Ch 9 Bomb the Cloud: On Tactical Refusal, Defection, and Withdrawal from Data Labor
When the Factory Turns Cold
In certain periods, for instance when we learn that telcos and tech giants are making millions from their surveillance pact with the government, selling our location, and every word we write or speak, the will to resist gains momentum.
We won’t answer your status updates. We will throw a switch and let bots do the data entries for us while we go for a stroll.[13]We will not cater to your expectations; we feel nothing but disdain for your conformism. We refuse to be stripped of our data. We will not submit to hours of tweaking of your privacy settings, to turning off Retweets, only to limit unwanted exposure and uncontrollable data leakage. Equally, opt-in defaults have become agents of forced labor. We lost interest and will no longer be caught in your web, enthralled and captured. When we refuse to perform ourselves, we will manage to break our attention away from your centralized hubs. We don’t trust you and don’t believe that somehow, suddenly you’ll act ethically and respect our relationships. We will seek new ways of coming together, not just temporarily but for the long haul. We don’t boycott; we defect, we don’t need your hall of mirrors. We don’t have to look cool; we quit your reputation economy. We are tired of soliciting “likes” from our friends, which are then used to advertise to them. We are weary of being tagged in random photos and don’t want to waste time thinking up authentic witticisms. We may not beat your mighty commerce and security apparatus but we can break away from your networked spectacle of self-promotion.
It’s fairly clear now that many of us are feeling less satisfied with their lives when constantly reading about the highlights in the lives of others.[14] Let’s put an end to Facebook Depression and social media dependency. Political theorist Jodi Dean even talks of the growing “constant-contact media addiction, birdlike attention-span compression, and vapidity to the point of depravity.” (Dean 97) Some propose “Internet usage disorder” as a new category of mental illness (Papacharissi 59).
We refuse the stress, envy, and loneliness that we feel because we are enthralled in your web. Our vitality is the sum of our fears.
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[CALLE- PLEASE RETAIN THE FORMATTING- TOP HERE IS CENTERED< REST OF TEXT IS NOT.]
Today, the precariat does no longer solely include scientists, researchers, artists, musicians, and writers, it is now comprised of everybody who produces data. [CALLE: I DELETED FOOTNOTE [3] This chapter is thinking through tactical refusal, defection, withdrawal, and selective engagement as possible responses to the monetization of data labor and cloud computing.
Which frustrations and disappointments instilled the desire for more ethically aligned alternatives to platform capitalism? Some of the urgency to build alternatives is rooted in the Global Recession, the “uberization” of professional work, stagnating wages despite ever-increasing productivity, and a growing sense that capitalism is not good for most people. [ADD CITATION HERE http://observer.com/2015/04/howard-dean-people-are-doubting-capitalism-works-for-them/] The search for alternatives is also motivated by pervasive shifts of labor markets, the Internet of Things, sprawling automation, and cloud computing.
Tensions are increasing and questions about possible alternatives to (platform) capitalism are more urgently felt- just think of Los Indignados, Occupy, DebtStrike, Podemos, mass protests in Chile, the revolutionary upheavals in North African countries — sometimes misconstrued as “Twitter Revolution” — the global antiwar protests on February 15, 2003, or the legendary defeat in the US House of Representatives of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in 2012.
Add to that, the push for basic guaranteed income and the massive responses to disclosures of the whistleblower Edward Snowdon, strategically analyzed, released, and distributed by Laura Poitras, Glenn Greenwald, and others. Consider the platform owners: In 2013, Google was making an estimate average of $10.09 per user per year. [ ADD CITATION FOR THIS: http://www.forbes.com/sites/tristanlouis/2013/08/31/how-much-is-a-user-worth/] But also government surveillance can be profitable for platform owners. On the one hand, Snowden’s revelations, made some users turn away from giant platforms. But at the same time, telcos like AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, and Verizon are not only compelled to hand over user data, as it turns out, they are also making tens of millions of dollars from selling your phone records to the NSA. T-Mobile — charges law enforcement a flat fee of $500 per target per wiretap. Or, take Sprint:
“Sprint/Nextel — charges $400 per wiretap per “market area” and per “technology” as well as a $10 per day fee, capped at $2,000; it also charges $120 for pictures or video, $60 for email, $60 for voice mail and $30 for text messages; it also charges $50 per tower dump and $30 per month per target for location tracking.”
[ADD CITATION http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/294-159/11729-americas-spy-state-how-the-telecoms-sell-out-your-privacy]
Targeting the Centers of Power
When thinking about building alternatives, some predicate their vision on the end of capitalism as we know it, leading to a kind of wholesale criticism that leaves us without any alternatives. Contrary to this approach, social visions evaluate the current system and offer a guide to action that might lead to a new system. [9] For me, this discussion is about selective engagement and platform cooperativism, discussed in the previous chapter.
Today, Apple, Goldman Sachs, Google, and even IBM are nothing but brands and their line segments can reach variable orientation in space. Apple calls production managers at the Taiwanese company Foxconn — the producers of the Xbox and Playstations — who then coordinate the production of objects, only to add the Apple brand sticker in the end. Naomi Klein taught us to think of the brand as the core meaning of the modern corporation, and advertising as one vehicle used to convey that meaning to the world (Klein 2). Klein linked the astronomical growth in the wealth of cultural influence of multinational corporations to a seemingly innocuous idea that development management theorists in the mid-1980s conceived of, which is that successful businesses must primarily produce brands as opposed to products.
The author Matt Taibi famously referred to the giant vampire squid that wraps itself around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming his blood funnel into anything that smells like money [7]. The methods of maintaining power of this overclass are rooted in their ability to spin and shift from one resource point to another. We know Goldman Sachs as the giant money-sucking vampire squid and then there is IBM, which used to make computers but who knows what they are producing today.
Platform owners like Google or Facebook, what really matters is that these platforms become cultural centers, engineered by users. Copyright of this material mattered only in so far that the company wants to be able to delete porn, etc, but it is utterly peripheral to its business model. Facebook is not interested in selling the knowledge that users are submitting. They are benefitting indirectly.
What is implicit in this, then is also that the hacker class, if we refer to that as the most important value generating class that is deprived of property, is to lesser degree about knowledge labor, abstractions, and ideas but more about mere raw life. Raw life has become the source of profit. Like Paolo Virno put it — “life itself is put to work.” David Harvey writes “What once was viewed as natural social behavior and pleasure-seeking has now been turned into labor.”(McVegas) Jogging in the park, bickering with friends, water cooler chats, writing. The main, value-generating contribution to today’s emerging economies is not primarily intellectual but it is based on the monetization of raw life, data labor.
If class is about property, then the vectoral class remains neatly defined but the hacker class would be everyone else, the creative segment of the 99%. The ones who are productive are no longer merely researchers or authors, biologists, chemists, musicians philosophers, programmers but also the children who work on Amazon Mechanical Turk to feed their gaming addiction with credit points or the 11 year old on Facebook.
And my second point is that not all capitalists can be vectoralists. 30% of the German economy for example still comes from manufacturing. Mercedes Benz, Daimler, Caterpillar, cannot spin their business around on a dime; they are not vectoral. The vectoral class is not replacing the “productive capitalists,” it is rather a segment of the merchant capitalists.
And my third point is that the vectoral class does no longer divest itself of direct productive processes. Just think of the fact that Google inhaled all the leading companies that produce hardware and software in relation to the Internet of Things. And even more importantly think of their acquisition of many leading robotics companies. Then consider of Facebook’s acquisition of Oculus, a manufacturer of virtual reality gear (Immersive Facebook? Hmmm…). Therefore companies are moving from strategic space also back into commodity space.
But one thing is clear, the search for non-commercial alternatives can’t just be a discussion about gadgets, design interfaces, and back ends. To change everything you can’t just click here. Ask Evgeny Morozov: technological solutionism is not the answer. Nevertheless, building alternative social infrastructures throughout society and on the web matters.
The figure of the politically-minded hacker used to be at the center of the discussion about digital alternatives. Former NSA Chief Michael Hayden has a rather burlesque take on hackers. For him, the term represents “nihilists, anarchists, activists, Lulzsec, Anonymous, twentysomethings who haven’t talked to the opposite sex in five or six years.”(Ackerman)
The loosely associated international network of activists Anonymous demonstrated the importance of what the author Gabriela Coleman calls weapons of the geek, not to be mistaken for weapons of the weak, a term introduced by James Scott to capture the unique clandestine nature of peasant politics- from foot dragging to minor acts of sabotage.[5] Network-centric actions like Denial of Service attacks are still part of their repertoire. In Hacker Manifesto, McKenzie Wark hailed hackers as the class of the dispossessed, the ones who produce abstractions. Hackers are not hackers of property but hackers of networks, he wrote. Today the hacker stands in for the deviant political subject whose aspirations, political insight, and tactical approaches vary widely. How useful is the hacker as the prototype of digital subjectivity today? Nishant Shah, director of the The Centre for Internet & Society in Mumbai, India wrote that it might be useful to look at the transformation of the hacker from the fringe to the mainstream, to step away from a defensiveness that justifies and explains the hacker.[4] [CALLE- TO THIS FOOTNOTE ADD THIS URL http://cis-india.org].
In the 1990s, the tactical media collective Critical Art Ensemble suggested that resistance should migrate to the network because that is where power resided. Historically, activists targeted the centers of power; from the stock exchange to the headquarters of pharmaceutical companies. In the 1980s, the Coalition to Unleash Power (ACTUP) protested the apathetic approach of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to AIDS drug development by organizing the national “Seize Control of the FDA” demonstration, aiming to shut down the business of the FDA for a day. (Da Costa and Philip 329). In 2015, thousands of McDonald’s employees and union activists went to the company’s headquarters near Chicago to protest against “poverty wages” paid to most of its 400,000 employees. [ADD citation http://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/may/21/mcdonalds-workers-protest-poverty-wages-headquarters?CMP=share_btn_link]
Today, very little such protest against Amazon or Google is happening at the physical headquarters of these companies in Seattle, Mountain View, and elsewhere. So far, there have not been any massive occupations of far out-of-the-way data centers. It is important not to overlook the validity of such direct actions.
Break off, Switch Off, Disengage, Unthink
Where to begin? Thinking about alternatives to the commercial regime of data labor could start by prioritizing spending time with your own mind without distractions, and constant affirmative prompts. It could be about breaking off, switching off, and disengaging from the network. It could be about obscuring the network with fake data or unthinking the network altogether, as Ulises Meijas suggested in Off the Network.
On the Post-Snowden Web, the network effect has run out of steam; hordes of users cut loose and ran from Facebook when it became official that the NSA and their parents got on board. [8] [CALLE, I AM NOT SURE IF THE FOOTNOTE REFS GO INSIDE OR OUTSIDE THE FULL STOP. PROBABLY INSIDE] Who needs to see one billion faces? Instead, let’s foster thorny conversations, direct actions, and slowly growing friendships.
The search for new tactical approaches could find inspiration in the struggle of domestic workers and migrants in the 1960s, the efforts of Hugo Chavez who organized migrant farm workers and succeeded in raising wages with the help of consumer boycotts of grapes and lettuce.[6] A consumer boycott against platform owners would have to be a boycott by advertising agencies and all those others who purchase our user data.
Instead of hanging out on Facebook, Geert Lovink calls on us to waste our time elsewhere. In 2014, the long-time Wired writer and Internet guru Bruce Sterling, at a conference at the Volksbühne theater in Berlin, called out “It’s time to move on, people, it’s time to leave Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Amazon!”
When Facebook will collide with an iceberg, only to sink — and it will sink, just like MySpace and Friendster — then where do we go? What are we joining when we are taking off?
A Reprieve from Monetized Data Labor
“In a media environment where everyone seems to be selling something and everything is for sale, the noncommercial model is more important than ever.” writes Pat Mitchell, former director of the Public Broadcasting Society. (PBS) [THIS IS A CITATION, CALLE] Alternative platforms can carve out greed-free spaces for shared humanity.
There is no lack of technical alternatives that take on platform owners like Facebook but for the alternatives to succeed, Metcalfe’s Law needs to kick into effect; it suggests that it is not only the number of people but also their interactions that matter and that a telco network’s value is proportional to yhe square of the number of connected users. It cannot only be geeks, post-Marxist theorists, artists, hackers, anarchists, and professional technologists who migrate to services like Diaspora. The cognitive economy is driven by the network effect.
It will be an exciting moment when liberal arts colleges and philosophy departments at major universities become concerned with digital culture. Academic work should at least try to help us to lead more meaningful and fulfilled lives. No longer should we remain punk-ish resistors on the page while leading conformist lives. The politics of our daily life choices matters just as much as our ideas and code on paper or on the screen.
Much of the success of alternatives hinges on addictive UX design, system design, information management, ease of use, broad coalitions of support, and community organizing: the ability to convince large numbers of people to migrate. Ultimately, measuring the value of alternatives by asking how closely they resemble some purist ideal of human sociality does not help; they need to be assessed through comparison with existing options.
There is no shortage of examples. Crabgrass offers secure social networking for activists while the self-identified Facebook successor Diaspora, and the decentralized social network Friendica, which allows users to interact with various existing social networks at the same time while using one interface. For a short moment in 2014, the ad-free social network Ello with the motto “You Are Not a Product” became popular but many users lost interest after the company accepted over five million dollars in venture capital. Investors want to see a return on their money and it was unclear how that would sit with Ello’s promise of never selling user data [ADD FOOTNOTE: https://ello.co/beta-public-profiles]. Own Cloud offers secure, open source cloud services [ADD FOOTNOTE https://owncloud.org/install/]. There is also Freedom Box [ADD FOOTNOTE http://freedomboxfoundation.org], an inexpensive computer in the making that can provide a platform for distributed applications. And lastly, there are cloud archives like Libgen and Monoskop that offer terabytes of free books.
Or, give Craigslist a second chance: not everybody knows that Craig Newmark is leaving at least $500 million a year on the table because he is not introducing advertising.[10] Craigslist has demonstrated that it is possible to make profits while also supporting the sociality of millions of users all over the world. It is offering a service that is free for almost all of its users. In the land of platform capitalism, Craigslist rules Sherwood Forest.
The German upstart Fairmondo is another noteworthy example. At its core a cooperative, ethically–run consumer-to-consumer business, it is a cooperatively run eBay of sorts.
After some initial thoughts about frustrations and some possible alternatives, I’m now turning to cloud computing.
Bomb the Cloud
Just take a moment and delve into your own interactions with cloud-based services. Some of you might use Adobe’s Creative Suite, Dropbox, Google Drive, Apple Cloud, and Evernote on a daily basis. Since the early 1990s, increased copyright protection and the so-called digital agenda attempted to expand influence of copyrights to manage access to digital enclosures thereby driving back copyright’s historic and conceptual orientation.
Today, former CEO of Google Eric Schmidt wrote in 1993 that “the network has become as fast as the computer, and the computer hollows out and spreads across the network.” [CITE BIG SWITCH BY NICHOLAS CARR, PAGE 60] Nicholas Carr refers to it as the worldwide computer. The introduction of cloud computing then, has led to a move away from a general-purpose computer with sizeable hard drive to geographically distant, large data storage facilities. It’s hard to imagine a better opportunity for a bait and hook business model. Samsung, HP, and others market a whole new generation of so-called Chrome books. These stripped down, two-hundred-something-dollar lightweight devices are nothing but gateways to production and data access, where, deprived of your own data and means of production we can now conveniently buy back access to the data that used to be ours in the first place.
Now, a little bit more convenient, accessible on all your devices, the newest versions of all your äppäräti, in Gary Shteyngart’s words, and in real time, you can get caught in what commons advocate David Bollier calls “the enclosure trap.” It is incredibly convenient to rely on the cloud for your backups and data mobility from one device to the other. The cloud looks like an highway to heaven but privacy concerns are very real. The cloud becomes the new playground for the vectoralists but at its core this is not about commoditized knowledge labor; it is merely about controlling nodal points of access in the Absurdistan of the Web.
The key problem with the vectoral mode of capital is conglomeration/ consolidation/centralization. If in doubt, ponder the moment when PayPal, Visa and Mastercard decided to boycott donations for WikiLeaks. And while you are at it, don’t forget about the electricity outages that affected Amazon.com’s server farms thereby shutting down dozens of core services on the Internet including Netflix. Or, think of Apple’s App Store that clearly defines how its users experience the web- no flash, no pornography, no political cartoonists. For legal scholar Julie Cohen, the experience of the networked world is increasingly not one of freedom. There are fewer and fewer choices about the interactions with the online environment, she writes (Cohen). Cloud providers can completely reign over your web experience, they can expose you to as much advertisement as they wish.
In the post-post-Sputnik era, apologists in favor of centralization may argue that it might take such platform owners, the Big Five to manufacture driverless cars or restaurant service robots, for example. The same argument was made in fear of the powers of Communist centralized planning and its ability to focus enormous resources at a single objective. Are Google-Apple-Amazon-Facebook-Microsoft the modern day equivalent of the Communist Party, then? Is innovation, which has significantly eased off in the absence of cold war competition, now the sole domain of platform owners? The resources that it might take to compete are certainly concentrated in their hands.
But from the outset, Internet users were promised a social environment that is open, and decentralized. Wasn’t that the whole point? Paul Baran was obsessed with distributed networks to ward off the red menace.
So, if we don’t manage to cut through the consensual defeatism, and the hypnosis of the convenience virus, we will wake up in the friendly fascism of the cloud only to find that we managed to mortgage the data that were ours once from the ruling class.
Granted that the Internet, ruled by TCP/IP protocol, was never completely free from control but today millions are caught in the suffocating grip of the platform capitalists. Legal scholar David Lametti proposes a publicly delivered cloud, an alternative to the shortcomings of proprietary, privately owned cloud services that lock in their users. (Lametti)
In light of all this, what really counts is our ideas and the partial alternatives, greed-free upstarts, emerging forms of solidarity, boycotts, and social movements. What matters are the initiatives that we are building and supporting all the while acknowledging their shortcomings. What matters is that we don’t stifle our outrage and protest, that we live aberrant lives.
On Withdrawal, Defection, and Refusal
“In this McJob era,” Geert Lovink writes, “artists and cultural workers must prepare a range of parallel projects that may or may not become realized as paid labor. This is why it is not morally wise to dismiss participation on corporate platforms such as Facebook and Twitter.”(Lovink, Networks Without a Cause 168) For most people, being included in the Ferris wheel of the network society isn’t something they have much control over. A growing number of companies like the IT consulting firm Appirio even mandate their employees to link their Facebook profiles to their employee identities. “In a society governed by economic trade-offs,” Nick Carr writes, “the technological imperative is precisely that: an imperative. Personal choice has little to with it.” (Carr 23) Pragmatically, workers justify their participation through the fear of loosing their livelihood and social standing. Without privilege, there is no lasting shelter from online sociality. No Facebook, no LinkedIn, no jobs?
Recalling days in the Hamptons, it is soothing to think of the smell of the trees, hikes, the offline freedom, but all that is just a temporary reprieve. Those who are able to purposefully unhook ourselves from media produsage will have to acknowledge their privilege. [CALLE< HERE< PLEASE ADD A FOOTNOTE: Introduced by Australian scholar Axel Bruns, produsage is a portmanteau of the words production and usage.]
Donald Knuth, a prominent computer scientist at Stanford University, put it this way.
“I have been a happy man ever since January 1, 1990, when I no longer had an email address. E-mail is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things.” [15]
The software freedom activist Richard Stallman confided that he rarely looks at any web site, and never from his own computer. “This started as a personal penance,” he wrote. “But nowadays [it] seems possibly advisable for reasons of privacy.” (Stallman) Let’s not interpret Knuth’s and Stallman’s retreat as a boastful display of status and privilege; these are life choices which are, no doubt, predicated on rare privilege, which should be respected as radical deviations from social norms.
It does not come as a surprise that the 1% are not on Facebook and even in Gary Shteyngart’s book SuperSad True Love Story the only people who aren’t slaves to “the tech-nah-luh-gee,” “the äppärät,” their phones, are the oligarchs. (Shteyngart) Don’t forget that the lack of a Facebook account does not only make you suspicious for love seekers (it‘s awfully suspicious if I can’t investigate you prior to a date) but also makes you look dubious to the 1200 intelligence agencies in the United States. Any behavior that falls outside of the grid of big data-induced predictive analysis, like the retreat of Knuth and Stallman, raises suspicion.
There are, however, options other than voluntary labor and servitude. The refusal of participation in corporatist platforms does not have lead to the breaking of all social ties and professional relationships. If only the big blackout of 2003 lasted some more months, we would have learned how much the Post-Snowden Web works us over, how much it shapes every moment of our lives, as McLuhan put it.
Some will start to engage with media platforms selectively, which does not mean opting out of urban life altogether, living in the deep dark forest like Henry David Thoreau or Ted Kaczynski, eating nothing but beans. The binary rhetoric for or against unplugging is missing the point. (CEP) There is more than the nuclear option; this is not about an all-out refusal of technology or a romantic, posing withdrawal to “Betterworld Island” in “Real Life.” The German author Michael Seemann calls it “multi homing.” Seeman explains that in order to avoid the lock-in effect, applications, services, or data resources should not be only on one but rather several platform. It’s a “strategy to make users less dependent on individual platforms,” he writes. (ADD CITATION PAGE NUMBER IS 42 http://networkcultures.org/blog/publication/no-09-digital-tailspin-ten-rules-for-the-internet-after-snowden-michael-seemann/] It’s not about finding the ultimate form of resistance or critique that works for all. It’s not about a social media diet versus staggering gadget-addiction. It’s not about detox versus addiction. It’s not about stylized self-help for the well-to-do; this is about respect for selective engagement, alternative modes of being and inconvenient life choices. To paraphrase Geert Lovink: To live a tweetless life should not be constructed as not living (Lovink, Networks Without a Cause 44).
The will to refuse is also born from the impulse to acknowledge the plentitude of alternatives and the possibilities for protest. Coleman writes, “Just as there are many ways to hack, there are many ways for hackers to enter the political arena. From policymaking to running political parties like the pirate party, from reinventing the law through free software to engaging and personally risky acts of civil disobedience, the geek and hacker are not bound to one single type of politics and they certainly don’t agree on how such politics should be accomplished.” [ CALLE CITE HER BOOK https://books.google.com/books?id=9MpNBAAAQBAJ&pg=PT79&lpg=PT79&dq=Just+as+there+are+many+ways+to+hack,+there+are+many+ways+for+hackers+to+enter+the+political+arena.&source=bl&ots=foivKL8fFM&sig=Wf_GPYGRx4WRJR8-VwU8bpnisec&hl=en&sa=X&ei=rtVNVeyNJIaPyASUpYGYBg&ved=0CCEQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=Just%20as%20there%20are%20many%20ways%20to%20hack%2C%20there%20are%20many%20ways%20for%20hackers%20to%20enter%20the%20political%20arena.&f=false … I USED THE EBOOK VERSION AND I AM NOT SURE OF THE PAGE NUMBER; IT’S NOT CLEAR IN GOOGLE BOOKS EITHER; I GUESS DON’t VITE GOOGLE BOOKS BUT THE E BOOK VERSION OF HER BOOK “HACKER, WHISTLEBLOWER….”] Some of us will fight from within by working with civil liberties groups and human rights organizations. They will write to Congress, and promote secure, alternative social networking software[16] while others will obfuscate their data by adding noise to the network; everything from random “likes” to fake searches that pollute the stream of signals that marketers collect, analyze, and sell.[17] [CALLE< PLEASR CHECK IF CHICAGO STYLE PUTS FOOTNOTES LIKE 16 HERE IN HE MIDDLE OF A SENTENCE OR AT THE END. CHECK WHAT PASQUALE DID IN HIS BOOK AND LET’s FOOLWO THAT]
We remain open and perform small experiments with technology all the time, we figure out what works for us. Then there is also the e-mail sabbatical, “technology diet,” and offline “detox.” Some responses are technical with software like No-Social, Freedom, Self-Control, or plugins like AdBlock Pro, and NoScript. [18] [19] [20] Freedom, for example, allows you to block the Internet connection on your computer for a defined period of time.
Boycott is not the only way to protest against unfair digital labor but it is one option. After years of continuous privacy blunders, the Electronic Privacy Information Center filed complaints with the Federal Trade Commission suggesting that Facebook deceived users about the way their data are shared.
While some people wait for a Katrina-like event to prompt them to turn their backs to platform owners, there is already an opt-out movement against the effects of the real-time web. In 2010, May 31 was declared Quit Facebook Day and an estimated 38,146 people signed an online pledge committing to delete their Facebook account. The organizers pointed out that the average Facebook user does not have many fair choices when it comes to the management of their data and that the service isn’t aligned with any positive future for the web, which is reason enough to leave, they suggest. (“QuitFacebookDay.com”) While authors like danah boyd, Alice Marwick, Nancy Baym, Zeynep Tufekci, and Don Tapscott have argued in favor of a public discussion rather than boycott of Facebook, Geert Lovink joined the Facebook ‘exodus’ in 2010 to question the growing role of centralized Internet services.
“What we need to defend,” he wrote, “ is the very principle of decentralized, distributed networks.” (Lovink, UnlikeUs Reader 25) Media theorist Douglas Rushkoff writes that he surrendered his Facebook account because his participation on the site simply became inconsistent with the values to which he espouses in his work. Facebook is entitled to be paid for delivering users to advertisers, Rushkoff explains, but now you’re supposed to pay to “promote” your posts to your friends and if you pay even more, to their friends, and that wasn’t the deal going in. “The promotional leverage that Facebook affords me is not worth the price. … Facebook isn’t the Internet. It’s just one website, and it comes with a price.” (Rushkoff)
Surely, not being on Facebook we will be harder to reach. Some may even find such withdrawal a bit presumptuous. But how will dissent ever get any traction if all we care about is blending in? What kind of people have we become if we are too afraid to miss a few event invitations or inconvenience our acquaintances? What kind of life is that?
Toward Tactical Refusal and Selective Engagement
Discussions about refusal, withdrawal, or defection from platform capitalism must account for the privilege of participation but also the privilege of defection, given the drastically different life situations of people worldwide. Considering the social costs of our participation, it only makes sense that those who can afford it opt out. Defection from platform capitalism is not only about the refusal of data labor, it could denote a refusal of work altogether.
In 1883, The French revolutionary Paul Lafargue who also happened to be Karl Marx’ son in law, wrote in “The Right to be Lazy” that the “proletariat has allowed itself to be seduced by the dogma of work.” He refuses the configuration of the work society, and speaks out against the ideology of work as highest calling. In his provocative tribute to the merits of laziness, Lafargue refuses to privilege work over all other pursuits (Lafargue). Kathi Weeks, a Duke University professor and author of “The Problem with Work,” explains that Lafargue’s extravagant refusal of work is not a refusal of all productive activity. Data labor outside of the confines of platform capitalism would not be an issue at all. Weeks points to the autonomist Marxist critique that does not only focus on alienation and exploitation but also on the overvaluation of work itself (Hoegsberg and Fisher 151). How could we possibly unlearn our extreme work habits, our overvaluation of work? The refusal of work is really a refusal of the way work is organized. For Weeks, the problem with work would not disappear if invisible labor would be more visible and appropriately compensated. The problem is not only about the degradation of skill, low wages/exploitation, and discrimination. It’s about “securing not only better work, but also the time and money necessary to have a life outside of work.” (Weeks 13) Do you remember the times when people still had hobbies and knew how to take a vacation? For a discussion of the refusal to work please see chapter 10.
A small cadre of people also find ways of subverting the system. Take Kevin Killian, a poet living in San Francisco. As an active Amazon reviewer, he is not exclusively honing in on books. With his reviews, Killian found a creative way of establishing an audience for his autobiographical fiction; he reviews everything from sweet potato baby foods to films like Doctor Zhivago.
In recent months, whenever I feel low, or in a funk because of the depressed, gray state of the world today (not excluding the poetry community from my strictures either!), I have been fueled by the raw energy of Peter Valente’s Artaud Variations, surely the best book on the subject.
[ADD CITATION http://www.amazon.com/gp/cdp/member-reviews/A30TK6U7DNS82R/103-4091758-3020655]
Here is an excerpt from one of his reviews about an oil painting in his mother’s living room.
“As an American boy growing up in France, I became mesmerized by an enchanting painting of an ancestor that hung never very far from the hearth. The painting, smudged by smoke and damaged by Vichy occupation of the chateau, showed a very thin and angular woman, her face like something reflected in the bowl of a spoon, festooned in bright stones that gleamed out still bright after the passage of many decades. “Who is this woman,” I used to wonder out loud, until one evening, as my grandmother passed through the room looking for our vanished cat, “Gateau,” I noticed that she wore the same diamond and ruby necklace as the ancestor in the old damaged painting. … Amazon’s 14K Ruby and Diamond “Dynasty” necklace looks a lot like my family jewels; the resemblance is shocking enough to have made me drop my cocoa while leafing through the jewel pages this morning in an attempt to bring back, madeleine-style, the vanished days of yesteryear.”
[ADD CITATION,CALLE. AND DON”T BE PUZZLED BY THE LINK ROT. THEPRODUCT IS NOT AVAILABLE ANYMORE< I GUESS BUT THE URL WAS ACCUARTE AT THE TIME SO WE CAN USE IT. AND WHO WILL SIT THERE TYPING IN THE URL ANYWAY..?) http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00014E3EY/ref=cm_rna_own_review_prod/105-5355651-0322046
You can have the necklace delivered in a day or two with Amazon Prime.
An equally challenging proposal is Ulises Mejias’ suggestion to not only refuse but unthink the network logic, to become aware of those who are left out by the network, loosen up our habitualized network-centric thinking, and form subjectivities that are not created in reference to the network. That is, of course, easier said than done given that the real-time web is a professional imperative for most people in the overdeveloped world; it’s hard to imagine a job that is not in some way involves the network.
It’d be a false dichotomy to present the option as either being connected or being unplugged, as either signing my life away to platform capitalism or giving it a pass. I can loosen my device dependency through “email sabbaticals” or a day without social media each week. I can engage selectively, actively seek out and experiment with emerging alternative platforms; I can deactivate Facebook for a few weeks or months, and, of course, I can ultimately quit altogether. We are just beginning to imagine what tactical refusal and defection could look like.
References
Ackerman, Spencer. “Former NSA Chief Warns of Cyber-terror Attacks If Snowden Apprehended.” The Guardian 6 Aug. 2013. The Guardian. Web. 6 Apr. 2014.
Carr, Nicholas. The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google. Reprint. W. W. Norton & Company, 2009. Print.
CEP, CASEY N. “The Pointlessness of Unplugging.” N.p., n.d. Web. 20 Mar. 2014.
Cohen, Julie E. Configuring the Networked Self: Law, Code, and the Play of Everyday Practice. New Haven [Conn.]: Yale University Press, 2012. Print.
Da Costa, Beatriz, and Kavita Philip. Tactical Biopolitics: Art, Activism, and Technoscience. Cambridge, Mass.; London: MIT Press, 2010. Print.
Dean, Jodi. Blog Theory: Feedback and Capture in the Circuits of Drive. 1st ed. Polity, 2010. Print.
Gorman, Sean. “Ethics of Crowdsourcing — What Constitutes an Abuse of the Commons | GeoIQ Blog.” N.p., 29 June 2008. Web. 18 May 2012.
Hoegsberg, Milena, and Cora Fisher, eds. Living Labor. 2013 June: Sternberg Press. Web. 15 July 2013.
“How Facebook Makes Us Unhappy : The New Yorker.” N.p., n.d. Web. 23 Dec. 2013.
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. “Facebook-Nutzung Macht Neidisch Und Unzufrieden.” Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. N.p., n.d. Web. 27 Dec. 2013.
Kessler, Sarah. “Pixel And Dimed: On (Not) Getting By In The Gig Economy.” Fast Company. N.p., n.d. Web. 19 Mar. 2014.
Lafargue, Paul. “The Right To Be Lazy.” N.p., 1883. Web. 11 May 2012.
Lametti, David. “The Cloud: Boundless Digital Potential or Enclosure 3.0?” VIRGINIA JOURNAL OF LAW & TECHNOLOGY 17.03 (2012): 192–242. Print.
Lovink, Geert. Networks Without a Cause. 1st ed. Polity, 2012. Print.
—-, ed. UnlikeUs Reader. Amsterdam: N.p., 2012. Print. Institute for Network Culture.
MacKinnon, Rebecca. Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle For Internet Freedom. Basic Books, 2012. Print.
Marvit, Moshe. “How Crowdworkers Became the Ghosts in the Digital Machine.” The Nation (2014): n. pag. Web. 3 Mar. 2014.
McVegas, Craig. “4 Things David Harvey Thinks Anti-Capitalists Should Know.” Novara Wire. N.p., n.d. Web. 6 Apr. 2014.
Papacharissi, Zizi, ed. A Networked Self: Identity, Community, and Culture on Social Network Sites. Routledge, 2010. Print.
PBS. “Pat Mitchell Remarks to National Press Club.” PBS. N.p., 24 May 2005. Web. 19 Jan. 2014.
“QuitFacebookDay.com.” N.p., n.d. Web. 29 June 2012.
Rushkoff, Douglas. “Why I’m Quitting Facebook.” CNN 25 2013. Web. 5 Jan. 2014.
Shteyngart, Gary. Super Sad True Love Story: a Novel. New York: Random House, 2010. Print.
Stallman, Richard. “First Five.” New Criticals. N.p., n.d. Web. 6 Jan. 2014.
Taibbi, Matt. “The Vampire Squid Strikes Again: The Mega Banks’ Most Devious Scam Yet.” Rolling Stone 12 Feb. 2014. Web. 6 Apr. 2014.
Wallace, Julia. “Workers of the World, Faint!” The New York Times 17 Jan. 2014. NYTimes.com. Web. 28 Jan. 2014.
Wark, McKenzie. A Hacker Manifesto. Harvard University Press, 2004. Print.
Weeks, Kathi. The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries. Duke University Press Books, 2011. Print.
[FOOTNOTES WILL HAVE TO BE RENUMBERED- I TOOK SOME OUT]
[1] Moshe Marvit elaborates on Stephanie Costello situation in his Nation article on Invisible Workers. (Marvit)
[INSERT FULL CIATTAION OF (Marvit) HERE]
[2] Such precarious conditions can, of course, also be found among adjunct faculty. You might, think of Mary-Faith Cerasoli who is a 53 year-old adjunct professor of Spanish and Italian at Mercy College in Manhattan who is currently homeless, meeting students for office hours in her car. Or, think of the drunken court stenographer in a Manhattan courtroom who kept on typing “I HATE MY JOB, I HATE MY JOB” — taking cues from Shining and maybe On the Waterfront.
[3] http://blogs.newschool.edu/news/2014/03/hackers-unite/
[4] Email exchange with the author.
[5] You might also call to mind the collective spell of fainting of 250 workers in the Anful Garments Factory in the Kompong Speu Province of Cambodia in 2014. Facing devastating production conditions, workers collapsed all at once, claiming to speak in the name of an ancestral spirit, demanding offerings of raw chicken and attacked management. (Wallace)
[INSERT FULL CITaTION of (Wallace) HERE PLEASE]
[6] Or, consider the cross-border organizing of the Wobblies and their fight for one big union.
[7] See Matt Taibbi’s work on global finance and Goldman Sachs, the giant vampire squid, in particular. (Taibbi)
[INSERT FULL CITaTION of (Taibbi) HERE PLEASE]
[9] Noam Chomsky differentiates between “utopias” and “social visions,” visions that evaluate the current system and offer a guide to action that might lead to a new system. Utopias, however, remain imagined ideals (Chomsky 70).
[10] 99% of the free classifieds on the site are from individuals and the profits needed to pay for the technical infrastructure and for the 23 employees are generated from help-wanted listings and from brokers and apartment listings in New York City and Los Angeles.
[11] The pirate streaming service Popcorn will not change my mind about that.
[12] It certainly didn’t help that the Motion Picture Association of America just joined the W3, the organization that rules on technical standards for the web such as HTML 5.
[13] In November 2013, Google reported that it patented robotic response technology, which would propose personalized responses for users of Twitter, Text, Google+, and Email. (Gorman)
[14] There are several, fairly large scale studies with titles like “They are Happier and Having Better Lives than I Am,” which demonstrate that overall life satisfaction decreases slightly for users of Facebook. A research team at the Institute of Information Systems, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, (Germany) conducted two independent studies with 584 Facebook users. They conclude that “users frequently perceive Facebook as a stressful environment…” that provokes feelings of envy (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin) According to a study by University of Michigan psychologist Ethan Kross, Facebook makes us feel lonely. A Utah Valley University analysis of forty studies confirmed the broader trend: Internet use had a small, significant detrimental effect on psychological well-being, including depression, loneliness, self-esteem, and life satisfaction. (“How Facebook Makes Us Unhappy : The New Yorker”)
[15] There is no question that such email refusal is a sign of extreme privilege. Knuth’ secretary prints out all messages addressed to his still existing e-mail address so that he can reply with written comments once every 6 months or so. Equally, Stallman explains that others peruse the web for him all the time.
[16] Rebecca MacKinnon gives the example of sustained lobbying by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Committee to Protect Journalists and others, which let to Facebook’s engineers adding new encryption and security settings that enable users to better protect themselves against surveillance of as well as unauthorized intrusion into their accounts. (MacKinnon 158)
[17] See Helen Nissenbaum’s and Daniel C. Howe’s project AdNauseam, for example. http://rednoise.org/adnauseam/
[19] Email sabbaticals simply mean that you go on vacation after announcing in advance that “all e-mail messages will be deleted for the duration of the holiday. The person taking the sabbatical will return to an empty inbox.” (boyd)
[20] For years now, and I am including an exercise in my syllabi: A Week Without Google, Facebook, and Twitter. A whole week; students find it almost impossible to tackle. The idea, originally inspired by Mushon Zer-Aviv, is that students find alternatives for these software packages. The exercise is complicated by the fact that like many US-universities, The New School uses Gmail as its university email service. But they can still replace Twitter with identi.ca and Google search with Duckduckgo, for example.
