potlatch

data's double life

Flicking through twitter over the weekend, I was struck by a peculiar contradiction between two articles that were being widely linked to. The first (which was really a cluster of articles) related to the revelations about the US government's surveillance activities, which, we now know, exploit the affordances of ubiquitous digital media, to record and analyse billions of informal communications between members of the public. As various wags have quipped, it turns out that Big Data really is very hot in Washington right now. The UK government has also been implicated, with the Foreign Secretary astonishingly blasé about the activities being alleged.

The second was an article in The Economist, complaining that the UK government has "a worrying disregard for data". Evaluations and censuses are being cancelled, statistics are being manipulated, evidence is being ignored. As a result, policies are being built on intuitions and prejudices, and New Labour's glorified 'evidence-based policy' agenda has fallen by the wayside. This is odd, given the recent flurry of excitement surrounding 'what works centres', in which the new 'gold standard' for policy evaluation, the RCT, has been promoted as the ultimate arbiter of rational policy-making.

Enthusiasm for RCTs, alongside the rise of Big Data and neuroscience, represents the emergence of a neo-positivism, in which the data is professed to 'speak for itself', unpolluted by theory or causal metaphysics. No doubt the National Security Agency's (NSA) enthusiasm for social media is that, unlike the subjects of Stasi and KGB surveillance, Facebook users are happy to speak for and surveil themselves, sharing all sorts of banal details of their lives, locations and activities voluntarily. The genius of this new surveillance state is that it, like the liberal market state before it, works with the grain of individual freedom, rather than against it.

But which is it to be? Do we want states to become more interested in data or less? The positivist answer is that we want governments to become more interested in some data, and less interested in other data. The tricky thing here is that positivists must also vehemently deny that there is any politics of data in the first place: repeat, data must be allowed to speak for itself. And yet only certain individuals, using certain techniques, are able to truly listen to what the data is trying to say to us. Positivists may end up making the somewhat underwhelming critique, that security agencies and marketing companies simply aren't good enough listeners. If only they had read their Karl Popper a bit more closely, and then watched The Lives of Others, they'd represent the perfect audience for Verizon customers.

What this reminds us, should any reminder be necessary, is of the contradictory nature of positivism generally. The primary problem with positivism isn't epistemological, but political: it seeks a monopoly on the legitimate means of truth, to match (and occasionally complement) the state's monopoly on the legitimate means of violence. It then abstains from any political engagement with the critics of this monopoly, for fear that this would be to abandon it. Hence, perfectly empirical and empiricist histories and sociologies of science (with or without post-structuralist baggage) must be simply ignored, a tacit recognition that they also carry some truth, which (like the IRA in the 1980s) must be starved of the oxygen of publicity. The same holds in the relationship between economics and the history of economics, not to mention economic history. A huge amount of political work goes into keeping politics at bay.

In Science in Action, Bruno Latour discusses the 'janus-faced' nature of modern science, which attributes its real-time 'discoveries' to individuals in certain times and places, but its past findings to some non-human thing called 'nature'. Something similar is going on with data right now. On the one hand, it is becoming hotly politicised, rarely more so than over the last few days in the context of the NSA revelations. Even aside from surveillance or governmental issues, it appears that social and economic life is becoming lived dynamically in terms of production, manipulation and interpretation of data, with (for example) live events being compulsively recorded, tweeted and connected to. Data is now part of lived experience, or rather lived experience is being 'datafied'.

On the other hand, data is being icily naturalised, with its institutional and methodological preconditions being marginalised from discussion. Arguably this is a rhetorical ploy on the part of those who simply want to collect more data. The idea of an entirely neutral methodology, which allows data to 'speak for itself', will be most appealing for those who don't wish to justify their scientific activities.

Every wave of positivism eventually comes undone, when its central contradiction emerges. The fact that the resolutely 'anti-political' behaviorists of the 1920s, for example, produced techniques of psychological control that could serve the interests of military and corporate power, is one demonstration of this. The NSA revelations arguably herald a similar moment of reckoning for digital data collectors and analysts. Google's childish political mantra of being anything other than 'evil' ignored the historical lesson, that apolitical, purposeless knowledge is often one of the greatest assets to the strategies of the powerful.

What would be the positivist (or neopositivist) response to any of this? For those who believe fMRI's reveal the 'truth' of who we are, that RCTs prove 'conclusively' 'what works', or that, with enough data, correlations start to 'speak for themselves' allowing us to abandon our causal theories, is the task now to build an even higher wall around what counts as 'science'? While Google, Facebook et al cosy up with the US security services, will Dawkins, Ridley et al still turn their backs on the increasingly obvious Nietzschean insight, that power and knowledge are entangled, rather than ontologically separate? And if they shrug, and quietly accept the role of money and violence in making knowledge possible, what will they have to say about it? What notion of democracy will they appeal to, once the boundary of the science lab is accepted as arbitrary and constructed? No doubt they fear that the choice is between positivism and a complete postmodern free-for-all, echoing the Hobbesian choice between the all-powerful Leviathan and the deathly state of nature. But if this is the case, they will find it increasingly difficult to criticise the actions of anyone who claims an exclusive right to observe and analyse, including security agencies.

where do neoliberals go after the market?

My colleague, Nate Tkacz and I, have put together a conference at CIM, which tries to think about neoliberalism in terms of rival technologies of information-processing.  In particular, could the market be usurped within the neoliberal imagination by other 'smarter' machinic visions of liberty, such as those promised by 'open data'? Philip Mirowski will give a keynote, drawing on his forthcoming book on the financial crisis. The full ad for the conference is copied below (the original link is here) with registration details at the bottom. Come along!

 

Where Do Neoliberals Go After the Market? - A one day conference, 13th June

University of Warwick

10am-6.30pm

Room S0.21

Neoliberalism is commonly identified as a belief in the self-regulating powers of markets, especially financial markets. Markets, from this perspective, are powerful information-processors, which are uniquely capable of governing complex societies while preserving liberty. In recent decades, financial institutions have added further computational power, which, among other things, has led to the automation of trading and the calculation and simulation of market scenarios to manage risk. The financial crisis has been perceived by some as the outcome of this collision between markets and increasingly ‘performative’ economics.

But where does this leave neoliberalism and its technical ideal of freedom? Does it simply require more markets or greater computational power to prevent future crises? Or are we witnessing the emergence of a different neoliberalism, based on different technologies and ideologies of liberty, in appeals to ‘Big Data’ and ‘openness’? Might software and ‘open data’ usurp the primacy of the price system in the neoliberal imagination, as tools of governance in complex modern societies? To what extent are the political desires of the digital elite – from Hackers to Silicon Valley – amenable to the neoliberal project?

This one-day conference will address these questions from a range of disciplinary perspectives, including software studies, history of economics, political theory, media studies, international political economy and economic sociology.

Speakers

• Prof Philip Mirowski, University of Notre Dame
• Prof Shirin Rai, University of Warwick
• Dr Richard Barbrook, University of Westminster
• Dr Orit Halpern, New School for Social Research
• Dr David Berry, Swansea University
• Dr Johan Soderberg, Université Paris-Est/Écoles des Ponts

 

Conference themes

• Neoliberal responses to financial crisis
• The invention and reinvention of 'competition'
• The philosophy and techniques of 'openness'
• The persistence and reinvention of the market
• The intersections between neoliberalism and cybernetics
• The significance of data and 'Big Data' to the evolution of neoliberalism
• The role of specific devices in visions of freedom
• The political lineages of 'hackers'

 

Attendance

The conference is free to attend, but registration is essential. To register please click here.

Room S0.21 is in the Social Sciences block. A campus map is available here. All details on how to get to Warwick University are available here.

the pre-history of the Tweet

In the early 2000s, I had a brief and enjoyable run-in with the world of trend-spotting and technology futurism. I guess this was the transition point between a period when the geeks were still experimenting with new forms of digital sociability and the corporations had worked out what they wanted from 'new' media. As something of an outsider to this fast-talking world of predictions and Silicon Valley anecdata, I would be transfixed by seminar presentations and talking shops, in which it was never entirely clear who precisely knew what, or on what basis they knew it. Nor was it entirely clear where money fitted in to the scene. Of course, nobody was in it for the money; but they still wanted to continue the conversation back at their central London loft, or over an expensive breakfast the next day. The borderland between innovation and capital needs its cultural and economic sustenance.

When technology futurists and trendspotters got together, with a smattering of geeks, business consultants and maybe the odd tame BT engineer, there could be a lengthy mexican stand-off, as everyone waited to see who was willing to share some dazzling insight first. Murmers about a recent visit to 'the Valley' would be the New Economy equivalent of loosening a top button or showing a little flicker of leg. But who was to know if anyone else had any real futurological beans to spill?

Then, out of nowhere, it would happen. Waiting for a pause in the conversation, one well-shirted man in trendy glasses would sit back in his chair and throw down one of his aces: "what's so different in Tokyo now [this being a time when references to Japanese IT usage could still be enough to make the entire Nasdaq stand to attention] is that teenagers aren't holding their phones to their ears any longer, but typing on them in front of their eyes"...

Silence.

An epistemological bell had been rung. A glimmer of a smile would appear around the lips of the geeks, while the trend-spotters would scribble furiously in their moleskins, nodding urgently. Others glanced at each other, with an I-know-that-you-know-that-we-both-know furtiveness, as if someone had just broken sweet consultancy wind. It was a form of magic.

Where had this pearl come from? How was it so perfectly formed? If I'd been a little less trusting or concerned with intellectual norms of accreditation and citation, I probably could have worked it out. This brilliantly concise nugget of wisdom had been thrown into the pool, not only for everyone's consumption, but to be recycled for future use. It was a contribution to the chat commons. But, by the same logic, it had also been extracted from the chat commons on a previous occasion.

(A few months later, I showed a draft version of a report I'd written to an external associate. The report contained a concise insight into online social networks that I had discovered from - and accredited to - an American sociologist, Paul Resnick. The associate in question commended this insight in particular, offering as proof of its credibility that he had successfully sold some consultancy to Orange on the back of it. I wasn't sure whether to be flattered, to pass on this flattery to Prof Resnick or to suggest to Prof Resnick that he invoice Orange directly.)

I'm frequently reminded of this game of futurology poker, thanks to twitter. I am basically a 'lurker' in the twittersphere, following friends and peers, but hiding behind an impersonal institutional twitter account. I follow the general hubub, while contributing very little. It's like being on the bank of the Thames, watching a flotilla go by, or a viewer of BBC2s Review Show as Paul Morley drones on about why nobody else understands the 1980s as much as him. No offence; except to Paul Morley, obviously. I enjoy most of it tremendously.

What really transports me back to those croissanted mornings of technological chatmanship is one particularly odd genre of tweet: the real-time quotation of a conference speaker. Most twitter-users will know the score. Someone is at a conference, and broadcasting each nugget of wisdom as it lands from the podium. "Austerity isn't the problem without a solution, it's the problem of a failed solution #economyconference". "Facebook is to entrepreneurs what petrol stations are to pedestrians #technologyconference". "Evolution has solved the problem of death by replacing it with a problem of life #dawkins". "Steve Jobs wasn't a CEO, he was an OEC #China". What the hell are you all on about???

Is the conference speaker communicating exclusively in arguments of 140 characters or less? Or are the audience stripping out everything of any depth or weight from what they're saying? Is the tweeter performing some sort of public service function? Who, exactly, is intended to benefit from having these contextless aphorisms floating around our networks and heads? Maybe the idea is that, when I'm next on a conference platform and searching for something tweetable to say, I can plunder the past by plucking "the tree is nature's equivalent of a bicycle #TED2012" from the tweet phrasebook.

I recently read Philip Mirowski's intimidating More Heat Than Light, about the origins of neo-classical economics' theory of value. One interesting passage from the book concerns the 'free trade mercantilists' (Nicholas Barbon, John Houghton, Dudley North and William Petty). This bunch of pamphleteers criticised the mercantilist argument, that the wealth of a nation could be measured in gold, and that the purpose of the state should therefore be to engage in zero-sum acts of hoarding. As Mirowski argues, Petty in particular came extremely close to inventing classical economics, by arguing that markets have some autonomous function and that wealth exists independently of any monetary measure of it. However, he did not make the final leap (made by Adam Smith) of formally identifying labour as the standard measure of value.

Similarly, Eve Chiapello has shown how accounting provided many of the categories and tools that later made up classical economics, including categories of capital and profit. The point, as pragmatist sociologists stress, is that codified social science is a late-comer, which arrives only after human practices have evolved to the point where they can be formalised and rendered objective. The problems and perspectives that underpin classical economics long pre-dated Smiths Wealth of Nations. In that sense, a formalised social science became both possible and (arguably) necessary, because there was already sufficient common understanding of a certain view of economic life. A social science that simply descended on us from outer space would be both useless and meaningless, no matter how brilliant or truthful. If lions could speak, we should not be able to understand them, and all that.

I suspect that the same is true of twitter. People already communicated in 140 characters or less, before its invention. Knowledge already had to be produced in a style that enabled ease of circulation and re-use. The tweet has a pre-history. No doubt twitter's founders were attending similar meetings and seminars in the early 2000s, noting the virtue of concision and aesthetics of seeming well-informed. The norms pre-dated the technology, but were heavily localised in a world of futurism and seminars, that few were privy to. Twitter therefore extended its founders already-existing social norms, in the same way that the internet has done more broadly, for the once-localised norms of geeks and hackers.

If, for the sake of a thought experiment, we imagine twitter being introduced into Victorian society or even into 1970s society, I wonder if it could possibly have provided a platform for anything meaningful. Of course, the codification and automation of a social norm entrenches and transforms it in various ways, just as the invention of classical economics unleashed entirely new ways of talking about, governing and acting on economic processes. An uninteded cost - and, in the case of the windbags out there, benefit - of twitter may, in time, be that conference speakers increasingly strive to offer their insights as concise nuggets of wisdom, which can be dispersed by the audience into the ether. It may also be that these spread like memes, losing any sense of authorship as they travel. The pre-twitter tweets that were once scattered across breakfast seminars, as a hint of brilliant consultancy to come, now have an abundance that makes them difficult to escape.

how not to save a tiger

In my best impression of Alan Partridge, I recently lost my rag with someone in the street by shouting at them, "that's not how tigers die!" An unusual form of insult, I'm sure you'll agree. The person in question was a chugger, probably from the World Wildlife Fund or somewhere, who had been trying to block my path in the now-standard manner of waving a clipboard in my face and doing a silly little dance. But as I walked past, still smiling falsely at them, they had the nerve to say "this isn't about a direct debit! I just want you to send one text and save a tiger!"

How dare they? How dare they insult both me and the tiger community (as they are probably known), by implying some equivalence between a text message and a tiger's life. An absence of text messages, as I informed the young chugger, is "not how tigers die". I am usually a more gracious respondent - chuggee? - than that, but I am becoming increasingly wound up by the marketing strategies of charities and their phoney account of digital media. Exhibit B:

Again, the imputed equivalence in this advert is horrific, and entirely unbecoming of a charity of Amnesty's stature. This is one of a series of ads on the London underground, implying some magical omnipotence to the possessor of a commuter with a mobile phone (or, conversely, some peculiar impotence or triviality on the part of a prison guard or torturer several thousand miles away). 

First and foremost, the advert is a lie, although the word "and" is of course ambiguous. Maybe they're not implying any causal link between the two events, in which case one might place an advert saying "A man in Colchester shops in Tescos and he wins the lottery". Maybe that's what most advertising effectively does anyway, but the bit after the "and" is normally represented with an image, to the effect that "a man uses a deoderant and [image of woman with large breasts]".

But there is something more troubling about this, than just standard marketing mendaciousness. Adam Smith was concerned by the fact that human beings seem to feel less sympathy for others, the further they are away (see this interesting piece in the LRB on how this problem manifests itself in climate change). This is not a problem that can be easily solved or got round. But the strategy of these charities is not to work on increasing the level of sympathy, but of trivialising the nature of the problem. In the advert above, it is assumed by Amnesty that human beings (at least in London) have very little capacity to imagine the situation of others, to sympathise over distance or to adopt an unconditional moral position. Rather than nurture imagination, sympathy or moral sentiment, the advertisement effectively suppresses those things by containing them within the solipsistic realms of the ego-phone. The individual's solitary comfort zone is reinforced by this, rather than rattled in any way.

Aside from this, there is also the problem of economic and technological functionalism, that I've complained about before, in which social life is reduced to a series of inputs and outputs. Institutions are hollowed out by a philosophy that understands them entirely in terms of their measured outputs, rather than their routines and rules. But when digital technology is thrown into the mix, something quite preposterous happens: the relationship between input and unput becomes utterly mystified, as if it's no longer anything to do with us. The therapeutic role of digital media is to allow an instrumental view of social relations to be propagated, in which the instrument somehow suspends any sense of moral causality or responsibility. Between the 'input' and the 'output' is a machine that we are blissfully unable or unwilling to understand. Hence, the possibility that clicking "send" might stop a stoning in Iran.

What does Amnesty or anyone else gain from this? Their aim seems to be to build up a database of phone numbers, as the tiger chuggers were apparently doing also. Hopefully this makes them better equipped to prevent torture and illegal imprisonment; they must know what they're doing. But they're also engaged in a political equivalent of "quantitative easing", which runs the risk of political hyper-inflation: in their desparate bid to get political will moving, they're exaggerating the efficacy of their tactics, to the point where they will start to lose value. A greater and greater 'quantity' of political output is being promised, for a smaller and smaller 'quantity' of ethical action on the part of the Western consumer. As credulity declines as well, the long-run effect can only be bad for the charitable sector as a whole.

'political correctness' revisited

We live in the age of 'transparency' or what I once heard Michael Power describe as 'the age of permanent audit'. This is thanks to the presence, sometimes ubiquity, of technologies which make audit the default option, and inaudit (or privacy) a form of specified opt-out. For celebrities, these include legal and quasi-legal forms of media surveillance; for the powerful, it means the constant threat of leaks, the publication of money-grabbing memoirs and Freedom of Information Requests; for the rest of us, it means facebook and digital cameras.

Under these conditions, words, actions and decisions have a nasty habit of catching up on one. Interestingly, we've largely forgotten about the intrusion of the Big Brother state (for the time being), and discovered that the public sphere can be a far more brutal and effective mechanism for surveillance than the all-seeing, expert panopticon. This is partly thanks to the on-going furore around 'hackgate' in the UK, but also because of a strange new form of political correctness that appears to be emerging, as the public etiquette of the twitter age.

As Chris Dillow argues, a number of recent events suggest that the British have become incredibly over-sensitive recently. Despite having been one of the marchers that Jeremy Clarkson said he would like to shoot (in front of my family) in November, I was depressed by the scale of reaction against a man who (as Stuart Lee points out) is paid specifically to recite predictable rightwing slogans in public. The saga over Luis Suarez's finger - which hilariously now gets reported with the offensive gesture concealed - suggests that we're reviving an Edwardian sensibility. This at a time when no Guardian or Observer op-ed is complete, without an anonymous cabinet minister being quoted that someone or other is "completely fucked" (serving only to demonstrate the intimacy of quoter with quoted).

Levels of rudeness, obscenity and pornography are becoming normalised everywhere, while the stakes surrounding a stray finger or badly-judged joke are also rising rapidly. It's hard not to feel sorry for the BBC and Channel 4, who have to muster unprecedented levels of confidence (that are impossible to defend, if challenged persistently enough by enough people) that Franky Boyle or someone is within his rights to use a certain word or sentence.

Clearly, twitter and chatrooms have changed things in two obvious ways. Firstly, registering disgust has become massively easier, a problem which afflicts various service and hospitality industries, via user feedback websites. Secondly, movements of disgust can gather momentum and experience tipping points, until they dominate the headlines. This means that complaints can far outstrip the number of initial viewers, as 'Sachsgate' demonstrated best of all.

All of which turns public offence and defence into a game, involving strategy, scores, winners and losers. Offence can be measured partly in terms of how many people claim to be offended. But there are also PR-type strategies at work in terms of getting things into and out of the public 'conversation'. If they hang around for long enough, then it becomes apparently insensitive for political leaders to avoid confronting them (as both Ed Miliband and David Cameron seemingly felt in relation to Jeremy Clarkson's joke). Because the threat of over-reaction by the public is now so great, authorities often opt to over-react in the first place. For instance, this mildly irreverant Tim Minchin Christmas song was apparently pulled by ITV, before any offence had been taken. OfCom, which ironically was set up according to the most boldly technocratic principles of any regulator, is now in the unfortunate position of having to adjudicate over many such moral issues. Humour experts cannot be far behind.

What gets forgotten in amongst all of this is a fairly simple question: what does offence consist of in the first place? This NYRB article, reviewing two books on digust, might be a good place to start. I am perfectly willing to call Jeremy Clarkson a 'tosser', or even - if I thought I could get a cheap laugh - suggest that he be chopped into slices and fed to the rest of the Top Gear team. But I would find it difficult to watch the clip of him asking for marchers to be 'shot', and report that I am experiencing 'offence' or 'disgust'. To do so would be to descend to another form of moral failing: it would make me a 'liar'.

So what about the recent scandals surrounding racism by Premier League footballers? Maybe all of this over-sensitivity is a price worth paying, if it helps to out John Terry and Luis Suarez as racists and condemn them accordingly. But the problem is that these cases still feel like they're part of a game. The moral repugnance of racism gets almost overlooked, in favour of empirical questions, such as who said what, how do we know, what does the camera or microphone pick up, whose responsibility is it to act, what does the FA (or police) have to do in order for the issue to go away again, how will this affect his football or the England football team. It's almost as if John Terry's greatest mistake was to be so easily lip-read. Quite how or why a multi-millionaire England football captain thinks like that in the first place (or whether he really does) gets left in the shadows, by debates about what can be seen and confirmed as true.

As a result of all this, the age of transparency is also the age of the choreographed grovelling apology. The most disgusting - yes, I think I really mean that - aspect of the Aiden Burley 'nazi-themed stag party' scandal was the report that:

Aides tried to arrange for him to join a trip organised by the Holocaust Educational Trust to Auschwitz, the Nazi concentration camp in German-occupied Poland. But the Tory leadership moved against Burley after the newspaper reported on Sunday that he was responsible for hiring the Nazi uniform.

So their ruse didn't quite work. But the point is this: in the game of public offence and defence, Aiden Burley's aides sought to instrumentalise a Nazi concentration camp as a strategy to wrong-foot his opponents (perhaps in time for the lunchtime news). Personally, I hope Aiden Burley and his aides suffer serious disappointments in their careers, leading to prolonged regret and self-doubt. In front of their families. I'm not joking, but I am being offensive.

John Terry's PR team pulled off an equivalent coup, with this surreal headline. Is this where we're all heading to? Mobilising children, monuments and history as a means to distract the twittersphere for a few hours? Some bizarre logic of equivalence is underway, that one regrettable photograph or youtube clip can be cancelled out with one carefully planned (and photographed) gesture towards transcendent political ideals or tragedies. I suspect that Princess Diana may have set the stage for the politics of this new era.

The first wave of political correctness was idealistic, with shades of Orwellian mind control, but too technologically naive to tip into totalitarianism. It sought to police how people spoke, but with no means of achieving this, other than traditional education, debate and disapproval. As the inverse of this, the new wave of political correctness is technologically sophisticated, but with no ideals attached. It is purely concerned with catching people out, making them look foolish, putting them through the ringer for a few hours, days or weeks (depending on how much they are considered to deserve it).

But as a result, it has no concern with the unseen, the undetected or the not-yet-detected. It can work in tandem with professional investigative journalism (as with hackgate, MPs expenses and wikileaks), but it only judges what it can see. It reduces crimes and misdemeanours to their visible evidence, which can be cancelled out by the creation of equivalent visible counter-evidence.

whatever happened to 'Japan'?

Nations, as Benedict Anderson famously proposed, are 'imagined communities'. But 'the global' is also an imaginary horizon. When we think of 'the global', we think of something, and it isn't typically a planet. It typically involves something about trade, cosmopolitanism, information and financial flows, diplomacy. And it varies constantly. In the 1960s, to imagine 'the global' would most likely have included space satellites, that made a visualisation and a technological use of 'the global' possible. But now, we're far more likely to think of telecom cables or internet platforms.

It follows that nations aren't only imagined by their residents, but also, just as importantly, as components within the (equally imagined) global horizon. There is, as I explored here, an 'America' as imagined and constructed by Americans, then an 'America' as imagined and constructed by Europeans. And it recently occurred to me that one way in which 'the global' has been transformed over the past decade is in the gradual disappearance of 'Japan' in its formulation. How could an imagined nation disappear from our cultural, political and economic consciousness quite so rapidly, yet without us even noticing?

Japan's status as our (i.e. the West's) economic and cultural horizon peaked in the 1980s, a time when Clive James created an entire television genre dedicated to marvelling at strange techno-oriental practices, which supposedly avoided the charge of racism because the Japanese economic and social model was eminently so much more successful than our's. Rumours of hotels where you slept in a small capsule, mobile phones which could communicate with microwaves, vending machines selling used underwear (please tell me I didn't imagine that one on my own) animated pub conversations in Britain throughout the 1990s, even as the supporting social and economic model was dwindling under an economic depression. By the time that the UK show Banzai was launched as a kitsch play on such things, the reference points were fading from memory. The stupidly over-rated Lost In Translation was merely a coda (its primary cultural significance is to have nudged The Jesus and Mary Chain and My Bloody Valentine out of retirement for a few months).

When I dabbled in consumer technology research circa 2002-03, Japan still carried an exotic hint of our own future. Powerpoint presentations were not complete without some reference to what Japanese teenagers were doing with their mobile phones, no doubt generating a fair amount of apocrypha along the way (there was always one rumour about teenagers ringing each other, then hanging up after one ring, as a cost-free way of saying 'hello').

So much has changed. The depression of the Japanese economy meant that the wonks and economists lost interest in the model some years ago. Japan was a scarcely-noticed absentee from the global financial crisis, having been weighed down by its own collapsed credit system for nearly twenty years.  The plundering of Japanese production techniques (just-in-time production, Total Quality Management) by American management specialists over the 1980s meant that 'Toyotism' is no longer the horizon of productivity, as these tricks have now spread. But remembering that phones-speaking-to-microwaves used to be our global future also throws our new global future into some relief. Here are a few ways in which the global is now imagined differently.

Firstly, we now imagine the global in terms of the rising BRIC economies. The future will now be produced by cheap and abundant labour, not by mysterious oriental tech-wizardry (NB I am trying to describe an imaginary, not a reality!). 'The global' is therefore a harsher, more primitive horizon than it used to be. It no longer represents scientific progress, so much as sheer scale of population. (Meanwhile, the concept of 'the third world' has also fallen away, due to a combination of political correctness and economic trends). One feature of this is that, where 'globalisation' used to be conceived as the partner to acute urban densification (with Tokyo as the iconic example), it is now conceived as the partner to a more primary process of voluminous urbanisation (with Mumbai as an iconic example), not unlike the urbanisation of Europe and the United States during the 19th century.

Second, and in combination with the first point, the internet now dominates imaginations of the global. Around the time of the millenium, companies such as Cisco started to run advertisements with Chinese and Indian children staring into the camera, asking "are you ready?" - ready, in this instance, for the emergence of a single, virtually free, global medium, which was no longer exclusive to wealthy or technologically advanced nations. Again, the global was now about sublime numerical scale. A decade on, it has become clear that the companies with most to gain from the internet are not those with the most far-fetched technological imaginations, but those with the greatest numerical imaginations. Google and facebook are mathematical business propositions, based on insight into what changes once things are measured in billions, not millions.

Thirdly, and relatedly, imaginations of 'the global' now include a somewhat different status for 'America', once 'Japan' is absent. From the mid-1970s onwards, the US became increasingly paranoid that Japan was "eating its lunch", taking American jobs by producing consumer goods and cars that American consumers then bought. The reversal of fortunes during the Clinton years changed all of that. 'Off-shoring' of US jobs went from being viewed as a 'threat' to a means of exploiting the huge new cheap labour pools that were opening up. Post-2008, the US has lost any pretence of being a financial hegemon, but it retains some status as a technological hegemon. 'The global' is now conceived in terms of the relationships between the US and the BRICs, and while dependence on Chinese surpluses means the US is scarcely in charge, nor does this balance of power look especially troubling for a US statesman.

In all these ways, the new imagination of 'the global', lacking Japan, has gone hand in hand with a new imagination of what our collective technological future looks like. The influence and status of Clay Shirky is a good indication in this respect - Shirky's expertise is in people, not in machines. As he says, it is when technology itself ceases to be remarkable that its social effects are most radical. This is quite the opposite of how 'the global future' was imagined during the heyday of Japanese tech exoticism.

If a single company defined the imagined global horizon in the 1970s and 1980s, it would have been Sony or Toyota - Japanese firms out-performing, out-thinking tired, Western competitors. Their prowess was best represented in making things that 'we' would scarcely even know how to use. Today it would be Apple - a home-grown US household name, that exploits Chinese labour and the lessons of American business strategy, to enable ordinary people to sit at home or in a cafe, idly toying with a multi-billion user medium. Their prowess is in taking the global, with all of its numerical sublimity, and somehow transforming it into a source of comfort.

the tedious ethic and the spirit of capitalism

The spirit of capitalism is not in good shape, if this advertisement for the iPad is anything to go by. Could our contemporary era be about to suffer a crisis of banality?

The reason for my alarm lies in the messages that are contained in these various tweets. These read:

The sun's out but it's raining! How is that even possible?

Just ate the best sandwich. Ever.

Can't wait to see my sister tomorrow!

Ran 10km this morning

I've long found the marketing strategies of telecom companies fascinating, though also deeply irritating, as these posts explore. What intrigues is that telecom networks are a product without any cultural quality or definition of their own, and must be sold purely as the possibility of social interaction. The product is other people. Hardt and Negri suggest that sheer sociability (speech, sympathy, affect etc) is now the source of value within post-industrial capitalism, and what must be inculcated in workplaces and beyond, to be drawn on by capital. What they do not add is the extent to which sheer sociability is also sold as a product, particularly by telecom and IT companies.

It follows from Hardt and Negri's analysis that individuals must be kept in a state of adequate sociability if immaterial labour (on which capitalism now depends) is to produce effectively. But it may also follow that individuals must be kept in a state of some loneliness if immaterial products (the promise of togetherness, love, sexual satisfaction) are to carry on being purchased. Hence, how telecom companies set about dangling that promise in front of people is actually quite significant. 

There is a dilemma attached to this. The sociability in question has to be available to everyone, and yet has  also to be special. It cannot be 'weird' or 'abnormal', but nor can it be dull. T-Mobile briefly experimented with some grizzly attempts to use amateur singers to represent what was special-yet-universal about their network, but these have thankfully disappeared of late. Family has long served to solve the problem, right back to those BT adverts depicting people ringing their parents and grandparents (including this monstrous attack on the queen of sciences). The fact that everyone has a family does not by any means detract from what makes it unique and special. But one problem that the telecom industry has, which other industries do not, is that it is hard pressed to employ the advertising industry's most reliable source of desire, namely sex. Where phoning one's mum is a nice marketing proxi for everything that is warm and special about family, phone sex or pornography are not (yet) acceptable means of channelling libido into retail. In a sense, the Orange 'don't let a mobile phone ruin your movie' ads are an honest appraisal of this dilemma.

Which brings us to twitter. What is a normal, yet special, thing to be communicated via twitter? What is twitter for? It is in many ways a credit to the power of twitter that it isn't for anything. No doubt it very occasionally offers a medium for essential information to be transmitted, maybe even averting emergencies, or catalysing them with political uprisings. But to say that twitter isn't for anything is also to say that it offers us far more technical communicative capacity than we could possibly need. We are only able to say that water 'isn't for anything', because we have more than we need; if we didn't, it would be for drinking, cleaning and farming.

Capitalism depends on frustrated yearning to persist, as both Marx and Keynes recognised. Its gravest danger is that people get enough of something, or even too much. Enough leads to a demand short-fall; too much, and you have a crisis of over-production. Many people pine for more intimacy with their loved ones; many people pine for greater sexual gratification. Harnessing these sources of dissatisfaction provides capitalism with a route to its own survival, as Boltanski and Chiapello put it. But digital communication now suffers a problem of over-abundance, leaving capital with no means of explaining what, specifically, it is for, or why, specifically, it is desirable.

Look again at those messages. "The sun's out but it's raining! How is that even possible?"; "Just ate the best sandwich. Ever."; "Can't wait to see my sister tomorrow!"; "Ran 10km this morning". To recognise quite how strange these are (in an advert), try to imagine an ISP using such tedious content to sell the internet just ten years ago. But someone has thought long and hard about these; this is what twitter and the iPad are deemed for. These were not thrown together, but probably analysed at some length. If anything they betray remarkable honesty regarding the networked age, that it has turned us into a society of communicative itch-scratchers. Yet if the desirability of an iPad lies in access to this carnival of banality, then Apple could have itself a serious problem in the long-run.

Then again, what else could this advertisement offer, when we quite manifestly have more than enough ways of communicating? Splitting the difference between Orwell and Huxley, maybe it is all ending with one long yawn.

politicians' love of broadband

I interviewed a very affable and smart economist a few years ago, who was a senior advisor to a European government at the time. We got onto the topic of industrial policy, one of the areas in which the vocation towards economics and that towards politics tend to clash. He said:

as one politician who recently became a bigger politician once told me, they are not in politics not to act. They are in politics to do certain things. And industrial policy is one of the things that you do. It’s a government intervention to promote certain activities. That’s why they’re in politics! They’re not in politics to do nothing, they’re in politics because there are levers, and they want to use those levers

Today's news that the Conservatives are promising super-fast broadband for everyone reminded me of this. The announcement has a fin de siecle feel to it - haven't we been here before, about five or six times? Is Daniel Bell's The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (1973) still our policy manual of choice? It's not that I don't want progress, its simply that it would be nice if our definition of progress occasionally progressed. Next someone will be arguing for more cafe culture in Britain's city centres and loft-style-living in ex-industrial wastelands. NESTA have apparently calculated  rollout of super-fast broadband could 'directly' create 600,000 jobs. And raising everybody's credit card limit by an additional £1,000 will lead to higher levels of nutrition across the population.

No, I would suggest that the economist quoted above is nearer the mark on this. If broadband didn't exist, politicians would need to invent it. If there wasn't a market failure in this area, politicians would need to produce it or insist on it. Rolling out more telecom infrastructure is something that politicians can do, it gives them a chance to act. But how much speed is enough? What comes after super-fast? What would be interesting would be to look at the claims made about ICT over the last twenty years, then test these against what is now empirical evidence regarding productivity, education levels, job creation and macro-economic growth. I've no doubt that compiling this evidence would be extremely difficult, but if NESTA can put a number on what super-fast broadband will contribute to the size of UK GDP - £18bn apparently - then it must be eminently possible to discover whether the promise of the post-industrial age was a remotely realistic one.

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.

lights, camera, inaction

In this day and age, many of us are guilty of falling into the trap of INAEB speak (prefacing sentences with "I'm not an economist, but..."). Well if I'm not an economist, I'm definitely not a lawyer, and I've even got the soul to prove it. My doctoral research strayed into some legal territory, partly through my Foucauldian analysis of the Law and Economics movement. Plus I got into reading some legal positivism - HLA Hart and Austin - which is philosophically fascinating. But generally speaking, I'm driving blind when it comes to theorising law.

So maybe I should just throw this out as an observation: isn't it slightly peculiar how meagre the legal impact of ubiquitous visual surveillance is turning out to be? Big Brother is indeed watching us. As has been regularly pointed out, it's slightly bizarre how little the British (the most photographed people in the world) seem to care. But maybe, as has been less regularly pointed out, they're right not to care - it doesn't change all that much.

Contrast the Ian Tomlinson case with the MPs expenses scandal. Again, I'm Not A Lawyer, But I can't quite understand why it's permissible for the police to beat a member of the public, effectively to death, and not suffer legal repercussions. It's obviously a complicated part of the law. But I wonder if different forms of evidence, and different media for carrying them, have wildly divergent ontological statuses in our legal and political culture. The interesting aspect of the Law and Economics story was how calculations of economic efficiency came to acquire such authority amongst the various forms of legal evidence that could otherwise be mobilised in economic (and non-economic) situations. 

One interesting issue today is that photographic images feel strangely lightweight as forms of evidence, perhaps because they're so ubiquitous. It's almost as if we've now reached a stage where so much is being caught on camera, by so many professional, governmental and amateur bodies, that we can't possibly allow it all to truly count. Imagine if it all did count to the extent that it might? Our culture of litigiousness, liability passing and auditting would be ratcheted up to such levels as to bring society to a complete halt.

An image can have a radical impact upon 'public opinion', as demonstrated by the Abu Graib camera phone images. But this isn't a significant departure from the pre-ubiquitous, pre-digital age of photography; photography played an equally important role in de-legitimising the Vietnam war. When images perform this function, they remain within the realm of the aesthetic - they can shock, wow, disgust, excite, but they don't make the leap from being sensational to being factual and technical.

While coppers and soldiers were being widely papped (and papping themselves) performing acts of wanton violence and getting away with it, MPs were being unknowingly auditted fiddling their expenses and not getting away with it at all. This time last year, British public life had become consumed by such urgent political issues as David Cameron's wisteria, a floating duck house and Jacqui Smith's husband's pornography consumption. And while the blood-letting may have been satisfying and necessary up to a point, the amount of public vitriol and vengeance enacted against Parliament was unprecedented, at least for a nation as politically docile as ours. It is clearly not the case that we lack the hunger for the disruptive political power of transparency, we're just picky about which varieties.

Maybe the chance to bully and harrass politicians is simply more attractive than the chance to do so to the police. But again, I wonder if there is something about the ontology of evidence here - all of those numbers, receipts, dated credit card statements, tax details, pounds and pence, all had the air of good hard data. They went with the grain of nearly 200 years of governmental technologies of knowledge. Whether the powers that be liked it or not, they had to count.

Meanwhile, all of those foggy images collected on CCTV and picture phones begin to blur into a papparazzoid mush of images, like flicking through the facebook pages of people you might have once met. Criminologists report that CCTV has negligible impact on crime and conviction rates. It's not even clear that the cameras which regulate our roads and traffic are even legally water-tight. The police seem to accept as their fate that they are now within the panopticon, being photographed and surveilled from all directions, in ways that will undermine their legitimacy and popularity. But given the choice between legal accountability for their actions, and being graphically portrayed in a negative cultural light, they will happily go for the second option. Aesthetically ugly, yet legally clean. 

Like ASBOs, photographic surveillance technologies hover ambiguously between informal and official norms. Jane Jacobs famously argued for "eyes on the street", a reference to the self-policing function of bustling, open public spaces - but this slogan has since been adopted by local councils proudly declaring their investments in CCTV. Where language is concerned, words and symbols are either spoken or written, offering law some ontological clarity in how it organises the relationship between the two. The voice and the pen operate in parallel planes. This distinction seems not to arise where images are concerned, making it ambiguous how a visible event and its photographic record should actually be related to each other, other than via artistic representation.