potlatch

new article: from cigarettes to smartphones

I have a new piece in openDemocracy, exploring cultural and economic transitions, via the shift from a society of cigarettes to one of smartphones. Here's a chunk:

...on a deeper psychological and cultural level, the difference between these two framing devices could scarcely be more profound. This touches on the malaise of anxiety that has become the dominant psychiatric disorder of our age. While smoking affirms the limits of time and space around us, smart phones do precisely the opposite. While one allows you to spend a finite chunk of time in a given space, as a break from the flux of work or travel, the other connects you to a more complex and fluid world beyond your immediate situation. 

As framing devices go, the smart phone suffers from the inherent problem that it is leaky. It is constantly connecting us to other times, other places, absent people, absent places, some in the future and some in the past. The selfie may seem narcissistic, but it is captured with the possibility of being seen by others who are not present (at least, not yet). If it is an expression of anything, it is one of paranoia: paranoia that human memory is no longer adequate for experiences, that one may be seen by others, that one may not be seen by others.

This is a restless condition. Where the cigarette allows us to (in the immortal words of Oasis's horrifically bombastic 1997 album) be here now, a smart phone allows us to do precisely the opposite. In this psychological sense, it is the very antithesis of a cigarette. The transition from the one object in our pocket to the other speaks of a more general shift in the character of capitalism.

'The New Social-ism' - 11th December

I'm organising a conference, which addresses themes explored in these pieces of mine, regarding the new logic and expertise of the 'social'. If you'd like to attend, please register (for free) at this link.

 

The New Social-ism

What is valuable, visible & knowable in the emerging social economy?

A one-day conference hosted by Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies

10am-6pm, 11^th December 2013

Room MS.03, University of Warwick

Appeals to the ‘social’ today are everywhere: ‘social enterprise’, ‘social media’, ‘social neuroscience’, ‘social prescribing’, ‘social marketing’, ‘social analytics’, ‘social innovation’. This is thanks partly to the affordances of new techniques of accounting, network visualization and behavioural analysis, many of which take advantage of the ubiquitous digitization of market and non-market activity. The social world can be seen, quantified and influenced via new forms of expertise and data analytics. Managers, marketers and policy-makers make explicit appeals to the ‘social’, in order to sustain brands, rational decision-making, mental health and public goods.

How do we make sense of this? What is the ontology of the ‘social’ that is being appealed to, and how does it differ from the ‘social’ of 20^th century statistics, society and sociology? What methodologies are at work in rendering this form of sociality visible, measurable and governable? Is social network analysis now performative, as neo-classical economics has been described in the past? What power relations are latent in this new notion of the social, and to what extent is it in fact reducible to the economic after all - or, perhaps, the biological?

This conference brings together scholars working in economic sociology, science and technology studies, social studies of finance, social studies of Big Data and other fields, to address these questions. Confirmed speakers include:

• Profesor Nikolas Rose - Kings College, University of London
• Professor Nigel Thrift, University of Warwick
• Dr. Noortje Marres, Goldsmiths University of London
• Professor Yuval Millo, University of Leicester
• Dr. Liz Moor, Goldsmiths University of London
• Dr. Evelyn Ruppert, Goldsmiths, University of London

The conference is free to attend, but registration is essential. You can register for this conference here. All queries should be sent to Will Davies – [email protected]

The event takes place in Room MS.03, which is in the Mathematics and Statistics building. A campus map is available here (the building is number 38 on the map). Information on how to get to Warwick University is available here.

This conference is sponsored by:

the ol' global village

I spy some post-speculative melancholia:

Birmingham is offering to whisk you into a high-tech future known as 1997, when horizontal networks were going to take over stale old top-down organisations, the space of flows was going to make a mockery of traditional place-based communities, and 'London' was going to be re-defined as a network of business parks spread out along the M40.

Birmingham has wandered down this path using the sublime power of numbers. But what do these numbers mean? What would it mean for these particular numbers to be true? By my rough calculation, Birmingham is claiming to host nearly 700 annual conferences every day, which must surely be only a small proportion of the total number of conferences, seminars and trade fairs going on in the city. Is this a lot? It sounds a lot. Or maybe it isn't very much. Who knows?

Then there are the 400 million people that can be accessed via Birmingham's transport links. That's got to be a lot, surely - it's the same as the population of Europe, all accessible, from Birmingham! But then again, it's only quite a small proportion of the entire world. If one were to point out that this leaves nearly 6 billion people who can't be accessed via Birmingham, that suggests something's not quite working. Maybe they should have mentioned that Birmingham's telecom networks offer access to basically everyone in the world. Now that is a lot.

The advert appears to miss one important point about 'facetime', as it puts it: it's never unlimited. People have other obligations beyond networking: sleep, sex and death are the primary ones. Sure, they can just about sustain their bodies with puff-pastry-based canapes and chocolate-chip shortbread biscuits from conference break-out sessions. And there's no doubt bottled water and coffee galore. But, to paraphrase Oscar Wilde, networking with 400 million people... well it would just take up too many evenings.

Where did they get these numbers from, and what the hell are they supposed to mean? Interestingly, elsewhere the 'actually existing' network society has rendered such numbers almost commonplace. Wikileaks has just released 250,000 confidential documents recorded from US diplomatic cables, which is comparable to the number of annual conferences hosted in Birmingham each year. Facebook has around 500 million users, which is only 25% more than the people you can travel to from Birmingham. Maybe Birmingham has read Jeff Jarvis's What Would Google Do? and decided to turn itself into a sort of puff-pastry-based networking platform. The next step would be to get rid of Birmingham City Council, all of its democratic and participatory structures, and hand over total control of the city to an asocial 20-something in a t-shirt.

The confusion lurking within this advert is partly due to a total failure to understand economies of presence, a failure that was not uncommon in the mid-1990s. The notion that knowing or meeting more and more people, of being more and more connected, was somehow advantageous has come to appear rather old fashioned. The founder of Ecademy, Thomas Power, used to say that his ambition was to know 100,000 people (or maybe I've missed a zero); he appears to be more than half way there.  This is perfectly fine, but only in the same way that it's perfectly fine for batty old ladies to fill their entire houses with royal wedding memorabilia and Union Jacks. Each to their own and all that.

The prophets of the network society used to argue that the greatest losers in the dawning age would be the excluded - those without social capital, ICT access and mobility. The implication was that the greatest winners would be the most connected, the most mobile, living the most fluid lives. One thing that they missed was that network connections are not always symmetrical, as twitter has now helpfully made plain: I can 'know' (or 'follow') as many people as I like, but if they don't know me then my 'inclusion' in the great network does not equate to power. The fact that Birmingham is boasting about its access to 400 million people is tinged with a melancholia, offering state of the art transport networks for getting the hell out of Birmingham. It's like boasting about how many people one follows on twitter.

But more fundamentally, the concern for the 'disconnected' also entirely missed out much power can be attached to being disconnected. The prophets of networks thought that the greatest loser in the digital age would be the child without a modem. Instead, the greatest losers are those who are being forcibly plugged in, and losing authority and status as a result - state institutions, American embassies, old boy networks, publishers, families, political organisations, MPs and so on. It's not so much that these traditional forms of organisation are left behind by the rise of open access networks and fluid forms of association, it's that they are strategically undermined by them, sometimes to the point of unviability.

We were told that power would consist in having more and more connectivity (so the telecom industry hoped), making charisma and bandwidth the most important forms of productive capital. By this account, the city of Birmingham could have been a contender. Instead, power resides with Mark Zuckerberg and Julian Assange, individuals with few friends or capabilities, other than to break down whatever norms, rules and institutions used to enable society and communities to cohere (for better or worse).

So, yes, 'facetime' is indeed a valuable commodity. It is, no doubt, one reason to go to Birmingham, maybe even without the promise of a break-out session and a chocolate chip shortbread biscuit. One may even want to stay there, dwell there, build relationships there, without being lured into international travel and the space of flows. But all of these things are anathema to the logic of network maximisation. The only people who definitely gain from more and more connectivity are the sociopathic founders of the networks themselves. Everyone else is caught in various balances between knower and known, follower and followed, (ironic that Julian Assange is now desparately trying not to be followed, wherever he may be.)

Equally,  'Napsterising' institutions may be thrilling (who isn't enjoying the current diplomatic crisis just a tad?) or depressing (newspapers), or a matter of ambivalence between the two. Birmingham can turn itself into just another node in a network of sublime, exponentially increasing scale. Or else it could try to avoid this insidious mathematical logic in the first place.

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..."

emergency tipping points

Something rather extraordinary has struck the good hipsters of East London over the past week. For the past 18 months or so, they've opted to move around on fixed gear bicycles, with multi-coloured wheels and strange stubby handle bars. Skinny jeans are often rolled up to reveal ankle, possessions are strapped to the back, and fake NHS spectacles and moustache are employed to resist wind (it's this and the absence of walky-talky that distinguishes them from couriers).

This has raised two questions for me. First, what will happen when the winds of fashion change? Will the second-hand bike market become flooded with these somewhat impractical vehicles? Or could this be a permanent shift - in which case, should the government be virally targetting the movers and shakers with other environmentally-friendly devices? (David Cameron should remove his wind turbine immediately, and give it to Peaches Geldof).

Second, what happens when they fall off? Sadly, elementary safety devices simply aren't very cool. But neither is having one's bare head collide at speed with tarmac. Like a sort of morbid Malcolm Gladwell, I've been watching this closely, wondering who's going to crack first and employ some basic common sense. Perhaps if the most virally influential hipster were to be flung from his bike and land head-first on the pavement, that would then set off the various network effects that lead helmets to becoming fashionable.

Whether or not such an accident occurred, something has clearly happened in the last week or so.  Suddenly everyone is wearing helmets such as the one on the right, which most closely resemble the helmets of German WW2 soldiers  (combine that with the Joy Division soundtrack, the short back and sides hair and moustache, and you start to get a rather unattractive cultural cocktail...). The helmet solves the essential problem, being at once safe while also rather odd and somewhat nerdy. But this fashion has not travelled via the usual, slow viral channels. Equally, I would also be surprised if it later becomes renounced as 'over' in any way.

What this points us to is how little rationalist social science takes account of desire, libido, death fear. Tipping point theory, founded on some plausible social network analysis and some unappealing biological metaphors, has an account of causality, but no account of power or desire. How much do people want or need to follow a trend? In this instance, there was clearly so much pent up desire for a trendy helmet, that when one was identified/announced/disseminated, there was an immediate run on the things. Trend followers, on the other hand, virtually begin from the premise that what they're dealing with is frivolous and transitory (a bicycling hipster who was especially enamoured with Schopenhauer might feel the same about life, but they would be in a minority). They study the transmission mechanisms and mediators, but ignore the forces of attraction and repulsion (Nigel Thrift has begun to think about this via the notion of 'glamour').

Similar anxieties are now expressed with regard to the financial models that are implicated in the financial crisis. The causal mechanisms all seemed sound, but nobody had quite factored in the sheer weight of pent-up libidinous material lust for money that would then be poured through the innocent, formal models. Desire can warp conventional accounts of social causality. Models broke under the strain of urgency and ego. The Hayekian (and, to a lesser extent, Chicago) attitude to economics is that if nobody has very good knowledge regarding the future, it is best that all of these imperfect judgements are factored into social organisation via the institution of a market. People are imagined to have certain things that they want, but never things that they desparately need. The question the crisis raises is what happens when such imperfectly informed people allow their stomachs to overwhelm their brains? Greenspan's confession that he had got human psychology wrong - and the rise of the smug behaviouralists who claim to get it right - still misses the Nietzschean point that brains (whether rational or irrational) are outnumbered by hearts, stomachs, genitals and much else.

So, I'm glad the hipster helmet Mexican stand-off is over. Perhaps the Department of Transport subtly intervened with the Wehrmacht solution, before it all ended in tears. Whatever happened, I'm not sure the Gladwell model survived the stress-testing.

oxbridge life

Tom Coates has unearthed something that amuses me: Oxbridge Life, "a free interactive network for anyone who is studying - or has ever studied - at Oxford or Cambridge University. It helps both current students and experienced professionals reach out to fellow members of the Oxbridge community to make the most of each other’s knowledge and connections."

Obviously this would normally be quite odious for all the same reasons that McKinseys, say, is odious. But what tips this out of the realm of 'sinister' and into the realm of 'charmingly wrong about society and basically everything' is that you don't have to prove you attended Oxford or Cambridge to register! So where the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge provide the UK with genuine and generally regressive forms of social filtration (aka 'meritocracy') - generating the aforementioned 'Oxbridge community' - Oxbridge Life is a perfect hunting ground for people who idolise these great institutions but didn't attend them.

(Which reminds me of a job interview I had once:
Him: " ah! I see you went to cambridge... I've always been an Oxford man myself!"
Me: "oh right. Which college?"
Him: "oh... no I didn't actually go to Oxford")

One of the funniest bit of Oxbridge Life is the singles section, which has the strapline 'finally pillowtalk worth listening to'. What would this involve?! Sweet nothings about your punting technique? Dreamy reflections about one's first May Ball? But funnier still is the fact that the website looks, to my untrained eye, quite well designed and built, suggesting that someone takes this idea seriously enough to invest time and money in it. To the credit of Thomas Power, founder of ecademy, he has never claimed that his online club is especially exclusive (which ultimately is its main problem), but sells the idea in terms of the support it provides to lonely or unemployed professionals. By contrast, to establish an online network without any filtration mechanism, but to sell it in terms of elitism and snobbery, is utterly ridiculous. And yet, if it gradually undermines the Oxbridge brand (which is all it can do) perhaps it is a welcome intervention to British social hierachy.   

Rudeness and the network society: idea for research project

One of the key concepts in Social Network Analysis is that of 'centrality'. Analysts will look at an organisation or community, and disregard the presupposed hierachies in favour of node centrality. An individual may be quite close to the bottom of a formal hierachy, but occupy a position close to the centre of several informal sets of relationships, granting him a degree of centrality that reveals his actual power. To put it another way, if lots of people need to go through me to get something done, that indicates my power and influence in some way.

Following from this is the recognition that links are not apolitical. Person A can be dependent on Person B, but if person B has far greater network centrality than person A, then the relationship is not in equilibrium; B may not even recognise A as a contact at all. Links in networks are likely to flow primarily in one direction, rather than the other. I may have your mobile number, but if you don't have mine then this symbolises little.

(Incidentally, failure to recognise this is what led to some of the most hilarious delusions surrounding social software a couple of years ago. Harking back to 2003, only last month I got a message from some moron saying "I currently have over 525 connections on Soflow, and what with being able to get a hold of anyone who is one degree of separation away I have 2000 people in my network already. Therefore, those who are already connected to me have at least 2000 people in their network too. Considering there are just over 8000 people on the site all told, if you connect to me you'll be able to get a hold of one quarter of everyone on the site." Errrr... so owning the London phone book gives me 8 million contacts, right?)

Anyway, so the research idea...

In environments where hierachy is deemed unhip or simply ignored for whatever reason, tacit norms have to develop to represent the power imbalances in networks, and the greater centrality that some individuals have over others. Rudeness becomes a critical way of supporting informal politics in networks. If, for instance, I wear the mantle of an egalitarian hippy, but I am in fact a bit of a megalomaniac, it becomes critical that I am accessible, but not approachable. It is technically possible and formally permissable to contact me, but the power imbalance at work will be made aesthetically clear. You will be polite and slightly nervous; I will be aloof and look bored.

Projects for Valdis Krebs, one of the most interesting network analysts around:

1. Email typos in networks: go through an individual's inbox and sent items, and check which contains the most typos. If your sent items contains more, you have a positive centrality rating in your own network, because you are being more rude to others than they are being rude to you; if your inbox contains more, you have a negative centrality rating in your own network [NB. be wary of the 'tousled email': emails which have typos put in deliberately, to give the sender a false sense of busyness/importance]
2. Over-shoulder glances in drinks receptions: Count the number of times a person looks over a shoulder, and compare it to the number of times their shoulder is in turn looked over. Again, calculate centrality.

What you then do, is work out an actual ratio (plus or minus) to reveal to an individual how significant they are in the eyes of their own social world. This then becomes a diagnostic tool for therapists. If someone starts to develop a plus-5 rudeness rating, they are encouraged to move towards a more network-central, more rude culture; if the opposite happens, it is explained to them that they are out of their league, and must go and find a slightly more marginal social environment in which they can behave more rudely. 

Right, time to ring the ESRC...