This Thursday, Andrew Boyd{1} will be in town for the Berlin launch of Beautiful Trouble{2}, something of an “An encyclopedia for creative activism” as described by Sandra Cuff, of the Vancouver Media Co-op. As a contributor, I will join Andrew for the launch. Please come and join us.
My contributions to the book where on the subject of organizing around debt as a political focus. Beyond the two essays in the book, I have written quite a bit about this already{3}. The event on Thursday is a book launch, not a lecture, so I’ll talk for 15 minutes or so, since tactics are an important focus in the book, and Andrew will certainly cover some of them, I want to try to go a little more theoretical and attempt an macroeconomics of debt in 15 minutes. We’ll see how it goes.
Here’s a bit of primer.
If a modern monetary economy is to have either growth or savings it requires a deficit somewhere.
This is not an opinion, or an ideologically biased point of view. It is an arithmetic fact based on the what money means in actually existing modern economies.
The key identities here are the “Sectoral Balances.” The “sectors” are private, public, and international. And the three balances in question are net private savings, the total amount the private sector, including households, can save, along with the public balance, that is the amount the Government taxes minus what it spends, and the “current account balance,” which the balance between imports and exports.
If you sum these three balances the total is always zero. That is because there is only a limited amount of money in the economy at any time, and therefore any surplus in one balance must inevitably show up as a deficit in another.
If economy needs more money, either because it is growing, or because people or corporations want or need to save more, either the budget deficit needs to increase or the trade imports need to go down relative to exports. If neither of these things happen, then neither economic growth, nor increased saving is possible. This is why if wealth is to grow, either a government deficit or trade surplus is required. Of course, the world as a whole can not have a trade surplus. A trade surplus in any nation, must be offset by a trade deficit in another. Thus, within a modern monetary economy, the only means for an wealth to grow in a balanced trade environment is for the Government to run a budgetary deficit.
In other words, if the private sector is carrying too much debt, this means the public sector is likely taxing too much or spending too little. Government needs to increase it’s deficit.
Government spending, and also government borrowing is essential for the functioning of our economy. Back in the year 2000, when the economy was on over-drive and the US Federal Reserve bank was ratcheting interest rates in an attempt to cool down an economy it felt was in overdrive, Scott F. Grannis, Chief Economist of a US asset management firm, delivered a remarkable paper at the Cato Institute 18th Annual Monetary Conference, a right-wing affair co-sponsored by the Economist. Grannis, like other fund managers was terrified. What terrified him was that the combination of a government budgetary surplus and the fed’s tight monetary policy would result in a scarcity of government treasuries. It’s worth quoting him.
Grannis argues “The world needs Treasuries, and would be worse off without them. They are a public good just like our justice system, our national defense, and our network of interstate highways. [...] We would be foolish to pay down the national debt.” Although Grannis interest are ultimately self-serving, the preservation of a risk-free investment, his point holds true. Bill Mitchell reports a similar situation taking place on Australia, during a period of budgetary surplus the government wanted to “pay down it’s debt,” and the financial industry went ballistic, for fear of a scarcity of risk-free Treasuries to hold in their portfolios.
Money, like Treasuries, is simply a form of Public debt. The fact is that Public debt, no matter if it’s in the form of accounts, currency or treasuries, is the basis of the modern monetary economy. We’d all be broke without it. Money enters the economy as government spending, and exits the economy as tax payments. If the government has a balanced budget, no extra money remains in circulation, and there can be no increase in private savings. If the Government has a budgetary surplus, this means that private wealth is decreased.
For this reason, as Grannis says, “Debt is a Public Good,” in the same way the infrastructure such as roads create the capacity for transport, government debt creates the capacity for commerce. Fiscal policy should never be interpreted from the budgetary balance alone, but must always keep the Sectoral Balances in mind. The government must spend enough to ensure that scarcity of its’s debt does not strangle the economy, which almost always means it must spend more than it taxes, if it fails to do so, then the result would either be economic stagnation or global trade imbalances. As we can see from the words of Scott F. Grannis, the bankers know this.
While public debt is a public good, private debt is a burden, often a crippling one. A sensible fiscal policy would be to use government spending to reduce private debt, especially household debt.
Understanding the way the Sectoral Balances function is key to understanding what is going on in the economy today. For instance, austerity measures reduce the government deficit, which in turn reduces private sector savings, or rather, increases private sector debt. Imbalances of political power within the private sector, for example between corporations and household, mean that the burden of this debt mostly born by households. The only way to reduce such household debt is either increase corporate debt or increase public debt, or decrease trade deficits. This not only explains why household debt is exploding, but also explains the Euro crisis. Germany has a large trade surplus, thus other countries, like Greece have a trade deficit. If the Euro is to be stable, Greece can only decrease its trade deficit if Germany increases its budgetary deficit. Somethings got to give.
Organizing around debt means uniting against insane policies that promote the interests of rich corporations and rich countries against common households and poorer countries. Much of the debt born by households and the debt born by peripheral nations is a result of bad government and bad economic policy.
To quote The Debtors’ Song{4}:
If us debtors get together,
all together, every one
we can heal, and house and teach each other
and do the work that must be done.
Them creditors, they don’t help us none,
they just get in the way,
their profits are what drags us down,
we must refuse to pay.
Look forward to discussing this with some of you tonight at Stammtisch{5} and this Thursday at the Beautiful Trouble Booklaunch!
Last month was a long and busy month that started in Canada and ended in South Africa.
Along the way, SecuShare’s {1} Daniel Reusche and I agitated for decentralized social platfors at Berlin’s Campus Party {2}, I presented the first Octo demo {3} at the latest reSource transmedial culture {4} event with Jeff Mann, Jonas Frankki and Baruch Gottlieb, also, Baruch, Jonas and I built the Miscommuniction Station {4} as an online project of the Abandon Normal Devices Festival.
Finally, Baruch and I traveled to the A MAZE / INTERACT festival {5} to present and represent iMine {6} and R15N {7}.
Now I’m back in Berlin and looking forward to tonight’s Stammtisch. And it’s September.
Tuesday, Septemeber 6944, 1993 to be exact {8}.
6944 days, or 19 years and 9 days after the Eternal September began.
A MAZE was fantastic, and the Braamfontein district of Johannesburg where the festival took place was an incredible place, not only to enjoy a great party in a really unbelievable community, but also to reflect on where we are now, nearly twenty years since the commercialization of the internet began to deliver a year-round flow of “newbies” to the Internet 1.0 that nobody yet called “the web”.
The Jargon File defines “The September that never ends” as “All time since September 1993. One of the seasonal rhythms of the Usenet used to be the annual September influx of clueless newbies who, lacking any sense of netiquette, made a general nuisance of themselves. This coincided with people starting college, getting their first internet accounts, and plunging in without bothering to learn what was acceptable. These relatively small drafts of newbies could be assimilated within a few months. But in September 1993, AOL users became able to post to Usenet, nearly overwhelming the old-timers’ capacity to acculturate them; to those who nostalgically recall the period before, this triggered an inexorable decline in the quality of discussions on newsgroups. Syn. eternal September.”
Once the internet was available to the general public, outside of the research/education/ngo world that had inhabited before September, the large numbers of users arriving on the untamed shores of early cyberspace “nearly overwhelmed the old-timers’ capacity to acculturate them.”
Even in Africa, you’d have to go pretty far out of your way to find a community where it’s not September yet. Internet access is certainly not as ubiquitous, reliable or fast as it is it “the West,” but the African people do use the Internet, and are part of its culture.
The Jargon File mentions “Netiquette,” a quaint term from the innocent times of net.culture, yet Netiquette was not simply a way of fitting in like table manners at an exclusive dinner party. The cultural context of that Internet that made acculturation necessary was it’s relative openness and lack of stratification.
Netiquette was required, because the network had relatively little constraints built into it, the constraints needed to be cultural for the system to work. There was much more to this culture than teaching new users how to not abuse resources or make a “general nuisance of themselves.” Nettiquette was not so much about online manners, it was rather about how to share. Starting from the shared network resources, sharing was the core of the culture, which not only embraced free software and promoted free communications, but generally resented barriers to free exchange, including barriers required to protect property rights and any business models based on controlling information flow.
As dramatic as the influx of new users was to the “old-timers” net.culture, the influx of capital investment and it’s conflicting property interests quickly emerged as an existential threat the basis of the culture. Net.culture required a shared internet, where the network itself and most of the information on it was held in common. Capital required control, constraints and defined property in order to earn returns on investment. Lines in the sand where drawn, the primitive communism of the pre-September Internet was over. The Eternal September began, and along with it, the stratification of the internet began.
Rather than embracing the free, open, platforms where net.culture was born, like Usenet, EMail, IRC, etc, Capital embraced the Web. Not as the interlinked, hypermedia, world-wide-distributed publishing platform it was intended to be, but as a client-server private communications platform where users’ interactions where mediated by the platforms’ operators. The flowering of “Web 2.0″ was Capital’s re-engineering of the web into an internet accessible version of the online services they where building all along, such as the very platforms whose mass user bases where the influx that started the Eternal September. CompuServ and AOL most notable among them.
The Eternal September started when these Online Services allowed their users to access Internet services such as Usenet and EMail, Web 2.0 instead replaced Usenet and EMail with social platforms embedded in private, centralized web-based services that look and work very much like the old Online Services.
Scratch-off the Facebook logo, and you’ll find the AOL logo underneath.
The internet is no longer a open free-for-all where old-timers acculturate new-comers into a community of co-operation and sharing. It is a stratified place where privileged users have preferential access, including broadband at-home, servers online, users who can control there own “domain,” can run their own mail and web services and access the internet as a whole, including the old platforms such as Usenet and IRC. New users, who may have broadband at home, but have no services and need to use online services like facebook or gmail to communicate at all, subject to the terms of use of those companies. Users who have no broadband at home, and rely on internet cafes and libraries. And at the lowest tier, Users who can only access the mobile internet, on locked-down iPhones and other smart phones, where apps stores control the available apps users can us, and the apps tightly control the users that use them. And of course, each bit of data is paid for from the users’ precious mobile airtime.
As the African people finally cross the digital divide, the once-vibrant cyberspace they arrive in has already been colonized, enclosed and captured by the profit motive. The culture of sharing and co-operation destroyed by the terms of service of online platforms, by copyright lobies pushing for greater and greater restrictions and by governments that create legislation to protect the interests of property and “security” against the interests of sharing.
The culture of co-operation and sharing has been replaced by a culture of surveillance and control.
We once believed that perhaps getting the Africans onto our Internet would help them in their struggles, now perhaps we can hope their capacity for struggle will allow us to find ways to make the Internet a transformational force again. Yet, like the urban centers of cities like Johannesburg, once access is finally won, the centers have been abandoned. The common squares and open markets have already been deserted in favour of protected suburbs and gated communities. Access is allowed not to extend freedom and welcome, but to facilitate exploitation.
If the modern Internet can’t be the liberating force early net.culture believed it could be, maybe we can hope that as the African people come online, their experience in working within environments where inequality, repressions and privilege rule will bring a transformational consciousness to us. They might be our last hope.
If you’re in Berlin this evening, join us at Cafe Buchhandling {9}, while we reminisce and reflect on the unforgettable experience we had in Johannesburg at AMAZE / INTERACT. I’ll be there around 9pm.
In her informative and entertaing talks Seda Gürses {1} often refers to the process of “responsibilization.” Speaking about privacy, she argues that new, privately operated, online platforms are transferring responsibility of providing safety and privacy to users of these platforms, where users would previously have had the expectations that operators and regulators would bear this responsibility. Responsibilization is the transfer of responsibility form being something that is social and shared, to being held solely by individuals.
Just looking at communications media, privacy on the postal system and the mail system was legislated, and operators and users where held responsible for complying to socially imposed standards.
Yet, on modern online platforms, despite their increasing importance, users are for the most part governed by the site operators’ user agreements, and the responsibility of understanding the sites privacy and safety implications, including often complex settings and options, is held by the user alone.
This raises a very important question.
Do we have a collective right to social aspirations? Do we have a collective right to work towards socially determining social outcomes?
Should people simply get the privacy and safety they deserve as determined by their own behaviour? Or do we want a society where people can expect that their privacy and safety is something that can be socially determined?
What’s worse, is that there is a significant moral hazard at work, even when legislation, regulation, or simply user outcry, seeks to improve the privacy policies of a platform, the site has significant incentive to resist, foot-drag or out-right ignore such expectations. The business models of most operators are based on monetizing user interaction and user data, and therefor whatever the regulatory environment or user desire, so long as it’s up to the operators to implement privacy, we’re leaving the fox in charge of the hen house, as the saying goes.
Can we realistically expect private platforms to enthusiastically place social concerns above there shareholder’s profit interest?
And even if strong regulations, vigilant user advocacy groups or some other incentives can manage to keep the fox from making diner of the hens, is this watchdog state of affairs, with social watchdogs watching profit watchdogs and fighting over every decision really the best way to manage communications platforms?
Ours is often called the communications age, and the development of global digital network communications network is often cited as one of the most important development in human history, comparable to electricity, or even agriculture.
Yet, the commercial Internet was born in a neoliberal era, an era when we are no longer allowed to have collective social aspirations, we are no longer allowed to want social outcomes, or even work towards them. We are allowed only to simply accept outcomes as facts, to believe that outcomes are determined by some sort of exogenous logic, be it the market or the economy or politics or nature itself, and this often comes hand in hand with blaming the victims for their misfortune. If they where faster, stronger, smarter or even luckier they would have done better with the whole privacy and safety thing, or further, the whole wealth and power thing.
Yet, being white, male and rich are often more significant than being strong, smart or talented. By accepting a world where we get what we deserve, where outcomes are the result of individual merit, we embrace a delusion, a make-believe land where power, privilege and wealth do not exist.
This delusion is killing the Internet.
Too often, solutions to the social issues of communications are presented as being individual and not collective. Too often, privacy concerns about online platforms are responded to with “Well, just don’t use Facebook, if you don’t like it” or even more unrealistically, “You should make something better then. If their was a market demand for something better, somebody would have made it, so obviously people don’t care about your issues.”
The fact is that “making something better” requires investment, requires wealth, which means in most cases, capital. Yet, capitalists must invest in ways that capture profit, which brings up the moral hazard again. Don’t trust this fox with your hens? Find a different fox!
More and more it feels like the biggest challenge of our age is the challenge of making people believe that we have a right to collectively work towards our social aspirations, that we can and must work together to achieve collective social outcomes. Not only for privacy and safety online, but to create the kind of society we want broadly. A society where wealth and power, and responsibility are more broadly shared.
I’m a little behind these days, so I’m not going to write a new text today. However, videos of several of my talks have been posted in the past few weeks, so I’ll just post the links:
My talk on the Telekommunist Manifesto from LiWoLi 2012:
Tomorrow I head to Linz, Austria to participate in LiWoLi 2012.
LiWoLi: 24-26 May 2012 Location: I/O Stadtwerkstatt, Kirchengasse, Linz, Austria
LiWoLi is a community festival, open lab and annual meeting spot for artists, educators and developers using and creating Free Software (FLOSS), Open Hardware and Open Design in the artistic and cultural context. This event is all about sharing artistic skills, code and knowledge within the public domain and discussing the challenges of an open practice.
This year’s edition will have a special focus on artworks that can be created, performed or exhibited outdoors and in public space. Like every year, numerous activities such as lectures, workshops and audiovisual performances will take place during the course of this three-day festival.
Thinking about “the challenges of a open practice” gets me thinking about what “radical openness” could mean. On the surface, it could just mean really, really, extremely, very open. But that’s a overly colloquial understanding of the word radical, as in “totally rad,” as opposed to “radical critique.”
Extreme or drastic is not necessarily radical. Radical requires a fundamental transformation, change so deep it goes to the root, the “radix”. Radical has the a same linguistic root as “radish,” the edible root vegetable of the Brassicaceae family.
Thus, to be radical, a practice has to get at the root, to work towards a fundamental transformation, no matter how moderate or gradual.
Radical openness would not necessarily mean being as open as one could be, but rather working towards removing the fundamental obstacles to openness that exist, perhaps even in ways that are not open, or less open than we might like.
To be open, we need to be safe and we need to be alive.
To be safely open requires us to have the freedom and privileged to speak our mind, to do as we please. When what you want to say, or do is unwelcome by powerful forces, perhaps because what you are saying
or doing is something they consider threatening to their interests, you can not be safe. So long as inequality and intolerance exists in society, any chance we have to get the freedom to pursue radical openness requires us to have privacy, requires us to be able to chose
when and with whom to be open. Not having privacy means that we will have less openness.
Radical openness requires privacy.
To be alive we require food and shelter and the necessities of life, and in a capitalist society, what we do, our practice, is largely formed by our participation in the labour market, in order to obtain such necessities. As such, not only the practice, but what becomes of the results of our work, is determined not by our own wishes, but by the logic of capitalism. This logic means that in most cases we can not chose either the conditions of our labour nor the terms of distribution of what we create. For the masses, openness in terms of their productive life is simply not a practice they can chose. This means that the degree of openness that we can have is not determined by individual choice, but by collective struggle.
Radical openness requires collective struggle.
In this light, radical openness can only mean the collective struggle for a more open society, which is a society where open practice is not threatened by repression or economic consequence.
Which means that radical openness must be closed to violations of privacy and to economic exploitation.
I’ll be at stammtisch {2} this evening around 9pm as usual.
Last week I wrote about one of the topics Jacob Appelbaum and I discussed at our talk at Re:publica 2012 {1}; that as a result of the commercialization of the Internet, we have moved from free and open social platform, to the centralized social media monopolies we know today. Today I want to mention another issue that we covered, how commercialization is putting an end to the Internet as a public space.
It’s import to understand that it’s not that capital does not want to fund free and open platforms, or that capitalists choose not to: capital simply can not do so.
Capital can not fund free and open platforms because capitalists must capture profit or lose their capital, and thus for-profit platforms that can not capture profit must eventually vanish.
In order to capture profit, capitalist funded platforms must introduce choke-points and/or toll-gates into their platforms, because their business models depends on the control of user data and interaction, and therefore these platforms can not be free and open.
Thus, the prospects for free and open platforms returning in any mainstream form seem slim without alternatives to the profit motive to finance them.
Free and open communication platforms that don’t surveil, control or exclude can only be provided socially, as a public good.
However, in the current era of unchallenged neoliberal ideology imposing public austerity and community precariousness everywhere, building the social capacity to create alternative platforms at a scale that can displace Facebook and the others seems unlikely.
As these are commercial platforms, which are operated for profit, you only have the privilege of using the private platforms so long as you use them in ways that benefit the platform operator.
The result of this, is that using these platforms become the only popularly accessible way to communicate with the masses, whether your an activist, an artist, a journalist or anybody who has something to say, privately run social media platforms are the only way you have to reach the majority of people.
Activists, artists and journalists often have things to say that upset people, sometimes powerful people, who can create problems for the platform operators.
As nobody has any explicit right to use a private social platform, these platforms have a strong incentive to remove users and content that may create controversy.
The early internet was conceived as a sort of virtual public space. In his 1996 “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” John Perry Barlow writes “We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.”
Barlow’s colleague John Gilmore famously claimed “The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.”
The critical feature of the Net that gave rise to such freedom was the mesh topology of the network and the distributed and peer-to-peer architecture of the applications that ran on it.
The early Internet was a social platform that allowed groups and individuals to interact directly with each other, and thus, such communications where unmediated by any public or private third party. As a result, it was difficult to monitor and control such communications.
To preserve this freedom Barlow and Gilmore became two of the founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, with Barlow’s declaration becoming something of a manifesto for the group.
The immediate threat was Government legislation intended to make the net more suitable for the purposes of commerce and law enforcement.
Barlow’s declaration warns how legislation such as the “Telecommunications Reform Act” (Telecommunications Act of 1996) are threatening to destroy the freedom of cyberspace. Barlow was so offended he claimed that the US 1996 act is one “which repudiates your own Constitution and insults the dreams of Jefferson, Washington, Mill, Madison, DeToqueville, and Brandeis.”
The 1996 act was followed by many more in the US, as well as other countries. Some of these are well known. DMCA, SOPA, ACTA, The Digital Economy act 2010, the list goes on an on, all with the usual concerns: piracy and cybercrime. All part of the effort to make the Net safe for business and under the control of law enforcement.
Yet, none of these laws where ever able to totally take away the freedom Gilmore and Barlow sought to protect.
Since legislation is a public sphere, there is public contestation.
These laws where opposed by the EFF, along with other groups such as Le Quadrature du Net, along with large social mobilizations, and even by the emergence of a political wing in the form of the Pirate Party phenomenon.
Even if much of the opposition failed, some succeed. Certain laws where delayed, a few totally defeated, and many modified to include concessions.
Opposition did not only take political form, the laws where also flaunted and simply shown-up by inspiring renegade sites such as the Pirate Bay.
Legislating the public internet was no easy task when the people where willing to fight for their online rights.
Laws such as the DMCA where conceived in the days of a peer-to-peer internet. When groups and individuals controlled their own means of communications, by, for instance, running their own mail and news servers, their own web servers, etc.
If somebody was hosting content somebody else objected to, coercive laws where required to force the person to remove the content from their own server.
While these laws where written in such ways so as to favour the interests of intellectual property holders and law enforcers, they where none-the-less regulating the internet as a public sphere. They recognize some rights and liberties for both sides, and, though with unequal capacity, both sides had the chance to fight for these rights and liberties.
However, starved of sufficient financing, the original distributed and peer-to-peer applications, that where the communications tools of the public internet, began to be abandoned.
As capital can not fund such platforms, online communications has largely moved to privately controlled social media platforms. Being private, they are not subject to the contestation of the public sphere.
Our social space online has moved from the public square to the shopping mall.
From the public sphere where we can fight for our rights and influence the laws and bylaws that govern our conduct, where we can engage in civil disobedience when we oppose the rules, to the private sphere, where we have no rights, and can be expelled and excluded at the pleasure of the private owners of the platforms.
Today, if somebody is hosting content that somebody else objects to, that content is not likely to be hosted by a server they control, but rather by a commercial social platform. Such content can be removed with no due process, with no recognition of the rights and liberties of both parties, simply the unilaterally imposed rules of the platform operator.
In the case that the content is controversial, and the objecting party is powerful, the operator has strong incentive to remove it, and very little incentive to put themselves at risk to keep the content online.
The powerful interest that wish to control content online no longer need coersive laws to do so, they simply need co-operation from the platform owners. Such co-operation is happily provided by most operators, and is often even a precondition of their financing.
Commercialization has made online rights irrelevant
The world where “anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity” can not exist on Facebook, and can not be built by capital.
I’ll be at Cafe Buchhandlung at 9pm as usual tonight. Please join us.
I gave a talk with Jacob Appelbaum at last week’s Re:publica conference in Berlin.
It seems it had fallen to us to break a little bad news. Here it is.
- We are not progressing from a primitive era of centralized social media to an emerging era of decentralized social media, the reverse is happening.
- Surveillance and control of users is not some sort of unintended consequence of social media platforms, it is the reason they exist.
- Privacy is not simply a consumer choice, it is a matter of power and privilege.
Earlier at Re:publica, Eben Moglen, the brilliant and tireless legal council of the Free Software Foundation and founder of the FreedomBox Foundation, gave a characteristically excellent speech.
However, in his enthusiasm, he makes makes a claim that seems very wrong.
Moglen, claims that Facebook’s days as a dominant platform are numbered, because we will soon have decentralized social platforms, based on projects such as FreedomBox, users will operate their own federated platforms and form collective social platforms based on their own hardware, retain control of their own data, etc.
I can understand and share Moglen’s enthusiasm for such a vision, however this is not the observable history of our communications platforms, not the obvious direction they seem to be headed, and there is no clear reason to believe this will change.
The trajectory that Moglen is using has centralized social media as the starting point and distributed social media as the place we are moving toward. But in actual fact, distributed social media is where we started, and centralized platforms are where we have arrived.
The Internet is a distributed social media platform. The classic internet platforms that existed before the commercialization of the web provided all the features of modern social media monopolies.
Platforms like Usenet, Email, IRC and Finger allowed us to do everything we do now with Facebook and friends. We could post status updates, share pictures, send messages, etc. Yet, these platforms have been more or less abandoned. So the question we need to address is not so much how we can invent a distributed social platform, but how and why we started from a fully distributed social platform and replaced it with centralized social media monopolies.
The answer is quite simple. The early internet was not significantly capitalist funded, the change in application topology came along with commercialization, and it is a consequence of the business models required by capitalist investors to capture profit.
The business model of social media platforms is surveillance and behavioral control. The internet’s original protocols and architecture made surveillance and behavioral control more difficult. Once capital became the dominant source of financing it directed investment toward centralized platforms, which are better at providing such surveillance and control, the original platforms were starved of financing. The centralized platforms grew and the decentralized platforms submerged beneath the rising tides of the capitalist web.
This is nothing new. This was the same business model that capital devised for media in general, such as network television. The customer of network television is not the viewer, rather the viewer is the product, the “audience commodity.” The real customer is the advertisers and lobby groups that want to control this audience.
Network Television didn’t provide the surveillance part, so advertisers needed to employ market research and ratings firms such as Nielson for that bit. This was a major advantage of social media, richer data from better surveillance allowed for more effective behavioral control than ever before possible, using tracking, targeting, machine learning, behavioral retargeting, among many techniques made possible by the deep pool of data companies like Facebook and Google have available.
This is not a choice that capitalist made, this is the only way that profit-driven organizations can provide a public good like a communication platform. Capitalist investors must capture profit or lose their capital. If their platforms can not capture profit, they vanish.
So, if capitalism can not fund free, federated social platforms, what will? For Moglen’s optimistic trajectory to pan out, this implies that funds can come from the public sector, or from volunteers/donations etc? But if these sectors where capable of turning the tide on social media monopolies, wouldn’t they have already done so? After all, the internet started out as a decentralized platform, so it’s not like they had to play catch-up, they had a significant head start. Yet, you could fill many a curio case with technologies dreamed up and abandoned because they could not be sustained without financing.
Give the continuous march of neoliberal public sector retrenchment, the austerity craze, and the ever increasing precariousness of most communities, it seems unlikely the public or voluntary sectors will be the source of such a dramatic turnaround. Given the general tendency of capitalist economies toward accumulation and consolidation, such a turnaround seems even less likely.
Thus, there is no real reason to believe Moglen’s trajectory will come about. The obstacle to decentralized social media is not that it has not been invented, but the profit-motive itself. Thus to reverse this trajectory back towards decentralization, requires not so much technical initiative, but political struggle.
So long as we maintain the social choice to provision our communication systems according to the profit motive, we will only get communications platforms that allow for the capture of profit. Free, open systems, that neither surveil, nor control, nor exclude, will not be funded, as they do not provide the mechanisms required to capture profit.
Facebook is worth billions precisely because of it’s capacity for surveillance and control. Same with Google.
Thus, like the struggle for other public goods, like education, child care, and health care, free communication platforms for the masses can only come from collective political struggle to achieve such platforms.
In the meantime, we have many clever and dedicated people contributing to inventing alternative platforms, and these platforms can be very important and worthwhile for the minority that will ever use them, but we do not have the social will nor capacity to bring these platforms to the masses, and given the dominance of capital in our society, it’s not clear where such capacity will come from.
As surveillance and control is enforced by the powerful interests of capital, privacy and autonomy become a question of power and privilege, not just consumer choice.
It’s not simply a question of choosing to use certain platforms over others, it’s not a question of openness and visibility being the new way people live in a networked society. Rather it’s a fact that our platforms are financed for the purpose of watching people and pushing them to behave in ways that benefit the operators of the platform and their real customers, the advertisers, and the industrial and political lobbies. The platform exists to shape society according to the interests of these advertisers and lobbies.
As such, how coercive these platforms are largely depend on the degree to which your behaviour is aligned with the platform-operators’ profit-driven objectives, and thus privacy and autonomy is not just a feature any given platforms my or may not offer, but determine the possibility of resistance, determine our ability to work against powerful interests’ efforts to shape society in ways we disagree with. As Jake said at our talk “We can’t have post-privacy until we are post-privilege”
Eliminating privilege is a political struggle, not a technical one.
I’ll be at Stammtisch as usual around 9pm, please come by, anybody still hanging around after #rp12 is more than welcome to join us. You can find us here: http://bit.ly/buchhandlung
IMPORTANT: Stammtisch will not be a Cafe Buchhandlung today, but rather at Cafe Kotti in Kruetzberg to be closer to the May 1st festivities.
It’s May 1st today, I’m sure that I could, rather than test your patience with yet more wonkish macroeconomic explorations, publish a more exiting and popular article today, celebrating the history of May Day, but I wont. I want to follow this macroeconomic line of though through.
As I’ve argued previously, the history of May 1st demonstrates that that reform and revolution are hardly in conflict, and often go hand in hand. From the very beginning May Day has been coloured by the whole spectrum of the methods of class strugle, from demonstration of labour solidarity and effective organized campaigns that dramatically improved the working conditions of the world’s workers, to demonstrations of uncontrollable rage and revolutionary uprisings that drew uncompromising lines in the sand resisting the endless encroachment of capitalism into our private and public lives, resisting the misery and alienation this creates.
Also, Telekommunisten was founded on May 1st, 2006, so it’s also always an anniversary for us, this year is our 6th birthday.
In my last article I begin sketching out what I’m calling an intermodal macroeconomic model, hoping to understand what an revolutionary social transformation would look like from the economic perspective.
In this model, we have two economies, each representing a given Mode of Production, capitalism and communism.
We often say we live in a Capitalist society, but yet this does not mean that all forms of producing and sharing that occur within our society are Capitalist. This is more than evident when looking at social relations in family and personal life, in intentional communities of various kinds, within co-ops and other non-capitalist organizations, the charity and profit sectors, and, of course, the emerging world of peer-production including free software, free culture, etc. It’s quite clear there is a lot more going on than just Capitalism.
When we say we live in a Capitalist society what we mean is that Capitalism is the dominant mode of production, and as such, it is able to apply the greatest amount of wealth towards it’s own expansion and the enforcement of it’s interests. As a result, our private and public institutions, including our law making and financial institutions are set up according to the interest of this dominant mode.
We can not change our society, neither the public or private institutions that make it up, nor the laws and financial constraints that are imposed without first building the capacity to overcome the capacity of those who resist such change.
Only when the commons based economy exceeds the market based economy can we achieve a society that is organized around the interests of creating wealth for the many instead of creating profit for the few.
Starting with the Kaleckian model, Y = Cw + Cp + I that introduces classes on the consumption side, by dividing consumption into consumption of workers (Cw) and consumption of capital (Cp), Kalecki is able to isolate profit as P = Cp + I. Reasoning that Cw = W, In other words, reasoning that worker’s spend whatever they earn. This assumption is of course true within capitalism. However, if we understand that Capitalism itself, while dominant, exists among several other modes occurring simultaneously, we need to take this into a different direction.
If the commons-based economy must become the dominant economic mode, then instead of understanding the level of profit within the capitalist sector, we need look at relative growth between the capitalist and communist sector, in other words between the sectors that produce for private profit and the sectors that produce for public wealth, the predatory sector and the co-operative sector.
To do so, me move Kalecki’s class division to the investment side, since with capitalism, workers spend everything they earn, but in the more complex social context that capitalism exists within worker’s also invest. So our starting point becomes Y = C + Ip + Iw. With Ip representing Capital’s capacity to invest, and Iw representing workers’ capacity to invest, as result as both classes have the capacity to invest in production.
We now divide C, not on classes, but on mode, creating Cm and Cc, market based consumption that returns profit to it’s investors privately, and Cc, commons based consumption that does not capture profit privately, and returns wealth to society collectively. This gives us Y = Cm + Cc + Iw + Ip.
This now allows to us divide these two sectors as Capitalism, Ym = Cm + Ip and Yp and Communism, Yc = Cc + Iw.
So, from a macroeconomic view, you could say that the revolutionary aspiration of May 1 is to make Yc > Ym, and thereby overcome the dominance of Capital on our society.
In order to understand how this might be possible, we need to look at the flows of value between the two modes.
We can not assume that workers will only invest in the commons and consume from it, nor can we assume that Capital will only consume and invest inversely.
We started to include this last week by drawing on the way import and export between nations is included in macroeconomic identities, adding “net imports” to the model, so to expand what we have above with N, Ym = Cm + Ip + Nm and Yc = Cc + Ow + Nc. Nm and Nc representing the net relative imports of each mode. Being net imports, Nm + Nc would equal zero as these would balance out by definition.
If, in balance, workers consumed the products of capitalist controlled production more than capitalists consumed the products of workers controlled production, then they would have a trade deficit with the capitalist sector and thus have relative reduced economic power as a result, capital would increase it’s dominance, conversely, if worker’s could create a intermodal trade surplus with capital, then then would decrease, and perhaps eventually overcome the dominance of capital.
Likewise, investment can also flow between the sectors, for instance workers buy shares on the stock market, and capitalists may, for instance, finance the development of free software.
It’s hard to identify such intermodal capital flows as investment, since from a class perspective they don’t directly reproduce the wealth that was used, as returns aren’t recaptured according to the relative mode, thus such investment is not directly “valorized.”
Production in capitalism is driven by exchange value, a capitalist commodity can not properly be considered produced until it consumed in such a way that creates more capital. As Capitalism is not directly concerned with producing things because they are useful, but because it is profitable. When the commodity is just given away the “productivity” of the producers who made it is calculated as zero, since zero capital was recaptured.
Therefore, I propose to call such capital flows “Sustentation,” where value creation within one mode is sustained by inflows from another. Individual capitalists may benefit from such sustentation, and often do, such as the capital cost reduction that free software provides to business that use it. However despite the benefit to some specific businesses, such flows represent a drainage of capital from the point of view of the class as whole, as this expenditure is not directly valorized, and even replaces potential valorized consumption, such as expenditures on commercial software made unneeded by using free software.
Likewise, workers’ using their retained earnings to buy stocks can be be understood as a similar sustentation. This drains wealth from the commons-based economy as to sustain capital finance, even though individual workers may privately benefit, by essentially becoming tiny capitalists.
We can add net sustentation to the model as follows. Ym = Cm + Ip + Nm + Sm and Yc = Cc + Iw + Nc + Sc.
Excluding taxation, which is not intermodal, so activity in both modes is subject to the same government, we have a complete macroeconomic picture of class struggle and can start discussing how venture communism, counterpolitics and insurectionist finance can be employed in the struggle.
But, that will need to wait until next week.
In the mean time you can join us at Cafe Kotti at 8pm or so: http://bit.ly/K04wqf
Y o u a r e c o r d i a l l y i n v i t e d t o t h e :
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Art & Economics Group comeback at West Germany, Berlin
hosted by Gitte Bohr
Quarterly Forum 2012, Q2
Presented by:
Tanja Ostojic / David Rych / Dmytri Kleiner
On behalf of the A r t & E c o n o m i c s G r o u p
Wednesday, May 2, 2012 at 19:00h
West Germany, Skalitzer Straße 133, Berlin-Kreuzberg
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Program:
- One day exhibition of Art-bonds 2007-2012
- Quarterly report
- Theoretical lecture by Diego Castro
- Auction of the special edition of art-bonds designed by Diego Castro
- Discussion
After a break due to the economical recession, the come-back of the Quarterly Workshop of the Art &Economics group will be held on
Wednesday, May 2, 2012 at 19:00h at “West Germany” in Berlin-Kreuzberg. This will be the first in a series of quarterly discussions held this year.
The Art & Economics Group, established in Berlin in 2007 by Tanja Ostojic, David Rych and Dmytri Kleiner, investigates the intersection of art and political economy. For the first two years Art & Economics Group Quarterly Forums were regularly hosted by Project Room 35 and Wooloo
Productions Berlin. After a break due to the economic recession and the closure of those two art spaces, Quarterly Forums have since 2010 been hosted by the Museum of American Art Berlin and at other different venues.
The program of the Quarterly Forums (QF) includes: quarterly report, guest of the evening, auction of special edition of art bonds designed by the guest of the evening, and discussion. Topics include political economy as a theme in art, the economics of art production and economic activity as an action based art practice.
Among the guests we had before are: Diego de La Vega, Alex Nikolic from Slum TV, former artist Goran Djordjevic, Stefan Kurr, Wooloo.org, etc.
Our guest of the evening Diego Castro (*1972 in Hanover) is a German-Spanish artist and researcher. His artworks, mostly drawings, video and installation, deal with political, historical and social issues. He is currently working on his PhD thesis on a critique of participation in art and as a leitmotif within the framework of post-fordist work ethics. In his theoretical lecture of the evening he will address the problem of the economic value of participation and of participation as labour.
Looking forward to discussing with you!
Yours sincerely,
Art & Economics Group
Contact: Art & Economics Group: tostojic@web.de
Gitte Bohr: gittebohr@gmx.de / www.gittebohr.de
Diego Castro: www.diegocastro.de
Location: Gitte Bohr @ West Germany, Skalitzer Straße 133, Berlin-Kreuzberg
(entrance next to “Effendi-Optik”), U8/U1 “Kottbusser Tor”
Gitte Bohr – Club für Kunst und politisches Denken
www.gittebohr.de
