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genera in Barok 2014

B

It can be said that research, as inquiry into a subject-matter, consists of
discrete queries. A query, such as a question about what something is, what
kinds, parts and properties does it have, and so on, can be consulted in
existing documents or generate new documents based on collection of data [in]
the field and through experiment, before proceeding to reasoning [arguments
and deductions]. Formulation of a query is determined by protocols providing
access to documents, which means that there is a

word, another to cluster them, and yet
another to abstract[generalize] the subject-matter of each of these clusters.
Needless to say, this is a craft of a few and these criteria are rarely being
disclosed, despite their impact on research, and more generally, their
influence as conditions for production[making] of a so called _common sense_.

It doesn't take that much to reimagine what a dictionary is and what it could
be, especially having large specialized corpora of texts at hand. These can
also se

roblems from which arguments/deductions start.
These are a definition (όρος), a genus (γένος), a property (ἴδιος), and an
accident (συμβεβηϰόϛ). Porphyry does not explicitly refer _Topics_ , and says
he omits speaking "about genera and species, as to whether they subsist (in
the nature of things) or in mere conceptions only"
⁸(http://www.ccel.org/ccel/pearse/morefathers/files/porphyry_isagogue_02_translation.htm#C1),
which means he avoids explicating whether he talks about

ver, the work sparked confusion, as
the following passage [suggests]:

> "[I]n each category there are certain things most generic, and again, others
most special, and between the most generic and the most special, others which
are alike called both genera and species, but the most generic is that above
which there cannot be another superior genus, and the most special that below
which there cannot be another inferior species. Between the most generic and
the most special, there are others which are alike both genera and species,
referred, nevertheless, to different things, but what is stated may become
clear in one category. Substance indeed, is itself genus, under this is body,
under body animated body, under which is animal, under animal rational animal,
under

.org/ccel/pearse/morefathers/files/porphyry_isagogue_02_translation.htm#C2))

Porphyry took one of Aristotle's ten categories of the word, substance, and
dissected it using one of his four rhetorical devices, genus. Employing
Aristotle's categories, genera and species as means for logical operations,
for dialectic, Porphyry's interpretation resulted in having more resemblance
to the perceived _structures_ of the world. So they began to bloom.

There were earlier examples, but Porphyry was the most infl

nd, but
should try t o find out what significance they had in the writer's mind.
Second, I realized that all functional or grammatical words (which in my mind
are not 'empty' at all but philosophically rich) manifest the deepest logic of
being which generates the basic structures of human discourse. It is .this
basic logic that allows the transfer from what the words mean today t o what
they meant to the writer.

>

> In the works of every philosopher there are two philosophies: the one which
he consci

actice of searching the web. It is a mechanism not
dissimilar to thought process involved in retrieving particular information
online. And search engines have it built in their indexing algorithms as well.

There is a paper proposing attaching words generated by tf-idf to the
hyperlinks when referring websites ¹⁴(http://bscit.berkeley.edu/cgi-
bin/pl_dochome?query_src=&format=html&collection=Wilensky_papers&id=3&show_doc=yes).
This would enable finding the referred content even after the link is de

genera in Stalder 2018

ocesses is
*communality*. It is only through a collectively shared frame of
reference that meanings can be stabilized, possible courses of action
can be determined, and resources can be made available. This has given
rise to communal formations that generate self-referential worlds, which
in turn modulate various dimensions of existence -- from aesthetic
preferences to the methods of biological reproduction and the rhythms of
space and time. In these worlds, the dynamics of network power have
reconfigu

formation, by extracting
information from the volume of data produced by machines. This extracted
information is then accessible to human perception and can serve as the
basis of singular and communal activity. Faced with the enormous amount
of data generated by people and machines, we would be blind were it not
for algorithms.

The third chapter will focus on *political dimensions*. These are the
factors that enable the formal dimensions described in the preceding
chapter to manifest themselves in the

etics had given the
concepts "information" and "communication" their first scientifically
precise (if somewhat idiosyncratic) definitions and had assigned to them
a position of central importance in all scientific disciplines, not to
mention life in general.[^12^](#c1-note-0012){#c1-note-0012a} Machlup\'s
investigation seemed to confirm this in the case of the economy, given
that the knowledge economy was primarily concerned with information and
communication. Since then, numerous analyses, formulas, a

90s, even if both terms are
supposed to stress the increased significance of information, knowledge,
and communication. With regard to the digital condition, the most
important of these differences are the greater flexibility of economic
activity in general and employment relations in particular, as well as
the dismantling of social security systems. Neither phenomenon played
much of a role in analyses of the early 1970s. The development since
then can be traced back to two currents that could not seem

Creative Industries Task Force was established right away, and
its first step was to identify "those activities which have their
origins in individual creativity, skill and talent and which have the
potential for wealth and job creation through the generation and
exploit­ation of intellectual
property."[^20^](#c1-note-0020){#c1-note-0020a} Like Fritz Machlup at
the beginning of the 1960s, the task force brought together existing
areas of activity into a new category. Such activities included
advertis

wealth, he devised a simple formula that would be easy for municipal
bureaucrats to understand: "technology, tolerance and talent." Talent,
as defined by Florida, is based on individual creativity and education
and manifests itself in the ability to generate new jobs. He was thus
able to declare talent a central element of economic
growth.[^22^](#c1-note-0022){#c1-note-0022a} In order to "unleash" these
resources, what we need in addition to technology is, above all,
tolerance; that is, "an open cultur

Rote
Zelle Schwul (RotZSchwul) in Frankfurt am
Main.[^27^](#c1-note-0027){#c1-note-0027a} One focus of their activities
was to have Paragraph 175 struck entirely from the legal code (which was
not achieved until 1994). This cause was framed within a general
struggle to overcome patriarchy and capitalism. At the earliest gay
demonstrations in Germany, which took place in Münster in April 1972,
protesters rallied behind the following slogan: "Brothers and sisters,
gay or not, it is our duty to fight cap

break"
title="25"}a broader and broader spectrum of gay positions, experiences,
and aesthetics was becoming visible to the public, the connection to
left-wing radical contexts became weaker. Founded as early as 1974, and
likewise in West Berlin, the General Homosexual Working Group
(Allgemeine Homosexuelle Arbeitsgemeinschaft) sought to integrate gay
politics into mainstream society by defining the latter -- on the basis
of bourgeois, individual rights -- as a "politics of
anti-discrimination." These e

ension (gender
proper).[^36^](#c1-note-0036){#c1-note-0036a} It thus opened up a space
for the articulation of experiences, self-descriptions, and lifestyles
that, on every level, are located beyond the classical attributions of
men and women. A new generation of intellectuals, activists, and artists
took the stage and developed -- yet again through acts of aesthetic
self-empowerment -- a language that enabled them to import, with
confidence, different self-definitions into the public sphere. An
exampl

n dismissed by
cultural authorities as flawed, misconceived, or outright ignorant --
into something negotiable and independently valuable. Bhabha is thus
interested in fissures, differences, diversity, multiplicity, and
processes of negotiation that generate something like shared meaning --
culture, as he defines it -- instead of conceiving of it as something
that precedes these processes and is threatened by them. Accordingly, he
proceeds not from the idea of unity, which is threatened whenever
"other

sses, however, is not the
only thing that has increased. Parallel to that development, the field
of the cultural has expanded as well -- that is, those areas of life
that are not simply characterized by unalterable necessities, but rather
contain or generate competing options and thus require conscious
decisions.

The term "culturalization of the economy" refers to the central position
of knowledge-based, meaning-based, and affect-oriented processes in the
creation of value. With the emergence of consu

ing manner, for the inherent material and design
qual­ities of an object were supposed to make it independent from
changing times and from the tastes of consumers.

::: {.section}
### Beyond the object {#c1-sec-0007}

At the end of the 1960s, a new generation of designers rebelled against
this industrial and instrumental rationality, which was now felt to be
authoritarian, soulless, and reductionist. In the works associated with
"anti-design" or "radical design," the objectives of the discipline were

oduction tools such as mechanical mills and 3D printers.
Digitalization, which has allowed all content to be processed, and
networking, which has created an endless amount of content ("raw
material"), have turned appropriation and recombination into general
methods of cultural production.[^64^](#c1-note-0064){#c1-note-0064a}
This phenomenon will be examined more closely in the next chapter.

Both the involvement of users in the production process and the methods
of appropriation and recombination are e

ved efficiently or on a large
scale. This was evident in the 1970s, when such approaches never made it
beyond subcultures and conceptual studies. With today\'s search engines,
every single user can trawl through an amount of information that, just
a generation ago, would have been unmanageable even by professional
archivists. A broad array of communication platforms (together with
flexible production capacities and efficient logistics) not only weakens
the contradiction between mass fabrication and per

onger understood the electronic image on the television screen
as a portrayal or representation of anything. Rather, it engendered in
the moment of its appearance an autonomous reality beyond and
independent of its representational function. A whole generation of
artists began to explore forms of existence in electronic media, which
they no longer understood as pure media of information. In his work
*Video Corridor* (1969--70), Bruce Nauman stacked two monitors at the
end of a corridor that was approxi

a very limited extent.
Nevertheless, they played an important role in sensitizing an entire
generation of media activists, whose opportunities expanded as the means
of production became both better and cheaper. In the name of "tactical
media," a new generation of artistic and political media activists came
together in the middle of the
1990s.[^76^](#c1-note-0076){#c1-note-0076a} They combined the "camcorder
revolution," which in the late 1980s had made video equipment available
to broader swaths of soc

and the campaigns of so-called
communication guerrillas were blurring the difference between media and
political activity.[^77[]{#Page_47 type="pagebreak"
title="47"}^](#c1-note-0077){#c1-note-0077a}

This difference was dissolved entirely by a new generation of
politically motivated artists, activists, and hackers, who transferred
the tactics of civil disobedience -- blockading a building with a
sit-in, for instance -- to the
internet.[^78^](#c1-note-0078){#c1-note-0078a} When, in 1994, the
Zapatista

l was not to
destroy data but rather to disturb the normal functioning of an
institution in order to draw attention to the activities and interests
of the protesters.
:::

::: {.section}
### Networks as places of action {#c1-sec-0012}

What this new generation of media activists shared in common with the
hackers and pioneers of computer networks was the idea that
communication media are spaces for agency. During the 1960s, these
programmers were also in search of alternatives. The difference during
the

immediate environment experienced its first
major change in the late 1970s. Software, which for many had been a mere
supplement to more expensive and highly specialized hardware, became a
marketable good with stringent licensing restrictions. A new generation
of businesses, led by Bill Gates, suddenly began to label co­operation
among programmers as theft.[^90^](#c1-note-0090){#c1-note-0090a}
Previously it had been par for the course, and above all necessary, for
programmers to share software with on

ht law, which served to separate programmers (producers) from
users (consumers), had to be neutralized or circumvented. The first step
in this direction was taken in 1984 by the activist and programmer
Richard Stallman. Composed by Stallman, the GNU General Public License
was and remains a brilliant hack that uses the letter of copyright law
against its own spirit. This happens in the form of a license that
defines "four freedoms":

1. The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freed

nt.

::: {.section}
### Information overload 1.0 {#c2-sec-0003}

The printing press made texts available in the three respects mentioned
above. For one thing, their number increased rapidly, while their price
significantly sank. During the first two generations after Gutenberg\'s
invention -- that is, between 1450 and 1500 -- more books were produced
than during the thousand years
before.[^9^](#c2-note-0009){#c2-note-0009a} And that was just the
beginning. Dealing with books and their content changed f

ed book
was that it overcame the "tyranny of major authorities, which was common
in small libraries."[^10^](#c2-note-0010){#c2-note-0010a} Scientists
were now able to compare texts with one another and critique them to an
unprecedented extent. Their general orientation turned around: instead
of looking back in order to preserve what they knew, they were now
looking ahead toward what they might not (yet) know.

In order to organize this information flood of rapidly amassing texts,
it was necessary to cr

es can make its way to
publicly accessible sites; and, conversely, content that was once freely
available can disappear into shadow libraries. As regards free access,
the details of this rapidly changing landscape are almost
inconsequential, for the general trend that has emerged from these
various dynamics -- legal and illegal, public and private -- is
unambiguous: in a comprehensive and practical sense, cultural works of
all sorts will become freely available despite whatever legal and
technical rest

or everything to exist side by side. Europeana is not an archive in the
traditional sense, or even a museum with a fixed and meaningful order;
rather, it is just a standard database. Everything in it is just one
search request away, and every search generates a unique order in the
form of a sequence of visible artifacts. As a result, individual objects
are freed from those meta-narratives, created by the museums and
archives that preserve them, which situate them within broader contexts
and assign more

e entirely
unproblematic, as in the case of
yoghurt.[^25^](#c2-note-0025){#c2-note-0025a}
:::

::: {.section}
### Selecting and organizing {#c2-sec-0006}

In this situation, the creation of one\'s own system of references has
become a ubiquitous and generally accessible method for organizing all
of the ambivalent things that one encounters on a given day. Such things
are thus arranged within a specific context of meaning that also
(co)determines one\'s own relation to the world and subjective position

sted time, be it only a second, in order to point to this and not to
something else. Thus, a process of validating what exists in the excess
takes place in connection with the ultimate scarcity -- our own
lifetimes, our own bodies. Even if the value generated by this act is
minimal or diffuse, it is still -- to borrow from Gregory Bateson\'s
famous definition of information -- a difference that makes a difference
in this stream of equivalencies and
meaninglessness.[^26^](#c2-note-0026){#c2-note-0026a} This singling out
-- this use of one\'s own body to generate meaning -- does not, however,
take place by means of mere micro-activities throughout the day; it is
also a defining aspect of complex cultural strategies. In recent years,
re-enactment (that is, the re-staging of historical situ­ations and
events

istory represented in the media -- the "authenticity" beyond the images
-- instead, they ask what the images we see might mean concretely to us,
if we were to experience these situations personally. In this way the
artistic reenactment confronts the general feeling of insecurity about
the meaning []{#Page_73 type="pagebreak" title="73"}of images by using a
paradoxical approach: through erasing distance to the images and at the
same time distancing itself from the
images.[^27^](#c2-note-0027){#c2-note-0

y and being forgotten.

On this basis, a genuine digital folk culture of re-mixing and mashups
has formed in recent years on online platforms, in game worlds, but also
through cultural-economic productions of individual pieces or short
series. It is generated and maintained by innumerable people with
varying degrees of intensity and ambition. Its common feature with
trad­itional folk culture, in choirs or elsewhere, is that production
and reception (but also reproduction and creation) largely coincide

slumber, and incorporates it into a newly relevant context of meaning.
"To be relevant," according to the artist Eran Schaerf, "things must be
recyclable."[^37^](#c2-note-0037){#c2-note-0037a}

Alone, everyone is overwhelmed by the task of having to generate meaning
against this backdrop of all-encompassing meaninglessness. First, the
challenge is too great for any individual to overcome; second, meaning
itself is only created intersubjectively. While it can admittedly be
asserted by a single person, o

){#c2-note-0046a}

From these various notions of community, it is possible to develop the
following way of looking at new types of communality: they are formed in
a field of practice, characterized by informal yet structured exchange,
focused on the generation of new ways of knowing and acting, and
maintained through the reflexive interpretation of their own activity.
This last point in particular -- the communal creation, preservation,
and alteration of the interpretive framework in which actions,
pro

e they are
overrun by tourists, the crises in which "the West" has to intervene,
the targets that "lend themselves" to a terrorist attack, and so on. On
its own, however, selection is not enough. Communal formations are
especially powerful when they generate the material and organizational
resources that are necessary for their members to implement their shared
worldview through actions -- to visit, for instance, the places that
have been chosen as important. This can happen if they enable access
[]{#P

te-0064){#c2-note-0064a}

Such strategies are no longer specific to art. Self-generated spaces of
reference and agency are now deeply embedded in everyday life. The
reason for this is that a growing number of questions can no longer be
answered in a generally binding way (such as those about what
constitutes fine art), while the enormous expansion of the cultural
requires explicit decisions to be made in more aspects of life. The
reaction to this dilemma has been radical subjectivation. This has not,
h

#c2-sec-0015}

Even though participation in new formations is voluntary and serves the
interests of their members, it is not without preconditions. The most
important of these is acceptance, the willing adoption of the
interpretive framework that is generated by the communal formation. The
latter is formed from the social, cultural, legal, and technical
protocols that lend to each of these formations its concrete
constitution and specific character. Protocols are common sets of rules;
they establish, a

[]{#Page_102 type="pagebreak" title="102"}schools of interpretation
develop. Despite much labor and effort, however, the knowledge gained is
minimal and fragmentary, so the prevailing attitude in the library is
bleak. By the time of the narrator\'s generation, "nobody expects to
discover anything."[^75^](#c2-note-0075){#c2-note-0075a}

Although this vision has now been achieved from a quantitative
perspective -- no one can survey the "library" of digital information,
which in practical terms is infini

nd thus also the ways in which algorithms can partake in the
constitution of the world. Third, it must be possible to execute an
operating instruction mechanically so that, under fixed conditions, it
always produces the same result.

Defined in such general terms, it would also be possible to understand
the instruction manual for a typical piece of Ikea furniture as an
algorithm. It is a set of instructions for creating, with a finite
number of steps, a specific and predefined piece of furniture (outpu

and made the essential contribution of introducing
Indo-Arabic nu­merals and the number zero to Europe. The work begins
with the formula *dixit algorizmi* ... ("Algorismi said ..."). During
the Middle Ages, *algorizmi* or *algorithmi* soon became a general term
for advanced methods of
calculation.[^78^](#c2-note-0078){#c2-note-0078a}

The modern effort to build machines that could mechanic­ally carry out
instructions achieved its first breakthrough with Gottfried Wilhelm
Leibniz. He has often been cr

ition and sensors. From these data, the program
extracts the decisive moments and players of a game, recognizes
characteristic patterns throughout the course of play (such as
"extending an early lead," "a dramatic comeback," etc.), and on this
basis generates its own report. Regarding the reports themselves, a
number of variables can be determined in advance, for instance whether
the story should be written from the perspective of a neutral observer
or from the standpoint of one of the two teams. If wr

er Kristian Hammond
confidently predicted "\[m\]ore than 90 percent." He added that, within
the next five years, an algorithm could even win a Pulitzer
Prize.[^86^](#c2-note-0086){#c2-note-0086a} This may be blatant hype and
self-promotion but, as a general estimation, Hammond\'s assertion is not
entirely beyond belief. It remains to be seen whether algorithms will
replace or simply supplement traditional journalism. Yet because media
companies are now under strong financial pressure, it is certainly
r

e_110 type="pagebreak"
title="110"}

Automatic facial recognition, as used in surveillance technologies and
for authorizing access to certain things, is based on the fact that
computers can evaluate large numbers of facial images, first to produce
a general model for a face, then to identify the variables that make a
face unique and therefore recognizable. With so-called "unsupervised" or
"deep-learning" algorithms, some developers and companies have even
taken this a step further: computers are expect

applications that are of
great interest to the military in particular.

Algorithms of this sort can react and adjust themselves directly to
changes in the environment. This feedback, however, also shortens the
timeframe within which they are able to generate repetitive and
therefore predictable results. Thus, algorithms and their predictive
powers can themselves become unpredictable. Stock markets have
frequently experi­enced so-called "sub-second extreme events"; that is,
price fluctuations that happ

for example, which came
out in 2011), programs based on self-learning algorithms have now
reached the public at large and have infiltrated increased areas of
everyday life.
:::

::: {.section}
### Sorting, ordering, extracting {#c2-sec-0022}

Orders generated by algorithms are a constitutive element of the digital
condition. On the one hand, the mechanical pre-sorting of the
(informational) world is a precondition for managing immense and
unstructured amounts of data. On the other hand, these large amo

n all about is problematic, for "unstructuredness" does
not simply mean the absence of any structure but rather the presence of
another type of order -- a meta-structure, a potential for order -- out
of which innumerable specific arrangements can be generated on an ad hoc
basis. This meta-structure is created by algorithms. They subsequently
derive from it an actual order, which the user encounters, for instance,
when he or she scrolls through a list of hits produced by a search
engine. What the user d

mic and singular universe of information that is tailored to every
individual user. For every person, an entirely different order is
created instead of just an excerpt from a previously existing order. The
world is no longer being represented; it is generated uniquely for every
user and then presented. Google is not the only company that has gone
down this path. Orders produced by algorithms have become increasingly
oriented toward creating, for each user, his or her own singular world.
Facebook, dating services, and other social mass media have been
pursuing this approach even more radically than Google.
:::

::: {.section}
### From the data shadow to the synthetic profile {#c2-sec-0024}

This form of generating the world requires not only detailed information
about the external world (that is, the reality []{#Page_116
type="pagebreak" title="116"}shared by everyone) but also information
about every individual\'s own relation to the
latter.[^108^](#c2-no

h this sequence of
activity. Or, as the data-mining company Science Rockstars (!) once
pointedly expressed on its website, "Your next activity is a function of
the behavior of others and your own past."

Google and other providers of algorithmically generated orders have been
devoting increased resources to the prognostic capabilities of their
programs in order to make the confusing and potentially time-consuming
step of the search obsolete. The goal is to minimize a rift that comes
to light []{#Page_117 type="pagebreak" title="117"}in the act of
searching, namely that between the world as everyone experiences it --
plagued by uncertainty, for searching implies "not knowing something" --
and the world of algorithmically generated order, in which certainty
prevails, for everything has been well arranged in advance. Ideally,
questions should be answered before they are asked. The first attempt by
Google to eliminate this rift is called Google Now, and its slogan is
"The righ

ies.[^113^](#c2-note-0113){#c2-note-0113a} With every use of
produced data and with every execution of an algorithm, the assumptions
embedded in them are activated, and the positions contained within them
have effects on the world that the algorithm generates and presents.

As already mentioned, the early version of the PageRank algorithm was
essentially based on the rather simple assumption that frequently linked
content is more relevant than content that is only seldom linked to, and
that links to si

producer of information to optimize its position in a search
engine\'s index, and thus there is a strong incentive to accept the
preconditions in question. Considering, moreover, the nearly
monopolistic character of many providers of algorithmically generated
orders and the high price that one would have to pay if one\'s own site
were barely (or not at all) visible to others, the term "voluntary"
begins to take on a rather foul taste. This is a more or less subtle way
of pre-formatting the world so tha

does not apply to
its own comparison shopping service the system of penalties which it
applies to other comparison shopping services on the basis of defined
parameters, and which can lead to the lowering of the rank in which they
appear in Google\'s general search results
pages."[^119^](#c2-note-0119){#c2-note-0119a} In other words, the
Commission accused the company of manipulating search results to its own
advantage and the disadvantage of users.

This is not the only instance in which the political

happens behind the user\'s back
and in accordance with the goals and pos­itions that are relevant to the
developers of a given algorithm, be it to optimize profit or
surveillance, create social norms, improve services, or whatever else.
The results generated in this way are sold to users as a personalized
and efficient service that provides a quasi-magical product. Out of the
enormous haystack of searchable information, results are generated that
are made to seem like the very needle that we have been looking for. At
best, it is only partially transparent how these results came about and
which positions in the world are strengthened or weakened by them. Yet,
as long as the needle is s

who, though validating
their choices more on financial than on argumentative grounds, are
essentially engaged in the same activity. Today, leading cur­ators
usually work closely together with collectors and thus deal with more
money than the first generation of curators ever could have imagined.

[64](#c2-note-0064a){#c2-note-0064}  Diedrich Diederichsen, "Showfreaks
und Monster," *Texte zur Kunst* 71 (2008): 69--77.

[65](#c2-note-0065a){#c2-note-0065}  Alexander R. Galloway, *Protocol:
How Cont

c2-note-0115}  One estimate that continues to be
cited quite often is already obsolete: Michael K. Bergman, "White Paper
-- The Deep Web: Surfacing Hidden Value," *Journal of Electronic
Publishing* 7 (2001), online. The more content is dynamically generated
by databases, the more questionable such estimates become. It is
uncontested, however, that only a small portion of online information is
registered by search engines.

[116](#c2-note-0116a){#c2-note-0116}  Theo Röhle, "Die Demontage der
Gateke

s the moment
arrive in which they come into conflict with one another? And what,
exactly, happens then? For the most part, these are unsolved questions.
On the other hand, because of the blending of work and leisure already
mentioned, as well as the general economization of social activity (as
is happening on social []{#Page_126 type="pagebreak" title="126"}mass
media and in the creative economy, for instance), it is hardly possible
now to draw a line between production and reproduction. Thus, this set

ted to clarifying the conceptual transition from the
previous chapter to the chapter at hand. The concern of the last chapter
was to explain the forms that cultural processes have adopted under the
present conditions -- ubiquitous telecommunication, general expressivity
(referentiality), flexible cooperation (communality), and informational
automation (algorithmicity). In what follows, on the contrary, my focus
will turn to the political dynamics that have emerged from the
realization of "productive forces" as concrete "relations of production"
or, in more general terms, as social relations. Without claiming to be
comprehensive, I have assigned the confusing and conflicting
multiplicity of actors, projects, and institutions to two large
political developments: post-democracy and commons. The former is moving

ch new competition has motivated established
providers to modify their own
infrastructure.[^12^](#c3-note-0012){#c3-note-0012a} In the case of
email, the level on which new user options are created is still
relatively closely linked to that on which generally binding decisions
are made and implemented. In this sense, email is not a post-democratic
technology.
:::

::: {.section}
### Centralization and the power of networks {#c3-sec-0004}

Things are entirely different in the case of new social mass med

ions
can be created with ease. Every day, groups are formed that organize
information, knowledge, and resources in order to establish self-defined
practices (both online and offline). The immense amounts of data,
information, and cultural references generated by this are pre-sorted by
algorithms that operate in the background to ensure that users never
lose their orientation.[^13^](#c3-note-0013){#c3-note-0013a} Viewed from
the perspective of output legitimation -- that is, in terms of what
opportuniti

more and more new functions for
generating data, and entire new areas of recording data are being
developed (think, for instance, of Google\'s self-driving car). Yet
users have access to just a minuscule portion of the data that they
themselves have generated and with which they are being described. This
information is fully available to the programmers and analysts alone.
All of this is done -- as the sanctimonious argument goes -- in the name
of data protection.
:::

::: {.section}
### Selling, predi

en days, one more message than they might usually
exchange. With trad­itional methods of surveillance, which focus on
individual people, such a small deviation would not have been detected.
To do so, it is necessary to have immense numbers of users generating
immense volumes of data. Accordingly, these new []{#Page_136
type="pagebreak" title="136"}analytic possibilities do not mean that
Facebook can accur­ately predict the behavior of a single user. The
unique person remains difficult to calculate, f

ing content but rather -- and above all -- environments in
which we live. Both of the examples discussed above illustrate what is
possible when these environments, which do not represent the world but
[]{#Page_139 type="pagebreak" title="139"}rather generate it, are
centrally controlled, as is presently the case. Power is being exercised
not by directly stipulating what each individual ought to do, but rather
by altering the environment in which everyone is responsible for finding
his or her way. The b

this is because there is no baseline against which it is
possible to measure the extent to which the "baseline of facts" has been
tilted. Search results and timelines are always being filtered and,
owing to personalization, a search will hardly ever generate the same
results twice. On a case-by-case basis, the effects of this are often
minimal for the individual. In aggregate and over long periods of time,
however, the effects can be substantial without the individual even
being able to detect them. Yet the practice of controlling behavior by
manipulating the environment is not limited to the environment of
information. In their enormously influential book from 2008, *Nudge*,
Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein even recommended this as a general
method for "nudging" people, almost without their notice, in the
direction desired by central planners. To accomplish this, it is
necessary for the environment to be redesigned by the "choice architect"
-- by someone, for instance, who can organize

y the unwilling-willing users of Facebook has
not been caused by the transformation of communication into data as
such. This is necessary to provide input for algorithms, which turn the
flood of information into something usable. To this extent, the general
complaint about the domination of algorithms is off the mark. The
problem is not the algorithms themselves but rather the specific
capitalist and post-democratic setting in which they are implemented.
They only become an instrument of domin­ation w

ter do not use collected data primarily for commercial
ends (although they do engage in commercial espionage) but rather for
political repression and the protection of central power interests --
or, to put it in more neutral terms, in the service of general security.
Yet the NSA and other intelligence agencies also record decentralized
communication and transform it into (meta-)data, which are centrally
stored and analyzed.[^41^](#c3-note-0041){#c3-note-0041a} This process
is used to generate possible courses of action, from intensifying the
surveillance of individuals and manipulating their informational
environment[^42^](#c3-note-0042){#c3-note-0042a} to launching military
drones for the purpose of
assassination.[^43^](#c3-note-0043){

ng a less significant role in the public
discussion. In somewhat exaggerated terms, one could say that the
disregard for fundamental rights is justified by the quality of the
"security" that these agencies have created. Perhaps the similarity of
the general methods and self-justifications with which service providers
of social production, consumption, and security are constantly
"optimized" is one reason why there has yet to be widespread public
protest against comprehensive surveillance programs. We h

ng applications are combined with the data available to
insurance companies, hospitals, authorities, or employers. It does not
take too much imagination to do so, because this is already happening in
part today. At the end of 2014, for instance, the Generali Insurance
Company announced a new set of services that is marketed under the name
Vitality. People insured in Germany, France, and Austria are supposed to
send their health information to the company and, as a reward for
leading a "proper" lifestyl

community []{#Page_148 type="pagebreak" title="148"}and violates
Facebook\'s terms."[^57^](#c3-note-0057){#c3-note-0057a} For the police
and the intelligence agencies in particular, all activities that attempt
to evade comprehensive surveillance are generally suspicious. Even in
Germany, people are labeled "extremists" by the NSA for the sole reason
that they have supported the Tor Project\'s anonymity
software.[^58^](#c3-note-0058){#c3-note-0058a} In a 2014 trial in
Vienna, the use of a foreign pre-pa

however, did not become an important method of
resistance on account of technical developments alone. In the era of big
data, databases are the central resource not only for analyzing how the
world is described by digital communication, but also for generating
that communication. The power of networks in particular is organized
through the construction of environmental conditions that operate
simultaneously in many places. On their own, the individual commands and
instructions are often banal and harml

with externalities, but rather as one facet of a complex and
comprehensive phenomenon with intertwining commercial, social, ethical,
ecological, and cultural dimensions.

It is impossible to determine how the interplay between these three
dimensions generally solidifies into concrete institutions.
Historically, many different commons-based institutions were developed,
and their number and variety have only increased under the digital
condition. Elinor Ostrom, who was awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize in
Economics for her work on the commons, has thus refrained from
formulating a general model for
them.[^69^](#c3-note-0069){#c3-note-0069a} Instead, she has identified a
series of fundamental challenges for which all commoners have to devise
their own solutions.[^70^](#c3-note-0070){#c3-note-0070a} For example,
the membership of a gro

ith its low percentage of women editors (around 10 percent),
exhausting discussions, complex rules, lack of young personnel, and
systematic attempts at manipulation, have been well documented because
Wikipedia also guarantees free access to the data generated by the
activities of users, and thus makes the development of the commons
fairly transparent for outsiders.[^84^](#c3-note-0084){#c3-note-0084a}

One of the most fundamental and complex decisions in the history of
Wikipedia was to change its licen

ion to voting and a focus on building a consensus that
does not have to be perfect but simply good enough for the overwhelming
majority of the community to acknowledge it (a "rough consensus").
Today, the coverage and quality of the maps that can be generated from
these data are so good for so many areas that they now represent serious
competition to commercial digital alternatives. OSM data are used not
only by Wikipedia and other non-commercial projects but also
increasingly by large commercial servi

ations,
the financial resources of the OSM Foundation, which functions as the
legal entity and supporting organ­ization behind the project, cannot be
compared to those of the Wikipedia Foundation. The OSM Foundation has no
employees, and in 2014 it generated just £88,000 in revenue, half of
which was obtained from donations and half from holding
conferences.[^89^](#c3-note-0089){#c3-note-0089a} That said, OSM is
nevertheless a socially, technologically, and financially robust
commons, though one with

ning commons, especially the new
informational ones, are distinguished by the heterogeneity of their
motivations and actors. Just as the Wikipedia project successfully and
transformatively extended the experience of working with free software
to the generation of large bases of knowledge, the community responsible
for OpenStreetMaps succeeded in making the experiences of the Wikipedia
project useful for the creation of a commons based on large datasets,
and managed to adapt these experiences according

ecentralized collection,
networking, and communal organization of data. For several years, for
instance, there has been a global community of people who observe
airplanes in their field of vision, share this information with one
another, and make it generally accessible. Outside of the tight
community, these data are typically of little interest. Yet it was
through his targeted analysis of this information that the geographer
and artist Trevor Paglen succeeded in mapping out the secret arrests
made by

luding election results, company registries, maps, and national
statistics. A study of 97 countries revealed that, by the middle of
2015, only 11 percent of these datasets were entirely freely accessible
and usable.

Although public institutions are generally slow and resistant in making
their data freely available, important progress has nevertheless been
made. Such progress indicates not only that the new commons have
developed their own structures in parallel with traditional
institutions, but also

is
typical of commons, function simultaneously as producers and consumers.

It is not a coincidence that commons have begun to infiltrate the energy
sector. As Jeremy Rifkin has remarked:[]{#Page_171 type="pagebreak"
title="171"}

::: {.extract}
The generation that grew up on the Communication Internet and that takes
for granted its right to create value in distributed, collaborative,
peer-to-peer virtual commons has little hesitation about generating
their own green electricity and sharing it on an Energy Internet. They
find themselves living through a deepening global economic crisis and an
even more terrifying shift in the earth\'s climate, caused by an
economic system reliant on fossil fue

omprehensive
realization of the infrastructural possibilities of the present. Both of
them develop new relations of production on the basis of new productive
forces (to revisit the terminology introduced at the beginning of this
chapter) or, in more general terms, they create suitable social
institutions for these new opportunities. In this sense, both
developments represent coherent and comprehensive answers to the
Gutenberg Galaxy\'s long-lasting crisis of cultural forms and social
institutions.

It

f communication. In
practice, however, the two categories cannot always be sharply
distinguished from one another.

[42](#c3-note-0042a){#c3-note-0042}  By manipulating online polls, for
instance, or flooding social mass media with algorithmically generated
propaganda. See Glen Greenwald, "Hacking Online Polls and Other Ways
British Spies Seek to Control the Internet," *The Intercept* (July 14,
2014), online.

[43](#c3-note-0043a){#c3-note-0043}  Jeremy Scahill and Glenn Greenwald,
"The NSA\'s Secr

the EU guidelines for the
harmonization of certain aspects of copyright (2001). Since 2006, a
popular tactic in Germany and elsewhere has been to issue floods of
cease-and-desist letters. This involves sending tens of thousands of
semi-automatically generated threats of legal action with demands for
payment in response to the presumably unauthorized use of
copyright-protected material.

[81](#c3-note-0081a){#c3-note-0081}  Examples include the Open Content
License (1998) and the Free Art License (200

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