The tragedy of the common internet

Often when discussing file sharing, the notion of the tragedy of the commons is invoked. Often as an argument against it - the one person having access to most of human culture is no big deal, but as more and more entities gain this access, stranger and stranger things start to happen. In the end, tragedy occurs.

For those of you who for whatever reason might want a reminder of what the tragedy of the commons is all about, here's the gist of it: imagine a public space, open for everyone. Any one person using it won't make that much difference, so the implicit imperative for any one parcitular person is to use it to the max. Which, eventually, leads to a critical mass of people using it to the max. Which, in turn, ends in tragedy, as the usefulness of this public space is diminished or even destroyed, due to everyone overusing this public space.

The implied relevance to the issue of file sharing being that even though the one person engaging in it can be written off as collateral damage, the effect of the multitude of people doing it is a radical shift in consumer behavior that will destroy the common good. Which, according to this logic, means that any and all cultural activities that also happens to be a commercial enterprise will in effect shrivel and die because no one is willing to pay for anything anymore.

Why pay for anything when everything is free, right?

Wrong. Evidently wrong, too. My proof for this claim is as follows: the internet exists.

This is the entirety of my claim. The alpha, omega and all in between. Nothing added, nothing subtracted - this is it, in sum total.

So, what does it mean that the internet exists? And, moreover, that it has existed for so long that those born on this side of the millennium bug don't know what a world without it looks like?

It means that the fact that people are still willing to pay for culture is a brutal argument against the validity of the invocation of the tragedy of the commons. Because - and be sure to notice my stressing of this point - even though most of what's produced in terms of commercial culture is available for free these days, people still pay for it. And, moreover: if you ask them about it, they will most likely tell you that this is the right and proper thing to do.

Soo.

Can we get past this moot point now, and get back to the business at hand? There's a whole lot of business going on on this internet thingy, after all, and I dare say that most of it has something to do with culture -

Overcoming everyday life

I am having a womancold.

A womancold is exactly the same thing as a mancold, only with less sympathy and more pain, responsibility and missed opportunities.

The thing about being sick is that things that things that are usually very easy to do, suddenly become an epic struggle of stupendous proportions. And getting these things done is a project of intense management, juggling the ever decreasing amount of resources in a manner that makes most work places seem like a fun place of relaxed relaxation with optional amounts of actual work - in comparison.

In short, it's somewhat of a challenge.

In a way, this challenge is something of a relief from the ordinary state of things. Suddenly, you know what to do, and you know that it is within your reach to do this thing - in contrast to ordinary life, where the default mode is not having a clue as to what is to be done or how to go about doing it.

So, here I was, barely able to stand up, my head spinning like any number of electrons on a mission, and the most primal of all urges told me to get thing done.

Being out of toilet paper is no laughing matter.

What to do, you ask?

There are several options. One is to brutalize oneself through the sickness and stumble to the store to get some new paper - no matter the protests of the body. Another is to ask someone for help. Another is to soldier through this lack and make do with whatever substitute might happen to be around -

Options abound.

It does make you view the default mode of your everyday life in a new light, to be sure. Suddenly, taking things for granted is not an option, and this renegotiation of your relationship with the world is an imperative to appreciate what you have once health is restored.

Like, for instance, the ability to get a womancold without having to worry about life and limb. Thanks to the actually existing socialist utopia I live in, I know I can just retreat from the world until the sickness fades away, without having to worry about anything bigger than the lack of certain necessities.

On the one hand, life sucks - womancold, you know. On the other hand, life is pretty good, all things considered.

Once I'm back on my feet, I'll be sure to remember this.

Text me

There are two kinds of text in the world.

The one is where the different parts of the text serve as parts of a coherent whole, where each and every part provides you with some aspect or detail of a greater whole, and where the ultimate goal is that you as a reader navigate these parts in order to grok the more overarching theme and structure of the work.

The other is where the author draws your attention in various ways and directions in order to make you think in new and interesting ways.

I sometimes forget that these two types exist. For some reason, I imagine that there is just the one, and that anything I write will have to measure up to some sort of Platonic yardstick of textiness. If the parts don't measure up - well, then shut up.

This is not a good thing. It means I go silent for a longer while than is healthy for an aspiring blogger.

What is a good thing, though, is that I'm sometimes reminded that I don't have to be the newest, edgiest, wittiest or bestest of anything. I just have to be the one who nudges you and your thinking in a direction neither of you have been nudged before.

This is a more managable goal.

I nudge you to ponder it.

Why end the world when we can change it?

So. The world ends today.

Or, well. It doesn't. But I'm pretty sure I'm not alone in having a blast bonding with people in the hyperbolic and utterly ironic preparations for this supposed end of the world. I've talked to people I rarely talk to otherwise, met some new people, and on the whole been on a socializing binge.

Good times, these endtimes.

It's hard not to think of the saying that it is easier to envision the end of the world than a minor change to the modes of production. That it is easier for everything to end than to change.

Somehow, this idea lingers, even though the world as we know it has changed radically over the last years. You already know the list - the Soviet Union fell, the internet arose, cell phones happened and so on and so forth. In short, we moved from a world based on the active (and, to be sure, passive) restrictions on what people could communicate, to one based on the fact that these restrictions do no longer apply.

This is a brutal change in both the means and the modes of production. And most of us remember living through it, and can still feel obligated to know the answer to questions such as: when was the first time you used a computer?

We've been there, done that, got the scars. And remember the time before that.

Despite this brutal revolution in the ways to go about things, it still seems like it's easier to imagine the end of the world than a minor change to the state of things.

Why is this the hegemonical thought? And how do we remix this into something more realistic?

Songs for the end of the world

According to sources, the world will end tomorrow. This being quite a pivotal even for us all, I figured we could all sit down and discuss the important things. Such as, say, the soundtracks the end of our particular lifeworlds might have.

I am going to share with you - right now, before it all ends - the four soundtracks of the end of all my things. Along with a short motivational string of words, to put the end times in context. Are you ready?

Here goes.


One might think the passing of a world is a big, sorrowful thing. But, in the words of Silver Mt Zion:
Let's have a parade
It's been so long since we had a parade, so let's have a parade!
Let's invite all our friends
And all our friends' friends!
Let's promenade down the boulevards with terrific pride and light in our eyes
Twelve feet tall and staggering
Sick with joy with the angels there and light in our eyes
Brothers and sisters, hope still waits in the wings like a bitter spinster
Impatient, lonely and shivering, waiting to build her glorious fires
It's because of our plans man; our beautiful ridiculous plans
Let's launch them like careening jet planes
Let's crash all our planes in the river
Let's build strange and radiant machines at this Jericho waiting to fall

It is a big thing, indeed. So let's go out with a parade. The last thing we will se is a multitude of smiles reflected in each others eyes.


I did mention that smile, didn't I?



Sit down, friend. You are among your peers. You, me and everyone we know. The world might end tomorrow, but there's nowhere else I'd rather be than right here, right now.


And, yes, I know. The very essence of the world ending is that we won't be here tomorrow, and that some sort of transition between now and then will be required. So I propose we make it in style - 747 style. The one last careening jet plane to close off the parade.

Smile, friends. The world is over. And now, it's time to do something else. -

Having fun with discourse

In their fun but somewhat overwrought book Contingency, hegemony, universality: contemporary dialogues on the left, the three authors Butler, Laclau and Zizek discusses contingency, hegemony and universality. At some length. For our purposes, we only need to extract their sense of hegemony, which goes something like this: of all the things that is theoretically possible to think, only a few of them are actually thought, and those things that are actually thought constitute what might be called hegemony.

They go on quite a while about it, but that's the gist of it.

This notion of hegemony opens up for the notion of certain people being pariah. People who, for whatever reason, are not accepted in a certain social setting, yet which are for that very reason a part of that same social setting. As Hannah Arendt described so acutely in her work Rahel Varnhagen, there is very much a difference between being present in a society and being part of it, and never is that difference more pronounced than when one is a visitor in them.

As any guest worker can tell you.

While it might, in theoretical fact, be very possible indeed to conceive of a notion of (actual) citizenship that includes those who are at present excluded, the presence of hegemony precludes this possibility from undergoing the formality of actually occurring. It may be a good idea to go through with this expansion of citizenship for the community in question, but, again - hegemony.

If we want to understand this hegemonic power over what is and isn't thinkable, we could do worse than to turn to Michel Foucault. In the Archaeology of Knowledge, he talks about the discursive conditions that form and inform our social practices, which in turn forms and informs what is thinkable and what isn't. Depending on what contingent (there's that word again) factors once served to shape our discourse was, our present takes on forms they wouldn't have taken on otherwise.

(As any who has studied anything at all about ancient Greeks know, there's really no getting around the fact that you have to know the context of the Ancients to really understand their thoughts. Socrates didn't die due to lack of a will to live, after all, and this death has inspired many a possible thought into hegemony -)

Well. Back to our times. From Foucault, we can take two directions. We can either go with Bourdieu, and discuss the habitus as the ultimate expression of hegemonic being - whatever you happen to be, you are in some sense a hegemonic being, and cannot be otherwise. Not due to personal failings, but due to the limitations of the human body - you do have to be someone, no matter how many indecisions you commit in a daily basis.

Or, we can go with Hanna Fenichel Pitkin's notion of the anti-blob. Which is to say - society is not a blob, and regardless of how brutally hegemony may affect our lives, change is  possible. Society may be big, slow-moving and prone to mind numbing inefficiencies, but it is possible to make things happen. In spite of and indeed because of these very things.

I usually return to Nancy Fraser's Rethinking the public sphere at this point. There is hegemony, yes, and there are things that simply cannot be said and/or done in society as we know it today. The solution to this - the correct answer, if you will - is not to despair, but to build our own hegemony, where new things are thinkable and new ways of being are made possible. Not a global hegemony, to be sure, but a small one, a local one. One where we, the local people, can talk to each other as the people, about the people we really are -

And thus, reforming our respective habituses into something new.

There is, of course, somewhat of a risk of becoming pariah in the course of building this subaltern discourse of ours. But as any fan of Doctor Who can tell you - it won't matter.

So go out there and have fun. Remix that discourse with a smile, and prove the current hegemony wrong once and again.

Not once and for all, though. We do still want change to be possible, after all. -

How to make a new year's resolution last longer than four months

A new year approaches, and with it, a new round of #95theses.

I've already invited you all to come join me in this festival of a blog series, so I'm not going to do it again. Instead, I'm going to muse for a bit about what we will see in the coming months.

First off, the first thesis: Markets are conversations.

Right there, we have the basis for a radical re-evaluation of what it means to be an actor on the market. And, with it, a re-evaluation of what it means to be an actor in what we tend to call human life. As the logic of capitalism and market exchanges encompasses ever larger areas of our daily life, so it becomes ever more important to understand how and why this logic has changed.

Only in the twentieth century could you get away with talking about the free flow of goods and services as if they had nothing to do with people. Suddenly, communication becomes that much easier to do, and suddenly you have to care about what you say to your customers.

Saying that communication has become easier is a backward way of saying that it was harder back in the days. Harder both in terms of getting the word out to the people, and in terms of getting the word to you. If you were a small business, you had to work like a dog in order to make people notice you - at all. And if you were a regular customer, chances were you went with your standard option (i.e. a big corporation) rather than attempt the complex task of finding things out the hard way.

Or, to put it yet another way: how do you find things without using a search box?

It can be done, to be sure. People made whole careers out of being able to find stuff that way. But most people didn't, and this tendency made it all to easy for the big established players to get away with not talking very well with its customers.

Why would they? They were the standard option, after all. Old faithful. Tested and true.

This changed.

This has consequences for our daily lives in two ways. First off, we do seem to have more choice regarding where to spend our money these days. We can easily find those previously hard to find places and give them the benefit rather than the doubt. We may not have more money, but we can do the research and determine if we are using it well.

Secondly, it wreaked havoc with the notion of getting a job and staying there for the rest of the career. As it turned out, the big, old, true and tested companies didn't know what to do when their customers suddenly started to talk back at them, and continued to talk badly. Too big to fail and all that. And suddenly, the customers went away and did something different. They still bought stuff, to be sure, but they bought them from someone else - because they knew there were other actors on the stage, and because these actors both walked the walk and talked the talk.

It could be argued that the dot com boom (and bust) were due to the fact that more talking than walking went on. That does not change the fact that markets - now more than ever - are conversations, and that this places other kinds of demands on corporations and on people than the old style standardization of production did.

I'm going to explore this theme (and others similar to it) in the months to come. If you want to tag along and be a part of the discussion on this, then by all means. I start out on January the first, going through one thesis at a time until I run out of them at the beginning of April.

It's going to be a fun ride. And I look forward to receiving your input along the way.