in the spirit of kicking Google's ass...

well, i kinda like some things about Google, but i'd still give him a swirlie at least.

thanks for the support, everyone, in my time of blog loss.

i think i'll be taking that advice to use a more stable, hosted blog.

seeing that my friend has a site for us to post wackiness on, and he set up a blog for me, i guess should use that. although, i need to pick a better design, but yeah...

by the way, our site is freaking awesome and you should all definitely check it out:
http://www.illogicaloperation.com/

and my blog would be here: http://chris-v.illogicaloperation.com/

now to update my links in my myspace page...hahahahahahhahaha...frickin myspace.

Conclusion: take 2

In each of the three chapters, I described the behavior of digital artifacts, including peer-to-peer file sharing applications, media files, and weblog entries. In each case,

wow, i got way farther last time. thanks again blogger. when i hit Cancel, to not move away from this page, that doesn't mean close everything.

hey blogger

thanks for fucking me over and erasing everything i wrote today

a reminder to myself

okay, self, you've basically already decided that you're only going to add small conclusions to chapters 2 and 3, so other than filling out a few details (like finish explaining ytmnd.com) and building transitions, you really just need the Conclusion to the whole thing. but, since that's gonna leave you/me with basically 52 pages or so, your Conclusion is going to have to be kickass relevant, so you/I should totally start working on that ASAP, and leave the other minor shit as revision work, since it's basically all there.

love,
me

chapter 3, the saga continues

so, i've reached the point in this chapter where, like the others, i go "hey, what about control that's not overt and direct?" i think i'm gonna go for a little change in direction and use this section for describing "blogs" that do not allow comments. people still call them blogs, even though they're just a bunch of PR bullshit where you can't respond.

now, disallowing comments on a blog can be done for various reasons. why blogs on CNN.com don't have comments is one thing. well, they do have "comments," it's just that they're filtered through email, just like with all other journalism, which is very similar to what Baudrillard describes in his "Requiem for the Media" as "decentralized totalitarianism."

this is somewhat different than a journalist who receives copious death threats disabling comments on his/her blog. but, the basic similarity is that they are putting up a wall for defense.

this is also different than someone who disables comments to prevent spam. but, still, wall for defense. a ban on graffiti, protection of a message and of territory.

so....what should i actually write on this? i guess i need to re-read the second half of "Requiem for the Media" and figure that out.

chapter 3: p2p journalism

In the first chapter, we examined the ways in which digital artifacts replicate and aredistributed. In the second chapter, we examined the ways in which digital artifacts can be broken down and recomposed into new artifacts, often with the consequence of illegality. In this chapter, we will look at digital artifacts in conversation with each other in weblogs, which could be said to be microcosms of the internet in general, as they provide ecosystems in which artifacts interact and respond to each other. A weblog consists of a website presented with journal entries in reverse chronological order. Journal entries can contain a wide variety of content, including text on a variety of topics and images. What makes weblogs unique is the comment function, by which people may respond to weblog entries, appending their own text and image, including links to other websites and weblogs, to parent entries. In this way we can call weblogs a form of peer-to-peer journalism, as it involves literally journals that link to each other, forming a network of texts and images, as well as a social component of the network that form the
connections between partial objects. Those connections are what Deleuze and Guattari call
machines, as we saw in the previous chapter. To recall another Deleuzoguattarian concept,
from the first chapter, smooth space is space in which machines are allowed to connect, and
striated space is space in which mixture and connction is contained and made predictable.

However, even in the case of weblogs, hierarchical institutions have imposed overt control and attempted subtle, smooth control. Once again, the focus rests on the strategies employed both in capture of territory and flight from territory. In this case, the territory in question is what has been called the blogosphere, that is, the territory of the internet comprised of weblogs.


Weblog as Smooth Space

A weblog seems to be the site at which a collection of heterogenous flows and materials intersect. Steve Himmer, in “The Labyrinth Unbound: Weblogs as Literature,” an article in an online book featuring academic investigations into blogging called Into the Blogosphere, compares the blog to avant-garde art in its ability to bring together various elements into one space. He describes this in terms of weblogs as a collapse of different types of writing into a space that one could label as smooth space if one were to use Deleuze and Guattari's terminology:

In general […] the content of weblogs actively collapses many of the distinctions that traditional commodity journalism (or, for that matter, fiction and memoir) relies on, mixing the deeply personal with the factual and the interpretive. While this collapse serves, over time, to allow authors to develop and deepen the public persona presented through their work, incorporating more and more of the personality traits and quirks which would not, typically, emerge in public writing—the equivalent of Andy Rooney, say, opening one of his Sunday night rambles through nostalgia and curmudgeonry by mentioning how much he drank the night before and how much he’s been enjoying the newest album by the White Stripes.⁸⁰

Therefore, weblogs allow connections and flows, whereas "traditional commodity journalism" blocks them, or at the least, channels them into predictable texts. If a book is a little machine that forms a rhizome with the world, made of variously formed matters, as Deleuze and Guattari say, then a weblog is even more so because of its mixture of different kinds of writing. In addition, the comment feature on weblogs gives them another point of connection with computer-social networks.

Comments on Weblogs as Marking Territory

In the previous chapter, I discussed détournement, recuperation, deterritorialization, and reterritorialization as marking territory, and I gave examples of illegal art that employ various strategies for pushing the boundaries of the legal conventions of the intellectual property system. I would like to provide weblog commenting as another example of such territorial marking. It has similarities to another unpredictable and unsanctioned form of territorial marking: graffiti.

The French philosopher Jean Baudrillard, published in 1972 "Requiem for the Media," a work in which he discusses the structure of the techno-social networks of media. What he proposed is needed for a decentralized media is not merely the ability to produce and consume (as opposed to only consume), but the ability to respond as in the case of graffiti. He describes the mass media as a space in which nothing is exchanged, a

non-communication—this is what characterizes [the mass media], if one agrees to define communication as an exchange, as a reciprocal space of a speech and a response, and thus of a responsibility (not a psychological or moral responsibility, but a personal, mutual correlation in exchange). We must understand communication as something other than the simple transmission-reception of a message, whether or not the latter is considered reversible through feedback. (290)

In reference to graffiti as a powerful force during the events in Paris, May 1968, Baudrillard writes, "Graffiti is transgressive, not because it substitutes another content, another discourse, but simply because it responds, there, on the spot, and breaches the fundamental role of nonresponse enunciated by all the media. Does it oppose one code to another? I don't think so: it simply smashes the code" (287). We see then that, even if the weblog is "just so much graffiti" (Hebdige 3), that such graffiti, such marking of territory is a form of unpredictable resistance in the same way as peer-to-peer file sharing and illegal art.

The fact that weblogs allow comments is what gives them an added dimension of the potential for a diversity of thought—for a living discursive graffiti ecosystem to grow like a rhizome. Baudrillard notes the importance of "response" in an emancipatory media:

[the media] speak[s], or something is spoken there, but in such a way as to exclude any response anywhere [emphasis his]. This is why the only revolution in this domain—indeed, the revolution everywhere: the revolution tout court—lies in restoring this possibility of response. But such a simple possibility presupposes an upheaval in the entire existing structure of the media. (281)

His point rings true. To look at weblogs put out on CNN.com and MSNBC.com, one notices that the blogs exist in an enfeebled form. Stripped of the ability to display comments in full view of everyone, the blog lacks the ability to create new "life"—viable culture. Instead of functioning as part of a media ecosystem, these pseudo-blogs feature the same structure as newspapers, television, and other traditional media, in that they mark territory, but do not allow themselves to be marked. The impotent and barren blogs of Big Media allow for response, but via email, which is the current version of what Baudrillard refers to as the "formal 'reversibility' of circuits (letters to the editor, phone-in programs, polls, etc.), without conceding any response" (286). This is his "practical" example of "decentralized totalitarianism" (Baudrillard 286) that seems congruent with Deleuze's "control society," or in Alexander Galloway's words, "how control exists after decentralization."

Because weblogs feature these two characteristics: containing a multiplicity of kinds of writing, and allowing themselves to be marked upon, they conflict with the traditional centralized and hierarchical media. As in the previous chapters, we looked at the strategies used in making flows of materials predictable, centralized, and hierarchical, and the strategies by which such flows decentralized, smooth, and become unpredictable. We now turn to examples of banned weblogs.

Internation Olympic Committee as Centralizing Institution

In August of 2004, the International Olympic Committee banned those associated with the Olympics (athletes, coaches卐tc.) from posting their Olympic experiences in weblogs. According to a CNN.com article, "The IOC's rationale for the restrictions is that athletes and their coaches should not serve as journalists -- and that the interests of broadcast rightsholders and accredited media come first."81 One could argue that it would be more beneficial to the IOC for them to allow weblogs and recuperate them as a kind of free publicity. In the same CNN.com article, Robert Bliwise is quoted as saying just that: "I don't understand what the International Olympic Committee might be concerned about. It's a way to engage a wide audience with reporting from the field and therefore generate excitement and interest in the games."82 Such a response from the IOC would be a more decentralized method of control. However, the IOC preferred, in that situation, to consolidate its power and make media concerning the Olympics predictable by disallowing peer-to-peer journalism. (We should note that the IOC colluded with NBC to keep internet users in the United States from accessing online streaming video of the Olympics.83)

AOL-TimeWarner in Iraq

We can examine other instances of weblog banning by looking at journalists' adventures in weblogging while working for AOL-Time Warner owned news media outlets in Iraq. Both Kevin Sites, a freelance journalist working for CNN at the time, and Joshua Kucera of TIME magazine were made to stop their blogging by their employers. Christine Boese, in "The Spirit of Paulo Freire in Blogland: Struggling for a Knowledge-Log Revolution," also from Into the Blogosphere, describes how Josh Kucera was forced to end his blog by his employer, TIME, after an article in The Boston Globe:

appeared to mock TIME, suggesting that the writing and topics on Josh's site were more immediate and compelling than what TIME was publishing from him. […] After TIME shut the blog down, Josh was clearly disturbed by the anti-mass media ranting and the level of anger against big media corporations in the comments field of his blog. He strongly resisted becoming a poster child for the independent journalism movement. Josh said he had been trained to focus on the story and not to become the story.84

Interestingly, Kucera, despite having a weblog that featured the chracteristic mixture, being "more immediate and compelling than what TIME was publishing from him," still advocated the position of AOL-Time Warner (and the IOC) that journalism should be produced by hierarchical and centralized institutions rather than peer-to-peer techno-social networks.

"Decentralized Totalitarianism": Decentralized Control of Blogs

As we have explored before, in the work of both Deleuze and Baudrillard, control exists that is decentralized and smooth. Corporations are now seeking to exploit and counter the information about them posted in blogs.85

see "The selling of the Blogosphere—Technorati's big push into monetizing its treasure trove of data collected about millions of blogs". . .helping corporations control their message

http://www.siliconvalleywatcher.com/mt/archives/2005/07/the_selling_of_1.php

this is where we'll pick up next time.

how the intellectual property system sweeps culture from below under the rug

The intellectual property system, or copyright as it is often called, which has become digital rights management when speaking of digital artifacts, functions because of two moves. The first move is the obvious one: mark some artifacts as copyrighted. The cultural artifacts that receive the mark of copyright are often produced by the entertainment industry, but sometimes independent artists use copyright (or other variations, copyleft, creative commons...etc.) to protect their own work. The first move separates cultural artifacts into two categories through marking them: within the intellectual property system and outside of the intellectual property system.

The second move is the one that allows the entertainment industry to dominate culture. Although it constructs two categories, it simply ignores the existence of the second category, or at the very least, ignores its role in culture. For example, a homemade video on Youtube is not made within the entertainment industry and is not part of the intellectual property system.

However, in the rhetoric of the defenders of intellectual property, like Dick Parsons, would lead us to believe that the intellectual property system is the only thing protecting culture itself from decay and stagnation.

TimeWarner chairman and CEO Richard Parsons has been quoted as saying of peer-to-peer file sharing:

This is a very profound moment historically. This isn't about a bunch of kids stealing music. It's about an assault on everything that constitutes the cultural expression of our society. If we fail to protect and preserve our intellectual property system, the culture will atrophy. And corporations won't be the only ones hurt. Artists will have no incentive to create. Worst-case scenario: The country will end up in a sort of cultural Dark Ages.

There is no place for your amateur, DIY culture here, kids. No YTMNDs. Not even Channel101...they let you download their videos. Basically, if it's not part of the intellectual property system, it doesn't exist.

[cross posted here at illogical operation]

continuations of something or other

listening to: "Mariah Carey and Arthur Doyle" by Sonic Youth. the lyrics are pretty amusing. check it out sometime.

ok, so the damn WoW server is down. time for more theoretical babblings. maybe this can be a continuation of both previous posts, because either way, i'll be talking about capitalism.

i think Marx's point is that the abstraction of "money" hides the value of commodities, both their usefulness and the work that went into producing them. now, i don't even know whether or not 'use value' and 'exchange value' are useful ideas or not. they're not really referenced too much that i'm aware of in the works that Capital has influenced. but, the idea of "abstraction" is definitely still around. i'm pretty sure that Wark's The Hacker Manifesto makes a lot of use of it. but, before i go on about abstraction, let me return to what i was saying two posts ago about capitalism, and work my way back around.

why did i reference this blog post before anyway? it's a post about one of those pay-for-download peer to peer file sharing sites that uses a BitTorrent like system. that means that not only are you paying for copyrighted content, but you're also giving up bandwidth to help distribute it. in addition, this particular service offers you coupons (basically) for getting the word out about products. in this way, they not only capture and appropriate the computer networks, but the social networks that engender them.

my point in all this is that this is extremely similar to the way Deleuze and Guattari characterize capitalism in Capitalism and Schizophrenia. the whole conflict that drives their questions is this: schizophrenia and capitalism are similar, but what is the difference? now, what do i mean by that? it's complicated, trust me.

first of all, they're not talking about the actual illness schizophrenia. they're talking about Freud's take on schiznophrenia. they've got an axe to grind with Freud and they're not letting him live anything down. sure, lots of people discredit Freud now, but they really wanted to go all out. Freud thought that psychoanalysis wouldn't work on schizophrenics because they're too rebellious to listen to a psychoanalyst. Deleuze and Guattari take that and turn it into a good thing. remember, they're not saying that the actual illness schizophrenia is good. but, it's that rebellious aspect they like: the schizophrenic resists having everything related to the family unit -- to mommy and daddy; for the schiznophrenic, everything is relatable and related to everything else. for the schizo, whether or not something is organic or inorganic doesn't matter: it's all alive in its own way.

then, they turn to Marx. capitalism, to D&G is similar to schizophrenia, in that everything can be exchanged for anything else thanks to the abstraction of 'capital.' that means everything can be exchanged, including labor and life itself. that gave capitalism great power to break things down. economies and societies were reorganized around capital. so, that's their driving conflict: how can these two ideas, capitalism and schizophrenia, be so similar, and yet schizophrenia is a revolutionary and liberatory concept, whereas capitalism causes great human suffering because it turns life itself into a commodity?

this may seem like a silly question to even ask? who cares if Freud's interpretation of schizophrenia is like Marx's interpretation of capitalism? well, today, it would be a silly question to ask i guess. at the time Capitalism and Schizophrenia was written, those two thinkers were the most influential in Europe, so, i guess they had to be taken to task. but, what's important is that it turned out that the question was very productive and they discovered a lot philosophically by asking the question. rather than explaning the 1000+ pages to you, i'll just skip to the end. warning: spoilers ahead.

so, it turns out that capitalism, in its full realization, appropriates social networks. capitalism likes all this freedom of movement and such, as long as capitalism itself is what is driving human action. this is what Deleuze is talking about in 'Postscript on the Societies of Control': what we see is a movement from institutions that all tell us to behave and order the movements of our bodies: the school, the hospital, the factory, the barracks...etc. to a society in which there is no clear boundary between the institutions. it's a situation in which there is no "work time" and "play time" -- it's all mixed up to the point where you don't even know the difference any more. you can already see this happening with people who do business on airplanes. never stop working, even when you're off the clock. or eventually: there is no clock. is it better to not have a clock? better than slavery and timed labor, sure, but still, we should call bullshit when we see it. what happens when it comes back around to you having no free time? at least a slave knows that he's a slave; he has some kind of imagination of what lies outside the plantation. what does the knowledge worker have to escape to?

this brings us to the whole pay-for-peer-to-peer services thing: what such services do is to benefit from the social networks that already exist. yes, people already tell each other about things they like. "hey man, check out this album, it's awesome!" but, what if you had an incentive to do that? "dude, you'll get AnnoyingDouchbag (tm) points if you tell promote this band/service/website...etc.. You can cash in your AnnoyingDouchebag (tm) points for more of our services that you already pay for and give up bandwidth for!"

if i had to make a prediction, expect to see a lot more of this kind of shit where you are supposed to promote something for some kind of credit, or maybe even a small amount of actual money.

so...this is where we are today. we can no longer tell the difference between doing something we want to because we want to (pick up a guitar and play it, go skateboard, draw a picture, make someone dinner, play a video game) and doing something because it's our job (do your homework, take this test, read this book, file this report, mop this up, fire this weapon).

well, i take that back. we're not quite here today. maybe in the future, but nothing is set in stone. as Deleuze says, "There is no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons. [...] Can we already grasp the rough outlines of the coming forms, capable of threatening the joys of marketing? Many young people strangely boast of being "motivated"; they re-request apprenticeships and permanent training. It's up to them to discover what they're being made to serve, just as their elders discovered, not without difficulty, the telos of the disciplines. The coils of a serpent are even more complex tha[n] the burrows of a molehill."

i wish i knew what the hell that last sentence means. and on that note, the WoW server is up just in time. time to forget what i'm serving for a while and just have some fun.

not a continuation of the last post as promised

it seems that lots of writing that gets called "theory" is influenced by Marx, not only in content, but also in form (style). that's a bit of Marxist comedy there for you. yeah, i know, not very funny, which is why it's been said that it's better to be a Groucho Marxist than one of the Karl variety. as for my own take on the whole Marx thing, well, sure he's an influential thinker, but there are too many other influential thinkers to put Marx at the top of some kind of influence pyramid.

nevertheless, the work of Marx that seems the most influential to me (not necessarily on me) is Capital, despite having only read a small amount of it. Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle has been called the Capital of the 20th Century, and references it directly. Recent works, like McKenzie Wark's The Hacker Manifesto and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's Empire have both been called the Capital of the 21st Century. well, why let them get all the glory?

the following is a hybrid of my thesis and Capital. i guess this is just kind of an exercise in working on style as well as content. i doubt it will be very funny though. but, one can always hope.

The internet presents itself as an immense accumulation of digital artifacts, its unit being a single file. Our investigation must therefore begin with the analysis of a digital artifact.

A digital artifact is, in the first place, an object outside us, a thing that by its properties satisfies human wants of some sort or another. The nature of such wants, whether, for instance, they spring from the stomach or from fancy, makes no difference. Neither are we here concerned to know how the object satisfies these wants, whether as indirectly as means of entertainment or information, or directly as means of production.

Every digital artifact may be looked at from two points of view of flows and relations. It is an assemblage of many properties, and may therefore be mapped and traced in various ways. To discover the various flows and relations of things is the work of (nonlinear) history.

The use of digital artifacts necessarily means that they must be copied. Files on a computer network (such as the internet) are not made of air. Being limited to the physical properties of the digital artifact, it has no existence apart from being copied from one section of memory to another, whether in one computer or on a network of networks. Copy value could then be said to include only the material conditions required to copy a file: a proliferation of computers, electricity, the telecommunications infrastructure, etc.

okay, that last paragraph was kind of stretching it. i ran into the concepts of 'use value' and 'exchange value' but then had to come up with something else because files are copied, often with little human effort. they're also easily created, like email. so the effort to make them is also much less than the commodities that Marx is describing. maybe i should go that way: 'production value' and 'copy value.' both are decreasing on average (assuming that the electricity and telecommunications infrastructure do not become more expensive, but let's hope that doesn't happen soon).

another thing i just noticed is that, i don't really think of a digital artifact as being "an object outside us" -- where do you draw the line really? because using, copying, or otherwise experiencing the internet involves images being sent to your eyes and brain. your hands must operate the computer. then you have to consider the social networks without which none of this would happen. the line isn't so clear cut between "us" and the things we use. there is no subject and object, just machines connecting to other machines. whether or not they are organic doesn't really matter.

time to go play some WoW.