trans in Stalder 2018
ng after the late 1960s. As many of
the cultural and political institutions shaped by the previous condition
-- which McLuhan called the Gutenberg Galaxy -- fell into crisis, new
forms of personal and collective orientation and organization emerged
which have been shaped by the affordances of this new condition. Both
the historical processes which unfolded over a very long time and the
structural transformation which took place in a myriad of contexts have
been beyond any deliberate influence. Although obviously caused by
social actors, the magnitude of such changes was simply too great, too
distributed, and too complex to be attributed to, or molded by, any
particular (set of) actor(s).
Yet -- and this is the core of what motivated me to write this book --
this does not mean that we have someh
ondition -- is
crumbling, more economic and political projects are rushing in to fill
that void with new institutions that advance their competing agendas.
These new institutions are well adapted to the digital condition, with
its chaotic production of vast amounts of information and innovative
ways of dealing with that.
From this, two competing trajectories have emerged which are
simultaneously transforming the space of the political. First, I used
the term "post-democracy" because it expands possibilities, and even
requirements, of (personal) participation, while ever larger aspects of
(collective) decision-making are moved to arenas that are structurally
disconnected from those of participation. In effect, these arenas are
forming an authoritarian reality in which a small elite is vastly
emp
the structural level,
surprisingly coherent and, on the social and political level, full of
contradictions and thus opportunities.[]{#Page_viii type="pagebreak"
title="viii"}
I traced some aspects of these developments right up to early 2016, when
the German version of this book went into production. Since then a lot
has happened, but I resisted the temptation to update the book for the
English translation because ideas are always an expression of their
historical moment and, as such, updating either turns into a completely
new version or a retrospective adjustment of the historical record.
What has become increasingly obvious during 2016 and into 2017 is that
central institutions of liberal democracy are crumbling more quickly and
dramatically than was expected. The race to replace them has
metropolis.
Over the last 18 months, the imbalances between the two trajectories
have become even more extreme because authoritarian tendencies and
surveillance capitalism have been strengthened more quickly than the
commons-oriented practices could establish themselves. But it does not
change the fact that there are fundamental alternatives embedded in the
digital condition. Despite structural transformations that affect how we
do things, there is no inevitability about what we want to do
individually and, even more importantly, collectively.
::: {.poem}
::: {.lineGroup}
Zurich/Vienna, July 2017[]{#Page_ix type="pagebreak" title="ix"}
:::
:::
:::
[Acknowledgments]{.chapterTitle} {#ack}
l 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} {#cin
n 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 wi
lion-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 dev
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
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 digi
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 differi
d 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-s
ts 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 e
anded 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} Mac
he "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 plac
y 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 communi
ible 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
etwork
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 Cre
e 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
){#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 w
ag 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 re
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
d
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-det
on 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
cations 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 co
ncy 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
machine
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 wa
mcorder
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 alternati
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 n
irst
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 avoi
came 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
e 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 u
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 .note
: 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 Networ
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.
ilm *Lawrence of Arabia*
(1962).
[43](#c1-note-0043a){#c1-note-0043} Said has often been criticized,
however, for portraying orientalism so dominantly that there seems to be
no way out of the existing dependent relations. For an overview of the
debates that Said has instigated, see María do Mar Castro Varela and
Nikita Dhawan, *Postkoloniale Theorie: Eine kritische Einführung*
(Bielefeld: Transcript, 2005), pp. 37--46.
[44](#c1-note-0044a){#c1-note-0044} "Migration führt zu 'hybrider'
Gesellschaft" (an interview with Homi K. Bhabha), *ORF Science*
(November 9, 2007), online \[--trans.\].
[45](#c1-note-0045a){#c1-note-0045} Homi K. Bhabha, *The Location of
Culture* (New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 4.
[46](#c1-note-0046a){#c1-note-0046} Elisabeth Bronfen and Benjamin
Marius, "H
Deutschland entwickelt sich zu
einem attraktiven Einwanderungsland für hochqualifizierte Zuwanderer,"
press release by the CDU/CSU Alliance in the German Parliament (June 4,
2014), online \[--trans.\].
[51](#c1-note-0051a){#c1-note-0051} Andreas Reckwitz, *Die Erfindung
der Kreativität: Zum Prozess gesellschaftlicher Ästhetisierung* (Berlin:
Suhrkamp, 2011), p. 180 \[--trans.\]. An English translation of this
book is forthcoming: *The Invention of Creativity: Modern Society and
the Culture of the New*, trans. Steven Black (Cambridge: Polity, 2017).
[52](#c1-note-0052a){#c1-note-0052} Gert Selle, *Geschichte des Design
in Deutschland* (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2007).
[53](#c1-note-0053a){#c1-note-0053} "Less Is More: The Design Ethos of
Dieter Rams," *SFMOMA* (June 29, 2011), online.[]{#Page_181
type="pagebreak" title="181"}
[54](#c1-note-0054a){#c1-note-0054} The cybernetic perspective w
mair
(eds), *Phantom Kulturstadt* (Vienna: Löcker, 2009).
[61](#c1-note-0061a){#c1-note-0061} See, for example, Andres Bosshard,
*Stadt hören: Klangspaziergänge durch Zürich* (Zurich: NZZ Libro,
2009).
[62](#c1-note-0062a){#c1-note-0062} "An alternate realty game (ARG),"
according to Wikipedia, "is an interactive networked narrative that uses
the real world as a platform and employs transmedia storytelling to
deliver a story that may be altered by players\' ideas or actions."
[63](#c1-note-0063a){#c1-note-0063} Eric von Hippel, *Democratizing
Innovation* (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005).
[64](#c1-note-0064a){#c1-note-0064} It is often the case that the
involvement of users simply serves to increase the efficiency of
production processes and customer service. Many activities
ter Voss, *Der arbeitende Kunde:
Wenn Konsumenten zu unbezahlten Mitarbeitern werden* (Frankfurt am Main:
Campus, 2005).
[65](#c1-note-0065a){#c1-note-0065} Beniger, *The Control Revolution*,
pp. 411--16.
[66](#c1-note-0066a){#c1-note-0066} Louis Althusser, "Ideology and
Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation)," in
Althusser, *Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays*, trans. Ben Brewster
(New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), pp. 127--86.
[67](#c1-note-0067a){#c1-note-0067} Florian Becker et al. (eds),
*Gramsci lesen! Einstiege in die Gefängnishefte* (Hamburg: Argument,
2013), pp. 20--35.
[68](#c1-note-0068a){#c1-note-0068} Guy Debord, *The Society of the
Spectacle*, trans. Fredy Perlman and Jon Supak (Detroit: Black & Red,
1977).
[69](#c1-note-0069a){#c1-note-0069} Derrick de Kerckhove, "McLuhan and
the Toronto School of Communication," *Canadian Journal of
Communication* 14/4 (1989): 73--9.[]{#Page_182 type="pagebreak"
title="182"}
[70](#c1-note-0070a){#c1-note-0070} Marshall McLuhan, *Understanding
Media: The Extensions of Man* (New York: McGraw-Hill, 196
tionen 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
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 providin
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 in
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 for
rality 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
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.
ble
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
ed 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 accumulat
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.
::
r 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
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 existen
imilar 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 wa
, 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 sp
aditional 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, t
eveloping 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
rential, 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 t
imultaneously
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
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
organiz
imize 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-sor
){#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 \[--trans.\]
[
* (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 est
stination.
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 unter
aphic 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
, 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
it
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
s
73): 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){#c
em*
(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. Bow
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-no
-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 Dee
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 politic
at 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, mos
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}
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}
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 heighten
^](#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
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 throu
ion.[^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,
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 ava
ntries 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 count
ndamental, 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
er 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 thro
igitalitaet* © Suhrkamp Verlag,
Berlin, 2016
This English edition © Polity Press, 2018
Polity Press
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Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK
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Suite 300
Medford, MA 02155, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the
purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be
reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or
by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or
otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
P. 51, Brautigan, Richard: From "All Watched Over by Machines of Loving
Grace" by Richard Brautigan. Copyright © 1967 by Richard Brautigan,
renewed 1995 by Ianthe Brautigan Swenson. Reprinted with the permission
of the Estate of Richard Brautigan; all r
trans in Dekker & Barok 2017
2017
COPYING AS A WAY TO START SOMETHING NEW
A Conversation with Dusan Barok about Monoskop
Annet Dekker
Dusan Barok is an artist, writer, and cultural activist involved
in critical practice in the fields of software, art, and theory. After founding and organizing the online culture portal
Koridor in Slovakia from 1999–2002, in 2003 he co-founded
the BURUNDI media lab where he organized the Translab
evening series. A year later, the first ideas about building an
online platform for texts and media started to emerge and
Monoskop became a reality. More than a decade later, Barok
is well-known as the main editor of Monoskop. In 2016, he
began a PhD research project at the University of Amsterdam. His project, titled Database for the Documentation of
Contemporary Art, investigates art database
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
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
rily 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 reposito
ng 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 thi
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