by Ben Atlas on 04.13.2010.9:45am · 1 comment
We will offer you multiple platforms to publish. We will then stealthy crawl and index the most popular information and suggest the advertising modules to place by the side of your work. We will then sell the ads and give you a 5% cut (no one knows for sure, one of Google’s top secrets) for your own work. Because it takes too long to actually write and publish an interesting, creative content we will encourage aggregation, embeds and outright stealing (repackaging and relabeling) of the creative work, to the point that majority of the internet are the scraped splogs (spam blogs) and the content feeds. We will send you SEO (search engine optimization) signals on how to please and worship us, your master.
We would link all the available content and display the links with the ads. If you are a creative writer or an artist you are at a systemic disadvantage to the aggregation. Nowhere in our business plan is there a place for the direct reimbursement of the creative class, they must be reduced to selling tee shirts for the ugly fat stomach women alongside their silly poetry. And yes we will scan and link every book known to man.
We will then give you the tools for email, chat, calendar, video, etc.. This will enable us to spy on your habits and tastes even in your sleep (we might even monitor your emails when you are already dead). After we invade every crevice of your psyche we will use the computational power (the green energy of course) to increase your clicking ratios. Unlimited financial resources at our disposal will enable us to crash or buyout every innovation that threatens to disrupt our model.
Finally because nothing scales as fast as crap we will rank the most popular content that aims to sink to the lowest common denominator and to appeal to the masses of the Generation Like!!! and the Generation LOL!!!
We will then go to China and complain about the lack of democracy and the
“free information”.
***
And just to underline the above is a quote from the comment by Jaron Lanier to the conversation between Evgeny Morozov and Clay Shirky on the Edge (worthy of reading in the entirety):
“Here is what I wish Hillary Clinton had said to the Chinese after they hacked into Google’s computers: “Of course we need to stop hacking into each other’s computers. But let’s keep our eyes on the bigger picture: The world we want to live in would also happen to be the best world for China’s vital interests. We want to live in a world in which a Chinese movie routinely earns billions of dollars in the USA from intellectual property rights. China needs this world because eventually cheap robotics and other technologies will put pressure on the margins China can earn from manufacturing. We want to live in a world in which both Chinese citizens and Americans can often earn their livings from their hearts and brains, instead of their hands. We want them to use the Internet to do that, and that means we have to stop using the ‘Net the way we are, primarily as a way to gather data. Both the Chinese government and Google ought to change their approaches in order to bring about this world.”
You can read there also Douglas Rushkoff’s comments and it doesn’t really come close to the depth of Jaron Lanier. Take this profound thought as an example. The binary architecture expressed on the surface of the media:
“The basic problem is that web 2.0 tools are not supportive of democracy by design. They are tools designed to gather spy-agency-like data in a seductive way, first and foremost, but as a side effect they tend to provide software support for mob-like phenomena. There are some nice mob effects, but the intensity of the failures is more profound than the delights of the successes. A flash mob in San Francisco in which people suddenly hold a pose and disperse doesn’t compensate for a flash mob in Philadelphia in which people are beaten up.
In the USA, the rise of these tools has corresponded to a truly loony period of reality disconnect and rancor. When you bring digital tools into a system in a crude way, you risk infecting elements of that system with a binary character. Either you’re all in or you’re all out. Each politician becomes a bit.”
image via flickr/zaruka
by Ben Atlas on 11.1.2009.10:41pm · 1 comment
Blogs [internet] straddle learning and entertainment. Yet the word information is overused, it implies the voracious appetite to devour data, images and news. We know there is more to the Internet and at the core is our innate desire to learn. Douglas Rushkoff comments to Frank Schirrmacher on Edge:
“It’s the inability to draw these boundaries and distinctions — or the political incorrectness of suggesting the possibility — that paints us into corners, and prevents meaningful discussion. And I believe it’s this meaning we are most in danger of losing.
I would argue we humans are not informavores at all, but rather consumers of meaning. My computer can digest and parse more information than I ever will, but I dare it to contend with the meaning. Meaning is not trivial, even though we have not yet found metrics capable of representing it. This does not mean it does not exist, or shouldn’t.
Faced with a networked future that seems to favor the distracted over the focused and the automatic over the considered, it’s no wonder we should want to press the pause button and ask what this all means to the future of our species. And while the questions this inquiry raises may be similar in shape to those facing humans passing through other great technological shifts, I think they are fundamentally different this time around”
Daily Kos reviews Douglas Rushkoff’s Life Inc.:
“Quick: what’s the purpose of a corporation? If you think about it for a few minutes, you can come up with a justification about encouraging innovation by protecting investors from failing along with their ideas. The truth is, corporations are such a part of our lives that most of us are as likely to ask the purpose of the sun. And heck, every heartwarming story of a corporate CEO seems to start with the tale of how he or she drove three businesses into the ground before hitting it big, and who would want to mess with a system like that?
Rushkoff shows that corporations don’t owe their origins to a desire for fostering innovation or to open up the investor class. It wasn’t about building an “ownership society” or encouraging enterprise. Corporations were invented to stop all those things. They were invented because the ruling class saw that the middle class was ascendant, that the would-be bourgeoisie were expanding their wealth and threatening to squirm out from under the thumbs of their upper-class lords. The aristocracy created the corporation to perpetuate the control of the aristocracy.
Corporations are business at a distance. Work once (or twice, or many times) removed from the people who do the work. They allow difficult tasks to be performed by surrogates who may never had met the people they serve. They allowed the aristocracy to get their hands dirty without actually getting their hands anywhere near the dirt. It’s business, and life, lived as an abstraction. Why should we be surprised that modern corporations are increasingly reliant on complex and incomprehensible derivatives to fund their business, when they are themselves a kind of unquantifiable derivative of real people and real work?
If a casino can be described as a machine designed to extract money from those who come inside, a corporation is a machine designed to extract money from everyone it touches. Not just consumers, not just investors, but also anyone unfortunate enough to be in the way of resources the corporation hopes to exploit. The money from this machine is then funneled to a few people at the top. It’s pocket feudalism, designed to sustain by law the hierarchy that threatened to be undermined by pesky things like freedom and individual enterprise.”
Illustration by Mattias Inks
Rushkoff published a seminal essay in the Edge – Economics is not a natural science:
“In their ongoing effort to define and the defend the functioning of the market through science and systems theory, some of today’s brightest thinkers have, perhaps inadvertently, promoted a mythology about commerce, culture, and competition. And it is a mythology as false, dangerous, and ultimately deadly as any religion.”
Douglas Rushkoff in the Arthur Magazine – An End to Movements:
“Mass organization may just have been a twentieth century thing: collective actions of all sorts—good and bad—were responses to the corporatization of government and industry. As such, they took the form of the entities with whom they sought to do battle. But—like the top-heavy, highly abstracted creatures they were created to counter —they are proving utterly incapable of providing an alternative to what they would replace.”
I don’t know if this is because of his book promotion or a style of thinking. But often people get hold of a formula and everything they say is reduced to a template. Perhaps this is the case with Rushkoff, yes we get it, need to buy more from a local farmer… And then there are holes in the logic. The rejection of mass movements, that I applaud, doesn’t really explain how America, still a country the last I checked, can be governed. What is being advocated in practical terms, the split of the union into states, small towns? This is a careless flaw in Rushkoff’s logic. Yet he is right and most contemporary thinkers sense the decline of “big”, the decline of mass media and mass movements. Also true that the Obama phenomenon is a contradiction to this trend. Even Obama himself perhaps recognized this fact when he called for “a more perfect union”. So we are either in the midst a last gasp of “big” or indeed searching for the elusive perfection. But despite my objections to Rushkoff’s logic and his final stupid put down of blogs, I find some of his passages simply delicious. Can sign in blood to this paragraph:
“In our current position, when disconnection from the real world is itself a cause for concern, movements only serve to disconnect us further from the actionable. They give us content for websites, language for our bumper stickers, and faces to put on our ideals. But they distract us from the matter at hand, and worse, turn our attention upward toward brand mythologies instead of immediately before us to the people and problems that need our time and energy. In the place of real connections to other people, we get the highly charged but ultimately fake connection to an image.”
Everyone should tape this last paragraph to their mirrors. I might roll a mezuzah out of it. Still Rushkoff is a fascinating thinker but he lacks people around him who have the rigor to challenge and perfect his ideas.
I am so intrigued by Rushkoff because he is very consistent in application of his ideas. I find the following paradox puzzling:
- The Net was supposed to be post-geographical, instead there is this perception of the cultural command and control center in the Bay Area.
- The Net was supposed to allow bottom up wealth, instead the wealth is highly concentrated with tiny group of people at the top of the scalable pyramid, reaping all the financial benefits.
- The Net was supposed to be a cross denominational, universal in language, etc. Instead the Net fragmented into tiny niches that don’t talk to each other.
What is very clear for me that we still going through revolutionary destruction brought about by the Internet. It is also clear that the credit and real estate crisis is just a side show of the grandiose cultural shift. It is also rather obvious that the net sill had not impacted society as a creative and constructive force. Yes the internet already reformed our visual culture and the narrative. It remains to be seen how it will evolve into a sustainable force that can give people meaning and livelihood.
Rushkoff in Fast Company – How the Tech Boom Terminated California’s Economy:
“This was the real dream, after all. Not simply to pass messages back and forth, but to dis-intermediate our exchanges. To cut out the middleman, and let people engage and transact directly.
This is, quite simply, cheaper to do. There’s less money in it. Not necessarily less money for us, the people doing the exchanging, but less money for the institutions that have traditionally extracted value from our activity. If I can create an application or even a Web site like this one without borrowing a ton of cash from the bank, then I am also undermining America’s biggest industry–finance.”
The entire interview is enlightening but few quotes are really illuminating: Beyond Life Inc: Talking with Douglas Rushkoff:
6. Home Sweet Home Depot
“From the 1920s to the 1970s an iconography was developed that turned corporations into our heroes [BA: note the rise of the corporate ethos mirrors the ideological era of fascism and communism]. Instead of me buying stuff from people I know, I actually trust the Quaker Oat Man more than you. This is the result of public relations campaigns, and the development of public relations as a profession.”
Did the rise of PR just happen, or did they have to do that in order to prevent things from getting out of control?
“They had to do that in order to prevent things from getting out of control. The significant points in the development of public relations were all at crisis moments. For example, labor movements; it’s not just that labor was revolting but that people were seeing that labor was revolting. There was a need to re-fashion the stories so that people would think that labor activists were bad scary people, so that people would think they should move to the suburbs and insulate themselves from these throngs of laborers, from “the masses.” Or to return to the Quaker Oats example, people used to look at long-distance-shipped factory products with distrust. Here’s a plain brown box, it’s being shipped from far away, why am I supposed to buy this instead of something from a person I’ve known all my life? A mass media is necessary to make you distrust your neighbor and transfer your trust to an abstract entity, the corporation, and believe it will usher in a better tomorrow and all that.
It got the most crafty after WWII when all the soldiers were coming home. FDR was in cahoots with the PR people. Traumatized vets were coming back from WWII, and everyone knew these guys were freaked out and fucked up. We had enough psychology and psychiatry by then to know that these guys were badly off, they knew how to use weapons, and — this was bad! If the vets came back into the same labor movement that they left before WWII, it would have been all over. So the idea was that we should provide houses for these guys, make them feel good, and we get the creation of Levittown and other carefully planned developments designed with psychologists and social scientists. Let’s put these vets in a house, let’s celebrate the nuclear family.”
So home becomes a thing, rather than a series of relationships?
“The definition of home as people use the word now means “my house,” rather than what it had been previously, which was “where I’m from.’” My home’s New York, what’s your home?”
Right, your town.
“Where are you from? Not that “structure.” But they had to redefine home, and they used a lot of government money to do it. They created houses in neighborhoods specifically designed to isolate people from one another, and prevent men in particular from congregating and organizing — there are no social halls, no beer halls in these developments. They wanted men to be busy with their front lawns, with three fruit trees in every garden, with home fix-it-up projects; for the women, the kitchen will be in the back where they can see the kids playing in the back yard.”
So you don’t see the neighbors going by. No front porch.
“Everything’s got to be individual, this was all planned! Any man that has a mortgage to pay is not going to be a revolutionary. With that amount to pay back, he’s got a stake in the system. True, he’s on the short end of the stick of the interest economy, but in 30 years he could own his own home.”
Didn’t I write it in Suburbia versus Urbanity or a Round Trip from New York to Newton, MA. There are people who live in Newton who got upset at that post. My guess it not only they dont know better but there are desensitized, unable to imagine the word differently from what the history cast at them.
Reality Sandwich published a fascinating excerpt from Rushkoff’s new book Life Inc. It’s a lighting speed ride through the history of the American Spirituality and Psychology. The interesting idea in the article is how American Calvinism and Protestantism in general with the emphasis on corporate and corporal evolved into the uniquely American New Age:
“In L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, we get theosophy through the lens of a window trimmer. He Americanizes the fairy tale, softening violence and misfortune with color and abundance. The Wizard in the Emerald City can provide anything to anyone, and especially to pure- hearted Dorothy as long as she believes. It is mind cure at its best: carpe diem. And it quickly became a foundation myth for the new spirituality of self.
Despite its antiauthoritarian and self-affirming style, the mind-cure movement didn’t offer a genuine alternative to American Protestantism, or a break from its manufactured individualism. Both movements focused on the salvation of the self — one through grace, the other through positive thinking. Throughout the twentieth century, personal freedom would become the rallying cry of one counterculture or another, only serving to reinforce the very same individualism being promoted by central authorities and their propagandists. We were either individuals in thrall of the masquerade, or individuals in defiance of it. Corporatism was the end result in either case.”
Rushkoff accuses the New Age in diverting of attention from the social into self improvement:
“The self- improvement craze had begun. Instead of changing the world, people would learn to change themselves. Taking this as their central operating premise, the students of Fritz Perls, Aldous Huxley, and the other Esalen elders developed increasingly codified and process-driven methods of achieving self-actualization. David Bandler introduced the Esalen crowd to what he called Neuro-Linguistic Programming, or NLP. Part hypnosis, part behavioral therapy, NLP sees the human organism as a set of learned neural patterns and experiences. By reframing one’s core beliefs, a person can relearn reality. The NLP practitioner is a kind of hypnotist who can help reprogram his patients by changing their “anchors,” “associations,” and “body language.”
This work trickled down both directly and indirectly to Werner Erhard and Tony Robbins, who democratized these self- actualization technologies even further through their workshops for EST (now the Landmark Forum) and Unleash the Power Within. Erhard based his seminars on an insight he had gained as a used-car salesman: people weren’t buying cars from him at all — they were buying something else that they were simply projecting onto the car. When he was doing his sales job properly, he was just selling people back to themselves. So why not do this without the cars at all?”
When a human being is the predicament and the solution at the same time, this becomes nobody’s problem. “You are the problem” as they say. Amazing article.
Two prominent articles signal the coming rhetorical and perhaps practical wave. David Cameron, the leader of the Conservative opposition in London, writes in The Guardian – A new politics: We need a massive, radical redistribution of power:
“…reverse the collapse in personal responsibility that inevitably follows this leeching of control away from the individual and the community into the hands of political and bureaucratic elites. We can reverse our social atomisation by giving people the power to work collectively with their peers to solve common problems. We can reverse our society’s infantilisation by inviting people to look to themselves, their communities and wider society for answers, instead of just the state. Above all, we can encourage people to behave responsibly if they know that doing the right thing and taking responsibility will be recognised and will make a difference.
So I believe the central objective of the new politics we need should be a massive, sweeping, radical redistribution of power: from the state to citizens; from the government to parliament; from Whitehall to communities; from the EU to Britain; from judges to the people; from bureaucracy to democracy. Through decentralisation, transparency and accountability we must take power from the elite and hand it to the man and woman in the street. Yes, as many Guardian commentators in their contributions to A New Politics have argued, that means reforming parliament. But it means much more besides. The reform that’s now required – this radical redistribution of power – must go through every public institution, not just parliament.”
Who is writing for Cameron? I mean “central objective” is “decentralization”- for real! But you get the drift. Kevin Kelly chimes in – Wired – The New Socialism: Global Collectivist Society Is Coming Online:
“I recognize that the word socialism is bound to make many readers twitch. It carries tremendous cultural baggage, as do the related terms communal, communitarian, and collective. I use socialism because technically it is the best word to indicate a range of technologies that rely for their power on social interactions. Broadly, collective action is what Web sites and Net-connected apps generate when they harness input from the global audience. Of course, there’s rhetorical danger in lumping so many types of organization under such an inflammatory heading. But there are no unsoiled terms available, so we might as well redeem this one.
When masses of people who own the means of production work toward a common goal and share their products in common, when they contribute labor without wages and enjoy the fruits free of charge, it’s not unreasonable to call that socialism.”
These people are doing great disservice to their idea by calling this “socialism”, as they themselves pointed out, the very brand for the extreme centralized command and control. In truth, as Douglas Rushkoff argued, these ideas predate Renaissance. See the first volley for his upcoming book:
I have an untainted name for the new movement. Let’s brand this Suprematism. The name was invented by Kasimir Malevich for his art, to my knowledge has not etymological meaning and even contains a subliminal reference to the Dark Ages. Malevich said: “I felt only night within me and it was then that I conceived the new art, which I called Suprematism.”
MARTINI SIMONE, Meditation (detail), 1312-17 Fresco, 390 x 200 cm, Cappella di San Martino, Lower Church, San Francesco, Assisi
Humans like to vilify past, especially the preceding management, generation, political class, parents, an era, etc. Douglas Rushkoof maintains that the so called “Dark Ages” were not that dark after all, but were deliberately branded “dark” during the Renaissance – In Defense of the Dark Ages:
“First off, the Dark Ages were not dark. The Late Middle Ages, in particular, were extremely prosperous. Population and wealth went up, work hours went down. Height and health went up, death and taxes went down. This is when the cathedrals were built, with local profits generated by local economies.
The notion of a “dark ages” is really Renaissance disinformation. It’s an effort to make Renaissance innovations to banking, manufacturing, and corporate law look like modernity instead of the extraction of wealth by the few. It was only after the invention of monopoly centralized currency that the economy in Europe began to tank, common lands were fenced in, farming and grazing became impossible for peasants, sustainable land became speculative property, food supplies diminished, jobs required going to workshops in the city, health deteriorated and, you guessed it, the plague began.
That’s right: the plague didn’t happen during the Middle Ages – it was the direct result of centralized monetary and business policy in Europe at the beginning of the Renaissance. Once the plague killed off more than half of Europe, people got healthier and wealthier again, because the crippled, centralized economy could support that few.”
