width: 600px; margin: 0px auto;">
<p style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.5em; text-align:
justify; margin: 20px 0px;"><strong>MJ</strong><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Central to your
research on the situationists and the historical avant-garde
is your conceptualization of the notion of<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><em>strategy</em><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>as it relates to the
social function of these collectives. More specifically, the
idea of games and gaming feature quite prominently in your
work, particularly in connection with the tactical nature of
everyday life. In an age of Second Life and Candy Crush Saga,
do games still possess the strategic capacity to stimulate
revolutionary creativity?</p>
</div>
<div class="narrowtext" style="width: 600px; margin: 0px auto;">
<p style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.5em; text-align:
justify; margin: 20px 0px;"><strong>MK</strong><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>What’s dead is the
notion of play as some kind of ‘outside’ to work that escapes
commodification and disciplinary society. Play and game are
fully incorporated into the engines of control and value. We
are all supposed to be ‘playful’ and ‘creative’ all the time.
Which basically means this: nobody knows how to get maximum
value out of information-based work, so you have to figure it
all out yourself, ‘creatively’, but the results will all be
measured and you will compete with all your collaborators for
the prizes — whether real or imaginary.</p>
</div>
<div class="narrowtext" style="width: 600px; margin: 0px auto;">
<p style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.5em; text-align:
justify; margin: 20px 0px;">But then if game is no longer a
peripheral but a central aspect of contemporary life, then
perhaps we need to pay more attention to the avant-gardes of
play, to the theory of play, to experimental practices of
play, and so on. Hence I thought it timely to re-read the
Situationists as game-players and strategists rather than as
crypto-Hegelian Marxists. To read them through Clausewitz and
Fourier, the two key thinkers of the ‘grand game’ in the era
of Napoleon.</p>
</div>
<div class="narrowtext" style="width: 600px; margin: 0px auto;">
<p style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.5em; text-align:
justify; margin: 20px 0px;"><strong>MJ</strong><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Alongside today’s
hyper-personalized market of highly customizable commodities,
in which every consumerist choice entails a micro-branding
manifesto, we are witnessing the rise of the TED Talk moralist
who preaches<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><a
href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VO6XEQIsCoM"
target="_blank" style="color: rgb(59, 89, 152); outline:
none; text-decoration: none;">“The Paradox of Choice”</a><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>while remaining an
apologist for the system that creates it. How did Debord
predict this consumerist anxiety with his concept of the
diffuse spectacle, and in which direction do you think the
spectacle has developed today?</p>
</div>
<div class="narrowtext" style="width: 600px; margin: 0px auto;">
<p style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.5em; text-align:
justify; margin: 20px 0px;"><strong>MK</strong><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Ted Talks are a sort
of experiment in pure ideology. The emerging ruling class is
actually very thin skinned and easily insulted. So they want a
kind of private public sphere where only nice things are said
about them. They don’t want books or universities, or any art
that isn’t decorative. Nothing that ventures beyond affordable
critique. It is perhaps a new stage in the history of the
spectacle.</p>
</div>
<div class="narrowtext" style="width: 600px; margin: 0px auto;">
<p style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.5em; text-align:
justify; margin: 20px 0px;">Debord initially thought the
spectacle came in two kinds: concentrated and diffuse. Both
begin around 1919, and make the last great challenge to the
commodity form — the radical working class — appear as a kind
of spectacularized double of itself. The concentrated form is
the bureaucratic pseudo-socialist states; the diffuse form is
the west, where the labor movement was incorporated as an
image of itself, as the social democratic party.</p>
</div>
<div class="narrowtext" style="width: 600px; margin: 0px auto;">
<p style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.5em; text-align:
justify; margin: 20px 0px;">Debord later thought there was a
third form of spectacle, the integrated spectacle, which fused
aspects of both. He had in mind the corrupt and secretive
French and Italian state from the 70s onwards, which were
formally ‘free market capitalist’ but where the state had
become involuted and the secret police were no longer under
any central control. As Snowden’s revelations about the NSA
show, there’s certainly an element of the integrated spectacle
about the state-form of today.</p>
</div>
<div class="narrowtext" style="width: 600px; margin: 0px auto;">
<p style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.5em; text-align:
justify; margin: 20px 0px;">In my book<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><em>The Spectacle of
Disintegration</em>, I propose a 4th kind of spectacle, the
disintegrating spectacle. The incorporation of labor as an
image of itself leaves the state without a coherent external
enemy to negate, and hence leaves it without an orientation
within historical time. The state no longer knows how it is
supposed to marshall the forces of commodification towards
‘progress’. There is no real promise of a better tomorrow to
make the pain and boredom of commodified life seem worthwhile.
The disintegrating spectacle is where we are now. So while
there are indeed new social movements that point beyond
commodified life, the state no longer knows how to coopt them
and make them affirmative forces pushing commodification
forward in ways that diffuse dissent. Hence our era, which
speaks hysterically about ‘disruption’ and ‘innovation’ —
precisely because there really isn’t any.</p>
</div>
<p style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.5em; text-align:
justify; margin: 20px 0px;"><a
href="http://dismagazine.com/uploads/2014/01/yuppiebeacch-240d7834.jpg"
style="color: rgb(59, 89, 152); outline: none;
text-decoration: none;"><img class="size-full wp-image-57495
aligncenter" alt=""
src="mailbox:///home/rene/.thunderbird/70j3ho1q.default/Mail/pop.ziggo-2.nl/shadowlist?number=71411736&rendition=image240&part=1.5&filename=yuppiebeacch-240d7834.jpg" style="border:
none; display: block; margin: 0px auto 20px;" height="423"
width="640"></a></p>
<div class="narrowtext" style="width: 600px; margin: 0px auto;">
<p style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.5em; text-align:
justify; margin: 20px 0px;"><strong>MJ</strong><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>In your latest book,<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><em>Excommunication</em><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>(co-written by
Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker), the title of your
section is “Furious Media, A Queer History of Heresy.” How
does a specifically<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><em>queer</em><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>perspective on history
offer new insights into the development of media and
communication?</p>
</div>
<div class="narrowtext" style="width: 600px; margin: 0px auto;">
<p style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.5em; text-align:
justify; margin: 20px 0px;"><strong>MK</strong><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I think now that I
have always been interested in heretics. It’s striking how
many theorists want to resurrect some long dead authority or
other. We are supposed to bow down again at the altar to Lenin
or Mao — God help us — or even Saint Paul. As if these sorts
of gestures of deferral were not themselves part of the
problem. So: no more master thinkers! Thought will be
genuinely collaborative and comradely, or not at all.</p>
</div>
<div class="narrowtext" style="width: 600px; margin: 0px auto;">
<p style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.5em; text-align:
justify; margin: 20px 0px;">So rather than read Saint Paul,
I’m with Vaneigem, who wrote about the heretics. It turns out
that what proto- and early Christian heresies tend to have in
common is distrust of authorities who seem to claim control
over the ‘portals’ to a higher reality, a taste for common
property, and alternative models of organizing sexuality. I
take ‘queering’ to be a practice that includes all three of
those things. It’s about low theory, the conceptual practice
of everyday life. Of these three elements of a queer practice,
I have rather neglected the third, the alternative models of
organizing sexual life.</p>
</div>
<div class="narrowtext" style="width: 600px; margin: 0px auto;">
<p style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 1.5em; text-align:
justify; margin: 20px 0px;">So my contribution to<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><em>Excommunication</em><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>is among other things
a bit of a gesture towards that aspect. There’s a bit in<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><em>The Beach Beneath
the Street</em><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>about
Michele Bernstein’s games of love and sex without property and
in<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><em>The
Spectacle of Disintegration</em><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>about Fourier’s queer
theory utopia. And in<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span><em>Telesthesia</em><span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>I take up Tiqqun’s
“Theory of the Young Girl” a little. But I think there’s a lot
more to be said and done about what Béatriz Préciado calls
‘gender hacking’. There’s a lot more work — and play — to be
done there.</p>
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