potlatch

the MBUOSM check-up

I've discovered a handy way of running a quick health-check on Western civilisation. Simply google the phrase 'make better use of social media' to receive an instant check-list of which of our beloved institutions are feeling a bit under the weather. High on the list, one discovers:

- governments

- government departments and the public sector

- journalists

- sporting organisations

- small businesses

- charities

- more government

I came across an article last week (which I now can't find) on how scientists can help Britain's economy return to growth. Recommendations included: be more innovative, spin-out more businesses and MBUOSM (as I shall now insist it's called). That's science sorted. Please send in the Catholic Church.

the advantage of nihilism

In her brilliant review of The Social Network, Zadie Smith makes an important observation regarding Mark Zuckerberg (or at the very least, his depiction in the film) - the mystery of his vocation.

If it’s not for money and it’s not for girls—what is it for? With Zuckerberg we have a real American mystery. Maybe it’s not mysterious and he’s just playing the long game, holding out: not a billion dollars but a hundred billion dollars. Or is it possible he just loves programming? No doubt the filmmakers considered this option, but you can see their dilemma: how to convey the pleasure of programming—if such a pleasure exists—in a way that is both cinematic and comprehensible? Movies are notoriously bad at showing the pleasures and rigors of art-making, even when the medium is familiar.

It may indeed be that Facebook involves extending 'the hacker ethic' into everyday life, but mischievously divorcing that ethic from the technological domain which it initially accompanied. As I suggested in this post, the hacker ethic becomes especially disruptive, once no longer confined to coders (just as economics becomes most disruptive when no longer confined to the analysis of markets). But Smith's point is a good one nevertheless. Part of Zuckerberg and Facebook's power lies in refusing to inhabit any known 'vocation' (Weber), 'Sphere of justice' (Walzer), or 'order of worth' (Boltanski and Thevenot).

It strikes me that Britain's coalition government is doing something similar: promising to unleash chaos into public services, but without offering any justification for doing so. As I've argued before, this betrays a certain manic psychological element. But it may also be politically astute. George Osborne is a man entirely at ease with his own unpleasantness, thereby side-stepping Tony Blair's achilles heal, namely vanity. It was Osborne, as much as any Cameroon advisor, who suggested he remain sidelined in the run up to the 2010 election. He knows what the public thinks about him but doesn't care.

If Polly Toynbee is even half right in her assessment, we have a genuinely and frighteningly radical government on how hands. But to what end? With what justification? Driven by what vocation or sense of worth? Answers are few and far between, which must surely be considered a strategy. A government that justifies itself immediately establishes certain implicit limits for itself. It offers its critics a moral benchmark, which it itself has introduced. To justify is, therefore, to close down the scope for chaos, to set tramlines for the whirlwind of innovation. As David Stark argues in The Sense of Dissonance, innovation (as enacted by entrepreneurs) involves "keeping multiple evaluative principles in play", thereby preserving an element of uncertainty and maintaining respect for the power of contingency. Stark is writing about the economy, but transported to the realm of politics, this same principle sits at the heart of a Machiavellian or even Schmittian concept of realpolitik.

Zuckerberg's genius undoubtedly resides in refusing to adopt a single benchmark of success, as The Social Network well demonstrates. John Naughton wrote a nice piece a few weeks back about why the brutish Winklevoss twins would not be in Zuckerberg's position right now, had they retained control over Facebook - they were in it for the money. But Facebook seems, even more than Google, to succeed through a complete absence of moral rulebook, rather than a moral pluralism. The same is true of this increasingly disturbing government, which gives less and less account of itself, yet discretely unveils greater and greater policy ambition. To say that 'The Big Society' provides the moral vision behind the current NHS reforms is like saying that 'friendship' provides the moral vision behind a for-profit, privately-owned internet platform with half a billion users.

None of this is to say that Mark Zuckerberg or George Osborne is actually a nihilist. I'm not sure I believe in the possibility of nihilism as a consistent philosophy, but only as lurking existential unease that cannot be articulated. Articulation is already an exit from nihilism of sorts. However, the condition of the modern individual, as Weber would see it, is for one's vocation or meaning or ethos, to be a painfully private one. At best, it is shared by a small community, but never by society or state at large. The Weberian individual pines for a re-enchanted world, filled with shared meaning for all, embodied in great public figures or works - but this is never realised. 

The Zuckerberg-Osborne strategy is the inverse - it is to refuse articulation, to keep one's personal vocation as private and mysterious as possible, to create an illusion that one has no justification for one's actions. It is a lie, of course, but one that then maximises room for manoeuvre. In practice, the nihilist is not quite without any morality, just without any confession of one; laughter is offered in place of explanation or justification. Twenty years ago, the Conservative government used to ban Sinn Fein's leaders from having their own voices broadcast, as a means of constraining their demands within the nihilistic category of 'terrorism'. Today, Tory politicians turn this same trick to their own advantage, by demanding that chaos sweeps through the public sector, but refusing to articulate why.

reigning cats and dogs

There was one telling feature of the BBC's online coverage of the Haitian disaster on Wednesday: the 'Most read' story, as of around 10am that day, reported on a dog that was learning Polish.

I've long wondered about animals and the internet. The most read stories on the BBC regularly feature dogs that have adopted kittens, sheep that have had sex with goats, cats that can water-ski. There was one story that frequently recurred in the top five, of a man who was forced to marry a farm animal that he'd been caught having sex with. Then there are those annoying 'I can haz' cat pictures that I've never understood. 

Why is this? Maybe this is just a variant on pornography. The animals are, after all, usually naked. Simon Critchley argues that the existential substrate of humour (as opposed to comedy) is the blurring of the distinction between human and animal. We all laugh when a human does something animalistic, or an animal does something human. His book on the topic offers a definitive case of a joke involving a man having sex with a bear, which is surely destined for the BBC's 'most read' list. 

There is universality in this, but it is the inverse of that promised by Enlightenment cosmopolitanism. To appreciate this, read Kant's Idea for a Universal History, whose third thesis runs: 

Nature has willed that man should, by himself, produce everything that goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence, and that he should partake of no other happiness or perfection than that which he himself, independently of instinct, has created by his own reason.

Kant's account of history sees the human species gradually heading towards a single, global civil society, in which discourse is rational and elevated above the animal and the parochial. Humanity's telos is to globalise, rationalise, de-nationalise and de-naturalise its condition. The anti-Enlightenment sneer of Nietzsche and his followers - especially John Gray today - stresses the gut over the head, the friend over the enemy, the irrational custom over the civilised debate, desire over rationality. Animality doesn't just rattle reason, but gobbles it up.

The Haitian disaster is both shockingly counter-Enlightenment - almost counter-civilisation - and potentially a condition of greater Enlightenment. The grizzly reports refer to the living amongst piled up corpses, and the dying left to die without care, let alone modern medicine. It's not just that humanity is overwhelmed by a natural disaster, or that humans are on the verge of sub-human conditions and behaviour, but that modern science, technology and politics are virtually helpless at present. The Lisbon earthquake had a profound effect on the formation of European Enlightenment, famously leading Voltaire to abandon his theological optimism. An earthquake reveals how thin the veneer of modernity ever is, though perhaps equally how much thicker we have to make it.

I heard Douglas Alexander on the radio yesterday morning declaring that nobody knew the number of dead. I kept wondering why this number was so important - was it just morbid fascination on an epic scale? - until he used the phrase "so we can't get our arms around the scale of the problem", and then realised that, as puny and as silly as they are, numbers are one of the main tools that contemporary humans use to try and save themselves. As the Latourians would tell you disparagingly, they're one of our best sticks for fending off nature and keeping it at bay. So, fair enough, Douglas Alexander - I'll let you off this time. When nature was this rampant, cavemen would employ every tool available to them.

Meanwhile, another million people have watched the clip of the dog being taught Polish. As a space of communication, the internet hovers uncertainly between the promised global civil society that Kant believed would eventually arrive, and the sort of horror show that Nietzsche and Gray believe we are biologically wired to gawp at. The 'most read' section on the BBC website is a sort of barometer of the human condition, neither as elevated as the 'global civil society', nor as grotesque as nature's full awfulness. The watching world can't cope with Haiti from an Enlightenment perspective, for it can't get its 'arms around the scale of the problem' (which is not a bad definition of the Kantian sublime). But thankfully it can't cope with it from a Nietzschean perspective either, for some forms of awfulness are too much even for animals as sick as us. So we watch a dog learning Polish instead.

Pets sit mid-way between a global civil society and a global horror show. As Critchley indicates, human beings can't all partake in a single rational discourse about the nature of scientific progress, but they can all laugh at a cat that plays the clarinet. I saw the film of Disgrace at the weekend, and if there's one way that the film actually supplements the book, its with the constant canine imagery. I suspect that this is Coetzee's point, that between the sexual animal violence of the wild and the judicial order of the city lies the intermediary of the pet dog, representing both our connection to nature, and our miniscule distance from it. A cat or a dog turns out to be the most comforting thing to look at, for beings that can't work out if they're animals or not.

digital exuberance in space

Last week, I experienced two separate moments of bitterness regarding our contemporary cultural geography. Depending on your levels of Benjaminian pomposity, you might even call them moments of mourning for what capitalism discards unthinkingly.

The first occurred on a train from Birmingham to London, a journey of a mere 70 minutes. I am not one of those enviable people who find it easy to lose themselves in books (that's why I became an academic: to turn reading into a professional obligation), but I find that a combination of a train journey and super-ego provides the perfect opportunity to read. Across the aisle from me, a man of my age was fidgetting with his iphone. In between scrolling, clicking and browsing, he was ringing people up, for no discernible reason. His lack of mental peace started to infect me, until I experienced a Basil Fawlty-esque urge to lean over and offer him my newspaper. His 70 minute journey was spent scratching a technologically induced itch.

Mobile telecom companies, as I've argued before, are so culturally pernicious because they are effectively flogging language itself. In an age when there is scarcely any limit to what can be mediated, and where or when it can be distributed, there is no relationship or artefact that isn't on sale at your nearest Vodafone stockist. Your granny, Coldplay, BBC, work, dating are all part of the package. It's everything.

As the scarcity of Everything gradually wanes, the companies are becoming bolder in their branding of the infinite. T-Mobile now has an advert asking 'What would you do with limitless texts?' with a photo of a happy punter saying things like 'I'd text everyone I know and put together the world's greatest super-group!' (sorry??). Infinite opportunity to say, share, broadcast everything all the time anywhere has to be sold as a positive achievement, with a tangible result. But the truth was sitting across the aisle from me on the 15.03 from Birmingham: a restless child, pawing at a toy which promised everything and delivered scarcely anything. I had the gift of forty pages of a book. He had the gift of an anytime unlimited nothing. This isn't progress.

The second was when I found myself near the Astoria. I say the Astoria, I mean the crane in this picture.  I'd read about the Astoria being demolished and some of the protests being staged to defend it. But you don't experience the full sadness of 'all that is solid melting into air' until you witness this sort of vast, oppressive absence. Many others have written far more eloquently and knowledgeably about the creative destruction of the capitalist city than I can. What struck me, however, was - it being a venue, and a wonderful historic one at that - my overwhelming urge to start ranting, a la James Murphy, "But I was there! I was there at the Manic Street Preachers gig in December 1994! I was there in 1997 when etc etc!"

This is more than the impulsive reaction to seeing heritage destroyed. It's connected to my unfortunate co-passenger on the 15.03 from Birmingham. As James Murphy sees all too clearly, the age of the internet (and especially the mobile internet) has accelerated the development of William Mitchell's Economy of Presence, in which the most scarce form of communication (i.e. co-presence, such as gig) becomes the most valuable, and the most abundant (i.e. data sent over time and space, such as a text) drifts to worthlessness like spam.

In technological terms, the Economy of Presence looks something like the table on the left. The mobile phone company's task is to convince us that moving more of our lives into the column entitled 'Different place' is a form of liberation (the clue is in the word 'telecom'). This isn't to say that they wage war on face-to-face communication, only that they don't typically extract any surpluses from it either. As for the empty space above it, nobody has discovered many cultural forms that sit neatly in that box (one example I can think of is the BFI Mediatheque, which is limited by place presumably as part of a copyright deal on their archive).

And yet, the regrettable impact of all this digital mediation creates the forms of pathology in the box on the right. Consumers have developed their own unfortunate behaviour to sit in that troublesome empty box (Vodafone must be delighted!), namely the drifting out of conversations, and into text messaging and email. As far as the 'different place' column is concerned, my co-passenger on the 15.03 was certainly eating up his free minutes like a good boy, but I wonder if he was enriched by this experience in any way. I wonder if he felt liberated, or actually vaguely oppressed. As Zizek argues, contemporary capitalism replaces the moral imperative 'thou shalt' with a new permissive imperative 'thou may', which is no less burdensome. (Zizek also defined neo-liberalism as 'you can do whatever you like, as long as it involves shopping'. There is a variant of it which says 'you can do whatever you like, as long as it involves an iPhone').

Which brings us to the bottom right hand box. My nostalgia for the Astoria was partly nostalgia for an age in which cultural production was simpler, less ubiquitous and more value-able, just as people now treat vinyl records as sort of tombstones for their more cherished music. The 'But I was there!' plea is an attempt to cling to something that cannot be watered down and rendered worthless by over-production.

What is more appalling about the marketing strategies of contemporary telecom companies is that they see this, and then seek to control this form of presence too. O2 are currently leading the way, with their Priority tickets campaign, in which they grant their customers early access to tickets at their growing network of venues. As I discuss here, the contemporary marketer loathes the notion that cash alone might grant someone access to something as rare as a concert, so much so that they'd almost rather make it free and exclusive than priced and inclusive. Evidently aware that their customers increasingly cherish live music (in an age when other forms of music have been reduced to frigging ring-tones, I wonder who's responsible for that), they have staged a landgrab on the 'same place' column, offering proxi-communication as part of their telecommunication packages. 

Having removed all constraints on the 'where' and the 'when, they discover to their horror that people actually liked many of those constraints, just as I liked being stuck on a train with my book for 70 minutes. Not tolerating this, they then move on the individual in a pincer movement, offering cultural immediacy as part of their sales pitch for cultural mediacy (thought: the words 'media' and 'mediocre' both stem from the same word, 'medium').

A few years back, I argued something along these lines in an article for Prospect, entitled Digital Exuberance [pdf here], in which I argued that we need an 'ethic of inconvenience'. This was partly inspired by the Marshal Berman-esque critique of capitalist urban churn, in which the past is constantly sacrificed for the future. One spin-off from the modernist critique of modernity is the Jane Jacobs defence of slowness and social complexity, which I think can contribute to a defence of co-presence, un-packaged by telecoms. I asked what might be the equivalent of a speed-hump for the digital age.

Now I'm wondering if the two forms of critique need to be fused in some way. With telecoms inter-woven with everyday social life, be it long distance or otherwise, all varieties of space are being marketed. We're cajoled to relinquish our enjoyment of just being there, and when we refuse, we're sold a new package which allows us to shout 'but I was there!' It's suffocating.

Clay Shirky, Ronald Coase and, err, me

Clay Shirky is a Coasian, and a very smart one at that. His analysis of emerging, internet-enabled social structures is based on the economic theory of transaction costs. My report on the nature and future of the firm is also Coasian up to a point, and yet I'm eager to take an exit from neo-classical economics, and to enter political sociology instead.

What I'm trying to stress, which I don't pick up from Shirky's work (and certainly not from the freakonomic Chicago-based followers of Coase), is that if non-market structures can be more efficient than market ones, then this makes political questions of authority, legitimacy, power and democracy (even more) unavoidable. The liberal economic attempt to entirely bracket questions of efficiency falters, once the very concept of efficiency becomes entangled with coercive or co-operative industrial structures.

This would then lead to a critique of Shirky, that I'd love to develop properly at some point. The seeds of it are actually contained in my Demos work. The section which the geekier amongst you may find interesting is entitled 'the future of co-operation?' and begins on p. 54. I take the following economic premise:

One might say that where mutuals have their value locked in to them, open networked collaboration practices make sure that value remains locked out of any private hands or organisation. If most firms seek to defend their intangible assets as a ‘private good’, and mutual societies do so as a ‘club good’, then open networked collaboration does so as a ‘public good’.

So far so Coasian. But then the political critique:

The problem these associations have is that they struggle to appoint decision makers or to overcome their defining feature, which is the freedom for people to exit and enter from one moment to the next. A mutual establishes a set of democratic rules that everyone then consents to. Power becomes centralised, but on the understanding that it is used within a constitutional structure. Open collaborative networks, on the other hand, have certain individuals who are more powerful than others (the highly connected, the initiators, the brokers) but little sense of legitimacy surrounding these individuals, and therefore little obligation for others to obey them. The bodies providing the ‘constitutions’ of the new associations tend to be private companies – Facebook, Google, Zopa etc – and their rules are currently established as they please. If a new democratic mutualism is to arise from any of this, and not merely a new informational mutualism, then this problem will have to be overcome.

My full Weberian rewrite of Here Comes Everybody will have to wait for another day.

what's politically worthwhile?

How do we judge the worth of a person? Philosophically this is a question almost too vast to address, leading beyond morality into much headier questions about existence, death etc. But sociologically, it can be much easier to take a bite out of. The economic sociology of Luc Boltanski, Laurent Thevenot and David Stark broadens the analysis of worth beyond narrow economic categories of value or efficiency to highlight the fact that such categories are parasitical upon larger, foundational accounts of what is morally valuable. On a technical level, Lucy Kimbell has explored the techniques of human evaluation in various artistic projects. And then there are those such as Kevin Kelly who are looking at this issue of self-auditting. If a philosophical defence of this sociology of moral pluralism is required, it is provided by Michael Walzer's Spheres of Justice.

Times of economic and political upheaval offer an opportunity to move from one evaluative framework to another. Boltanski and Chiapello's New Spirit of Capitalism is an outstanding exposition of how this can occur, focusing mainly on the moral-economic transitions that followed '68. This recent report on 'Prosperity Without Growth' shows a canny understanding of the possibilities to reinvent our economic evaluations, after the present crisis.

In line with some of my recent postings, and this thoughtlet about moral bragging, I keep coming back to this one question: why is it that 'citizens' seize social media to portray an optimal cultural representation of themselves, while avoiding any moral representation, but politicians seize mass media to do the reverse? As the two forms of media begin slowly to merge with one another, the issue starts to become even more striking.

Imagine, for a moment, that the state is just one organisation amongst many, simply with larger, more complex responsibilities for socio-economic coordination and investment (this shouldn't be too hard: it's what the neo-classical 'market failure' brigade and the Shirky-influenced politics2.0 crowd already appear to believe. This excessively economistic worldview is ultimately only able to distinguish between a nuclear warhead and an e-petition in the language of price). Then also imagine that a citizen is already a politician, just with a smaller remit and fewer people to represent. The convergence of broadcast and social media makes this easier to do on both fronts - after all, we're constantly told by Jeff Jarvis et al that a newspaper is just a blog with higher overheads, so why not view the state as a facebook group with prisons?

From this perspective, might we say the following: that in the age of a decentralised, network society, where people demand autonomy - primarily as consumers, but that could change - the problem politicians face is how to be more like 'us' and the problem 'we' face is how to be more like politicians. Matthew Taylor writes regularly on this latter issue of how to enable people to take active, collective responsibility for the world around them. 

Might this issue about aesthetic vs moral reputation be part of the problem, and hence part of the solution? Gordon Brown's central problem is that he conveys endless moralism, duty and calling, while failing entirely to communicate who he is. The civic deficit, on the other hand, is that people aspire to optimal identities, tastes and fashions, but only rarely gauge themselves in terms of 'the good life'. The politician measures worth in ethical terms while the citizen does so in aesthetic terms. Now that we all have equal access to the means of media production and can organise without organisations (still disregarding the substantive distinction between a nuclear warhead and an e-petition), politics has become a pro-am pursuit, but where the 'pros' are trading in social capital and the 'ams' in cultural capital. 

When politicians do start trading in cultural accounts of worth, we need to remain vigilent. At best it involves Tony Blair inviting Noel Gallagher to Downing Street, and at worst it involves something much more troubling, as we saw in the European election results. I wonder if we'll miss Gordon Brown's rather dreary, 1950s promises to 'do his duty'. In some ways it is rather comforting to be governed by politicians who are 'out of touch' as it relieves the citizenry of responsibility for the state of things. But anyone who is committed to the 'radical' devolution of power, to autonomy, to organising without organisations, grass-roots democracy and so on might seriously want to consider what a new moral economy might look like. How will ugliness, blandness, tastelessness be trumped in the future by virtue and participation? Or is the challenge simply to make ethics 'cool'? So how then is that different from the marketing strategies and 'reputation management' of ethically dubious companies? There must be a limit to how neatly ethics can be collapsed into aesthetics.

In the realm of consumption, optimists argue that ethical accounts of worth are beginning to fight back against aesthetic ones. In time, this may occur with use of media and mySociety-type initiatives may become a dominant force. But until then, the risk is that social media makes us spin doctors of our own lives, tweaking our cultural identities, where democracy in fact requires the opposite. As uncomfortable as it makes the British (not the Americans), perhaps virtue needs audiences and platforms for celebration.

One of Lucy Kimbell's evaluation projects, 'Pindices', looked at this issue of how to evaluate an individual's democratic worth. On the face of it, the project is absurd, beyond the realms of how we imagine ourselves living, but that poses the question 'why?'. I've noticed that people 'donate' their facebook statuses to a given cause, but 'moral bragging' is still taboo in comparison to 'cultural bragging'. I have no deep desire to see this reversed, but suspect that it signifies something about the challenges involved in creating the type of decentralised society that most of us purport to want.

social brutalism

In shockingly Germanic fashion, Facebook has gifted an entirely new verb to the English-speaking world. What do you do if you choose to 'like' someone's comment, link, photo or whatever, and then change your mind? Of course: you opt to unlike it. (Facebook doesn't grant you the chance to go as far as disliking it, but then I guess you simply opt to hide people you don't want to see).

It strikes me that we will need many such new verbs in the future. How else will we prevent our society gradually moving towards the ultimate synoptical inter-connection of every digital node in the world? How to tackle all the social pollution that's arising? Hence we need more mechanisms and norms to untag, unfriend, unlike, unsend, unreceive, untwitter...

You could look at this as just another example of privacy technologies in action. I've long believed that breaks in informational networks are just as valuable as links (I mean that culturally and politically, but if you prefer an economic explanation read Ronald Burt's paper [pdf] on this). Privacy is one way of understanding the value of disconnects. But things are more complicated than that now. 'Private' sits in opposition to 'public', in parallel to how 'economic' sits in opposition to 'political'. But can all efforts to unconnect really be understood in terms of this opposition? The problem of spam, for instance, doesn't really feel like a privacy deficit. Efforts to opt out of information networks aren't necessarily motivated by privacy.

Instead, the spirit of unconnection is fuelled by the Miesian aesthetic, 'less is more'. Unliking, unfriending, unconnecting will one day emerge as acts of social brutalism, analogous to architectural brutalism. They won't seek to alienate or criticise anyone, simply to minimise and cleanse. We have the phenomenon of undesign in web design, which I assume shares a similar aesthetic principle. The problem is that we're not talking about objects, buildings or pixels on this occasion, we're talking about people. It's all very well being a modernist when it comes to non-human actors, but what about where non-non-human ones are concerned? At some point we'll need it to be OK to say "it's not that I dislike you, it's just that I unlike you..."

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.

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.

moral bragging and web 2.0

I performed two acts of anti-anti-social behaviour in quick succession this morning around Old Street. Neither could strictly be described as 'pro-social', to borrow Matthew Taylor's expression (the first involved berating a man who chucked his litter away from a nearby litter bin, and ignored me; the second involved berating a woman who pushed past a blind person on an escalator, who then also ignored me), thereby contradicting that old mathematical wives' tale that a double negative is a positive. So anyway, here I am publicly patting myself on the back.

This got me thinking about how civic software, web2.0-type, mySociety-ish stuff might be reoriented to incentivise gallant (though admittedly pointless) acts of this nature: what's needed is a cross between Twitter and Habermas. Bear with me.

Habermas, following on from Kant, defines modernity in terms of the schism between the True, the Good and the Beautiful. These correspond to Kant's three Critiques (of Pure Reason, Practical Reason and Judgement). The first engages with the question 'what can I know?', the second with the question 'what should I do?' and the third with the question 'what do I like?'

Now, imagine a version of Twitter (or any other social software) in which the user had to explicitly categorise which of these three domains their announcement fell into. A cursory glance at how social software is currently used (at least in my networks) might suggest that it is in the second of these, the moral domain, where there is most room for improvement. Currently, these three domains are represented on Twitter and Facebook mostly as follows:

- What can I know? The first time anyone ever convinced me that Twitter might be anything less than excessive was when Bill Thompson explained to me that he'd once been lost in some American city, unable to find his conference venue, and he'd simply announced this on his Twitter feed. Within a few minutes, information had been sent to him by the hive mind of his various Twittering friends. This domain seems to be all working quite satisfactorily. There are endless other examples of effective social software in action, such as fixmystreet, Google's new flu scanning service etc, which employ networked technology to cognitive ends, as a supplement to bureaucratic organisational forms.

- What should I do? Consider cases when someone updates their Facebook status or Twitter feed around purely practical content. What would be a typical example? The most common genre is exemplified by "John is at home with the family", "Susan is tucking into a lovely dinner in front of the television" or "Chris is relaxing on a beach". Fine, but this is scarcely the stuff of Blue Peter Badges. Now what would happen if the following suddenly popped up: "Will has just berated a woman on an escalator for pushing past a blind person". I imagine the reaction might be one of 'stop showing off, you self-righteous bastard'. Indeed. Stop showing off. Except...

- What do I like? "Peter is in Tate Modern loving the Mark Rothko!" "Jennifer can't wait to go to the opera!" "Graham enjoyed the latest Coen Brothers movie". We all do this. I do this. Here's a dreadful, dreadful confession: I have some Coldplay on my ipod, but sometimes when it comes on, it occurs to me that it will show up in my lastfm profile, and I experience a momentary shudder of lost kudos. I wouldn't be surprised if I've subconsciously skipped it for this very reason. So I'm a narcissistic freak, but you get my point. Just as we display a deficit of moral pride, we display a surplus of aesthetic pride. On dating sites, people queue up to declare their cultural passions, but would fear looking evangelical if they sold themselves in terms of their charitable activities. And we wonder about anti-social behaviour...

Lets leave aside cognitive issues ('what do I know?'). My question is - why are we so comfortable reporting on the aesthetic peaks we scale, yet so conservative in reporting on our practical, moral decisions? To which the answer is - because we don't reflect on it in quite this way, and see it as all just reputational stuff. But codifying behaviour invariably alters it, once we come to view it differently.

With the reworked, Habermasian Twitter programme, people are forced to reflect on their public image in a three-fold way. What do (or don't) I know that I'm prepared to form a cognitive reputation on? What should I do, that I'm prepared to form a moral reputation on? What do I like, that I'm prepared to form an aesthetic reputation on?

The Nietzschean rebuke to this would be 'aha, but you're forgetting how Christianity polluted ethics with a self-destructive veneration of humility! It is far more acceptable in our self-loathing, Pauline world to declare that one is making mashed potatoes than that one is battling a mugger!'

Except, consider political spin in 2008. As far as we are led to believe by Downing Street, Gordon Brown's answer to the moral question 'what should I do?' is 'save Africa, be courageous, and help the poor'. But as far as we are led to believe by Downing Street, Gordon Brown's answer to the aesthetic question 'what do I like?' is 'X Factor and Raith Rovers'. Bizarrely enough, the spin politicians apply to their own lives is the direct inverse of the spin we apply to our own lives; while they play up their moral heroism and play down their aesthetic taste, we do quite the opposite.

If there were greater potential reputational currency connected to the moral sphere, perhaps we would be more inclined - out of sheer vanity, but so what? - to go about performing extroverted ethical acts. Don't knock spin: people who choose to project a positive image of some form are typically obliged to at least partially live up to it (this is the same reason why Corporate Social Responsibility should not be dismissed too lightly).

The truth is that I don't go around berating people in the street very often. The sun was shining, and I was mildly hungover. But if we all came to view ourselves as distinctly moral agents in the public eye, a la Gordon Brown, who knows what competitive reputational incentives this would then create?