13. What's happening to markets is also happening among employees. A metaphysical construct called "The Company" is the only thing standing between the two.
[Part 12]
Here's a radical thought for you: what if Google simply vanished one day?
I'm quite fond of this thought. Not because of any particular animosity towards Google, but because the notion of millions upon millions of bots doing billions of pings into the void of eternal 404s is a brutal and profound visualization of what transience means. And of what it really means to move from a centralized system of communication to a radically decentralized one.
The internetional botnet you are trying to reach is no longer available.
Right now, at ths very moment, an uncountable number of coders count on the continued existence of the Google for their codemunching. SEO mystics write their arcane formulas, trend analysts tune their bots for certain keywords, any number of back-end applications attaches a string to the one node that answers all pinged queries -
Hey, even lazy writers code for Google, using the always-already tired formula of "a search for the words x gives n results..."
Imagine all of this simply breaking down. 404, page not found, connection timed out. All dependencies are severed, are supply chains are cut off, all lines of communication are returned to 127.0.0.1. All businesses based on the Google doing its magic - dead. All consultants based on condensing the Google experience into what the customer need to head - out of work. All possibilities of making money - no more.
Hyperbole alert? Well, yes.
But I imagine this is in the spirit of how those who fear the advent of the internet, file sharing and the other new forms of communication. Being as dependant as they are on the one logic operator - capitalism - the notion of doing it without the immediate medium of money is as frightening as frightening can be. Suddenly, everything that has been proven to be right in both theory and practice is said to be both null and void, and it is only natural to go on the defensive in response to that. Especially
There is a reason hackers are routinely pictured as either socially maladjusted misfits living in their mom's basements or as supermegahyperdangerous geniuses with almost magical skills. Those who defy a given paradigm are either all out crazy or outright dangerous - if they are wrong, they are wrong, and if they are right, then all bets are off. Those criminals can't be up to no good, ignoring the rules that decent people follow.
I want you to ponder the image of the suddenly disappearing Google for a while. If you are anything like me, it will eventually give you some insight into the worldview of those who just can't seem to get what the while deal with global instant communication is. A sense of that confused asking of the question: if not this, then what?
Like a bot pinging the Google that suddenly wasn't there. Wanting and needing only a Googled response, no matter how many ducks are a go go.
It is only appropriate to end this with a Pink Floyd quote. I'm pretty sure you can Google yourself to the song in question, so here goes:
All we need to do is make sure we keep talking.
I'll see you tomorrow for part fourteen.
Sunday, January 13, 2013
Saturday, January 12, 2013
12 of 95: You can have secrets or profits, but not both
12. There are no secrets. The networked market knows more than companies do about their own products. And whether the news is good or bad, they tell everyone.
[Part 11]
This is brutal. In a good way.
Back in the by now quite mythological ages of information poverty, you could get away with selling sub-par products by virtue of the market not knowing that they were in fact sub-par. The cost of researching the alternatives were either too high or our of reach completely, and this fact was exploited by the various actors on the market. Due to the logic of capitalism - make money - corners would be cut, and cut in such a way that what you got was the cheapest possible produced unit with the lowest possible standard of quality acceptable. Cheap, bad and mass-marketed - those were the days.
No more of that now.
A tangible example of this is bike locks. Just take a gander at this here hyperlink for the longer version.
If you gandered, you'll no doubt have gotten to the point by now: if something is broken, it will remain broken, and people will know all about just how broken it is. No ifs, no buts, no secrets - if it is broken, fix it. There will be no mercy if you don't.
Returning to the dialectic between the inter and the intra, we see that the tremendous increase in the communicative ability of ordinary people cannot but have effects on the logic of ordinary workplaces. Or, put in another way: if you keep selling broken bike locks on a market where thieves, customers, bloggers and every mom of every one of these persons know just how broken these locks are, you're done.
That is an ex business model. It has ceased to be.
What you want and need to do is to get out there and talk to these people. The customers and experts. Because they will tell you all about what you're doing. What you're doing right, what you're doing wrong and what you're doing that they don't like. And I hope I don't have to venture into a long diatribe about how you want to keep doing the right things, fix the wrong ones and deal with the unliked ones.
You can't please everybody. That never changed.
This goes for everything. The quality of goods produced, the expedience of services rendered, the everything of everything. Advertising, working conditions, the eco-friendliness of the supply chains, the bonuses to the high bosses, the things that the internal discourses of the workplace has developed a fond blind spot for - nothing of that is secret, and people will find out about it. By virtue of caring about what you do.
I once again want to return to the main point of yesterday's post: you can either view this as a bad thing or a good thing. If you're in the good mood, then you're probably thinking about how everyone's life is improved by the discontinuation of bad practices. If not -
Well.
Why would anyone want to keep these bad practices around, I wonder?
I'll see you all again tomorrow for part thirteen.
[Part 11]
This is brutal. In a good way.
Back in the by now quite mythological ages of information poverty, you could get away with selling sub-par products by virtue of the market not knowing that they were in fact sub-par. The cost of researching the alternatives were either too high or our of reach completely, and this fact was exploited by the various actors on the market. Due to the logic of capitalism - make money - corners would be cut, and cut in such a way that what you got was the cheapest possible produced unit with the lowest possible standard of quality acceptable. Cheap, bad and mass-marketed - those were the days.
No more of that now.
A tangible example of this is bike locks. Just take a gander at this here hyperlink for the longer version.
If you gandered, you'll no doubt have gotten to the point by now: if something is broken, it will remain broken, and people will know all about just how broken it is. No ifs, no buts, no secrets - if it is broken, fix it. There will be no mercy if you don't.
Returning to the dialectic between the inter and the intra, we see that the tremendous increase in the communicative ability of ordinary people cannot but have effects on the logic of ordinary workplaces. Or, put in another way: if you keep selling broken bike locks on a market where thieves, customers, bloggers and every mom of every one of these persons know just how broken these locks are, you're done.
That is an ex business model. It has ceased to be.
What you want and need to do is to get out there and talk to these people. The customers and experts. Because they will tell you all about what you're doing. What you're doing right, what you're doing wrong and what you're doing that they don't like. And I hope I don't have to venture into a long diatribe about how you want to keep doing the right things, fix the wrong ones and deal with the unliked ones.
You can't please everybody. That never changed.
This goes for everything. The quality of goods produced, the expedience of services rendered, the everything of everything. Advertising, working conditions, the eco-friendliness of the supply chains, the bonuses to the high bosses, the things that the internal discourses of the workplace has developed a fond blind spot for - nothing of that is secret, and people will find out about it. By virtue of caring about what you do.
I once again want to return to the main point of yesterday's post: you can either view this as a bad thing or a good thing. If you're in the good mood, then you're probably thinking about how everyone's life is improved by the discontinuation of bad practices. If not -
Well.
Why would anyone want to keep these bad practices around, I wonder?
I'll see you all again tomorrow for part thirteen.
Friday, January 11, 2013
11 of 95: Not so fast, mister!
11. People in
networked markets have figured out that they get far better information
and support from one another than from vendors. So much for corporate
rhetoric about adding value to commoditized products.
[Part 10]
There is an easy way to write this thesis, and that is to just write "file sharing". Just those two words.
I sense we might need to be indirect about this. For reasons of clarity and pedagogy.
What is information? one might indirectly ask. And should you choose to venture out into the vastness of literature on the subject, you would find that you can pretty much pick and choose among the various definitions. There's enough of them for everyone, and then some.
The fact that you can venture out there (most likely starting on Wikipedia) is in and of itself a revolutionary thing. You no longer have to wait for the company, the experts or any particular institution to provide you with a prepackaged morsel of information. You can venture, instead.
File sharing is the transfer of information. Communication, if you want. Don't let the fact that it is faster, cheaper and more efficient than other forms of information transfer/communication cloud your mind - it's exactly the same thing as it's always been.
Only faster, cheaper and more efficient.
This is bad news bears for those businesses relying on the premise that communication will remain slow, expensive and inefficient. At least slow, expensive and inefficient enough that ordinary people like you and me won't bother with the whole venturing business. Slow, expensive and inefficient enough that those who deal in prepackaged morsels of information are perceived as the only feasible mean of getting the word out there.
Tell me, have you bought a CD lately?
Ten (or twenty) years ago, CDs were the de facto standard of moving music around. You could compress a whole lot of audio quality into a small package, and you could do it on such a scale that it made economic sense to do so. And, since no one else could do the same thing at the same scale, you could charge a whole lot of money for it - the prize of a CD has very little to do with material costs, to be sure. Especially at larger scales.
These days, the sales of CDs are down. Due to the fact that they are inefficient carriers of information - no matter how many of them you haul on to an ever so fast airplane, the speed of light is faster than that. And the speed of this internet thing of ours is pretty much working at such speeds, especially as you get closer to the network backbone.
And why should people buy CDs? Other than the nostalgia value, no value is added to the physical object other than the physical object in itself. And you can get a piece of plastic a lot cheaper than what they're charging.
Should you like a particular musician enough, then it is well within your venture capabilities to look them up and give them a donation. Not just once, but as many times as you like.
It goes without saying that if you base your business on the sales of CDs, this might pose a problem to your business model.
For the rest of us, who suddenly are able to venture far and wide into the collected writings and recordings of humanity, this increase the speed of information transfer is a good thing. And it takes a certain kind of slowness to not see it as such.
Even if a few business models may have to change along the information highway to the future.
I'll see you tomorrow for part twelve.
[Part 10]
There is an easy way to write this thesis, and that is to just write "file sharing". Just those two words.
I sense we might need to be indirect about this. For reasons of clarity and pedagogy.
What is information? one might indirectly ask. And should you choose to venture out into the vastness of literature on the subject, you would find that you can pretty much pick and choose among the various definitions. There's enough of them for everyone, and then some.
The fact that you can venture out there (most likely starting on Wikipedia) is in and of itself a revolutionary thing. You no longer have to wait for the company, the experts or any particular institution to provide you with a prepackaged morsel of information. You can venture, instead.
File sharing is the transfer of information. Communication, if you want. Don't let the fact that it is faster, cheaper and more efficient than other forms of information transfer/communication cloud your mind - it's exactly the same thing as it's always been.
Only faster, cheaper and more efficient.
This is bad news bears for those businesses relying on the premise that communication will remain slow, expensive and inefficient. At least slow, expensive and inefficient enough that ordinary people like you and me won't bother with the whole venturing business. Slow, expensive and inefficient enough that those who deal in prepackaged morsels of information are perceived as the only feasible mean of getting the word out there.
Tell me, have you bought a CD lately?
Ten (or twenty) years ago, CDs were the de facto standard of moving music around. You could compress a whole lot of audio quality into a small package, and you could do it on such a scale that it made economic sense to do so. And, since no one else could do the same thing at the same scale, you could charge a whole lot of money for it - the prize of a CD has very little to do with material costs, to be sure. Especially at larger scales.
These days, the sales of CDs are down. Due to the fact that they are inefficient carriers of information - no matter how many of them you haul on to an ever so fast airplane, the speed of light is faster than that. And the speed of this internet thing of ours is pretty much working at such speeds, especially as you get closer to the network backbone.
And why should people buy CDs? Other than the nostalgia value, no value is added to the physical object other than the physical object in itself. And you can get a piece of plastic a lot cheaper than what they're charging.
Should you like a particular musician enough, then it is well within your venture capabilities to look them up and give them a donation. Not just once, but as many times as you like.
It goes without saying that if you base your business on the sales of CDs, this might pose a problem to your business model.
For the rest of us, who suddenly are able to venture far and wide into the collected writings and recordings of humanity, this increase the speed of information transfer is a good thing. And it takes a certain kind of slowness to not see it as such.
Even if a few business models may have to change along the information highway to the future.
I'll see you tomorrow for part twelve.
Thursday, January 10, 2013
10 of 95: Context is both king and revolutionary
10. As a result, markets are getting smarter, more informed, more organized. Participation in a networked market changes people fundamentally.
[Part 9]
I feel as if it is time to do something I don't do that very often. That is, talk about what I do when I'm not a blogger, tweeter or a general web presence in some other form.
I sleep.
But other than that, I make it easy for myself. I go to organizations and pretty much apply the advice given in the 95 theses (and in the probably less read but more wordy part of the Manifesto). Often, this is radical and/or different enough to blast many institutional (inertial) practices that just seems to hang around because that's what's always been done.
(Here I could say "hire me", but - that's not why were here. Though I suppose you could draw some conclusions about the whole marketing angle from this - I'll just leave this part in as an illustrative yet incoherent and parenthetical example.)
Anywho, institutional change. As you can see from the thesis up above, it's yet again one of these referrals back to the earlier numbers. Both to #8 and #9, as it were, and this is important. Because much of what I do consists of taking this thesis and applying it onto the actually existing framework of the institution in question. Mostly to see where these effects of more smart, more informed and more organized don't happen.
That's where the change is needed. Most of the times.
If you've read ahead in the theses (or the very helpful cheat sheet over at Wikipedia), you've kinda noticed that the authors place a strong emphasis on the relationship between internets and intranets. Or, rather, the tendency of organizations to think that it is enough to communicate amongst themselves in order to get things done.
As I've argued before, this is enough if all you want to do is transform raw material into money. If the one and only thing you have to do is make a profit at the end of the month, you can pretty much ignore all the communication with the outside world that is not the delivery of contractually agreed results. Money talks, as it were.
This has been the default mode for corporations for the last couple of hundred years or so, give or take with any given definition of capitalism. And there's a lot of institutional inertia going on, to be sure - discourses layered in and on discourses and so forth.
Things are changing, though, and this is where the "smarter, more informed and more organized" part comes in.
If you're working at a workplace where the only lines of communication are internal ones, you're most likely experiencing two things. One is that the communications along these lines tend to take on a certain characteristic of their own after a while, and the other is that this characteristic more often than not tend to get strange features that cannot be removed no matter how much better things would get if they did.
Cue sexism.
It also tends to happen that [other] blind spots appear. Some things don't get done, some things are ignored, some things are constantly left to the interns - some things are left in the eternal category of "we'll do that later".
The traditional (yet domestic) example of this is the meat loaf that gets its two ends cut off. A family makes meatloaves on a regular basis, and always cuts off the ends before serving. Not because of any particular reason, but because its always been done that way. One day, one of the younger kids bring a friend from school over, who asks about this particular meat loaf style. Not knowing why, they decide to ask old grandma what the deal is. Who says: why, it's because when we lived in that small place oh so long ago, the oven was only yea big, and we couldn't fit a bigger meat loaf in it!
These things tend to outlive both their usefulness and their employees. The bigger and older the institution in question, the more of these things there tend to be. And the more they tend to be like the infamous TPS reports: much fuss about not that much at all.
The general cure for these things is to open up new channels of communications. Not just for one person knowing about different ways of doing things, but for the workplace as a whole. Opening up the black box, as it were, and letting the content take part of a lighter setting. Or letting those friends from school in and encourage them to ask questions.
Not just as a onetime thing, but continually. Enough to change the dynamic of discourse in a direction where the old "just because we've always dunnem" just won't cut it anymore. Because it won't. But we will return to that as we proceed.
This may or may not be what the authors meant by their theses. It's what I make them mean when I go about and do things in the world, though, and since I'm kind of important in this context, this is relevant to our purposes.
Though I'd love to hear your thoughts on the matter.
I'll see you again tomorrow for part eleven.
[Part 9]
I feel as if it is time to do something I don't do that very often. That is, talk about what I do when I'm not a blogger, tweeter or a general web presence in some other form.
I sleep.
But other than that, I make it easy for myself. I go to organizations and pretty much apply the advice given in the 95 theses (and in the probably less read but more wordy part of the Manifesto). Often, this is radical and/or different enough to blast many institutional (inertial) practices that just seems to hang around because that's what's always been done.
(Here I could say "hire me", but - that's not why were here. Though I suppose you could draw some conclusions about the whole marketing angle from this - I'll just leave this part in as an illustrative yet incoherent and parenthetical example.)
Anywho, institutional change. As you can see from the thesis up above, it's yet again one of these referrals back to the earlier numbers. Both to #8 and #9, as it were, and this is important. Because much of what I do consists of taking this thesis and applying it onto the actually existing framework of the institution in question. Mostly to see where these effects of more smart, more informed and more organized don't happen.
That's where the change is needed. Most of the times.
If you've read ahead in the theses (or the very helpful cheat sheet over at Wikipedia), you've kinda noticed that the authors place a strong emphasis on the relationship between internets and intranets. Or, rather, the tendency of organizations to think that it is enough to communicate amongst themselves in order to get things done.
As I've argued before, this is enough if all you want to do is transform raw material into money. If the one and only thing you have to do is make a profit at the end of the month, you can pretty much ignore all the communication with the outside world that is not the delivery of contractually agreed results. Money talks, as it were.
This has been the default mode for corporations for the last couple of hundred years or so, give or take with any given definition of capitalism. And there's a lot of institutional inertia going on, to be sure - discourses layered in and on discourses and so forth.
Things are changing, though, and this is where the "smarter, more informed and more organized" part comes in.
If you're working at a workplace where the only lines of communication are internal ones, you're most likely experiencing two things. One is that the communications along these lines tend to take on a certain characteristic of their own after a while, and the other is that this characteristic more often than not tend to get strange features that cannot be removed no matter how much better things would get if they did.
Cue sexism.
It also tends to happen that [other] blind spots appear. Some things don't get done, some things are ignored, some things are constantly left to the interns - some things are left in the eternal category of "we'll do that later".
The traditional (yet domestic) example of this is the meat loaf that gets its two ends cut off. A family makes meatloaves on a regular basis, and always cuts off the ends before serving. Not because of any particular reason, but because its always been done that way. One day, one of the younger kids bring a friend from school over, who asks about this particular meat loaf style. Not knowing why, they decide to ask old grandma what the deal is. Who says: why, it's because when we lived in that small place oh so long ago, the oven was only yea big, and we couldn't fit a bigger meat loaf in it!
These things tend to outlive both their usefulness and their employees. The bigger and older the institution in question, the more of these things there tend to be. And the more they tend to be like the infamous TPS reports: much fuss about not that much at all.
The general cure for these things is to open up new channels of communications. Not just for one person knowing about different ways of doing things, but for the workplace as a whole. Opening up the black box, as it were, and letting the content take part of a lighter setting. Or letting those friends from school in and encourage them to ask questions.
Not just as a onetime thing, but continually. Enough to change the dynamic of discourse in a direction where the old "just because we've always dunnem" just won't cut it anymore. Because it won't. But we will return to that as we proceed.
This may or may not be what the authors meant by their theses. It's what I make them mean when I go about and do things in the world, though, and since I'm kind of important in this context, this is relevant to our purposes.
Though I'd love to hear your thoughts on the matter.
I'll see you again tomorrow for part eleven.
Wednesday, January 9, 2013
9 of 95: Hello, human. Is that your voice I hear?
9. These networked conversations are enabling powerful new forms of social organization and knowledge exchange to emerge.
[Part 8]
There is a game I like to play with my contemporaries, and that is the game of pointing out confounding things that gave happened both because and despite the recent advances in everything.
The confounding confusions of contemporary life are many and confoundingly confusing.
So we have all of these new technologies, all of these new social conventions and all of these new ways of making social interaction happen - that's an empirical fact. We have them, all of them, at once, available now. As in, right now, no extra effort required, all you need to do is to go use them.
Like public libraries. Only with better hours.
So we have all of these new thingamajigs. Yet the actual uses they are put into are more stupid than they need to, less human than they should, and all in all less enabling than they by any reasonable standard ought to. What gives?
There are two lines of reasons to this. The first is capitalism - you're already familiar with that, so I'll just subvert you with this here link. The second should be familiar to you as well, as it is the standard critique of liberalism: making something a formal right/possibility doesn't automatically confer the means or realistic life conditions to use these rights and possibilities.
You may have the right of free speech, but during your lifelong struggle to make ends meet in the slums of Sao Paolo you somehow never got around to acquire an education in the art of saying things effectively. Or anything else, for that matter.
Or, to paraphrase: there's no such thing as technological determinism.
We have the technology to do things in better ways. We have the technology do organize in radically new social ways, and to utilize the new means of discursive production in brutally efficient manner (hello, Wikipedia). We have the technology to make knowledge exchange (stack exchange) a thing of everyday life, in contrast to the traditional elite seclusion of the university institutions.
We have the technology to tear down any number of walls. But having the tech - the possibility - is not the same thing as this happening all on its own. It shouldn't be a political issue, but in terms of actually existing human beings, it is.
As is all possible change, until it has transformed into the always-already state of normality.
So people have the possibility to make something new. People such as you and me, here and now, today. The always ever present logic of capitalism will make sure that this possibility is turn into a profit margin, no matter how pervasive the surveillance of workers will turn out to be - Taylorism never ceased to exist, and it too relishes in its newfound capacity to do what it has always done. and the equally present logic of actually existing human beings will ensure that the various subreddits will continue their existence.
New tech, new possibilities. Same old humanity. The same old confounding confusion about the difference between what is and what could, should and ought to be.
The more things change, the more they seem to stay the same. For better or worse.
I'll see you again tomorrow for part ten. Do tech over to Les and Eli for their thoughts on the matter.
[Part 8]
There is a game I like to play with my contemporaries, and that is the game of pointing out confounding things that gave happened both because and despite the recent advances in everything.
The confounding confusions of contemporary life are many and confoundingly confusing.
So we have all of these new technologies, all of these new social conventions and all of these new ways of making social interaction happen - that's an empirical fact. We have them, all of them, at once, available now. As in, right now, no extra effort required, all you need to do is to go use them.
Like public libraries. Only with better hours.
So we have all of these new thingamajigs. Yet the actual uses they are put into are more stupid than they need to, less human than they should, and all in all less enabling than they by any reasonable standard ought to. What gives?
There are two lines of reasons to this. The first is capitalism - you're already familiar with that, so I'll just subvert you with this here link. The second should be familiar to you as well, as it is the standard critique of liberalism: making something a formal right/possibility doesn't automatically confer the means or realistic life conditions to use these rights and possibilities.
You may have the right of free speech, but during your lifelong struggle to make ends meet in the slums of Sao Paolo you somehow never got around to acquire an education in the art of saying things effectively. Or anything else, for that matter.
Or, to paraphrase: there's no such thing as technological determinism.
We have the technology to do things in better ways. We have the technology do organize in radically new social ways, and to utilize the new means of discursive production in brutally efficient manner (hello, Wikipedia). We have the technology to make knowledge exchange (stack exchange) a thing of everyday life, in contrast to the traditional elite seclusion of the university institutions.
We have the technology to tear down any number of walls. But having the tech - the possibility - is not the same thing as this happening all on its own. It shouldn't be a political issue, but in terms of actually existing human beings, it is.
As is all possible change, until it has transformed into the always-already state of normality.
So people have the possibility to make something new. People such as you and me, here and now, today. The always ever present logic of capitalism will make sure that this possibility is turn into a profit margin, no matter how pervasive the surveillance of workers will turn out to be - Taylorism never ceased to exist, and it too relishes in its newfound capacity to do what it has always done. and the equally present logic of actually existing human beings will ensure that the various subreddits will continue their existence.
New tech, new possibilities. Same old humanity. The same old confounding confusion about the difference between what is and what could, should and ought to be.
The more things change, the more they seem to stay the same. For better or worse.
I'll see you again tomorrow for part ten. Do tech over to Les and Eli for their thoughts on the matter.
Tuesday, January 8, 2013
8 of 95: That's a capital idea, old chap! I'll retweet it at once!
8. In both internetworked markets and among intranetworked employees, people are speaking to each other in a powerful new way.
[Part 7]
Now, I know what you might be thinking. Isn't this something of a rehash of thesis #6, whose only apparent reason for being is that it introduces the divide between inter and intra, the networks of humans vs the networks of employees?
In a word, yes.
Since this theme will recur at some length as we go along, this is a perfect time - kairos - to return to the theme of capitalism. It has been declared vital and then kinda been indirectly forgotten. Let's remedy this.
There is no denying that capitalism produces results. Economists of the ideological bent might tell you it's because the free flow of capital by means of invisible hands unleashes the human spirit or some such descriptive handwaving. Which is interesting if you need a description of results, but tautological to a fault if you want to delve into reasons of why. (It goes without saying that the explanation "this produces this result because it produces this result" is tautological. I'm saying it anyway, so that you can point to this spot and say that I said it here.)
If you want a why, here's one: capitalism works because it reduces existential anxiety. Any and all practical strategic questions about what to do are given a prefabricated answer by default, and this answer is: make money.
This goes for whatever it is you're thinking about doing. Want to be a farmer? Make money. Want to run a newspaper? Make money. Want to run a global consortium of patent trolling with a vast array of lobbying interests in an equally vast number of countries? Make money. No matter what you're about to do, the answer to the question of why is always the same: make money.
This reduction of teleological complexity serves to increase productivity in human endeavors. It reduces the amount of discussion that can take place, and focuses the organizatorial spirit onto this one goal in such a fashion that getting along ultimately turns into an optional feature. You are, as it were, not on the job to make friends, but to - yep, you guessed it - do a job.
Make money.
One doesn't even have to think of an answer to the question what one is going to do with all the money that's being made. That question, too, is pre-answered: make more money, of course!
This capitalization on the cutting of bullshit is indeed a force for increasing production. The ever present need to make excuses, have reasons for what you're doing or explain why this absurd thing has to be done is removed, and as long as the main goal is fulfilled, anything goes. People don't even need to know each other, or indeed know that their partners in capitalization exist - ask any stock trader about their shareholder's interest in the companies they happen to own a part of at this given moment, and you'll see what I mean.
This anonymization of business is a general feature of capitalism. Just think about the transactions you do any given day - how many of them depend on you knowing anything about the person on the other end? When buying things in the grocery store, the fancy phone store, the subway toll booth - how much of the ritualized customer/salesperson relationship depend on you as an individual actor relating to another being-in-the-world?
This is indeed a rhetorical question.
Now, there's no force of increased production that doesn't have side effects, and this general sense of not having to know things about others in order to be a functioning and productive member of society is one of them.
If we return to the starting point - the division between networks among humans and networks among employees - we'll see how the implications of what's been said in earlier posts might make themselves brutally painful. People form communities around things, ideas, values, beliefs, particular human beings - anything you care to mention. Employees, on the other hand, can get along just fine without any sense of community whatsoever, and this shows in their top-downed intranetworks of profit-maximizing ambitions. The mandated goal? Why, to make money of course!
New tools of community are co-opted into new tools of profit making. Regardless of any human factor involved. Not because of malignant intent, conspiratorial conspiracies or even political ambitions, but because that's what capitalism is and does to everything. And everyone.
I'll see you again tomorrow for part nine. Do co-opt Les and Eli's thoughts.
[Part 7]
Now, I know what you might be thinking. Isn't this something of a rehash of thesis #6, whose only apparent reason for being is that it introduces the divide between inter and intra, the networks of humans vs the networks of employees?
In a word, yes.
Since this theme will recur at some length as we go along, this is a perfect time - kairos - to return to the theme of capitalism. It has been declared vital and then kinda been indirectly forgotten. Let's remedy this.
There is no denying that capitalism produces results. Economists of the ideological bent might tell you it's because the free flow of capital by means of invisible hands unleashes the human spirit or some such descriptive handwaving. Which is interesting if you need a description of results, but tautological to a fault if you want to delve into reasons of why. (It goes without saying that the explanation "this produces this result because it produces this result" is tautological. I'm saying it anyway, so that you can point to this spot and say that I said it here.)
If you want a why, here's one: capitalism works because it reduces existential anxiety. Any and all practical strategic questions about what to do are given a prefabricated answer by default, and this answer is: make money.
This goes for whatever it is you're thinking about doing. Want to be a farmer? Make money. Want to run a newspaper? Make money. Want to run a global consortium of patent trolling with a vast array of lobbying interests in an equally vast number of countries? Make money. No matter what you're about to do, the answer to the question of why is always the same: make money.
This reduction of teleological complexity serves to increase productivity in human endeavors. It reduces the amount of discussion that can take place, and focuses the organizatorial spirit onto this one goal in such a fashion that getting along ultimately turns into an optional feature. You are, as it were, not on the job to make friends, but to - yep, you guessed it - do a job.
Make money.
One doesn't even have to think of an answer to the question what one is going to do with all the money that's being made. That question, too, is pre-answered: make more money, of course!
This capitalization on the cutting of bullshit is indeed a force for increasing production. The ever present need to make excuses, have reasons for what you're doing or explain why this absurd thing has to be done is removed, and as long as the main goal is fulfilled, anything goes. People don't even need to know each other, or indeed know that their partners in capitalization exist - ask any stock trader about their shareholder's interest in the companies they happen to own a part of at this given moment, and you'll see what I mean.
This anonymization of business is a general feature of capitalism. Just think about the transactions you do any given day - how many of them depend on you knowing anything about the person on the other end? When buying things in the grocery store, the fancy phone store, the subway toll booth - how much of the ritualized customer/salesperson relationship depend on you as an individual actor relating to another being-in-the-world?
This is indeed a rhetorical question.
Now, there's no force of increased production that doesn't have side effects, and this general sense of not having to know things about others in order to be a functioning and productive member of society is one of them.
If we return to the starting point - the division between networks among humans and networks among employees - we'll see how the implications of what's been said in earlier posts might make themselves brutally painful. People form communities around things, ideas, values, beliefs, particular human beings - anything you care to mention. Employees, on the other hand, can get along just fine without any sense of community whatsoever, and this shows in their top-downed intranetworks of profit-maximizing ambitions. The mandated goal? Why, to make money of course!
New tools of community are co-opted into new tools of profit making. Regardless of any human factor involved. Not because of malignant intent, conspiratorial conspiracies or even political ambitions, but because that's what capitalism is and does to everything. And everyone.
I'll see you again tomorrow for part nine. Do co-opt Les and Eli's thoughts.
Monday, January 7, 2013
7 of 95: Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy
[Part 6]
The primary mode of transportation on the internet is teleportation. The time needed to travel from the one place to the other is getting ever closer to zero, not including the amount of time a click of the mouse entails. Which is a fact with many implications, most of the summed up by the thesis of today:
7. Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy.
And they subvert hierarchy precisely through this immediacy. When there's time between act and result, then there's also time time for regulation, bosses telling you you're not allowed to do that - and administrations denying access to whatever it is you're looking for.
It is hard to deny access to something available at a thoughts notice.
One of the biggest reasons that employers restrict internet access on their workplaces is the fear of employees finding out about things. Things such as the conditions under which they are employed, and the difference between these and the conditions on other workplaces. The fear being that an informed staff is a staff no more.
It's just as ridiculous as it sounds. Yet it happens anyway.
One of the biggest reasons politicians can get away with doing the most outrageous stuff is that these things are buried behind impenetrable walls of bureaucratic routines and procedures that takes time and effort to get past. So much time and effort, in fact, that by the time the affected citizens manage to effort through it, the time for discussion, debate and change is passed - things are already set in motion, the shovels have already hit the ground.
Time is a democratic resource.
One of the biggest reasons people who fundamentally agree with each other fail to organize lies in the slowness of communication. The current events that make them realize that they are indeed in agreement fade during the time it takes for messages to go back and forth - the issue goes out of the public's eye and the people involved get less involved. And none of this is helped by the tendency of organizers to get stuck in a web emergent hierarchy that a general lack of information generate spontaneously, out of necessity.
Time and information. Information and time.
It goes without saying that the immediate access to information - the teleportation, the (hyper)linking - brings with it a radical change. It gets that much harder to keep things secret to employees when things can be tweeted, tumblred, blogged or in other ways shared with minimal effort. As soon as the word is out, it's available to everyone. Everyone can teleport to it at the speed of light, without any regard to any business plan based on the notion of not having to invest in worker's conditions.
It's all the more difficult to keep a secret secret. All it takes is that one (1) person discovers that something is up for the world to know about it. The whole world is watching - and any attempt to hide behind the timelag of bureaucracy or administrative procedure is doomed to fail.
And since everyone can be everywhere, they can also react everywhere - in blogs, newspapers, massive global street protests or what have you. The gap between information and action is shorter than ever - most due to not being restricted by complicated planning meetings, declarations of intent and other features of a state of lack of information. Things are happening now, and the time for action is now - the time between now and now is now.
It goes wihout saying that any attempt to insist on the hierarchies of old will be undermined by this. Undermined to no end.
The world is a link away. And we no longer have to ask for permission to go there.
I'll see you again tomorrow for part eight. Do peek over at what Eli and Les have to say on the topic.
Originally published 7 January, 2012
The primary mode of transportation on the internet is teleportation. The time needed to travel from the one place to the other is getting ever closer to zero, not including the amount of time a click of the mouse entails. Which is a fact with many implications, most of the summed up by the thesis of today:
7. Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy.
And they subvert hierarchy precisely through this immediacy. When there's time between act and result, then there's also time time for regulation, bosses telling you you're not allowed to do that - and administrations denying access to whatever it is you're looking for.
It is hard to deny access to something available at a thoughts notice.
One of the biggest reasons that employers restrict internet access on their workplaces is the fear of employees finding out about things. Things such as the conditions under which they are employed, and the difference between these and the conditions on other workplaces. The fear being that an informed staff is a staff no more.
It's just as ridiculous as it sounds. Yet it happens anyway.
One of the biggest reasons politicians can get away with doing the most outrageous stuff is that these things are buried behind impenetrable walls of bureaucratic routines and procedures that takes time and effort to get past. So much time and effort, in fact, that by the time the affected citizens manage to effort through it, the time for discussion, debate and change is passed - things are already set in motion, the shovels have already hit the ground.
Time is a democratic resource.
One of the biggest reasons people who fundamentally agree with each other fail to organize lies in the slowness of communication. The current events that make them realize that they are indeed in agreement fade during the time it takes for messages to go back and forth - the issue goes out of the public's eye and the people involved get less involved. And none of this is helped by the tendency of organizers to get stuck in a web emergent hierarchy that a general lack of information generate spontaneously, out of necessity.
Time and information. Information and time.
It goes without saying that the immediate access to information - the teleportation, the (hyper)linking - brings with it a radical change. It gets that much harder to keep things secret to employees when things can be tweeted, tumblred, blogged or in other ways shared with minimal effort. As soon as the word is out, it's available to everyone. Everyone can teleport to it at the speed of light, without any regard to any business plan based on the notion of not having to invest in worker's conditions.
It's all the more difficult to keep a secret secret. All it takes is that one (1) person discovers that something is up for the world to know about it. The whole world is watching - and any attempt to hide behind the timelag of bureaucracy or administrative procedure is doomed to fail.
And since everyone can be everywhere, they can also react everywhere - in blogs, newspapers, massive global street protests or what have you. The gap between information and action is shorter than ever - most due to not being restricted by complicated planning meetings, declarations of intent and other features of a state of lack of information. Things are happening now, and the time for action is now - the time between now and now is now.
It goes wihout saying that any attempt to insist on the hierarchies of old will be undermined by this. Undermined to no end.
The world is a link away. And we no longer have to ask for permission to go there.
I'll see you again tomorrow for part eight. Do peek over at what Eli and Les have to say on the topic.
Originally published 7 January, 2012
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