potlatch

suffocation by present participle

We live in the age of the present participle. Twittering introduces a new mode of writing, in which I am doing something. The Facebook 'status update' had a mildly static element to it - 'I am on holiday' - but has been replaced by the irritatingly invasive invitation to report 'what's on your mind?'. In the brewing anxiety about where this is all leading, nobody has yet begun a campaign to save the past participle. Will today's children be able to either write or read novels? Not without the past participle they won't.

In a sociological chain that even he can't entirely understand, Nigel Thrift writes of how the collapse of fixed currency exchange rates in the 1970s led to the rise of the present participle in capitalism. Capitalism is now constant becoming, striving, arriving, nearly departing. A waste collection van will now have the words "making London cleaner" plastered down the side. Policies are all 'making Britain' into something else. Twitter might be successfully implemented here, so as to reveal this becoming in real time.

But what of getting something done? I recently happened to eves-drop on two workplace discussions, as follows:

[Cafe, Bloomsbury. Two mobile knowledge workers are discussing a powerpoint presentation they are to give to a potential client. One appears to be mildly more senior than the other]

"he's not going to read this properly... the main thing is he realises that we've thought about it"
"shall we put a link in?"
"no... but the follow-up could be this - which is the link."
"transaction to interaction - DASH... I love the wording. The formatting needs work. But they must be able to see this, it's obvious... I think they will see it."
"Couple of concluding points... we believe we are the user experience, permeating a lot of other clusters"
"by fuelling... by supplying... (by expanding the access?) technologies with data - something like that? By creating reusable web resources... "

[Seating in publicly-funded cultural institution. Two members of staff are speaking loudly next to me]
"OK, well i'm glad we had this conversation."
"I agree."
" The value is in the use..."
"absolutely"
" OK, well glad we had this conversation"
"I agree. I just thought..."
"I don't know. I think it's good that we discuss this"
"Yes. We should"
" Well i'm glad we discussed this. I just thought."

Contemporary work involves a desparate striving to put things in the past, to make them complete. In the first example, machismo and self-assurance is used to convince the practitioners that their task is becoming complete, but evidently this is sheer bravado. Such a task need never be complete. In the second, the conversation could go round and round in circles until I punched one of them. Only unseemly Taylorist power strategies - "time to stop talking!" - can save such employees from the tyranny of the present participle.

The problem is that language and grammar are both the form and the content of so much 21st century industry. We struggle to recognise the distinction between the means and the ends, the production method and the product. So we just keep on talking.

Throw ubiquitous real-time networks into the mix, and we could soon be completely fucked. Our capacity to produce a product is being dissolved in a miasma of producing. Why do the designers of technology not care? Why is the critical economic distinction between action and outcome, subject and object, not being defended by our digital architects? Are they all too busy twittering to notice? Allow me to set the ball rolling with some principles:

- Asynchronicity is a feature: Cory Doctorow's advice on 'writing in the age of distraction' is worth reading for anyone suffocated by the present participle. On reading it I removed three different forms of 'alert' from my desk top, each of which potentially broke my concentration. Previously I had also cancelled email alerts from facebook. Distracted contains some frightening data about how switching between different forms of communication weakens our capacity to engage with any of them intelligently. So if synchronicity is harmful to productivity, why is nobody examining ways of deliberately designing asynchronicity into new digital technologies? Why can I not opt out of the synchronous aspects of Facebook, say, but retain the events and information services? A particular form of Taylorism is required here, simply to cut up chunks of working time. But current trends seem to be all about the reverse.

- Erradication is a feature: gmail's most brilliant feature is 'archive' which equates to 'done' (or 'not my problem'). The most important consequence of limitless data storage is the greater capacity to remove it. Got rid, deleted, removed, archived, eliminated. These are satisfying and important past participles. They signal the mortality of data in an age of immortal projects. Lets produce information, nurture it, then murder it. Another geek tip: Danny Obrien discovered that most geeks organise their work using a lowly text file with a to-do list on it. I do exactly this for my own work, precisely so I can delete stuff from it when it's over (the key is to frame the tasks in ways that invite a past participle, e.g. 'go to dentist', not 'deal with dental hygiene'). This is very different from a Chris Anderson ideology, in which the achievement of our age is to have everything, everywhere, all the time. Lets have more murder weapons built into our computers.

Marx viewed capital as a vampire - the dead labour of previous generations, rising from its grave to oppress the living. The problem with language in the age of infinite computing is that it never dies at all. We never leave it behind, mourn it or escape from it. Instead, we have to limit it and kill it. In the analogue age, this was unpopular for various reasons. Limiting access sounds like censorship; killing information sounds like book-burning. But failure to come up with a new critique of digital communication means we can get stuck rearranging fonts on powerpoint slides, agreeing that we need to have the conversation we're currently having, and twittering about twitter.

Julie Myerson vs Hannah Arendt

Has the Guardian lost the plot entirely? At least the Saturday Guardian is divided into sections, enabling the reader to dump the 20kg 'private sphere' in a nearby recyling bin, and retain the 'public sphere' (I include sport, for my sins) as a handy carry-around newspaper, that can be transported home, onto buses, into pubs. Now Julie Myerson is dragging her tedious oikos into our lives on a daily basis, due to her son's predictable enjoyment of the old wacky baccy. Her husband has got involved, her son's got involved, she's got involved (about three times) and all because... as Alexander Chancellor says, she is addicted to writing about her family. Today she's sensationally revealed that she was also writing about family life under a pseudonym (perhaps to help with the come-down after writing about it under her real name?).

She first irritated the hell out of me when I read the Independent as a teenager ("hey! This guy was a teenager! Give him a column and book deal!"). The subsequent arrival of blogs has legitimated, arguably made an art of, the practice of writing about one's private life. The argument that 'if you're not interested, why are you reading it?' makes a great deal more sense in a medium in which there is no scarcity of space, no professionalisation and no capital overheads. Put simply, if you only have five readers, then it is fair enough to only write about five people. But this is never the case with newspapers.

It's important to note that Myerson's contempt of the public/private divide is considerably worse than that of the tabloids. The cult of celebrity (and the accompanying rise of photo-journalism) certainly warps orthodox accounts of the public sphere, in that the reader/viewer becomes distracted by phenomena that have no public impact beyond their sheer aesthetics. Reality television and its ilk takes this further, so that even aesthetics are abandoned.

But where celebrity is concerned, the public still retains a role as critic, filter, judge in some way. Taste is still at work. Of course we know that the ideal Habermasian situation never pertains, and there are public affairs agents and promoters oiling the wheels of the fame game. In the reality TV case, this game acquires a capital 'G', such that the processes mediating between private and public, anoymity and celebrity, are formalised and played. The audience become active players, and the whole process is out in the open (save where there's some phone-in monkey business).

Myerson abandons all of this. The boundary between private and public, anonymity and celebrity, is not traversed, routinised or explored, but simply dissolved. How can her son possibly have consented to have his private problems publicised in this way? If she's as oblivious to these distinctions as all that, perhaps she'd be happy to sell her right to be publicly recognised as the author of her work? To paraphrase Thatcher, in Myerson's world 'there is no such thing as the public sphere, there are individual men and women and there are families'. Perhaps one might also add 'and printing presses, lawyers and accountants'.

She didn't get famous, then perform a confession. She didn't buy her way into the public eye. She didn't even sleep her way there. She just vomitted her way. She's the literary equivalent of a flasher at a cricket match, and she deserves to get rugby tackled by a steward then evicted. At least flashers usually have the good grace to wait until the day is grinding to a halt, the run-rate has dried up and the crowd is bored. Are world events really so slow at the moment, that Myerson thinks we need to hear about what happened on her family's 1997 camping holiday in Tuscany? And I know this post was meant to be something about Hannah Arendt, but I'm now too irritated to continue.

article on economics and the 'nonsense' of law

This week I received the good news that I've had an article accepted at Economy & Society, one of the best peer-reviewed journals in my field. This is exciting for me (but if you can't fathom why, forget it; I'd have to start using expressions such as 'RAE' and 'academic job market' until you wanted to kill yourself).

It's called 'Economics and the "nonsense" of law: the case of the Chicago antitrust revolution', and you can download a preprint copy here [pdf] (copyright acknowledgement at the bottom of this post).

One of the central claims in the article may appear rather counter-intuitive: Chicago School economists were less committed to markets and price mechanisms than to economics and price theory. There is a pronounced epistemological pragmatism at work. The article focuses heavily on Ronald Coase's influence, that fed through the Law & Economics movement, then manifested itself in the renewed antitrust architecture of the neo-liberal era. Markets that worked ideally were of little interest (or, indeed, plausibility) to those in this tradition. The important thing was to set about rationalising areas of society, including the state, that were not explicitly determined by prices. Sovereign law was a metaphysical 'nonsense' that needed reframing in terms of incentives and effects. It concludes:

The ‘Chicago Revolution’ was not simply a Kuhnian revolution within economic orthodoxy, but a strategic project of professional colonisation. Simons’s appointment to run the Chicago Law School presaged this, albeit with little deliberate intent to colonise legal thinking. From there on, however, lawyers were encouraged to view their own discipline as polluted with nonsense, and to view price theory as the means of cleansing it. The rhetorical skills of Coase and Director proved critical in making the case for efficiency as the only ‘obvious’ basis for determining the implementation of law. The fact that conservative lawyers could not only grasp this logic, but develop it as a critique of the state was a testimony to its simplicity. Once price theory is accepted as common sense, state actions that seek to improve on the decision-making of individuals come to appear ridiculous.

This is a preprint of an article submitted for consideration in Economy & Society © 2009 [copyright Taylor & Francis]; Economy and Society is available online at http://journalsonline.tandf.co.uk/

conservatism 2.0

It is widely documented and recognised that the internet partly owes its origins to a west coast American political ethos: libertarian psychadelic hippy capitalism. I've no doubt that this is disputed in some quarters, but lets suppose there is something in this. Manuel Castells argues as much in The Internet Galaxy, for example, and Peka Himanen's Hacker Ethic is an interesting journey through the ideology and ethos of collaborative software coding. This ethos stresses networks over hierarchies, information sharing as the default option, a utilitarian version of meritocracy, and so on. It permeated the New Economy boom, and, according to Anna Lee Saxenian, accounted for the comparative rise of Silicon Valley over Route 128.

What is then sociologically interesting about the internet is how an architecture emerging from one ethos becomes inhabited by groups and communities with another ethos all together. This is analogous to the problem of Corbusian housing: such architecture was never intended as a cheap, badly-governed option for the worst off, but as a luxury. The ill-adaptation of such designs still blights British cities.

We're subject to a form of soft Californian colonialism, in which we take the technology of the libertarian hippy capitalists, and adapt it to our own ends. I quite agree that there are manifold benefits attached to this (I wouldn't otherwise be publishing these thoughts...), especially in areas of political and civic mobilisation. I have some good friends working in such projects. But what about those arriving late?

Firstly, over the last five years, we've seen the rise of many websites which act as brokers between individuals, so as to let them share information. Where this has some purpose or function, as with eBay, pledgebank or a campaign, then this seems fine. I'm minded of Clay Shirky's argument in Here Comes Everybody that online groups need a bargain: what is expected of each individual, if the group is going to actually get anything done?

And yet this is evidently not the default mode of online behaviour, and nor was it ever. The hacker ethic, in which information must be shared as a principle, has been imported into our own social lives, in order that every thought, image, action, event or experience must be shared simply for the sake of it. There is a golden thread linking the free software movement ('free as in speech') and the banality of social networking sites: thou shalt not restrict the information that you are at home having a cup of tea.

Secondly, the political right is only just beginning to grasp the possibilities offered to them by this technological child of the 1960s. I wonder if we have even seen the half of it. Actually, I wonder if we've seen the whole tip of the iceberg. A somewhat flippant example was given to me by a friend who has advised The Daily Mail on how to set up an online dating site.* The semi-humourous implication is that they're missing an inverted-eugenicist trick by allowing all those liberals to reproduce their numbers via Guardian Soulmates. But what really got me thinking about this was the news this morning that Jacqui Smith is to put the identities of criminals on a website, searchable by locality. The 'power of information' indeed. This isn't quite criminaljustice2.0, but it's not far off. One wonders if the old criticism, that government squashes existing 'intermediaries' through duplicating existing online services, could be levelled here. Maybe they should have just built a facebook app, that performed the service? Or made it operate via fixmystreet.com?

Because the question this then poses is how individuals are to use this information, and how it might be better organised. All it takes is a right-wing or vigilante version of mySociety, with a less attractive civic vision, and this criminal geo-data can become scraped, distributed, then offered with a Shirky-esque 'bargain': 'I will be outside this crim's house with a plank of wood at 3am if 10 other people will do the same'. That would be the extreme case, but milder responses are surely inevitable and, to some degree intended. As some proto-Richard Stallman within the Home Office must have put it "information about local criminals wants to be free!"

I know I'm not the first to raise these fears. The viability of mobilising angry people online has been recognised for some time. Niche interests and small factions are 'early adopters' in this regard, not far behind the more liberally-minded geeks. What's interesting today is the arrival of the very late adopters - those large bastions of the establishment who are habitually conservative, with the potential to become more so. The Daily Mail and the Home Office are good examples. How these bodies take to compulsive information-sharing and flat organisational structures - given that they oppose these phenomena everywhere else - is still quite difficult to fathom. It's one thing for left-wing liberals and right-wing pressure groups to adopt a libertarian architecture; it's quite another for traditional, illiberal conservatives to do so.

* The potential for satire here is endless. Can someone please set up a spoof Daily Mail dating site? You could call it myracistfriend.com Imagine...

Dislikes: Romanians, paedophiles, Labour, Polly Toynbee, modern society.
Likes:
Must have: GSOA (good sense of anger)
Dream date: a countryside march down to Dover to hurl insults at the channel tunnel.

my PhD

For all those people out there who are simply dying to know what my PhD is all about, I can now point you towards an article on this precise question in the latest European Economic Sociology newsletter. You can download the pdf, then go to 'PhD projects' on page 37, where I lay out my humble wares. It's actually far more interesting than I am able to demonstrate in anything less than 80,000 words. And no it's not bloody well finished.