Bourgeois Reaction to the Digital Revolution

[Summerspeaker]

A class this semester forced me to read Jaron Lanier (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaron_Lanier)'s You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto (http://www.amazon.com/You-Are-Not-Gadget-Manifesto/dp/0307269647). I'd stumbled across Lanier before but never realized what a capitalist ey is. While the book contains worthwhile criticisms of specific technologies and structures, the core argument centers on a fear that the decline of copyright protection has closed off upwards mobility for creative professionals such as musicians and writers. Lanier bemoans that no new artists have become millionaires from their music under the digital system. Instead, these mind workers get scraps while the Lords of the Clouds - as Lanier calls Google and company - reap the rewards. Ey accuses the Silicon Vally elite of promoting the system of open content out of cynical self-interest as well as a Singularitarian belief in the hive mind as a precursor to superhuman artificial intelligence. Ey identifies the ideology as digital collectivism or digital Maoism (:lol:). See eir bit in the Wall Street Journal (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703481004574646402192953052.html) for example and my blog piece (http://queersingularity.wordpress.com/2011/02/25/bourgeois-reaction-to-the-digital-revolution/) for further thoughts.

Lanier should be calling for revolution to unseat the new oligarchs rather a return to some imagined golden days of individualistic meritocracy. The fact these trends worry em gives me hope that we're going somewhere positive. Ey even predicts a sudden, desperate socialism if digital collectivism continues. May we live to it.

[piet11111]

What's with the constant Ey ?
Using a capital E makes me think you do it on purpose.

[ÑóẊîöʼn]

What's with the constant Ey ?
Using a capital E makes me think you do it on purpose.

I believe it's a pronoun used to refer to individuals of an indeterminate gender. I'm not sure why it's being used since a moment's Googling would reveal Jaron Lanier to be a typical human male.

A fairly comprehensive system of pronouns for referring to persons and objects of various, unknown and no genders is available HERE (http://orionsarm.com/eg-article/495360fba7a46).

Jaron's main fears seem to coalesce around the collectivist aspects and potentials of the digital age. I think that's the least we need to fear - in fact, it is something we should embrace if it helps us to realise that the most important single unit of humanity is society.

[Summerspeaker]

I try to use gender-neutral pronouns for everybody because I don't see any good reason support the distinction in language. Some of Lanier's fears about the dehumanizing aspects of the current internet structure and culture resonate with me, but the answer certainly isn't competition, intellectual property, and economic mobility. The market stands responsible for most of the nastiness in the first place.

[ÑóẊîöʼn]

I try to use gender-neutral pronouns for everybody because I don't see any good reason support the distinction in language.

But if someone has a gender identity, isn't it more polite to recognise that in one's references? Sure, the English language needs a proper gender-neutral singular pronoun, but if someone explicitly identifies as male or female (or hell, even neuter or androgyne), I think it's more respectful to recognise that.


Some of Lanier's fears about the dehumanizing aspects of the current internet structure and culture resonate with me, but the answer certainly isn't competition, intellectual property, and economic mobility. The market stands responsible for most of the nastiness in the first place.

How can the internet be dehumanising when both its structure and content is the result of human input?

[Summerspeaker]

But if someone has a gender identity, isn't it more polite to recognise that in one's references? Sure, the English language needs a proper gender-neutral singular pronoun, but if someone explicitly identifies as male or female (or hell, even neuter or androgyne), I think it's more respectful to recognise that.

I value smashing the oppressive gender distinction over politeness. As a counter example, however, should we invent new pronouns to respect racial identifications? What about political ones? I suggest co/cos/com for communists and ca/cas/cap for capitalists as a start. "Co walked up to cap and demanded worker control over the factory."

:lol:


How can the internet be dehumanising when both its structure and content is the result of human input?I'll grant that dehumanization is a sloppy concept, but it's always something done by humans. Bureaucratic structures are run by humans, for instance.

[stoneMonkey]

Well based on the Q&A on the Amazon page, the author seems to have a weird obsession with Towering Genius of the iPhone.

A lot of the things he's talking about are valid observations I think. I've seen enough examples of corporation eagerly sucking up all the open source code they could find and contributing nothing back to think that open source within the context of a capitalist society is not an unadultered good thing. When he says "When robots can repair roads someday, will people have jobs programming those robots, or will the human programmers be so aggregated that they essentially work for free, like today’s recording musicians?" it's not really that different from the Marxist concern about people's jobs being deskilled and people thrown out of work when factory machinery changes the nature of production. Yes, it's about middle-class people who are not in as hard a position and not as sympathetic as the more prototypical working-class, so maybe it's not priority #1, but it's the same basic issue.

I agree though that his analysis is pretty weak and is somewhat reactionary or at least not revolutionary. Kind of the typical liberal book where you have a listing of problems to wring one's hands over but it doesn't go much of anywhere.

I'm still burned from trying to read Neal Stephenson's "In the Beginning was the Command-Line... " and stopping mid-way as his analysis became more and more annoying and flaky... probably give me this one a rest to lest I come to hate nerd culture totally. Thanks for the review.

[ckaihatsu]

"When robots can repair roads someday, will people have jobs programming those robots, or will the human programmers be so aggregated that they essentially work for free, like today’s recording musicians?"


This sentence has a number of convoluted black-or-white contentions within it -- it would be better to conceptualize *all* activities as being on a continuum of material bases from rudimentary humane support for the artist / worker, to project funding, to rates of wages and wage-like compensation, through to some piece of the pie, and/or residuals.

From a political perspective the question is whether the overall objective situation can be addressed with sufficient attention and expertise. Intentional communities like that of a message board like RevLeft show that a spare-time, hobbyist-like level of collaboration may be adequate to fully address the extant administrative requirements of general society, with sub-sections and specific threads designated to particular topics. Such a massively parallel co-administration could very well replace capitalist financialized management of society's material world if a widespread social revolutionary movement called for such a thing.

[Summerspeaker]

Yes, Lanier absolutely makes valid observations. Unfortunately, eir proposed solutions simply employ state power to privilege creative professionals within the ridiculous capitalist system.