trans in Stalder 2018
(#c3-ntgp-9999)
[Preface to the English Edition]{.chapterTitle} {#fpref}
ussions of techno-economic paradigms have informed this book in
fundamental ways and which has offered multiple opportunities for me to
workshop inchoate ideas.
Not everything, however, takes place in diffuse conversations and
networks. I was also able to rely on the generous support of several
individuals who, at one stage or another, read through, commented upon,
and made crucial improvements to the manuscript: Leonhard Dobusch,
Günther Hack, Katja Meier, Florian Cramer, Cornelia Sollfrank, Beat
Brogle, Volker Grassmuck, Ursula Stalder, Klaus Schönberger, Konrad
Becker, Armin Medosch, Axel Stockburger, and Gerald Nestler. Special
thanks are owed to Rebina Erben-Hartig, who edited the original German
manuscript and greatly improved its readability. I am likewise grateful
to Heinrich Greiselberger and Christian Heilbronn of the Suhrkamp
Verlag, whose faith in the book never wavered despite several delays.
Regarding the English version at hand, it has been a privilege to work
with a translator as skillful as Valentine Pakis. Over the past few
years, writing this book might have been the most important project in
my life had it not been for Andrea Mayr. In this regard, I have been
especially fortunate.[]{#Page_xi type="pagebreak"
title="xi"}[]{#Page_xii type="pagebreak" title="xii"}
:::
Introduction [After the End of the Gutenberg Galaxy]{.chapterTitle} []{.chapterSubTitle} {#cintro}
desire for personal []{#Page_1 type="pagebreak"
title="1"}self-discovery, for community, and for overcoming stale
conventions. And she did this through a character that mainstream
society would have considered paradoxical and deviant not long ago but
has since come to understand: attractive beyond the dichotomy of man and
woman, explicitly artificial and yet entirely authentic. This peculiar
conflation of artificiality and naturalness is equally present in
Berndnaut Smilde\'s photographic work of a real indoor cloud (*Nimbus*,
2010) on the cover of this book. Conchita\'s performance was also on a
formal level seemingly paradoxical: extremely focused and completely
open. Unlike most of the other acts, she took the stage alone, and
though she hardly moved at all, she nevertheless incited the audience to
participate in numerous ways and genuinely to act out the motto of the
contest ("Join us!"). Throughout the early rounds of the competition,
the beard, which was at first so provocative, transformed into a
free-floating symbol that the public began to appropriate in various
ways. Men and women painted Conchita-like beards on their faces,
newspapers printed beards to be cut out, and fans crocheted beards. Not
only did someone Photoshop a beard on to a painting of Empress Sissi of
Austria, but King Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands even tweeted a
deceptively realistic portrait of his wife, Queen Máxima, wearing a
beard. From one of the biggest stages of all, the evening of Wurst\'s
victory conveyed an impression of how much the culture of Europe had
changed in recent years, both in terms of its content and its forms.
That which had long been restricted to subcultural niches -- the
fluidity of gender identities, appropriation as a cultural technique,
or the conflation of reception and production, for instance -- was now
part of the mainstream. Even while sitting in front of the television,
this mainstream was no longer just a private audience but rather a
multitude of sing
y
in honor of the print medium by which it was so influenced. What was
once just an abstract speculation of media theory, however, now
describes []{#Page_2 type="pagebreak" title="2"}the concrete reality of
our everyday life. What\'s more, we have moved well past McLuhan\'s
diagnosis: the erosion of old cultural forms, institutions, and
certainties is not just something we affirm, but new ones have already
formed whose contours are easy to identify not only in niche sectors but
in the mainstream. Shortly before Conchita\'s triumph, Facebook thus
expanded the gender-identity options for its billion-plus users from 2
to 60. In addition to "male" and "female," users of the English version
of the site can now choose from among the following categories:
::: {.extract}
Agender, Androgyne, Androgynes, Androgynous, Asexual, Bigender, Cis, Cis
Female, Cis Male, Cis Man, Cis Woman, Cisgender, Cisgender Female,
Cisgender Male, Cisgender Man, Cisgender Woman, Female to Male (FTM),
Female to Male Trans Man, Female to Male Transgender Man, Female to Male
Transsexual Man, Gender Fluid, Gender Neutral, Gender Nonconforming,
Gender Questioning, Gender Variant, Genderqueer, Hermaphrodite,
Intersex, Intersex Man, Intersex Person, Intersex Woman, Male to Female
(MTF), Male to Female Trans Woman, Male to Female Transgender Woman,
Male to Female Transsexual Woman, Neither, Neutrois, Non-Binary, Other,
Pangender, Polygender, T\*Man, Trans, Trans Female, Trans Male, Trans
Man, Trans Person, Trans\*Female, Trans\*Male, Trans\*Man,
Trans\*Person, Trans\*Woman, Transexual, Transexual Female, Transexual
Male, Transexual Man, Transexual Person, Transexual Woman, Transgender
Female, Transgender Person, Transmasculine, T\*Woman, Two\*Person,
Two-Spirit, Two-Spirit Person.
:::
This enormous proliferation of cultural possibilities is an expression
of what I will refer to below as the digital condition. Far from being
universally welcomed, its growing presence has also instigated waves of
nostalgia, diffuse resentments, and intellectual panic. Conservative and
reactionary movements, which oppose such developments and desire to
preserve or even re-create previous conditions, have been on the rise.
Likewise in 2014, for instance, a cultural dispute broke out in normally
subdued Baden-Würtemberg over which forms of sexual partnership should
be mentioned positively in the sexual education curriculum. Its impetus
was a working paper released at the end of 2013 by the state\'s
[]{#Page_3 type="pagebreak" title="3"}Ministry of Culture. Among other
things, it proposed that adolescents "should confront their own sexual
identity and orientation \[...\] from a position of acceptance with
respect to sexual diversity."[^2^](#f6-note-0002){#f6-note-0002a} In a
short period of time, a campaign organized mainly through social mass
media collected more than 200,000 signatures in opposition to the
proposal and submitted them to the petitions committee at the state
parliament. At that point, the government responded by putting the
initiative on ice. However, according to the analysis presented in this
book, leaving it on ice creates a precarious situation.
The rise and spread of the digital condition is the result of a
wide-ranging and irreversible cultural transformation, the beginnings of
which can in part be traced back to the nineteenth century. Since the
1960s, however, this shift has accelerated enormously and has
encompassed increasingly broader spheres of social life. More and more
people have been participating in cultural processes; larger and larger
dimensions of existence have become battlegrounds for cultural disputes;
and social activity has been intertwined with increasingly complex
technologies, without which it would hardly be possible to conceive of
these processes, let alone achieve them. The number of competing
cultural projects, works, reference points, and reference systems has
been growing rapidly. This, in turn, has caused an escalating crisis for
the established forms and institutions of culture, which are poorly
equipped to deal with such an inundation of new claims to meaning. Since
roughly the year 2000, many previously independent developments have
been consolidating, gaining strength and modifying themselves to for
is
reached at which both sides are mutually constituted. This, in turn,
changes the conditions that give rise to shared meaning and personal
identity.
In what follows, this broadly post-structuralist perspective will inform
my discussion of the causes and formational conditions of cultural
orders and their practices. Culture will be conceived throughout as
something heterogeneous and hybrid. It draws from many sources; it is
motivated by the widest possible variety of desires, intentions, and
compulsions; and it mobilizes whatever resources might be necessary for
the constitution of meaning. This emphasis on the materiality of culture
is also reflected in the concept of the digital. Media are relational
technologies, which means that they facilitate certain types of
connection between humans and
objects.[^7^](#f6-note-0007){#f6-note-0007a} "Digital" thus denotes the
set of relations that, on the infrastructural basis of digital networks,
is realized today in the production, use, and transformation of
material and immaterial goods, and in the constitution and coordination
of personal and collective activity. In this regard, the focus is less
on the dominance of a certain class []{#Page_8 type="pagebreak"
title="8"}of technological artifacts -- the computer, for instance --
and even less on distinguishing between "digital" and "analog,"
"material" and "immaterial." Even in the digital condition, the analog
has not gone away. Rather, it has been re-evaluated and even partially
upgraded. The immaterial, moreover, is never entirely without
materiality. On the contrary, the fleeting impulses of digital
communication depend on global and unmistakably material infrastructures
that extend from mines beneath the surface of the earth, from which rare
earth metals are extracted, all the way into outer space, where
satellites are circling around above us. Such things may be ignored
because they are outside the experience of everyday life, but that does
not mean that they have disa
te-0001a} A closer examination,
however, reveals an entirely different picture. Established cultural
practices and social institutions had already been witnessing the
erosion of their self-evident justification and legitimacy, long before
they were faced with new technologies and the corresponding demands
these make on individuals. Moreover, the allegedly new types of
coordination and cooperation are also not so new after all. Many of them
have existed for a long time. At first most of them were totally
separate from the technologies for which, later on, they would become
relevant. It is only in retrospect that these developments can be
identified as beginnings, and it can be seen that much of what we regard
today as novel or revolutionary was in fact introduced at the margins of
society, in cultural niches that were unnoticed by the dominant actors
and institutions. The new technologies thus evolved against a
[]{#Page_11 type="pagebreak" title="11"}background of processes of
societal transformation that were already under way. They could only
have been developed once a vision of their potential had been
formulated, and they could only have been disseminated where demand for
them already existed. This demand was created by social, political, and
economic crises, which were themselves initiated by changes that were
already under way. The new technologies seemed to provide many differing
and promising answers to the urgent questions that these crises had
prompted. It was thus a combination of positive vision and pressure that
motivated a great variety of actors to change, at times with
considerable effort, the established processes, mature institutions, and
their own behavior. They intended to appropriate, for their own
projects, the various and partly contradictory possibilities that they
saw in these new technologies. Only then did a new technological
infrastructure arise.
This, in turn, created the preconditions for previously independent
developments to come together,
e, irrelevant, backward, exotic, or
idiosyncratic.[^3^](#c1-note-0003){#c1-note-0003a} Even at that time,
the social basis of culture was beginning to expand, though the actors
at the center of the discourse had failed to notice this. Communicative
and cultural processes were gaining significance in more and more
places, and excluded social groups were self-consciously developing
their own language in order to intervene in the discourse. The rise of
the knowledge economy, the increasingly loud critique of
heteronormativity, and a fundamental cultural critique posed by
post-colonialism enabled a greater number of people to participate in
public discussions. In what follows, I will subject each of these three
phenomena to closer examination. In order to do justice to their
complexity, I will treat them on different levels: I will depict the
rise of the knowledge economy as a structural change in labor; I will
reconstruct the critique of heteronormativity by outlining the origins
and transformations of the gay movement in West Germany; and I will
discuss post-colonialism as a theory that introduced new concepts of
cultural multiplicity and hybridization -- concepts that are now
influencing the digital condition far beyond the limits of the
post-colonial discourse, and often without any reference to this
discourse at all.
::: {.section}
### The growth of the knowledge economy {#c1-sec-0003}
At the beginning of the 1950s, the Austrian-American economist Fritz
Machlup was immersed in his study of the political economy of
monopoly.[^4^](#c1-note-0004){#c1-note-0004a} Among other things, he was
concerned with patents and copyright law. In line with the neo-classical
Austrian School, he considered both to be problematic (because
state-created) monopolies.[^5^](#c1-note-0005){#c1-note-0005a} The
longer he studied the monopoly of the patent system in particular, the
more far-reaching its consequences seemed to him. He maintained that the
patent system was intertwined with so
(including their colonies). This []{#Page_14 type="pagebreak"
title="14"}enabled even larger factories to be built in order to
exploit, to an even greater extent, the cost advantages of mass
production. In order to control these complex processes, new professions
arose with different types of competencies and working conditions. The
office became a workplace for an increasing number of people -- men and
women alike -- who, in one form or another, had something to do with
information processing and communication. Yet all of this required not
only new management techniques. Production and products also became more
complex, so that entire corporate sectors had to be restructured.
Whereas the first decisive inventions of the industrial era were still
made by more or less educated tinkerers, during the last third of the
nineteenth century, invention itself came to be institutionalized. In
Germany, Siemens (founded in 1847 as the Telegraphen-Bauanstalt von
Siemens & Halske) exemplifies this transformation. Within 50 years, a
company that began in a proverbial workshop in a Berlin backyard became
a multinational high-tech corporation. It was in such corporate
laboratories, which were established around the year 1900, that the
"industrialization of invention" or the "scientification of industrial
production" took place.[^8^](#c1-note-0008){#c1-note-0008a} In other
words, even the processes employed in factories and the goods that they
produced became knowledge-intensive. Their invention, planning, and
production required a steadily growing expansion of activities, which
today we would refer to as research and development. The informatization
of the economy -- the acceleration of mass production, the comprehensive
application of scientific methods to the organization of labor, and the
central role of research and development in industry -- was hastened
enormously by a world war that was waged on an industrial scale to an
extent that had never been seen before.
Another important f
e pure
"conveyance of information." Communication became a strategic field for
corporate and political disputes, and the mass media []{#Page_16
type="pagebreak" title="16"}became their locus of negotiation. Between
1880 and 1917, for instance, commercial advertising costs in the United
States increased by more than 800 percent, and the leading advertising
firms, using the same techniques with which they attracted consumers to
products, were successful in selling to the American public the idea of
their nation entering World War I. Thus, a media industry in the modern
sense was born, and it expanded along with the rapidly growing market
for advertising.[^11^](#c1-note-0011){#c1-note-0011a}
In his studies of labor markets conducted at the beginning of the 1960s,
Machlup brought these previously separate developments together and
thus explained the existence of an already advanced knowledge economy in
the United States. His arguments fell on extremely fertile soil, for an
intellectual transformation had taken place in other areas of science as
well. A few years earlier, for instance, cybernetics 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, and slogans have
repeated, modified, refined, and criticized the idea that the
knowledge-based activities of the economy have become increasingly
important. In the 1970s this discussion was associated above all with
the notion of the "post-industrial
society,"[^13^](#c1-note-0013){#c1-note-0013a} in the 1980s the guiding
idea was the "information society,"[^14^](#c1-note-0014){#c1-note-0014a}
and in the 1990s the debate revolved around the "network
society"[^15^](#c1-note-0015){#c1-note-0015a} -- to name just the most
popular concepts. What these approaches have in common is that they each
diagnose a comprehensive societal transformation that, as regards the
creation of economic value or jobs, has shifted the balance from
productive to communicative activities. Accordingly, they presuppose
that we know how to distinguish the former from the latter. This is not
unproblematic, however, because in practice the two are usually tightly
intertwined. Moreover, whoever maintains that communicative activities
have taken the place of industrial production in our society has adopted
a very narrow point of []{#Page_17 type="pagebreak" title="17"}view.
Factory jobs have not simply disappeared; they have just been partially
relocated outside of Western economies. The assertion that communicative
activities are somehow of "greater value" hardly chimes with the reality
of today\'s new "service jobs," many of which pay no more than the
minimum wage.[^16^](#c1-note-0016){#c1-note-0016a} Critiques of this
sort, however, have done little to reduce the effectiveness of this
analysis -- especially its political effectiveness -- for it does more
than simply describe a condition. It also contains a set of political
instructions that imply or directly demand that precisely those sectors
should be promoted that it considers economically promising, and that
society should be reorganized accordingly. Since the 1970s, there has
thus been a feedback loop between scientific analysis and political
agendas. More often than not, it is hardly possible to distinguish
between the two. Especially in Britain and the United States, the
economic transformation of the 1980s was imposed insistently and with
political calculation (the weakening of labor unions).
There are, however, important differences between the developments of
the so-called "post-industrial society" of the 1970s and those of the
so-called "network society" of the 1990s, 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 more
different from one another. At first, flexibility was demanded in the
name of a critique of the value system imposed by bureaucratic-bourgeois
society (including the traditional organization of the w
1980s, the
neoliberal ideas prevailed in large part because some of the values,
strategies, and methods propagated by the new social movements were
removed from their political context and appropriated in order to
breathe new life -- a "new spirit" -- into capitalism and thus to rescue
industrial society from its crisis.[^17^](#c1-note-0017){#c1-note-0017a}
An army of management consultants, restructuring experts, and new
companies began to promote flat hierarchies, self-responsibility, and
innovation; with these aims in mind, they set about reorganizing large
corporations into small and flexible units. Labor and leisure were no
longer supposed to be separated, for all aspects of a given person could
be integrated into his or her work. In order to achieve economic success
in this new capitalism, it became necessary for every individual to
identify himself or herself with his or her profession. Large
corporations were restructured in such a way that entire departments
found themselves transformed into independent "profit centers." This
happened in the name of creating more leeway for decision-making and of
optimizing the entrepreneurial spirit on all levels, the goals being to
increase value creation and to provide management with more fine-grained
powers of intervention. These measures, in turn, created the need for
computers and the need for them to be networked. Large corporations
reacted in this way to the emergence of highly specialized small
companies which, by networking and cooperating with other firms,
succeeded in quickly and flexibly exploiting niches in the expanding
global markets. In the management literature of the 1980s, the
catchphrases for this were "company networks" and "flexible
specialization."[^18^](#c1-note-0018){#c1-note-0018a} By the middle of
the 1990s, the sociologist Manuel Castells was able to conclude that the
actual productive entity was no longer the individual company but rather
the network consisting of companies and corporate divisions of various
sizes. In Castells\'s estimation, the decisive advantage of the network
is its ability to customize its elements and their configuration
[]{#Page_19 type="pagebreak" title="19"}to suit the rapidly changing
requirements of the "project" at
hand.[^19^](#c1-note-0019){#c1-note-0019a} Aside from a few exceptions,
companies in their traditional forms came to function above all as
strategic control centers and as economic and legal units.
This economic structural transformation was already well under way when
the internet emerged as a mass medium around the turn of the millennium.
As a consequence, change became more radical and penetrated into an
increasing number of areas of value creation. The political agenda
oriented itself toward the vision of "creative industries," a concept
developed in 1997 by the newly elected British government under Tony
Blair. A 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
advertising, computer games, architecture, music, arts and antique
markets, publishing, design, software
himself as a
homosexual outside of semi-private space without immediately being
exposed to the risk of criminal prosecution. This was a necessary
precondition for the ability to defend one\'s own rights. As early as
1971, the struggle for the recognition of gay life experiences reached
the broader public when Rosa von Praunheim\'s film *It Is Not the
Homosexual Who Is Perverse, but the Society in Which He Lives* was
screened at the Berlin International Film Festival and then, shortly
thereafter, broadcast on public television in North Rhine-Westphalia.
The film, which is firmly situated in the agitprop tradition,
[]{#Page_23 type="pagebreak" title="23"}follows a young provincial man
through the various milieus of Berlin\'s gay subcultures: from a
monogamous relationship to nightclubs and public bathrooms until, at the
end, he is enlightened by a political group of men who explain that it
is not possible to lead a free life in a niche, as his own emancipation
can only be achieved by a transformation of society as a whole. The film
closes with a not-so-subtle call to action: "Out of the closets, into
the streets!" Von Praunheim understood this emancipation to be a process
that encompassed all areas of life and had to be carried out in public;
it could only achieve success, moreover, in solidarity with other
freedom movements such as the Black Panthers in the United States and
the new women\'s movement. The goal, according to this film, is to
articulate one\'s own identity as a specific and differentiated identity
with its own experiences, values, and reference systems, and to anchor
this identity within a society that not only tolerates it but also
recognizes it as having equal validity.
At first, however, the film triggered vehement controversies, even
within the gay scene. The objection was that it attacked the gay
subculture, which was not yet prepared to defend itself publicly against
discrimination. Despite or (more likely) because of these controversies,
more than 5
n of gays (and lesbians) into the social mainstream continued.
In 1993, the first gay and lesbian city festival took place in Berlin,
and the first Rainbow Parade was held in Vienna in 1996. In 2002, the
Cologne Pride Day involved 1.2 million participants and attendees, thus
surpassing for the first time the attendance at the traditional Rose
Monday parade. By the end of the 1990s, the sociologist Rüdiger Lautmann
was already prepared to maintain: "To be homosexual has become
increasingly normalized, even if homophobia lives on in the depths of
the collective disposition."[^33^](#c1-note-0033){#c1-note-0033a} This
normalization was also reflected in a study published by the Ministry of
Justice in the year 2000, which stressed "the similarity between
homosexual and heterosexual relationships" and, on this basis, made an
argument against discrimination.[^34^](#c1-note-0034){#c1-note-0034a}
Around the year 2000, however, the classical gay movement had already
passed its peak. A profound transformation had begun to take place in
the middle of the 1990s. It lost its character as a new social movement
(in the style of the 1970s) and began to splinter inwardly and
outwardly. One could say that it transformed from a mass movement into a
multitude of variously networked communities. The clearest sign of this
transformation is the abbreviation "LGBT" (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and
transgender), which, since the mid-1990s, has represented the internal
heterogeneity of the movement as it has shifted toward becoming a
network.[^35^](#c1-note-0035){#c1-note-0035a} At this point, the more
radical actors were already speaking against the normalization of
homosexuality. Queer theory, for example, was calling into question the
"essentialist" definition of gender []{#Page_27 type="pagebreak"
title="27"}-- that is, any definition reducing it to an immutable
essence -- with respect to both its physical dimension (sex) and its
social and cultural dimension (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 gener
onversion of a formerly insulting word ("queer") by the very people and
communities against whom it used to be
directed.[^37^](#c1-note-0037){#c1-note-0037a} Likewise observable in
these developments was the simultaneity of social (amateur) and
artistic/scientific (professional) cultural production. The goal,
however, was less to produce a clear antithesis than it was to oppose
rigid attributions by underscoring mutability, hybridity, and
uniqueness. Both the scope of what could be expressed in public and the
circle of potential speakers expanded yet again. And, at least to some
extent, the drag queen Conchita Wurst popularized complex gender
constructions that went beyond the simple woman/man dualism. All of that
said, the assertion by Rüdiger Lautmann quoted above -- "homophobia
lives on in the depths of the collective disposition" -- continued to
hold true.
If the gay movement is representative of the social liberation of the
1970s and 1980s, then it is possible to regard its transformation into
the LGBT movement during the 1990s -- with its multiplicity and fluidity
of identity models and its stress on mutability and hybridity -- as a
sign of the reinvention of this project within the context of an
increasingly dominant digital condition. With this transformation,
however, the diversification and fluidification of cultural practices
and social roles have not yet come to an end. Ways of life that were
initially subcultural and facing existential pressure []{#Page_28
type="pagebreak" title="28"}are gradually entering the mainstream. They
are expanding the range of readily available models of identity for
anyone who might be interested, be it with respect to family forms
(e.g., patchwork families, adoption by same-sex couples), diets (e.g.,
vegetarianism and veganism), healthcare (e.g., anti-vaccination), or
other principles of life and belief. All of them are seeking public
recognition for a new frame of reference for social meaning that has
originated from their own activity. This is necessarily a process
characterized by conflicts and various degrees of resistance, including
right-wing populism that seeks to defend "traditional values," but many
of these movements will ultimately succeed in providing more people with
the opportunity to
rned with the establishment of cultural authority. Now, this poses
the following question: How does one function as a negotiator when
one\'s own sense of agency is limited, for instance, on account of being
excluded or oppressed? I think that, even in the role of the underdog,
there are opportunities to upend the imposed cultural authorities -- to
accept some aspects while rejecting others. It is in this way that
symbols of authority are hybridized and made into something of one\'s
own. For me, hybridization is not simply a mixture but rather a
[]{#Page_31 type="pagebreak" title="31"}strategic and selective
appropriation of meanings; it is a way to create space for negotiators
whose freedom and equality are
endangered.[^44^](#c1-note-0044){#c1-note-0044a}
:::
Hybridization is thus a cultural strategy for evading marginality that
is imposed from the outside: subjects, who from the dominant perspective
are incapable of doing so, appropriate certain aspects of culture for
themselves and transform them into something else. What is decisive is
that this hybrid, created by means of active and unauthorized
appropriation, opposes the dominant version and the resulting speech is
thus legitimized from another -- that is, from one\'s own -- position.
In this way, a cultural engagement is set under way and the superiority
of one meaning or another is called into question. Who has the right to
determine how and why a relationship with others should be entered,
which resources should be appropriated from them, and how these
resources should be used? At the heart of the matter lie the abilities
of speech and interpretation; these can be seized in order to create
space for a "cultural hybridity that entertains difference without an
assumed or imposed hierarchy."[^45^](#c1-note-0045){#c1-note-0045a}
At issue is thus a strategy for breaking down hegemonic cultural
conditions, which distribute agency in a highly uneven manner, and for
turning one\'s own cultural production -- which has be
, which is threatened whenever
"others" are empowered to speak and needs to be preserved, but rather
from the irreducible multiplicity that, through laborious processes, can
be brought into temporary and limited consensus. Bhabha\'s vision of
culture is one without immutable authorities, interpretations, and
truths. In theory, everything can be brought to the table. This is not a
situation in which anything goes, yet the central meaning of
negotiation, the contextuality of consensus, and the mutability of every
frame of reference []{#Page_32 type="pagebreak" title="32"}-- none of
which can be shared equally by everyone -- are always potentially
negotiable.
Post-colonialism draws attention to the "disruptive power of the
excluded-included third," which becomes especially virulent when it
"emerges in the middle of semantic
structures."[^46^](#c1-note-0046){#c1-note-0046a} The recognition of
this power reveals the increasing cultural independence of those
formerly colonized, and it also transforms the cultural self-perception
of the West, for, even in Western nations that were not significant
colonial powers, there are multifaceted tensions between dominant
cultures and those who are on the defensive against discrimination and
attributions by others. Instead of relying on the old recipe of
integration through assimilation (that is, the dissolution of the
"other"), the right to self-determined difference is being called for
more emphatically. In such a manner, collective identities, such as
national identities, are freed from their questionable appeals to
cultural homogeneity and essentiality, and reconceived in terms of the
experience of immanent difference. Instead of one binding and
unnegotiable frame of reference for everyone, which hierarchizes
individual positions and makes them appear unified, a new order without
such limitations needs to be established. Ultimately, the aim is to
provide nothing less than an "alternative reading of
modernity,"[^47^](#c1-note-0047){#
a desired, foreseeable end
constitutes the design process. Any attempt to separate design, to make
it a thing-by-itself, works counter to the inherent value of design as
the primary underlying matrix of
life."[^56^](#c1-note-0056){#c1-note-0056a}
Potentially all aspects of life could therefore fall under the purview
of design. This came about from the desire to oppose industrialism,
which was blind to its catastrophic social and ecological consequences,
with a new and comprehensive manner of seeing and acting that was
unrestricted by economics.
Toward the end of the 1970s, this expanded notion of design owed less
and less to emancipatory social movements, and its socio-political goals
began to fall by the wayside. Three fundamental patterns survived,
however, which go beyond design and remain characteristic of the
culturalization []{#Page_37 type="pagebreak" title="37"}of the economy:
the discovery of the public as emancipated users and active
participants; the use of appropriation, transformation, and
recombination as methods for creating ever-new aesthetic
differentiations; and, finally, the intention of shaping the lifeworld
of the user.[^57^](#c1-note-0057){#c1-note-0057a}
As these patterns became depoliticized and commercialized, the focus of
designing the "lifeworld" shifted more and more toward designing the
"experiential world." By the end of the 1990s, this had become so
normalized that even management consultants could assert that
"\[e\]xperiences represent an existing but previously unarticulated
*genre of economic output*."[^58^](#c1-note-0058){#c1-note-0058a} It was
possible to define the dimensions of the experiential world in various
ways. For instance, it could be clearly delimited and product-oriented,
like the flagship stores introduced by Nike in 1990, which, with their
elaborate displays, were meant to turn shopping into an experience. This
experience, as the company\'s executives hoped, radiated outward and
influenced how the brand was perceived as
in the form of economic activity. Moreover,
through digitalization and networking, many new opportunities have
arisen for large-scale involvement by the public in design processes.
Thanks []{#Page_39 type="pagebreak" title="39"}to new communication
technologies and flexible production processes, today\'s users can
personalize and create products to suit their wishes. Here, the spectrum
extends from tiny batches of creative-industrial products all the way to
global processes of "mass customization," in which factory-based mass
production is combined with personalization. One of the first
applications of this was introduced in 1999 when, through its website, a
sporting-goods company allowed customers to design certain elements of a
shoe by altering it within a set of guidelines. This was taken a step
further by the idea of "user-centered innovation," which relies on the
specific knowledge of users to enhance a product, with the additional
hope of discovering unintended applications and transforming these into
new areas of business.[^63^](#c1-note-0063){#c1-note-0063a} It has also
become possible for end users to take over the design process from the
beginning, which has become considerably easier with the advent of
specialized platforms for exchanging knowledge, alongside semi-automated
production 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 extremely information-intensive
and communication-intensive. Without the corresponding technological
infrastructure, neither could be achieved efficiently or on a large
scale. This was eviden
e. The old administrative methods,
which involved manual information processing, simply could no longer
keep up. The crisis reached its first dramatic peak in 1889 in the
United States, with the realization that the census data from the year
1880 had not yet been analyzed when the next census was already
scheduled to take place during the subsequent year. In the same year,
the Secretary of the Interior organized a conference to investigate
faster methods of data processing. Two methods were tested for making
manual labor more efficient, one of which had the potential to achieve
greater efficiency by means of novel data-processing machines. The
latter system emerged as the clear victor; developed by an engineer
named Hermann Hollerith, it mechanically processed and stored data on
punch cards. The idea was based on Hollerith\'s observations of the
coupling and decoupling of railroad cars, which he interpreted as
modular units that could be combined in any desired order. The punch
card transferred this approach to information []{#Page_41
type="pagebreak" title="41"}management. Data were no longer stored in
fixed, linear arrangements (tables and lists) but rather in small units
(the punch cards) that, like railroad cars, could be combined in any
given way. The increase in efficiency -- with respect to speed *and*
flexibility -- was enormous, and nearly a hundred of Hollerith\'s
machines were used by the Census
Bureau.[^65^](#c1-note-0065){#c1-note-0065a} This marked a turning point
in the history of information processing, with technical means no longer
being used exclusively to store data, but to process data as well. This
was the only way to avoid the impending crisis, ensuring that
bureaucratic management could maintain centralized control. Hollerith\'s
machines proved to be a resounding success and were implemented in many
more branches of government and corporate administration, where
data-intensive processes had increased so rapidly they could not have
been managed wi
they are themselves a constitutive element of
reality.
:::
::: {.section}
### Media as lifeworlds {#c1-sec-0011}
Another branch of new media theories, that of Marshall McLuhan and the
Toronto School of Communication,[^69^](#c1-note-0069){#c1-note-0069a}
[]{#Page_43 type="pagebreak" title="43"}reached a similar conclusion on
different grounds. In 1964, McLuhan aroused a great deal of attention
with his slogan "the medium is the message." He maintained that every
medium of communication, by means of its media-specific characteristics,
directly affected the consciousness, self-perception, and worldview of
every individual.[^70^](#c1-note-0070){#c1-note-0070a} This, he
believed, happens independently of and in addition to whatever specific
message a medium might be conveying. From this perspective, reality does
not exist outside of media, given that media codetermine our personal
relation to and behavior in the world. For McLuhan and the Toronto
School, media were thus not channels for transporting content but rather
the all-encompassing environments -- galaxies -- in which we live.
Such ideas were circulating much earlier and were intensively developed
by artists, many of whom were beginning to experiment with new
electronic media. An important starting point in this regard was the
1963 exhibit *Exposition of Music -- Electronic Television* by the
Korean artist Nam June Paik, who was then collaborating with Karlheinz
Stockhausen in Düsseldorf. Among other things, Paik presented 12
television sets, the screens of which were "distorted" by magnets. Here,
however, "distorted" is a problematic term, for, as Paik explicitly
noted, the electronic images were "a beautiful slap in the face of
classic dualism in philosophy since the time of Plato. \[...\] Essence
AND existence, essentia AND existentia. In the case of the electron,
however, EXISTENTIA IS ESSENTIA."[^71^](#c1-note-0071){#c1-note-0071a}
Paik no longer understood the electronic image on the television screen
as a po
wless milieu of the GDR before
reunification.[^75^](#c1-note-0075){#c1-note-0075a}
These illegal, independent, or public-access stations only managed to
establish themselves as real mass media to 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 society, stirring visions of democratic media
production, with the newly arrived medium of the internet. Despite still
struggling with numerous technical difficulties, they remained constant
in their belief that the internet would solve the hitherto intractable
problem of distributing content. The transition from analog to digital
media lowered the production hurdle yet again, not least through the
ongoing development of improved software. Now, many stages of production
that had previously required professional or semi-professional expertise
and equipment could also be carried out by engaged laymen. As a
consequence, the focus of interest broadened to include not only the
development of alternative production groups but also the possibility of
a flexible means of rapid intervention in existing structures. Media --
both television and the internet -- were understood as environments in
which one could act without directly representing a reality outside of
the media. Television was analyzed down to its own legalities, which
could then be manipulated to affect things beyond the media.
Increasingly, culture jamming 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 Army of National Liberation rose up in the south of Mexico,
several media projects were created to support its mostly peaceful
opposition and to make the movement known in Europe and North America.
As part of this loose network, in 1998 the American artist collective
Electronic Disturbance Theater developed a relatively simple computer
program called FloodNet that enabled networked sympathizers to shut down
websites, such as those of the Mexican government, in a targeted and
temporary manner. The principle was easy enough: the program would
automatically reload a certain website over and over again in order to
exhaust the capacities of its network
servers.[^79^](#c1-note-0079){#c1-note-0079a} The goal was not to
destroy data but rather to disturb the normal functioning of an
institution in order to draw atte
tion of military,
academic, and countercultural interests -- was offered by David D.
Clark, a computer scientist who for some time coordinated the
development of technical standards for the internet: "We reject: kings,
presidents and voting. We believe in: rough consensus and running
code."[^88^](#c1-note-0088){#c1-note-0088a}
All forms of classical, formal hierarchies and their methods for
resolving conflicts -- commands (by kings and presidents) and votes --
were dismissed. Implemented in their place was a pragmatics of open
cooperation that was oriented around two guiding principles. The first
was that different views should be discussed without a single individual
being able to block any final decisions. Such was the meaning of the
expression "rough consensus." The second was that, in accordance with
the classical engineering tradition, the focus should remain on concrete
solutions that had to be measured against one []{#Page_52
type="pagebreak" title="52"}another on the basis of transparent
criteria. Such was the meaning of the expression "running code." In
large part, this method was possible because the group oriented around
these principles was, internally, relatively homogeneous: it consisted
of top-notch computer scientists -- all of them men -- at respected
American universities and research centers. For this very reason, many
potential and fundamental conflicts were avoided, at least at first.
This internal homogeneity lends rather dark undertones to their sunny
vision, but this was hardly recognized at the time. Today these
undertones are far more apparent, and I will return to them below.
Not only were technical protocols developed on the basis of these
principles, but organizational forms as well. Along with the Internet
Engineering Task Force (which he directed), Clark created the so-called
Request-for-Comments documents, with which ideas could be presented to
interested members of the community and simultaneous feedback could be
collected in order to wo
r own projects, which partly complemented
and partly contradicted one another. As we know today, the first three
groups still cooperate closely with each other. To a great extent, this
has allowed the military and corporations, which are willingly supported
by researchers in need of funding, to determine the technology and thus
aspects of the social and cultural agendas that depend on it.
The software developers\' 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 one another. The former culture of
horizontal cooperation between developers transformed into a
hierarchical and commercially oriented relation between developers and
users (many of whom, at least at the beginning, had developed programs
of their own). For the first time, copyright came to play an important
role in digital culture. In order to survive in this environment, the
practice of open cooperation had to be placed on a new legal foundation.
Copyright 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 (freedom
0).
2. The freedom to study how the program works and change it so it does
your computing as you wish (fr
its efficiency in practice: horizontal, informal
communities of actors -- voluntary, autonomous, and focused on a common
interest -- that, on the basis of high-tech infrastructure, could
include thousands of people without having to create formal hierarchies.
:::
:::
::: {.section}
From the Margins to the Center of Society {#c1-sec-0013}
-----------------------------------------
It was around this same time that the technologies in question, which
were already no longer very new, entered mainstream society. Within a
few years, the internet became part of everyday life. Three years before
the turn of the millennium, only about 6 percent of the entire German
population used the internet, often only occasionally. Three years after
the millennium, the number of users already exceeded 53 percent. Since
then, this share has increased even further. In 2014, it was more than
97 percent for people under the age of
40.[^95^](#c1-note-0095){#c1-note-0095a} Parallel to these developments,
data transfer rates increased considerably, broadband connections ousted
the need for dial-up modems, and the internet was suddenly "here" and no
longer "there." With the spread of mobile devices, especially since the
year 2007 when the first iPhone was introduced, digital communication
became available both extensively and continuously. Since then, the
internet has been ubiquitous. The amount of time that users spend online
has increased and, with the rapid ascent of social mass media such as
Facebook, people have been online in almost every situation and
circumstance in life.[^96^](#c1-note-0096){#c1-note-0096a} The internet,
like water or electricity, has become for many people a utility that is
simply taken for granted.
In a BBC survey from 2010, 80 percent of those polled believed that
internet access -- a precondition for participating []{#Page_56
type="pagebreak" title="56"}in the now dominant digital condition --
should be regarded as a fundamental human right. This idea was most
popular
marginalization, but have penetrated deeply into the former mainstream,
not least because the present forms of capitalism have learned to profit
from the spread of niches and segmentation. When even conservative
parties have abandoned the idea of a "leading culture," then cultural
differences can no longer be classified by enforcing an absolute and
indisputable hierarchy, the top of which is occupied by specific
(geographical and cultural) centers. Rather, a space has been opened up
for endless negotiations, a space in which -- at least in principle --
everything can be called into question. This is not, of course, a
peaceful and egalitarian process. In addition to the practical hurdles
that exist in polarizing societies, there are also violent backlashes
and new forms of fundamentalism that are attempting once again to remove
certain religious, social, cultural, or political dimensions of
existence from the discussion. Yet these can only be understood in light
of a sweeping cultural transformation that has already reached
mainstream society.[^98^](#c1-note-0098){#c1-note-0098a} In other words,
the digital condition has become quotidian and dominant. It forms a
cultural constellation that determines all areas of life, and its
characteristic features are clearly recognizable. These will be the
focus of the next chapter.[]{#Page_57 type="pagebreak" title="57"}
:::
::: {.section .notesSet type="rearnotes"}
[]{#notesSet}Notes {#c1-ntgp-9999}
------------------
::: {.section .notesList}
[1](#c1-note-0001a){#c1-note-0001} Kathrin Passig and Sascha Lobo,
*Internet: Segen oder Fluch* (Berlin: Rowohlt, 2012) \[--trans.\].
[2](#c1-note-0002a){#c1-note-0002} The expression "heteronormatively
behaving" is used here to mean that, while in the public eye, the
behavior of the people []{#Page_177 type="pagebreak" title="177"}in
question conformed to heterosexual norms regardless of their personal
sexual orientations.
[3](#c1-note-0003a){#c1-note-0003} No order is ever entir
1986), p. 350.
[12](#c1-note-0012a){#c1-note-0012} Norbert Wiener, *Cybernetics: Or
Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine* (New York: J.
Wiley, 1948).
[13](#c1-note-0013a){#c1-note-0013} Daniel Bell, *The Coming of
Post-Industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting* (New York:
Basic Books, 1973).
[14](#c1-note-0014a){#c1-note-0014} Simon Nora and Alain Minc, *The
Computerization of Society: A Report to the President of France*
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1980).
[15](#c1-note-0015a){#c1-note-0015} Manuel Castells, *The Rise of the
Network Society* (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996).
[16](#c1-note-0016a){#c1-note-0016} Hans-Dieter Kübler, *Mythos
Wissensgesellschaft: Gesellschaftlicher Wandel zwischen Information,
Medien und Wissen -- Eine Einführung* (Wiesbaden: Verlag für
Sozialwissenschaften, 2009).[]{#Page_178 type="pagebreak" title="178"}
[17](#c1-note-0017a){#c1-note-0017} Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello,
*The New Spirit of Capitalism*, trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso,
2005).
[18](#c1-note-0018a){#c1-note-0018} Michael Piore and Charles Sabel,
*The Second Industrial Divide: Possibilities of Prosperity* (New York:
Basic Books, 1984).
[19](#c1-note-0019a){#c1-note-0019} Castells, *The Rise of the Network
Society*. For a critical evaluation of Castells\'s work, see Felix
Stalder, *Manuel Castells and the Theory of the Network Society*
(Cambridge: Polity, 2006).
[20](#c1-note-0020a){#c1-note-0020} "UK Creative Industries Mapping
Documents" (1998); quoted from Terry Flew, *The Creative Industries:
Culture and Policy* (Los Angeles, CA: Sage, 2012), pp. 9--10.
[21](#c1-note-0021a){#c1-note-0021} The rise of the creative
industries, and the hope that they inspired among politicians, did not
escape criticism. Among the first works to draw attention to the
precarious nature of working in such industries was Angela McRobbie\'s
*British Fashion Design: Rag Trade or Image Industry?* (New York:
Routledge, 1998).
[2
eschichte* (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck
& Ruprecht, 2014).
[31](#c1-note-0031a){#c1-note-0031} "AIDS: Tödliche Seuche," *Der
Spiegel* 23 (1983) \[--trans.\].
[32](#c1-note-0032a){#c1-note-0032} Quoted from Frank Niggemeier, "Gay
Pride: Schwules Selbstbewußtsein aus dem Village," in Bernd Polster
(ed.), *West-Wind: Die Amerikanisierung Europas* (Cologne: Dumont,
1995), pp. 179--87, at 184 \[--trans.\].
[33](#c1-note-0033a){#c1-note-0033} Quoted from Regener and Köppert,
*Privat/öffentlich*, p. 7 \[--trans.\].
[34](#c1-note-0034a){#c1-note-0034} Hans-Peter Buba and László A.
Vaskovics, *Benachteiligung gleichgeschlechtlich orientierter Personen
und Paare: Studie im Auftrag des Bundesministerium der Justiz* (Cologne:
Bundesanzeiger, 2001).
[35](#c1-note-0035a){#c1-note-0035} This process of internal
differentiation has not yet reached its conclusion, and thus the
acronyms have become longer and longer: LGBPTTQQIIAA+ stands for
lesbian, gay, bisexual, pansexual, transgender, transsexual, queer,[36](#c1-note-0036a){#c1-note-0036} Judith Butler, *Gender Trouble:
questioning, intersex, intergender, asexual, ally.
5} Inke Arns, "Social Technologies:
Deconstruction, Subversion and the Utopia of Democratic Communication,"
*Medien Kunst Netz* (2004), online.
[76](#c1-note-0076a){#c1-note-0076} The term was coined at a series of
conferences titled The Next Five Minutes (N5M), which were held in
Amsterdam from 1993 to 2003. See \<
[77](#c1-note-0077a){#c1-note-0077} Mark Dery, *Culture Jamming:
Hacking, Slashing and Sniping in the Empire of Signs* (Westfield: Open
Media, 1993); Luther Blisset et al., *Handbuch der
Kommunikationsguerilla*, 5th edn (Berlin: Assoziationen A, 2012).
[78](#c1-note-0078a){#c1-note-0078} Critical Art Ensemble, *Electronic
Civil Disobedience and Other Unpopular Ideas* (New York: Autonomedia,
1996).
[79](#c1-note-0079a){#c1-note-0079} Today this method is known as a
"distributed denial of service attack" (DDOS).
[80](#c1-note-0080a){#c1-note-0080} Max Weber, *Economy and Society: An
Outline of Interpretive Sociology*, trans. Guenther Roth and Claus
Wittich (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1978), pp. 26--8.
[81](#c1-note-0081a){#c1-note-0081} Ernst Friedrich Schumacher, *Small
Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered*, 8th edn (New York:
Harper Perennial, 2014).
[82](#c1-note-0082a){#c1-note-0082} Fred Turner, *From Counterculture
to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Movement and the Rise of
Digital Utopianism* (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2006), p.
21. In this regard, see also the documentary films *Das Netz* by Lutz
Dammbeck (2003) and *All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace* by
Adam Curtis (2011).
[83](#c1-note-0083a){#c1-note-0083} It was possible to understand
cybernetics as a language of free markets or also as one of centralized
planned economies. See Slava Gerovitch, *From Newspeak to Cyberspeak: A
History of Soviet Cybernetics* (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002). The
great interest of Soviet scientists in cybernetics rendered the term
rat
se that it is reasonable to speak of the digital
condition in the singular.
"Referentiality" is a method with which individuals can inscribe
themselves into cultural processes and constitute themselves as
producers. Understood as shared social meaning, the arena of culture
entails that such an undertaking cannot be limited to the individual.
Rather, it takes place within a larger framework whose existence and
development depend on []{#Page_58 type="pagebreak" title="58"}communal
formations. "Algorithmicity" denotes those aspects of cultural processes
that are (pre-)arranged by the activities of machines. Algorithms
transform the vast quantities of data and information that characterize
so many facets of present-day life into dimensions and formats that can
be registered by human perception. It is impossible to read the content
of billions of websites. Therefore we turn to services such as Google\'s
search algorithm, which reduces the data flood ("big data") to a
manageable amount and translates it into a format that humans can
understand ("small data"). Without them, human beings could not
comprehend or do anything within a culture built around digital
technologies, but they influence our understanding and activity in an
ambivalent way. They create new dependencies by pre-sorting and making
the (informational) world available to us, yet simultaneously ensure our
autonomy by providing the preconditions that enable us to act.
:::
::: {.section}
Referentiality {#c2-sec-0002}
--------------
In the digital condition, one of the methods (if not *the* most
fundamental method) enabling humans to participate -- alone or in groups
-- in the collective negotiation of meaning is the system of creating
references. In a number of arenas, referential processes play an
important role in the assignment of both meaning and form. According to
the art historian André Rottmann, for instance, "one might claim that
working with references has in recent years become the dominant
production-aesthetic model in contemporary
art."[^1^](#c2-note-0001){#c2-note-0001a} This burgeoning engagement
with references, however, is hardly restricted to the world of
contemporary art. Referentiality is a feature of many processes that
encompass the operations of various genres of professional and everyday
culture. In its essence, it is the use of materials that are already
equipped with meaning -- as opposed to so-called raw material -- to
create new meanings. The referential techniques used to achieve this are
extremely diverse, a fact reflected in the numerous terms that exist to
describe them: re-mix, re-make, re-enactment, appropriation, sampling,
meme, imitation, homage, tropicália, parody, quotation, post-production,
re-performance, []{#Page_59 type="pagebreak" title="59"}camouflage,
(non-academic) research, re-creativity, mashup, transformative use, and
so on.
These processes have two important aspects in common: the
recognizability of the sources and the freedom to deal with them however
one likes. The first creates an internal system of references from which
meaning and aesthetics are derived in an essential
manner.[^2^](#c2-note-0002){#c2-note-0002a} The second is the
precondition enabling the creation of something that is both new and on
the same level as the re-used material. This represents a clear
departure from the historical--critical method, which endeavors to embed
a source in its original context in order to re-determine its meaning,
but also a departure from classical forms of rendition such as
translations, adaptations (for instance, adapting a book for a film), or
cover versions, which, though they translate a work into another
language or medium, still attempt to preserve its original meaning.
Re-mixes produced by DJs are one example of the referential treatment of
source material. In his book on the history of DJ culture, the
journalist Ulf Poschardt notes: "The remixer isn\'t concerned with
salvaging authenticity, but with creating a new
authenticity."[^3^](#c2-note-0003){#c2-note-0003a} For instead of
distancing themselves from the past, which would follow the (Western)
logic of progress or the spirit of the avant-garde, these processes
refer explicitly to precursors and to existing material. In one and the
same gesture, both one\'s own new position and the context and cultural
tradition that is being carried on in one\'s own work are constituted
performatively; that is, through one\'s own activity in the moment. I
will discuss this phenomenon in greater depth below.
To work with existing cultural material is, in itself, nothing new. In
modern montages, artists likewise drew upon
tion of synthesis becomes a principle []{#Page_60 type="pagebreak"
title="60"}of form."[^4^](#c2-note-0004){#c2-note-0004a} At least for a
brief moment, he considered them an adequate expression for the
impossibility of reconciling the contradictions of capitalist culture.
Influenced by Adorno, the literary theorist Peter Bürger went so far as
to call the montage the true "paradigm of
modernity."[^5^](#c2-note-0005){#c2-note-0005a} In today\'s referential
processes, on the contrary, pieces are not brought together as much as
they are integrated into one another by being altered, adapted, and
transformed. Unlike the older arrangement, it is not the fissures
between elements that are foregrounded but rather their synthesis in the
present. Conchita Wurst, the bearded diva, is not torn between two
conflicting poles. Rather, she represents a successful synthesis --
something new and harmonious that distinguishes itself by showcasing
elements of the old order (man/woman) and simultaneously transcending
them.
This synthesis, however, is usually just temporary, for at any time it
can itself serve as material for yet another rendering. Of course, this
is far easier to pull off with digital objects than with analog objects,
though these categories have become increasingly porous and thus
increasingly problematic as opposites. More and more objects exist both
in an analog and in a digital form. Think of photographs and slides,
which have become so easy to digitalize. Even three-dimensional objects
can now be scanned and printed. In the future, programmable materials
with controllable and reversible features will cause the difference
between the two domains to vanish: analog is becoming more and more
digital.
Montages and referential processes can only become widespread methods
if, in a given society, cultural objects are available in three
different respects. The first is economic and organizational: they must
be affordable and easily accessible. Whoever is unable to afford books
way,
digital coding is not necessarily bound to computers but can rather be
realized with all materials: a mosaic is a digital process in which
information is coded by means of variously colored tiles, just as a
digital image consists of pixels. In the case of the mosaic, of course,
the resolution is far lower. Alphabetic writing is a form of coding
linguistic information by means of discrete signs that are, in
themselves, meaningless. Consequently, Florian Cramer has argued that
"every form of literature that is recorded alphabetically and not based
on analog parameters such as ideograms or orality is already digital in
that it is stored in discrete
signs."[^7^](#c2-note-0007){#c2-note-0007a} However, the specific
features of the alphabet, as Marshall McLuhan repeatedly underscored,
did not fully develop until the advent of the printing
press.[^8^](#c2-note-0008){#c2-note-0008a} It was the printing press, in
other words, that first abstracted written signs from analog handwriting
and transformed them into standardized symbols that could be repeated
without any loss of information. In this practical sense, the printing
press made writing digital, with the result that dealing with texts soon
became radically different.
::: {.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 from the ground
up. In manuscript culture, every new copy represented a potential
degradation of the original, and therefore []{#Page_62 type="pagebreak"
title="62"}the oldest sources (those that had undergone as little
corruption as possible) were valued above all.
r content is made available digitally
and for free, whether legally or not. These sites, too, have experienced
uninterrupted growth. By the end of 2015, dozens of millions of people
were simultaneously using the BitTorrent tracker The Pirate Bay -- the
largest nodal point for file-sharing networks during the last decade --
to exchange several million digital files with one
another.[^19^](#c2-note-0019){#c2-note-0019a} And this was happening
despite protracted attempts to block or close down the file-sharing site
by legal means and despite a variety of competing services. Even when
the founders of the website were sentenced in Sweden to pay large fines
(around €3 million) and to serve time in prison, the site still did not
disappear from the internet.[^20^](#c2-note-0020){#c2-note-0020a} At the
same time, new providers have entered the market of free access; their
method is not to facilitate distributed downloads but rather to offer,
on account of the drastically reduced cost of data transfers, direct
streaming. Although some of these services are relatively easy to locate
and some have been legally banned -- the best-known case in Germany
being that of the popular site kino.to -- more of them continue to
appear.[^21^](#c2-note-0021){#c2-note-0021a} Moreover, this phenomenon
[]{#Page_67 type="pagebreak" title="67"}is not limited to music and
films, but encompasses all media formats. For instance, it is
foreseeable that the number of freely available plans for 3D objects
will increase along with the popularity of 3D printing. It has almost
escaped notice, however, that so-called "shadow libraries" have been
popping up everywhere; the latter are not accessible to the public but
rather to members, for instance, of closed exchange platforms or of
university intranets. Few seminars take place any more without a corpus
of scanned texts, regardless of whether this practice is legal or
not.[^22^](#c2-note-0022){#c2-note-0022a}
The lines between these different mechanisms of acc
ure, for instance in so-called "cosplay." The term, which is a
contraction of the words "costume" and "play," was coined by a Japanese
man named Nobuyuki Takahashi. In 1984, while attending the World Science
Fiction Convention in Los Angeles, he used the word to describe the
practice of certain attendees to dress up as their favorite characters.
Participants in cosplay embody fictitious figures -- mostly from the
worlds of science fiction, comics/manga, or computer games -- by donning
home-made costumes and striking characteristic
poses.[^29^](#c2-note-0029){#c2-note-0029a} The often considerable
effort that goes into this is mostly reflected in the costumes, not in
the choreography or dramaturgy of the performance. What is significant
is that these costumes are usually not exact replicas but are rather
freely adapted by each player to represent the character as he or she
interprets it to be. Accordingly, "Cosplay is a form of appropriation
[]{#Page_74 type="pagebreak" title="74"}that transforms, actualizes and
performs an existing story in close connection to the fan\'s own
identity."[^30^](#c2-note-0030){#c2-note-0030a} This practice,
admittedly, goes back quite far in the history of fan culture, but it
has experienced a striking surge through the opportunity for fans to
network with one another around the world, to produce costumes and
images of professional quality, and to place themselves on the same
level as their (fictitious) idols. By now it has become a global
subculture whose members are active not only online but also at hundreds
of conventions throughout the world. In Germany, an annual cosplay
competition has been held since 2007 (it is organized by the Frankfurt
Book Fair and Animexx, the country\'s largest manga and anime
community). The scene, which has grown and branched out considerably
over the past few years, has slowly begun to professionalize, with
shops, books, and players who make paid appearances. Even in fan
culture, stars are born. As soon as the subculture has exceeded a
certain size, this gradual onset of commercialization will undoubtedly
lead to tensions within the community. For now, however, two of its
noteworthy features remain: the power of the desire to appropriate, in a
bodily manner, characters from vast cultural universes, and the
widespread combination of free interpretation and meticulous attention
to detail.
:::
::: {.section}
### Lineages and transformations {#c2-sec-0008}
Because of the great effort tha they require, re-enactment and cosplay
are somewhat extreme examples of singling out, appropriating, and
referencing. As everyday activities that almost take place incidentally,
however, these three practices usually do not make any significant or
lasting differences. Yet they do not happen just once, but over and over
again. They accumulate and thus constitute referentiality\'s second type
of activity: the creation of connections between the many things that
have attracted attention. In such a way, paths are forged through the
vast complexity. These paths, which can be formed, for instance, by
referring to different things one after another, likewise serve to
produce and filter meaning. Things that can potentially belong in
multiple contexts are brought into a single, specific context. For the
individual []{#Page_75 type="pagebreak" title="75"}producer, this is how
fields of attention, reference systems, and contexts of meaning
tation, with its strong stress on
the freedom of the individual -- to realize oneself as an individual
actor in the allegedly open market and in opposition to allegedly
domineering collective mechanisms -- has radicalized these tendencies
even further. The ability to act, however, is not only a question of
one\'s personal attitude but also of material resources. And it is this
same neoliberal politics that deprives so many people of the resources
needed to take advantage of these new freedoms in their own lives. As a
result they suffer, in Ulrich Beck\'s terms, "permanent disadvantage."
Under the digital condition, this process has permeated the finest
structures of social life. Individualization, commercialization, and the
production of differences (through design, for instance) are ubiquitous.
Established civic institutions are not alone in being hollowed out;
relatively new collectives are also becoming more differentiated, a
development that I outlined above with reference to the transformation
of the gay movement into the LGBT community. Yet nevertheless, or
perhaps for this very reason, new forms of communality are being formed
in these offshoots -- in the small activities of everyday life. And
these new communal formations -- rather []{#Page_80 type="pagebreak"
title="80"}than individual people -- are the actual subjects who create
the shared meaning that we call culture.
::: {.section}
### The problem of the "community" {#c2-sec-0010}
I have chosen the rather cumbersome expression "communal formation" in
order to avoid the term "community" (*Gemeinschaft*), although the
latter is used increasingly often in discussions of digital cultures and
has played an important role, from the beginning, in conceptions of
networking. Viewed analytically, however, "community" is a problematic
term because it is almost hopelessly overloaded. Particularly in the
German-speaking tradition, Ferdinand Tönnies\'s polar distinction
between "community" (*Gemeinschaft*) and "societ
[^43^](#c2-note-0043){#c2-note-0043a} The English word
"community" is somewhat more open. The opposition between community and
society resonates with it as well, although the dichotomy is not as
clear-cut. American communitarianism, for instance, considers the
difference between community and society to be gradual and not
categorical. Its primary aim is to strengthen civic institutions and
mechanisms, and it regards community as an intermediary level between
the individual and society.[^44^](#c2-note-0044){#c2-note-0044a} But
there is a related English term, which seems even more productive for my
purposes, namely "community of practice," a concept that is more firmly
grounded in the empirical observation of concrete social relationships.
The term was introduced at the beginning of the 1990s by the social
researchers Jean Lave and Étienne Wenger. They observed that, in most
cases, professional learning (for instance, in their case study of
midwives) does not take place as a one-sided transfer of knowledge or
proficiency, but rather as an open exchange, often outside of the formal
learning environment, between people with different levels of knowledge
and experience. In this sense, learning is an activity that, though
distinguishable, cannot easily be separated from other "normal"
activities of everyday life. As Lave and Wenger stress, however, the
community of practice is not only a social space of exchange; it is
rather, and much more fundamentally, "an intrinsic condition for the
existence of knowledge, not least because it provides the interpretive
support necessary for making sense of its
heritage."[^45^](#c2-note-0045){#c2-note-0045a} Communities of practice
are thus always epistemic communities that form around certain ways of
looking at the world and one\'s own activity in it. What constitutes a
community of practice is thus the joint acquisition, development, and
preservation of a specific field of practice that contains abstract
knowledge, concrete proficiencies
teer the attention of its members toward one another. Through
the common production of culture, it also structures how the members
perceive the world and how they are able to design themselves and their
potential actions in it. It is thus a cooperative mechanism of
filtering, interpretation, and constitution. Through the everyday
referential work of its members, the community selects a manageable
amount of information from the excess of potentially available
information and brings it into a meaningful context, whereby it
validates the selection itself and orients the activity of each of its
members.
The new communal formations consist of self-referential worlds whose
constructive common practice affects the foundations of social activity
itself -- the constitution of space and time. How? The spatio-temporal
horizon of digital communication is a global (that is, placeless) and
ongoing present. The technical vision of digital communication is always
the here and now. With the instant transmission of information,
everything that is not "here" is inaccessible and everything that is not
"now" has disappeared. Powerful infrastructure has been built to achieve
these effects: data centers, intercontinental networks of cables,
satellites, high-performance nodes, and much more. Through globalized
high-frequency trading, actors in the financial markets have realized
this []{#Page_90 type="pagebreak" title="90"}technical vision to its
broadest extent by creating a never-ending global present whose expanse
is confined to milliseconds. This process is far from coming to an end,
for massive amounts of investment are allocated to accomplish even the
smallest steps toward this goal. On November 3, 2015, a 4,600-kilometer,
300-million-dollar transatlantic telecommunications cable (Hibernia
Express) was put into operation between London and New York -- the first
in more than 10 years -- with the single goal of accelerating automated
trading between the two places by 5.2 milliseconds.
For social and biological processes, this technical horizon of space and
time is neither achievable nor desirable. Such processes, on the
contrary, are existentially dependent on other spatial and temporal
orders. Yet because of the existence of this non-geographical and
atemporal horizon, the need -- as well as the possibility -- has arisen
to redefine the parameters of space and time themselves in order to
counteract the mire of technically defined spacelessness and
timelessness. If space and time are not simply to vanish in this
spaceless, ongoing present, how then should they be defined? Communal
formations create spaces for action not least by determining their own
geographies and temporal rhythms. They negotiate what is near and far
and also w
osen as important. This can happen if they enable access
[]{#Page_91 type="pagebreak" title="91"}to stipends, donations, price
reductions, ride shares, places to stay, tips, links, insider knowledge,
public funds, airlifts, explosives, and so on. It is in this way that
each formation creates its respective spatial constructs, which define
distances in a great variety of ways. At the same time that war-torn
Syria is unreachably distant even for seasoned reporters and their
staff, veritable travel agencies are being set up in order to bring
Western jihadists there in large numbers.
Things are similar for the temporal dimensions of social and biological
processes. Permanent presence is a temporality that is inimical to life
but, under its influence, temporal rhythms have to be redefined as well.
What counts as fast? What counts as slow? In what order should things
proceed? On the everyday level, for instance, the matter can be as
simple as how quickly to respond to an email. Because the transmission
of information hardly takes any time, every delay is a purely social
creation. But how much is acceptable? There can be no uniform answer to
this. The members of each communal formation have to negotiate their own
rules with one another, even in areas of life that are otherwise highly
formalized. In an interview with the magazine *Zeit*, for instance, a
lawyer with expertise in labor law was asked whether a boss may require
employees to be reachable at all times. Instead of answering by
referring to any binding legal standards, the lawyer casually advised
that this was a matter of flexible negotiation: "Express your misgivings
openly and honestly about having to be reachable after hours and,
together with your boss, come up with an agreeable rule to
follow."[^56^](#c2-note-0056){#c2-note-0056a} If only it were that easy.
Temporalities that, in many areas, were once simply taken for granted by
everyone on account of the factuality of things now have to be
culturally determined -
nd technical
protocols that lend to each of these formations its concrete
constitution and specific character. Protocols are common sets of rules;
they establish, according to the network theorist Alexander Galloway,
"the essential points necessary to enact an agreed-upon standard of
action." They provide, he goes on, "etiquette for autonomous
agents."[^65^](#c2-note-0065){#c2-note-0065a} Protocols are
simultaneously voluntary and binding; they allow actors to meet
eye-to-eye instead of entering into hierarchical relations with one
another. If everyone voluntarily complies with the protocols, then it is
not necessary for one actor to give instructions to another. Whoever
accepts the relevant protocols can interact with others who do the same;
whoever opts not to []{#Page_96 type="pagebreak" title="96"}accept them
will remain on the outside. Protocols establish, for example, common
languages, technical standards, or social conventions. The fundamental
protocol for the internet is the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet
Protocol (TCP/IP). This suite of protocols defines the common language
for exchanging data. Every device that exchanges information over the
internet -- be it a smartphone, a supercomputer in a data center, or a
networked thermostat -- has to use these protocols. In growing areas of
social contexts, the common language is English. Whoever wishes to
belong has to speak it increasingly often. In the natural sciences,
communication now takes place almost exclusively in English. Non-native
speakers who accept this norm may pay a high price: they have to learn a
new language and continually improve their command of it or else resign
themselves to being unable to articulate things as they would like --
not to mention losing the possibility of expressing something for which
another language would perhaps be more suitable, or forfeiting
traditions that cannot be expressed in English. But those who refuse to
go along with these norms pay an even higher price,
topics, this will
not remain the case for long. When asked about the percentage of news
that would be written by computers 15 years from now, Narrative
Science\'s chief technology officer and co-founder 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
reasonable to predict that many journalistic texts will be automated in
the future. Entirely different applications, however, have also been
conceived. Alexander Pschera, for instance, foresees a new age in the
relationship between humans and nature, for, as soon as animals are
equipped with transmitters and sensors and are thus able to tell their
own stories through the appropriate software, they will be regarded as
individuals and not merely as generic members of a
species.[^87^](#c2-note-0087){#c2-note-0087a}
We have not yet reached this point. However, given that the CIA has also
expressed interest in Narrative Science and has invested in it through
its venture-capital firm In-Q-Tel, there are indications that
applications are being developed beyond the field of journalism. For the
purpose of spreading propaganda, for instance, algorithms can easily be
used to create a flood of entries on online forums and social mass
media.[^88^](#c2-note-0088){#c2-note-0088a} Narrative Science is only
one of many companies offering automated text analysis and production.
As implemented by IBM and other firms, so-called E-discovery software
promises to reduce dramatically the amount of time and effort required
to analyze the constantly growing numbers of files that are relevant to
complex
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 amounts of
data and the computing centers in which they are stored and processed
provide the material precondition for developing increasingly complex
algorithms. Necessities and possibilities are mutually motivating one
another.[^98^](#c2-note-0098){#c2-note-0098a}
Perhaps the best-known algorithms that sort the digital infosphere and
make it usable in its present form are those of search engines, above
all Google\'s PageRank. Thanks to these, we can find our way around in a
world of unstructured information and transfer increasingly larger parts
of the (informational) world into the order of unstructuredness without
giving rise to the "Library of Babel." Here, "unstructured" means that
there is no prescribed order such as (to stick []{#Page_112
type="pagebreak" title="112"}with the image of the library) a cataloging
system that assigns to each book a specific place on a shelf. Rather,
the books are spread all over the place and are dynamically arranged,
each according to a search, so that the appropriate books for each
visitor are always standing ready at the entrance. Yet the metaphor of
books being strewn 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 encounter
e="pagebreak" title="114"}analyzing
"meta-data" (describing documents in light of their relationships to one
another) is a precondition for being able to make any use at all of
growing amounts of information.[^103^](#c2-note-0103){#c2-note-0103a}
This shift introduced a new level of abstraction. Information is no
longer understood as a representation of external reality; its
significance is not evaluated with regard to the relation between
"information" and "the world," for instance with a qualitative criterion
such as "true"/"false." Rather, the sphere of information is treated as
a self-referential, closed world, and documents are accordingly only
evaluated in terms of their position within this world, though with
quantitative criteria such as "central"/"peripheral."
Even though the PageRank algorithm was highly effective and assisted
Google\'s rapid ascent to a market-leading position, at the beginning it
was still relatively simple and its mode of operation was at least
partially transparent. It followed the classical statistical model of an
algorithm. A document or site referred to by many links was considered
more important than one to which fewer links
referred.[^104^](#c2-note-0104){#c2-note-0104a} The algorithm analyzed
the given structural order of information and determined the position of
every document therein, and this was largely done independently of the
context of the search and without making any assumptions about it. This
approach functioned relatively well as long as the volume of information
did not exceed a certain size, and as long as the users and their
searches were somewhat similar to one another. In both respects, this is
no longer the case. The amount of information to be pre-sorted is
increasing, and users are searching in all possible situations and
places for everything under the sun. At the time Google was founded, no
one would have thought to check the internet, quickly and while on
one\'s way, for today\'s menu at the restaurant round the corner. Now,
thanks to smartphones, this is an obvious thing to do.
:::
::: {.section}
### Algorithm clouds {#c2-sec-0023}
In order to react to such changes in user behavior -- and simultaneously
to advance it further -- Google\'s search algorithm is constantly being
modified. It has become increasingly complex and has assimilated a
greater amount of contextual []{#Page_115 type="pagebreak"
title="115"}information, which influences the value of a site within
PageRank and thus the order of search results. The algorithm is no
longer a fixed object or unchanging recipe but is transforming into a
dynamic process, an opaque cloud composed of multiple interacting
algorithms that are continuously refined (between 500 and 600 times a
year, according to some estimates). These ongoing developments are so
extensive that, since 2003, several new versions of the algorithm cloud
have appeared each year with their own names. In 2014 alone, Google
carried out 13 large updates, more than ever
before.[^105^](#c2-note-0105){#c2-note-0105a}
These changes continue to bring about new levels of abstraction, so that
the algorithm takes into account additional variables such as the time
and place of a search, alongside a person\'s previously recorded
behavior -- but also his or her involvement in social environments, and
much more. Personalization and contextualization were made part of
Google\'s search algorithm in 2005. At first it was possible to choose
whether or not to use these. Since 2009, however, they have been a fixed
and binding component for everyone who conducts a sear
which was
originally developed as an app but has since been made available on
Chrome, Google\'s own web browser, attempts to anticipate, on the basis
of existing data, a user\'s next step, and to provide the necessary
information before it is searched for in order that such steps take
place efficiently. Thus, for instance, it draws upon information from a
user\'s calendar in order to figure out where he or she will have to go
next. On the basis of real-time traffic data, it will then suggest the
optimal way to get there. For those driving cars, the amount of traffic
on the road will be part of the equation. This is ascertained by
analyzing the motion profiles of other drivers, which will allow the
program to determine whether the traffic is flowing or stuck in a jam.
If enough historical data is taken into account, the hope is that it
will be possible to redirect cars in such a way that traffic jams should
no longer occur.[^110^](#c2-note-0110){#c2-note-0110a} For those who use
public transport, Google Now evaluates real-time data about the
locations of various transport services. With this information, it will
suggest the optimal route and, depending on the calculated travel time,
it will send a reminder (sometimes earlier, sometimes later) when it is
time to go. That which Google is just experimenting with and testing in
a limited and unambiguous context is already part of Facebook\'s
everyday operations. With its EdgeRank algorithm, Facebook already
organizes everyone\'s newsfeed, entirely in the background and without
any explicit user interaction. On the basis of three variables -- user
affinity (previous interactions between two users), content weight (the
rate of interaction between all users and a specific piece of content),
and currency (the age of a post) -- the algorithm selects content from
the status updates made by one\'s friends to be displayed on one\'s own
page.[^111^](#c2-note-0111){#c2-note-0111a} In this way, Facebook
ensures that the stream of updates remains easy to scroll through, while
also -- it is safe []{#Page_118 type="p
formations, which is constituted by the sum of all of the activities of
their interacting participants. In this case, however, a communal
formation is not consciously created []{#Page_123 type="pagebreak"
title="123"}and maintained in a horizontal process, but rather
synthetically constructed as a computational function. Depending on the
context and the need, individuals can either be assigned to this
function or removed from it. All of this 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 somewhat functional, most users are content,
and the algorithm registers this contentedness to validate itself. In
this dynamic world of unmanageable complexity, users are guided by a
sort of radical, short-term pragmatism. They are happy to have the world
pre-sorted for them in order to improve their activity in it. Regarding
the matter of whether the information being provided represents the
world accurately or not, they are unable to formulate an adequate
assessment for themselves, for it is ultimately impossible to answer
this question without certain resources. Outside of rapidly shrinking
domains of specialized or everyday knowledge, it is becoming
increasingly difficult to gain an overview of the world without
mechanisms that pre-sort it. Users are only able to evaluate search
results pragmatically; that is, in light of whether or not they are
ty lends an
enormous amount of influence to the institutions and processes that
provide the solutions and answers.[]{#Page_124 type="pagebreak"
title="124"}
:::
:::
::: {.section .notesSet type="rearnotes"}
[]{#notesSet}Notes {#c2-ntgp-9999}
------------------
::: {.section .notesList}
[1](#c2-note-0001a){#c2-note-0001} André Rottmann, "Reflexive Systems
of Reference: Approximations to 'Referentialism' in Contemporary Art,"
trans. Gerrit Jackson, in Dirk Snauwaert et al. (eds), *Rehabilitation:
The Legacy of the Modern Movement* (Ghent: MER, 2010), pp. 97--106, at
99.
[2](#c2-note-0002a){#c2-note-0002} The recognizability of the sources
distinguishes these processes from plagiarism. The latter operates with
the complete opposite aim, namely that of borrowing sources without
acknowledging them.
[3](#c2-note-0003a){#c2-note-0003} Ulf Poschardt, *DJ Culture* (London:
Quartet Books, 1998), p. 34.
[4](#c2-note-0004a){#c2-note-0004} Theodor W. Adorno, *Aesthetic
Theory*, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis, MN: University of
Minnesota Press, 1997), p. 151.
[5](#c2-note-0005a){#c2-note-0005} Peter Bürger, *Theory of the
Avant-Garde*, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis, MN: University of
Minnesota Press, 1984).
[6](#c2-note-0006a){#c2-note-0006} Felix Stalder, "Neun Thesen zur
Remix-Kultur," *i-rights.info* (May 25, 2009), online.
[7](#c2-note-0007a){#c2-note-0007} Florian Cramer, *Exe.cut(up)able
Statements: Poetische Kalküle und Phantasmen des selbstausführenden
Texts* (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2011), pp. 9--10 \[--trans.\]
[8](#c2-note-0008a){#c2-note-0008} McLuhan stressed that, despite using
the alphabet, every manuscript is unique because it not only depended on
the sequence of letters but also on the individual ability of a given
scribe to []{#Page_185 type="pagebreak" title="185"}lend these letters a
particular shape. With the rise of the printing press, the alphabet shed
these last elements of calligraphy and became typography.
[9](#c2-note-0009a){#c2-note-0009} Elisabeth L. Eisenstein, *The
Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe* (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1983), p. 15.
[10](#c2-no
mations-
und Kommunikationstechnologien* (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1991), pp.
420--40.
[12](#c2-note-0012a){#c2-note-0012} Eisenstein, *The Printing
Revolution in Early Modern Europe*, p. 49.
[13](#c2-note-0013a){#c2-note-0013} In April 2014, the Authors Guild --
the association of American writers that had sued Google -- filed an
appeal to overturn the decision and made a public statement demanding
that a new organization be established to license the digital rights of
out-of-print books. See "Authors Guild: Amazon was Google's Target,"
*The Authors Guild: Industry & Advocacy News* (April 11, 2014), online.
In October 2015, however, the next-highest authority -- the United
States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit -- likewise decided in
Google\'s favor. The Authors Guild promptly announced its intention to
take the case to the Supreme Court.
[14](#c2-note-0014a){#c2-note-0014} Jean-Noël Jeanneney, *Google and
the Myth of Universal Knowledge: A View from Europe*, trans. Teresa
Lavender Fagan (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007).
[15](#c2-note-0015a){#c2-note-0015} Within the framework of the Images
for the Future project (2007--14), the Netherlands alone invested more
than €170 million to digitize the collections of the most important
audiovisual archives. Over 10 years, the cost of digitizing the entire
cultural heritage of Europe has been estimated to be around €100
billion. See Nick Poole, *The Cost of Digitising Europe\'s Cultural
Heritage: A Report for the Comité des Sages of the European Commission*
(November 2010), online.
[16](#c2-note-0016a){#c2-note-0016} Richard Darnton, "The National
Digital Public Library Is Launched!", *New York Review of Books* (April
25, 2013), online.
[17](#c2-note-0017a){#c2-note-0017} According to estimates by the
British Library, so-called "orphan works" alone -- that is, works still
legally protected but whose right holders are unknown -- make up around
40 percent of the books in its
has called the directive
"impracticable." Deutscher Bibliotheksverband, "Rechtlinie über
bestimmte zulässige Formen der Nutzung verwaister Werke" (February 27,
2012), online.
[18](#c2-note-0018a){#c2-note-0018} UbuWeb, "Frequently Asked
Questions," online.
[19](#c2-note-0019a){#c2-note-0019} The numbers in this area of
activity are notoriously unreliable, and therefore only rough estimates
are possible. It seems credible, however, that the Pirate Bay was
attracting around a billion page views per month by the end of 2013.
That would make it the seventy-fourth most popular internet destination.
See Ernesto, "Top 10 Most Popular Torrent Sites of 2014" (January 4,
2014), online.
[20](#c2-note-0020a){#c2-note-0020} See the documentary film *TPB AFK:
The Pirate Bay Away from Keyboard* (2013), directed by Simon Klose.
[21](#c2-note-0021a){#c2-note-0021} In technical terms, there is hardly
any difference between a "stream" and a "download." In both cases, a
complete file is transferred to the user\'s computer and played.
[22](#c2-note-0022a){#c2-note-0022} The practice is legal in Germany
but illegal in Austria, though digitized texts are routinely made
available there in seminars. See Seyavash Amini Khanimani and Nikolaus
Forgó, "Rechtsgutachten über die Erforderlichkeit einer freien
Werknutzung im österreichischen Urheberrecht zur Privilegierung
elektronisch unterstützter Lehre," *Forum Neue Medien Austria* (January
2011), online.
[23](#c2-note-0023a){#c2-note-0023} Deutscher Bibliotheksverband,
"Digitalisierung" (2015), online \[--trans\].
[24](#c2-note-0024a){#c2-note-0024} David Weinberger, *Everything Is
Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder* (New York: Times
Books, 2007).
[25](#c2-note-0025a){#c2-note-0025} This is not a question of material
wealth. Those who are economically or socially marginalized are
confronted with the same phenomenon. Their primary experience of this
excess is with cheap goods and junk.
[26](#c2-
n: Revolver, 2007), p.
42.[]{#Page_187 type="pagebreak" title="187"}
[28](#c2-note-0028a){#c2-note-0028} See the film *The Battle of
Orgreave* (2001), directed by Mike Figgis.
[29](#c2-note-0029a){#c2-note-0029} Theresa Winge, "Costuming the
Imagination: Origins of Anime and Manga Cosplay," *Mechademia* 1 (2006),
pp. 65--76.
[30](#c2-note-0030a){#c2-note-0030} Nicolle Lamerichs, "Stranger than
Fiction: Fan Identity in Cosplay," *Transformative Works and Cultures* 7
(2011), online.
[31](#c2-note-0031a){#c2-note-0031} The *Oxford English Dictionary*
defines "selfie" as a "photographic self-portrait; *esp*. one taken with
a smartphone or webcam and shared via social media."
[32](#c2-note-0032a){#c2-note-0032} Odin Kroeger et al. (eds),
*Geistiges Eigentum und Originalität: Zur Politik der Wissens- und
Kulturproduktion* (Vienna: Turia + Kant, 2011).
[33](#c2-note-0033a){#c2-note-0033} Roland Barthes, "The Death of the
Author," in Barthes, *Image -- Music -- Text*, trans. Stephen Heath
(London: Fontana Press, 1977), pp. 142--8.
[34](#c2-note-0034a){#c2-note-0034} Heinz Rölleke and Albert
Schindehütte, *Es war einmal: Die wahren Märchen der Brüder Grimm und
wer sie ihnen erzählte* (Frankfurt am Main: Eichborn, 2011); and Heiner
Boehncke, *Marie Hassenpflug: Eine Märchenerzählerin der Brüder Grimm*
(Darmstadt: Von Zabern, 2013).
[35](#c2-note-0035a){#c2-note-0035} Hansjörg Ewert, "Alles nur
geklaut?", *Zeit Online* (February 26, 2013), online. This is not a new
realization but has long been a special area of research for
musicologists. What is new, however, is that it is no longer
controversial outside of this narrow disciplinary discourse. See Peter
J. Burkholder, "The Uses of Existing Music: Musical Borrowing as a
Field," *Notes* 50 (1994), pp. 851--70.
[36](#c2-note-0036a){#c2-note-0036} Zygmunt Bauman, *Liquid Modernity*
(Cambridge: Polity, 2000), p. 56.
[37](#c2-note-0037a){#c2-note-0037} Quoted from Eran Schaerf\'s audio
in
or
instance, of the two large political parties in Germany, the Social
Democratic Party and the Christian Democratic Union, reached its peak at
the end of the 1970s or the beginning of the 1980s. Both were able to
increase their absolute numbers for a brief time at the beginning of the
1990s, when the Christian Democratic Party even reached its absolute
high point, but this can be explained by a surge in new members after
reunification. By 2010, both parties already had fewer members than
Greenpeace, whose 580,000 members make it Germany's largest NGO.
Parallel to this, between 1970 and 2010, the proportion of people
without any religious affiliations shrank to approximately 37 percent.
That there are more churches and political parties today is indicative
of how difficult []{#Page_188 type="pagebreak" title="188"}it has become
for any single organization to attract broad strata of society.
[39](#c2-note-0039a){#c2-note-0039} Ulrich Beck, *Risk Society: Towards
a New Modernity*, trans. Mark Ritter (London: SAGE, 1992), p. 135.
[40](#c2-note-0040a){#c2-note-0040} Ferdinand Tönnies, *Community and
Society*, trans. Charles P. Loomis (East Lansing: Michigan State
University Press, 1957).
[41](#c2-note-0041a){#c2-note-0041} Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels,
"The Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848)," trans. Terrell Carver, in
*The Cambridge Companion to the Communist Manifesto*, ed. Carver and
James Farr (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 237--60,
at 239. For Marx and Engels, this was -- like everything pertaining to
the dynamics of capitalism -- a thoroughly ambivalent development. For,
in this case, it finally forced people "to take a down-to-earth view of
their circumstances, their multifarious relationships" (ibid.).
[42](#c2-note-0042a){#c2-note-0042} As early as the 1940s, Karl Polanyi
demonstrated in *The Great Transformation* (New York: Farrar & Rinehart,
1944) that the idea of strictly separated spheres, which are supposed to
be so typical of society, is in fact highly ideological. He argued above
all that the attempt to implement this separation fully and consistently
in the form of the free market would destroy the foundations of society
because both the life of workers and the environment of the market
itself would be regarded as externalities. For a recent adaptation of
this argument, see David Graeber, *Debt: The First 5000 Years* (New
York: Melville House, 2011).
[43](#c2-note-0043a){#c2-note-0043} Tönnies's persistent influence can
be felt, for instance, in Zygmunt Bauman's negative assessment of the
compunction to strive for community in his *Community: Seeking Safety in
an Insecure World* (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2001).
[44](#c2-note-0044a){#c2-note-0044} See, for example, Amitai Etzioni,
*The Third Way to a Good Society* (London: Demos, 2000).
[45](#c2-note-0045a){#c2-note-0045
w* (2016), online.
[50](#c2-note-0050a){#c2-note-0050} Jeremy Gilbert, *Democracy and
Collectivity in an Age of Individualism* (London: Pluto Books, 2013).
[51](#c2-note-0051a){#c2-note-0051} Diedrich Diederichsen,
*Eigenblutdoping: Selbstverwertung, Künstlerromantik, Partizipation*
(Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2008).
[52](#c2-note-0052a){#c2-note-0052} Harrison Rainie and Barry Wellman,
*Networked: The New Social Operating System* (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
2012). The term is practical because it is easy to understand, but it is
also conceptually contradictory. An individual (an indivisible entity)
cannot be defined in terms of a distributed network. With a nod toward
Gilles Deleuze, the cumbersome but theoretically more precise term
"dividual" (the divisible) has also been used. See Gerald Raunig,
"Dividuen des Facebook: Das neue Begehren nach Selbstzerteilung," in
Oliver Leistert and Theo Röhle (eds), *Generation Facebook: Über das
Leben im Social Net* (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2011), pp. 145--59.
[53](#c2-note-0053a){#c2-note-0053} Jariu Saramäki et al., "Persistence
of Social Signatures in Human Communication," *Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America* 111
(2014): 942--7.
[54](#c2-note-0054a){#c2-note-0054} The term "weak ties" derives from a
study of where people find out information about new jobs. As the study
shows, this information does not usually come from close friends, whose
level of knowledge often does not differ much from that of the person
looking for a job, but rather from loose acquaintances, whose living
environments do not overlap much with one\'s own and who can therefore
make information available from outside of one\'s own network. See Mark
Granovetter, "The Strength of Weak Ties," *American Journal of
Sociology* 78 (1973): 1360--80.
[55](#c2-note-0055a){#c2-note-0055} Castells, *The Power of Identity*,
420.
[56](#c2-note-0056a){#c2-note-0056} Ulf Weigelt, "Darf der Chef
ständige Erreichbarkeit verlangen?" *Zeit Online* (June 13, 2012),
online \[--trans.\].[]{#Page_190 type="pagebreak" title="190"}
[57](#c2-note-0057a){#c2-note-0057} Hartmut Rosa, *Social Acceleration:
A New Theory of Modernity*, trans. Jonathan Trejo-Mathys (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2013).
[58](#c2-note-0058a){#c2-note-0058} This technique -- "social freezing"
-- has already become so standard that it is now regarded as way to help
women achieve a better balance between work and family life. See Kolja
Rudzio "Social Freezing: Ein Kind von Apple," *Zeit Online* (November 6,
2014), online.
[59](#c2-note-0059a){#c2-note-0059} See the film *Into Eternity*
(2009), directed by Michael Madsen.
[60](#c2-note-0060a){#c2-note-0060} Thomas S. Kuhn, *The Structure of
Scientific Revolutions*, 3rd edn (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago
Press, 1996).
[61](#c2-note-0061a){#c2-note-0061} Werner Busch and Peter Schmoock,
*Kunst: Die Geschichte ihrer Funktionen* (Weinheim: Quadriga/Beltz,
1987), p. 179 \[--trans.\].
[62](#c2-note-0062a){#c2-note-0062} "'When Attitude Becomes Form' at
the Fondazione Prada," *Contemporary Art Daily* (September 18, 2013),
online.
[63](#c2-note-0063a){#c2-note-0063} Ow
its goal was to increase the
participation of women to 25 percent by 2015. This has not been
achieved.[]{#Page_191 type="pagebreak" title="191"}
[69](#c2-note-0069a){#c2-note-0069} Shyong (Tony) K. Lam et al. (2011),
"WP: Clubhouse? An Exploration of Wikipedia's Gender Imbalance,"
*WikiSym* 11 (2011), online.
[70](#c2-note-0070a){#c2-note-0070} David Singh Grewal, *Network Power:
The Social Dynamics of Globalization* (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 2008).
[71](#c2-note-0071a){#c2-note-0071} Ibid., p. 29.
[72](#c2-note-0072a){#c2-note-0072} Niklas Luhmann, *Macht im System*
(Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2013), p. 52 \[--trans.\].
[73](#c2-note-0073a){#c2-note-0073} Mathieu O\'Neil, *Cyberchiefs:
Autonomy and Authority in Online Tribes* (London: Pluto Press, 2009).
[74](#c2-note-0074a){#c2-note-0074} Eric Steven Raymond, "The Cathedral
and the Bazaar," *First Monday* 3 (1998), online.
[75](#c2-note-0075a){#c2-note-0075} Jorge Luis Borges, "The Library of
Babel," trans. Anthony Kerrigan, in Borges, *Ficciones* (New York: Grove
Weidenfeld, 1962), pp. 79--88.
[76](#c2-note-0076a){#c2-note-0076} Heinrich Geiselberger and Tobias
Moorstedt (eds), *Big Data: Das neue Versprechen der Allwissenheit*
(Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2013).
[77](#c2-note-0077a){#c2-note-0077} This is one of the central tenets
of science and technology studies. See, for instance, Geoffrey C. Bowker
and Susan Leigh Star, *Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its
Consequences* (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999).
[78](#c2-note-0078a){#c2-note-0078} Sybille Krämer, *Symbolische
Maschinen: Die Idee der Formalisierung in geschichtlichem Abriß*
(Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1988), 50--69.
[79](#c2-note-0079a){#c2-note-0079} Quoted from Doron Swade, "The
'Unerring Certainty of Mechanical Agency': Machines and Table Making in
the Nineteenth Century," in Martin Campbell-Kelly et al. (eds), *The
History of Mathematical Tables: From Sumer to Spreadsheets* (Oxford:
O
f labour can be applied with equal
success to mental operations, and that it ensures, by its adoption, the
same economy of time."
[83](#c2-note-0083a){#c2-note-0083} This structure, which is known as
"Von Neumann architecture," continues to form the basis of almost all
computers.
[84](#c2-note-0084a){#c2-note-0084} "Gordon Moore Says Aloha to
Moore\'s Law," *The Inquirer* (April 13, 2005), online.[]{#Page_192
type="pagebreak" title="192"}
[85](#c2-note-0085a){#c2-note-0085} Miriam Meckel, *Next: Erinnerungen
an eine Zukunft ohne uns* (Reinbeck bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 2011). One
could also say that this anxiety has been caused by the fact that the
automation of labor has begun to affect middle-class jobs as well.
[86](#c2-note-0086a){#c2-note-0086} Steven Levy, "Can an Algorithm
Write a Better News Story than a Human Reporter?" *Wired* (April 24,
2012), online.
[87](#c2-note-0087a){#c2-note-0087} Alexander Pschera, *Animal
Internet: Nature and the Digital Revolution*, trans. Elisabeth Laufer
(New York: New Vessel Press, 2016).
[88](#c2-note-0088a){#c2-note-0088} The American intelligence services
are not unique in this regard. *Spiegel* has reported that, in Russia,
entire "bot armies" have been mobilized for the "propaganda battle."
Benjamin Bidder, "Nemzow-Mord: Die Propaganda der russischen Hardliner,"
*Spiegel Online* (February 28, 2015), online.
[89](#c2-note-0089a){#c2-note-0089} Lennart Guldbrandsson, "Swedish
Wikipedia Surpasses 1 Million Articles with Aid of Article Creation
Bot," [blog.wikimedia.org](http://blog.wikimedia.org) (June 17, 2013),
online.
[90](#c2-note-0090a){#c2-note-0090} Thomas Bunnell, "The Mathematics of
Film," *Boom Magazine* (November 2007): 48--51.
[91](#c2-note-0091a){#c2-note-0091} Christopher Steiner, "Automatons
Get Creative," *Wall Street Journal* (August 17, 2012), online.
[92](#c2-note-0092a){#c2-note-0092} "The Hewlett Foundation: Automated
Essay Scoring," [kaggle.com](http://kaggle.com) (February
inen, Personalisierung und Überwachung," in
Konrad Becker and Felix Stalder (eds), *Deep Search: Die Politik des
Suchens jenseits von Google* (Innsbruck: Studienverlag, 2009), pp.
112--31.
[110](#c2-note-0110a){#c2-note-0110} This raises the question of which
drivers should be sent on a detour, so that no traffic jam comes about,
and which should be shown the most direct route, which would now be
traffic-free.
[111](#c2-note-0111a){#c2-note-0111} Pamela Vaughan, "Demystifying How
Facebook\'s EdgeRank Algorithm Works," *HubSpot* (April 23, 2013),
online.
[112](#c2-note-0112a){#c2-note-0112} Lisa Gitelman (ed.), *"Raw Data"
Is an Oxymoron* (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013).
[113](#c2-note-0113a){#c2-note-0113} The terms "raw," in the sense of
unprocessed, and "cooked," in the sense of processed, derive from the
anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, who introduced them to clarify the
difference between nature and culture. See Claude Lévi-Strauss, *The Raw
and the Cooked*, trans. John Weightman and Doreen Weightman (Chicago,
IL: University of Chicago Press, 1983).
[114](#c2-note-0114a){#c2-note-0114} Jessica Lee, "No. 1 Position in
Google Gets 33% of Search Traffic," *Search Engine Watch* (June 20,
2013), online.
[115](#c2-note-0115a){#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
Gatekeeper: Relationale Perspektiven zur Macht der Suchmaschinen," in
Konrad Becker and Felix Stalder (eds), *Deep Search: Die Politik des
Suchens jenseits von Google* (Innsbruck: Studienverlag, 2009), pp.
133--48.
[117](#c2-note-0
the relations of production, however, is not
unproblematic. On the one hand, no one has managed to formulate an
entirely convincing theory concerning the reciprocal relation between
the two. What does it mean, exactly, that they are related to one
another and yet are simultaneously autonomous? When does 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
of concepts, which is strictly oriented toward economic production
alone, is more problematic than ever. My decision to use these concepts
is therefore limited 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
toward an essentially authoritarian society, while the latter is moving
toward a radical renewal of democracy by broadening the scope of
collective decision-making. Both cases involve more than just a few
minor changes
dual message on
the provider\'s computer, where they can be read and composed via web
browsers.[^9^](#c3-note-0009){#c3-note-0009a} From that point on,
providers have been able to follow everything that users write in their
emails. Thanks to nearly comprehensive internet connectivity, Webmail is
very widespread today, and the large providers -- above all Google,
whose Gmail service had more than 500 million users in 2014 -- dominate
the market. The gap has thus widened between user interfaces and the
processes that take place behind them on servers and in data centers,
and this has expanded what Crouch referred to as "the influence of the
privileged elite." In this case, the elite are the engineers and
managers employed by the large providers, and everyone else with access
to the underbelly of the infrastructure, including the British
Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) and the US National
Security Agency (NSA), both of which employ programs such as a MUSCULAR
to record data transfers between the computer centers operated by large
American providers.[^10^](#c3-note-0010){#c3-note-0010a}
Nevertheless, email essentially remains an open application, for the
SMTP protocol forces even the largest providers to cooperate. Small
providers are able to collaborate with the latter and establish new
services with them. And this creates options. Since Edward Snowden\'s
revelations, most people are aware that all of their online activities
are being monitored, and this has spurred new interest in secure email
services. In the meantime, there has been a whole series of projects
aimed at combining simple usability with complex []{#Page_132
type="pagebreak" title="132"}encryption in order to strengthen the
privacy of normal users. This same goal has led to a number of
successful crowd-funding campaigns, which indicates that both the
interest and the resources are available to accomplish
it.[^11^](#c3-note-0011){#c3-note-0011a} For users, however, these
offers are only attractiv
oth identity and opportunities for action. From the user\'s
standpoint, this is an all-or-nothing decision with severe consequences.
Formally, this is still a matter of individual and free choice, for no
one is being forced, in the classical sense, to use a particular
provider.[^39^](#c3-note-0039){#c3-note-0039a} Yet the options for
action are already pre-structured in such a way that free choice is no
longer free. The majority of American teens, for example, despite
[]{#Page_143 type="pagebreak" title="143"}no longer being very
enthusiastic about Facebook, continue using the network for fear of
missing out on something.[^40^](#c3-note-0040){#c3-note-0040a} This
contradiction -- voluntarily doing something that one does not really
want to do -- and the resulting experience of failing to shape one\'s
own activity in a coherent manner are ideal-typical manifestations of
the power of networks.
The problem experienced by 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 when open and
decentralized activities are transferred into closed and centralized
structures in which far-reaching, fundamental decision-making powers and
possibilities for action are embedded that legitimize themselves purely
on the basis of their output. Or, to adapt the title of Rosa von
Praunheim\'s film, which I discussed in my first chapter: it is not the
algorithm that is perverse, but the situation in which it lives.
:::
::: {.section}
### Political surveillance {#c3-sec-0008}
In June 2013, Edward Snowden exposed an additional and especially
problematic aspect of the expansion of post-democratic structures: the
comprehensive surveillance of the internet by government intelligence
agencies. The latter 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){#c3-note-0043a} The []{#Page_144
type="pagebreak" title="144"}great advantage of meta-data is that they
can be standardized and thus easily evaluated by machines. This is
especially important for intelligence agencies because, unlike social
mass media, they do not analyze uniformly formatted and easily
processable streams of communication. That said, the boundaries between
post-democratic social mass media and government intelligence services
are fluid. As is well known by now, the two realms share a number of
continuities in personnel and commonalities with respect to their
content.[^44^](#c3-note-0044){#c3-
eillance and sanctioning that will come about when data from
self-optimizing 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" lifestyle, receive a rebate on their premium. The
long-term goal of the program is to develop "behavior-dependent tariff
models," which would undermine the solidarity model of health
insurance.[^55^](#c3-note-0055){#c3-note-0055a}
According to the legal scholar Frank Pasquale, the sum of all these
developments has led to a black-box society: More social processes are
being controlled by algorithms whose operations are not transparent
because they are shielded from the outside world and thus from
democratic control.[^56^](#c3-note-0056){#c3-note-0056a} This
ever-expanding "post-democracy" is not simply liberal democracy with a
few problems that can be eliminated through well-intentioned reforms.
Rather, a new social system has emerged in which allegedly relaxed
control over social activity is compensated for by a heightened level of
control over the data and structural conditions pertaining to the
activity itself. In this system, both the virtual and the physical world
are altered to achieve particular goals -- goals determined by just a
few powerful actors -- without the inclusion of those affected by these
changes and often without them being able to notice the changes at all.
Whoever refuses to share his or her data freely comes to look suspicious
and, regardless of the motivations behind this anonymity, might even be
regarded as a potential enemy. In July 2014, for instance, the following
remarks were incl
is particularly []{#Page_156 type="pagebreak"
title="156"}important because the community sets extremely high
standards for itself, and it is for this reason that the distribution is
not only used by many server administrators but is also the foundation
of numerous end-user-oriented services, including Ubuntu and Linux Mint.
The Debian Project has developed a complex form of organization that is
based on a set of fundamental principles defined by the members
themselves. These are delineated in the Debian Social Contract, which
was first formulated in 1997 and subsequently revised in
2004.[^75^](#c3-note-0075){#c3-note-0075a} It stipulates that the
software has to remain "100% free" at all times, in the sense that the
software license guarantees the freedom of unlimited use, modification,
and distribution. The developers understand this primarily as an ethical
obligation. They explicitly regard the project as a contribution "to the
free software community." The social contract demands transparency on
the level of the program code: "We will keep our entire bug report
database open for public view at all times. Reports that people file
online will promptly become visible to others." There are both technical
and ethical considerations behind this. The contract makes no mention at
all of a classical production goal; there is no mention, for instance,
of competitive products or a schedule for future developments. To put it
in Colin Crouch\'s terms, input legitimation comes before output
legitimation. The initiators silently assume that the project\'s basic
ethical, technical, and social orientations will result in high quality,
but they do not place this goal above any other.
The Debian Social Contract is the basis for cooperation and the central
reference point for dealing with conflicts. It forms the normative core
of a community that is distinguished by its equal treatment of ethical,
political, technical, and economic issues. The longer the members have
been cooperating t
ve all
Torvalds\'s self-developed system Git, which automates many steps for
managing the distributed revisions of code. In all of this, an important
role is played by the Linux Foundation, a non-profit organization that
takes over administrative, legal, and financial tasks for the community.
The foundation is financed by its members, which include large software
companies that contribute as much as \$500,000 a year. This money is
used, for instance, to pay the most important programmers and to
organize working groups, thus ensuring that the development and
distribution of Linux will continue on a long-term basis. The
[]{#Page_158 type="pagebreak" title="158"}businesses that finance the
Linux Foundation may be profit-oriented institutions, but the main work
of the developers -- the program code -- flows back into the common pool
of resources, which the explicitly non-profit Debian Project can then
use to compile its distribution. The freedoms guaranteed by the free
license render this transfer from commercial to non-commercial use not
only legally unproblematic but even desirable to the for-profit service
providers, as they themselves also need entire operating systems and not
just the kernel.
The Debian Project draws from this pool of resources and is at the same
time a part of it. Therefore others can use Debian\'s software code,
which happens to a large extent, for instance through other Linux
distributions. This is not understood as competition for market share
but rather as an expression of the community\'s vitality, which for
Debian represents a central and normative point of pride. As the Debian
Social Contract explicitly states, "We will allow others to create
distributions containing both the Debian system and other works, without
any fee."
Thus, over the years, a multifaceted institutional landscape has been
created in which collaboration can take place between for-profit and
non-profit entities -- between formal organizations and informal
communal formations.
rotocol) BitTorrent,
quickly filled in the gap. The number of court cases skyrocketed, not
least because new legal standards expanded the jurisdiction of copyright
law and enabled it to be applied more
aggressively.[^80^](#c3-note-0080){#c3-note-0080a} These conflicts
forced a critical mass of cultural producers to deal with copyright law
and to reconsider how the practices of sharing and modifying could be
perpetuated in the long term. One of the first results of these
considerations was to develop, following the model of free software,
numerous licenses that were tailored to cultural
production.[^81^](#c3-note-0081){#c3-note-0081a} In the cultural
context, free licenses achieved widespread distribution after 2001 with
the arrival of Creative Commons (CC), a California-based foundation that
began to provide easily understandable and adaptable licensing kits and
to promote its services internationally through a network of partner
organizations. This set of licenses made it possible to transfer user
rights to the community (defined by the acceptance of the license\'s
terms and conditions) and thus to create a freely accessible pool of
cultural resources. Works published under a CC license can always be
consumed and distributed free of charge (though not necessarily freely).
Some versions of the license allow works to be altered; others permit
their commercial use; while some, in turn, only allow non-commercial use
and distribution. In comparison with free software licenses, this
greater emphasis on the rights of individual producers over those of the
community, whose freedoms of use can be twice as restricted (in terms of
the right to alter works or use them for commercial ends), gave rise to
the long-standing critique that, with respect to freedom and
communality, CC licenses in fact represent a
regression.[^82^](#c3-note-0082){#c3-note-0082a} A combination of good
timing, user-friendly implementations, and powerful support from leading
American universities, however, res
003 (with only 25
published articles), the English-language version of Wikipedia already
consisted of more than 160,000 entries, and the German version, which
came online in May 2001, already had 30,000. The former version reached
1 million entries by January 2003, the latter by December 2009, and by
the beginning of 2015 they had 4.7 million and 1.8 million entries,
respectively. In the meantime (by August 2015), versions have been made
available in 289 other languages, 48 of which have at least 100,000
entries. Both its successes -- its enormous breadth of up-to-date
content, along with its high level of acceptance and quality -- and its
failures, with 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 license. The process behind this is
indicative of how thoroughly the community of a commons can be involved
in its decision-making. When Wikipedia was founded in 2001, there was no
established license for free cultural works. The best option available
was the GNU license for free documentation (GLFD), which had been
developed, however, for software documentation. In the following years,
the CC license became the standard, and this []{#Page_163
type="pagebreak" title="163"}gave rise to the legal problem that content
from Wikipedia could not be combined with CC-licensed works, even though
this would have aligned with the intentions of those who had published
content under either of these licenses. To alleviate this problem and
thus facilitate exchange between Wikipedia and other cultural commons,
the Wikimedia Foundation (which holds t
. One
of the central demands of the Open Data and Open Access movements is
thus to have free access to these collections. Yet there has been a
considerable amount of resistance. Whether for political or economic
reasons, many public and scientific institutions do not want their data
to be freely accessible. In many cases, moreover, they also lack the
competence, guidelines, budgets, and internal processes that would be
necessary to make their data available to begin with. But public
pressure has been mounting, not least through initiatives such as the
global Open Data Index, which compares countries according to the
accessibility of their information.[^94^](#c3-note-0094){#c3-note-0094a}
In Germany, the Digital Openness Index evaluates states and communities
in terms of open data, the use of open-source software, the availability
of open infrastructures (such as free internet access in public places),
open policies (the licensing of public information,
freedom-of-information laws, the transparency of budget planning, etc.),
and open education (freely accessible educational resources, for
instance).[^95^](#c3-note-0095){#c3-note-0095a} The results are rather
sobering. The Open Data Index has identified 10 []{#Page_169
type="pagebreak" title="169"}different datasets that ought to be open,
including 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 that the commoners have begun to make new demands
on established institutions. These are intended to change their internal
processes and their interaction with citizens in such a way that
d in their concrete social
formulations. Even if it is impossible to preserve the old institutions
and cultural forms in their traditional roles -- regardless of all the
historical achievements that may be associated with them -- the dispute
over what world we want to live in and the goals that should be achieved
by the available potential of the present is as open as ever. And such
is the case even though post-democracy wishes to abolish the political
itself and subordinate everything to a technocratic lack of
alternatives. The development of the commons, after all, has shown that
genuine, fundamental, and cutting-edge alternatives do indeed exist. The
contradictory nature of the present is keeping the future
open.[]{#Page_175 type="pagebreak" title="175"}
:::
::: {.section .notesSet type="rearnotes"}
[]{#notesSet}Notes {#c3-ntgp-9999}
------------------
::: {.section .notesList}
[1](#c3-note-0001a){#c3-note-0001} Karl Marx, *A Contribution to the
Critique of Political Economy*, trans. S. W. Ryazanskaya (London:
Lawrence and Wishart, 1971), p. 21.[]{#Page_196 type="pagebreak"
title="196"}
[2](#c3-note-0002a){#c3-note-0002} See, for instance, Tomasz Konicz and
Florian Rötzer (eds), *Aufbruch ins Ungewisse: Auf der Suche nach
Alternativen zur kapitalistischen Dauerkrise* (Hanover: Heise
Zeitschriften Verlag, 2014).
[3](#c3-note-0003a){#c3-note-0003} Jacques Rancière, *Disagreement:
Politics and Philosophy*, trans. Julie Rose (Minneapolis, MN: University
of Minnesota Press, 1999), p. 102 (the emphasis is original).
[4](#c3-note-0004a){#c3-note-0004} Colin Crouch, *Post-Democracy*
(Cambridge: Polity, 2004), p. 4.
[5](#c3-note-0005a){#c3-note-0005} Ibid., p. 6.
[6](#c3-note-0006a){#c3-note-0006} Ibid., p. 96.
[7](#c3-note-0007a){#c3-note-0007} These questions have already been
discussed at length, for instance in a special issue of the journal
*Neue Soziale Bewegungen* (vol. 4, 2006) and in the first two issues of
the journal *Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte* (2011).
[8](#c3-note-0008a){#c3-note-0008} See Jonathan B. Postel, "RFC 821,
Simple Mail Transfer Protocol," *Information Sciences Institute:
University of Southern California* (August 1982), online: "An important
feature of SMTP is its capability to relay mail across transport service
environments."
[9](#c3-note-0009a){#c3-note-0009} One of the first providers of
Webmail was Hotmail, which became available in 1996. Just one year
later, the company was purchased by Microsoft.
[10](#c3-note-0010a){#c3-note-0010} Barton Gellmann and Ashkan Soltani,
"NSA Infiltrates Links to Yahoo, Google Data Centers Worldwide, Snowden
Documents Say," *Washington Post* (October 30, 2013), online.
[11](#c3-note-0011a){#c3-note-0011} Initiated by hackers and activists,
the Mailpile project raised more than \$160,000 in September 2013 (the
fundraising goal had been just \$100,000). In July 2014, the rather
business-oriented project ProtonMail raised \$400,000 (its target, too,
had been just \$100,000).
[12](#c3-note-0012a){#c3-note-0012} In July 2014, for instance, Google
announced that it would support "end-to-end" encryption for emails. See
"Making End-to-End Encryption Easier to Use," *Google Security Blog*
(June 3, 2014), online.
[13](#c3-note-0013a){#c3-n
2--31.
[18](#c3-note-0018a){#c3-note-0018} Thus, in 2012, Google announced
under a rather generic and difficult-to-Google headline that, from now
on, "we may combine information you\'ve provided from one service with
information from other services." See "Updating Our Privacy Policies and
Terms of Service," *Google Official Blog* (January 24, 2012), online.
[19](#c3-note-0019a){#c3-note-0019} Wolfie Christl, "Kommerzielle
digitale Überwachung im Alltag," *Studie im Auftrag der
Bundesarbeitskammer* (November 2014), online.
[20](#c3-note-0020a){#c3-note-0020} Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and
Kenneth Cukier, *Big Data: A Revolution That Will Change How We Live,
Work and Think* (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013).
[21](#c3-note-0021a){#c3-note-0021} Carlos Diuk, "The Formation of
Love," *Facebook Data Science Blog* (February 14, 2014), online.
[22](#c3-note-0022a){#c3-note-0022} Facebook could have determined this
simply by examining the location data that were transmitted by its own
smartphone app. The study in question, however, did not take such
information into account.
[23](#c3-note-0023a){#c3-note-0023} Dan Lyons, "A Lot of Top
Journalists Don\'t Look at Traffic Numbers: Here\'s Why," *Huffington
Post* (March 27, 2014), online.
[24](#c3-note-0024a){#c3-note-0024} Adam Kramer et al., "Experimental
Evidence of Massive-Scale Emotional Contagion through Social Networks,"
*Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences* 111 (2014): 8788--90.
[25](#c3-note-0025a){#c3-note-0025} In all of these studies, it was
presupposed that users present themselves naïvely and entirely
truthfully. If someone writes something positive ("I\'m doing great!"),
it is assumed that this person really is doing well. This, of course, is
a highly problematic assumption. See John M. Grohl, "Emotional Contagion
on Facebook? More Like Bad Research Methods," *PsychCentral* (June 23,
2014), online.
[26](#c3-note-0026a){#c3-note-0026} See Adrienne LaFrance, "Ev
9a){#c3-note-0099} Ron Amadeo, "Google\'s Iron Grip on
Android: Controlling Open Source by Any Means Necessary," *Ars Technica*
(October 21, 2013), online.
[100](#c3-note-0100a){#c3-note-0100} Seb Olma, "To Share or Not to
Share," [nettime.org](http://nettime.org) (October 20, 2014), online.
[101](#c3-note-0101a){#c3-note-0101} Susie Cagle, "The Case against
Sharing," *The Nib* (May 27, 2014), online.[]{#Page_204 type="pagebreak"
title="204"}
:::
:::
[Copyright page]{.chapterTitle} {#ffirs03}
trans in Dekker & Barok 2017
ay. Accessed 31 May 2016.
Online digital libraries
Aaaaarg, http://aaaaarg.fail.
Bibliotik, https://bibliotik.me.
Issuu, https://issuu.com.
Karagarga, https://karagarga.in.
Library Genesis / LibGen, http://gen.lib.rus.ec.
Memory of the World, https://library.memoryoftheworld.org.
Monoskop, https://monoskop.org.
Pad.ma, https://pad.ma.
Scribd, https://scribd.com.
Textz.com, https://textz.com.
UbuWeb, www.ubu.com.
226
LOST AND LIVING (IN) ARCHIVES
227
COPYING AS A WAY TO START SOMETHING NEW
inks to separate pages about various events,
212
LOST AND LIVING (IN) ARCHIVES
initiatives, and individuals. In the early days it was modelled
on Wikipedia (which had been running for two years when
Monoskop started) and contained biographies and descriptions of events from a kind of neutral point of view. Over
the years, the geographic and thematic boundaries have
gradually expanded to embrace the arts and humanities in
their widest sense, focusing primarily on lesser-known
1
phenomena.1 Perhaps the biggest change is the ongoing
See for example
shift from mapping people, events, and places towards
https://monoskop.org/
Features. Accessed
synthesizing discourses.
28 May 2016.
A turning point occurred during my studies at the
Piet Zwart Institute, in the Networked Media programme
from 2010–2012, which combined art, design, software,
and theory with support in the philosophy of open source
and prototyping. While there, I was researching aspects of
the networked condition and how it transforms knowledge,
sociality and economics: I wrote research papers on leaking
as a technique of knowledge production, a critique of the
social graph, and on the libertarian values embedded in the
design of digital currencies. I was ready for more practice.
When Aymeric Mansoux, one of the tutors, encouraged me
to develop my then side-project Monoskop into a graduation
work, the timing was good.
The website got its own domain, a redesign, and most
crucially, the Monoskop wiki was restructured from its
2
focus on media art and culture towards the much wider
https://monoskop.org/
embrace
of the arts and humanities. It turned to a media
Symposium. Accessed
28 May 2016.
library of sorts. The graduation work also consisted of
a symposium about personal collecting and media ar3
chiving,2 which saw its loose follow-ups on media aeshttps://monoskop.org/
thetics (in Bergen)3 and on knowledge classification and
The_Extensions_of_
Many. Accessed
archives (in Mons)4 last year.
28 May 2016.
AD
https
cessed
28 May 2016.
Did you have a background in library studies, or have
you taken their ideas/methods of systemization and categorization (meta data)? If not, what are your methods
and how did you develop them?
213
COPYING AS A WAY TO START SOMETHING NEW
4
been an interesting process, clearly showing the influence
of a changing back-end system. Are you interested in the
idea of sharing and circulating texts as a new way not just
of accessing and distributing but perhaps also of production—and publishing? I’m thinking how Aaaaarg started as
a way to share and exchange ideas about a text. In what
way do you think Monoskop plays (or could play) with these
kinds of mechanisms? Do you think it brings out a new
potential in publishing?
DB
Besides the standard literature in information science (I
have a degree in information technologies), I read some
works of documentation scientists Paul Otlet and Suzanne
Briet, historians such as W. Boyd Rayward and Ronald E.
Day, as well as translated writings of Michel Pêcheux and
other French discourse analysts of the 1960s and 1970s.
This interest was triggered in late 2014 by the confluence
of Femke’s Mondotheque project and an invitation to be an
artist-in-residence in Mons in Belgium at the Mundaneum,
home to Paul Otlet’s recently restored archive.
This led me to identify three tropes of organizing and
navigating written records, which has guided my thinking
about libraries and research ever since: class, reference,
and index. Classification entails tree-like structuring, such
as faceting the meanings of words and expressions, and
developing classification systems for libraries. Referencing
stands for citations, hyperlinking and bibliographies. Indexing ranges from the listing of occurrences of selected terms
to an ‘absolute’ index of all terms, enabling full-text search.
With this in mind, I have done a number of experiments.
There is an index of selected persons and terms from
5
across the Monoskop wiki and Log
itated Textz.com. Besides that, there are
overlaps in titles hosted in each library, and Monoskop bibliographies extensively link to scans on Libgen and Aaaaarg,
while artists’ profiles on the website link to audio and video
recordings on UbuWeb.
220
LOST AND LIVING (IN) ARCHIVES
AD
It is interesting to hear that there weren’t any archivist or
professional librarians involved (yet), what is your position
towards these professional and institutional entities and
persons?
DB
As the recent example of Sci-Hub showed, in the age of
digital networks, for many researchers libraries are primarily free proxies to corporate repositories of academic
9
journals.9 Their other emerging role is that of a digital
For more information see,
repository of works in the public domain (the role piowww.sciencemag.org/
news/2016/04/whosneered in the United States by Project Gutenberg and
downloading-piratedInternet Archive). There have been too many attempts
papers-everyone.
Accessed 28 May 2016.
to transpose librarians’ techniques from the paperbound
world into the digital domain. Yet, as I said before, there
is much more to explore. Perhaps the most exciting inventive approaches can be found in the field of classics, for
example in the Perseus Digital Library & Catalog and the
Homer Multitext Project. Perseus combines digital editions
of ancient literary works with multiple lexical tools in a way
that even a non-professional can check and verify a disputable translation of a quote. Something that is hard to
imagine being possible in print.
AD
I think it is interesting to see how Monoskop and other
repositories like it have gained different constituencies
globally, for one you can see the kind of shift in the texts
being put up. From the start you tried to bring in a strong
‘eastern European voice’, nevertheless at the moment the
content of the repository reflects a very western perspective on critical theory, what are your future goals. And do
you think it would be possible to include other voices? For
example, have you ever considered the possibility of users
uploading and editing texts themselves?
DB
The site certainly started with the primary focus on east-central European media art and culture, which I considered
221
COPYING AS A WAY TO START SOMETHING NEW
myself to be part of in the early 2000s. I was naive enough
to attempt to make a book on the theme between 2008–2010.
During that period I came to notice the ambivalence of the
ows. And if the PDF were to
suddenly be doomed, there would be a big conversion party.
On the side of audio and video, most media files on
Monoskop are in open formats—OGG and WEBM. There
are many other challenges: keeping up-to-date with PHP
and MySQL development, with the MediaWiki software
and its numerous extensions, and the mysterious ICANN
organization that controls the web domain.
as an imperative to us to embrace redundancy, to promote
spreading their contents across as many nodes and sites
as anyone wishes. We may look at copying not as merely
mirroring or making backups, but opening up for possibilities to start new libraries, new platforms, new databases.
That is how these came about as well. Let there be Zzzzzrgs,
Ůbuwebs and Multiskops.
AD
What were your biggest challenges beside technical ones?
For example, have you ever been in trouble regarding copyright issues, or if not, how would you deal with such a
situation?
DB
Monoskop operates on the assumption of making transformative use of the collected material. The fact of bringing
it into certain new contexts, in which it can be accessed,
viewed and interpreted, adds something that bookstores
don’t provide. Time will show whether this can be understood as fair use. It is an opt-out model and it proves to
be working well so far. Takedowns are rare, and if they are
legitimate, we comply.
AD
Perhaps related to this question, what is your experience
with users engagement? I remember Sean (from Aaaaarg,
in conversation with Matthew Fuller, Mute 2011) saying
that some people mirror or download the whole site, not
so much in an attempt to ‘have everything’ but as a way
to make sure that the content remains accessible. It is a
conscious decision because one knows that one day everything might be taken down. This is of course particularly
pertinent, especially since while we’re doing this interview
Sean and Marcell are being sued by a Canadian publisher.
DB
That is absolutely true and any of these web
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