About SLC

I've enjoyed reading Cyclonopedia, in the way one might enjoy a weirdly entertaining horror movie (by the way, thanks to everyone who posted the fun clips from Phantoms), and I do think it's brilliant at times. This quote from "freelance critic" Jonathan McCalmont sums up what I think is interesting about the book:

"Cyclonopedia . . .embodies an academic culture where impenetrability, the playful use of data from other disciplines and indifference to objective truth are not hidden secrets but standard operating procedure. However, what is even more enjoyable about this book as a piece of guerrilla methodology is that Negarestani is not chiding the cultural studies for its wayward values… he is positively celebrating them. Cyclonopedia presents Theory as a form of artistic creation where words and images combine in obscure and unexpected manners in order to produce works of obscure but terrifying beauty."

At times, however, I've been arrested by what I view as a strong current of misogyny in Cyclonopedia,in which productivity is equated with contamination, and contamination is specifically embodied as feminine. This complex of associations runs throughout all we've read of the book so far, but it's especially apparent in the sections entitled "The Dead Mother of All Contagions" and "Mistmare."

Maybe the "authenticity" theme is played out in this Tumblr group, but I'm going to add to it anyway, because after we talked about "authentic" Mexican food in class I kept seeing this puzzling ad during a TV show I was watching.

The ad (the one entitled "Men") for Jose Cuervo's 1800 (1800 as in the year) tequila talks about a time in the nebulous, authentic past when "real men" drank "real tequila," and bemoans the present when effeminate men drink "poser" tequila (Patron), but it's done in such a transparently manipulative way that I wondered if it was supposed to be ironic.

The ad does seem to be picking up on a characteristic of at least a few Patron drinkers - some people like Patron just because it's expensive and comes in a pretty bottle with a green ribbon. These people probably wouldn't drink Patron unless their friends know that they're drinking it and that it's pricey.

Another 1800 ad, the one entitled "Commercials," is definitely tongue in cheek, because it acknowledges with a wink that a lot of TV commercials are nonsense and sell the image rather than the product. Jose Cuervo didn't stick with this approach, though, and the other ads in the series seem like their message (you are not a real man if you drink Patron) can be taken straight or as irony.

This post from the blog "Psychomercials" analyzes the 1800 tequila ads in a little more depth.

I have found the Latour reading to be extremely interesting, and to provide useful ways of thinking about processes of boundary formation, group identity and personal identity that seem to figure hugely in most people's lives. I find Latour's idea of focusing "the relative share of mediators over intermediaries" (p. 61) in any situation to be a very useful concept. Latour says that "ANT pictures a world made of concantenations of mediatorswhere each point can be said to fully act," yet he acknowledges there is no communication without intermediation, and that no action can be seen as fully independent.

I could illustrate some of these processes with serious and controversial examples, because it's extremely dangerous when people rely to much on intermediated, received ideas, and place too much importance on boundary formation. The Trayvon Martin tragedy illustrates some of these dangers, as we discussed in class. People are killed every day because they have violated group boundaries, or because they are seen as hated vehicles for intermediated, received ideas about "others."

A more lighthearted example is a problem my high school age daughter is having in her choir group at school. She is considering dropping out because she is tired of the outrageous behavior of her classmates, and their obsession with interpersonal drama. She says the situation has gotten much worse during her three years of high school. I wondered if any of the kids were being influenced by the TV show "Glee," which seems to send the message "Choir kids are quirky!" "Choir kids love drama!"

I can't be the only one who thought of this scene from The Matrix during our discussion of Jane Bennett and the power of things. Bennett's emphasis on the force of things, placing things on a level playing field with human subjects, in fact asserting that human subjects are themselves things, is the opposite of what Neo finds in the Matrix, where the subject is all and things are illusions. I admire Bennett and her project, and I appreciate her rhetorical stance, which combines the courage to make bold statements with a lack of pretense toward originality and a willingness to be a little goofy.

Philosophical and literary discussions surrounding the limits of subjectivity and representation, the gap between subjects and objects, between words and things, go back at least as far as the myth of Adam and Eve (when Adam and Eve gain knowledge and self-awareness, they lose contact with God or the absolute), continuing through Greek philosophy and into the present. Bennett points out that the increasing connectedness and networked nature of people and things changes the tone of these discussions in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

In various ways, people have sought to escape the limits of the subject and experience oneness with the absolute (through spiritual practices, meditation or psychedelic drugs), or to experience subjectivity as mastery (mind over matter, The Secret, the Matrix). In Western thought, however, the subject is usually given primacy over things; things are represented as both unreal and inert. Plato's allegory of the cave, for example, paradoxically insists that material experience is an illusion and idealized Forms, which live in the mind and in representation, are ultimately real.

Here are a couple of project ideas I thought of as an an alternative to a traditional "close reading" of Rainbows End. I don't know if these are on the right track . . .

Interview an executive from a data security company about the history, current trends and future of identity theft, or about the relationship between data security and national security. Write this up as a magazine article of about 1000 words. The connections with Rainbows End would be implied. Alternatively, you could do a 2-person project, and add an academic paper spelling out some of the relationships between the interview and Rainbows End.

Watching RiP! made me think of a line from the U2 song "The Fly":

Every artist is a cannibal, every poet is a thief All kill their inspiration and sing about their grief

Truthfully, I'm a little confused by all the violent rhetoric in the stuff we've discussed about remix, copyright infringement and artistic influence. Girl Talk said he wanted to "put Elton John in a headlock, and pour a beer over his head." Back off, dude! Elton's an old man! And he's a knight!

Shaviro, paraphrasing Jeter, says "copyright violation cannot possibly be creative; it's a pure expression of negativity and hatred," explaining that someone who appreciates art has a death wish for both the creator and for himself (59-60). I'm deliberately using the masculine pronoun here, because I wonder if this is largely a male attitude. I wasn't surprised when Shaviro turned to the subject of testosterone, because I had been thinking about it for a couple of days before I got to that section of the book.

Now that I've got that off my chest, I actually wanted to write about Creative Commons. I love Creative Commons and think it's a genius idea. I use it quite a bit to find images for my work as an online journalist. But it has its limitations. Certain types of images are not usually available on Creative Commons - those that are expensive to produce, requiring specialized camera equipment, lots of time, and a trained photographer.

For more expensively produced images my employer provides me with a paid subscription to Getty Images, a company that offers images produced by their own photographers and by freelancers. The most expensively produced, timely, rare or otherwise desirable images are usually not available through Getty's subscription, but have to be licensed individually, and these types of licenses are not cheap.

Obviously, in a capitalist society, people expect to get paid. Some photographers are willing to give their work away, but professionals usually aren't - they've invested a lot of time and money in it.

I don't know a lot about the market for music samples, but it seems there could be a negotiated protocol, or set of protocols, for licensing music that would be parallel to the protocols for licensing photography.

The newest, most expensively produced music won't, and probably shouldn't, be cheap to license. Older music, or music for which the copyright holder chooses to give away the license, could be treated differently.

As a point of reference, here's a link to an NPR story explaining how Rhianna's record label, Def Jam, spent over $1 million to produce the song "Man Down," not knowing whether or not the song would be a hit (it wasn't). Until record labels get a less expensive business model, they will probably fight to protect their investment.

How Much Does It Cost to Make a Hit Song?

Shaviro's musings on Napster made me think of one powerful illustration of Galloway and Thacker's notions of protocol. "Often a misuse or an exploit of a protocol, be it intended or unintended, can identify the political fissures in a network."

Napster operated as a free, peer-to-peer music file sharing network from 1999 to 2001, allowing anyone to upload their music library to a server, where anyone else could download it, illegally and for free. Shaviro, who says he downloaded about 500 songs from Napster, describes the period as a time of "unprecedented freedom and joy" (Wow, all that from free music?).

I had a different reaction; I downloaded a few songs from Napster but didn't like the fact that it amounted to theft. I had just been through the experience of running an online software sales business in which I was victimized on a daily basis by people using fake credit card numbers (in the earliest days of online commerce when security was nonexistent), so I had the same hatred of pirates Shaviro ascribes to Jeter (minus that creepy trophy thing). These were people who would never dream of sticking a gun in my face and demanding the $20 bill in my wallet, but they didn't seem to have any compunction about defrauding me of that same $20 by stealing software with a fake credit card number.

Napster had legal problems from the beginning and was eventually shut down as a free file sharing service, but I kept thinking it could be a great idea if only someone developed a way to download a song for a fair price, say $1. In 2001, someone did just that when Apple introduced the iPod and iTunes. From my point of view the thing that sets the iPod apart is not the player, but the software. iTunes is a lot easier to use than other programs I've tried for downloading and organizing music. iTunes also offers a lot more content than competing services. Admittedly, the strict Digital Rights Management can be a drag - once you pay for a song you can't always do everything you want with it.

Napster exposed a huge hole in the online economy, a hole that iTunes ended up filling. iTunes represents a form of negotiated protocol - users have easy access to more content (more information) than ever, and content producers generally get paid. Not everyone who participates in this negotiated protocol has equal control or gets equal benefit - the major beneficiary is the ultra-influential, ultra-rich Apple Corporation. As Galloway and Thacker write, "protological control brings into existence a certain contradiction, at once distributing agencies in a complex manner, while at the same time concentrating rigid forms of management and control."

Shaviro writes: "The technolibertarians of Silicon Valley and Redmond tend to regard the capitalist economy as a natural, organic network, just like the rain forest (29ff). It’s almost too perfect a metaphor. The high-tech industry gets to have things both ways. On one hand, the rain forest is a place of life-and-death, Darwinian struggle. This is the famous vision of nature “red in tooth and claw,” rape as the natural order of things, a warrant for cutthroat capitalist competition. On the other hand, and at the very same time, the rain forest is a complex, self-regulating ecosystem. It exhibits spontaneous, self-generated order. All its pieces fit seamlessly together, and each problem receives an optimal solution. Everything converges, as the New Economy evangelist Kevin Kelly puts it, into a universal, corporate “hive mind.” The economy, like the rain forest, thus miraculously embodies both the New Age ideal of harmony and balance, and the workings of Adam Smith’s invisible hand. All is for the best, in this best of all possible worlds, as long as nobody intervenes to limit corporate power" (2).

Why limit this description to Silicon Valley and Redmond, when it applies equally well to Wall Street and Washington, D.C.? The view of "The Market" as an all-powerful, inscrutable, godlike entity that will bless us all as long as we make the proper sacrifices is widely held, but only to a point.

When the unregulated market reaches a crisis so large that it might collapse, the federal government comes to the rescue with billions of taxpayer dollars. This happened with the savings and loan crisis of the late 1980s, the collapse of Long Term Capital Management in 1998, and on a much larger scale with the mortgage market collapse that began in 2008.

One recent example of the prevailing schizophrenic attitude toward markets is a scandal at Freddie Mac, which was chartered by the Federal government in 1970. "Our statutory mission is to provide liquidity, stability and affordability to the U.S. housing market," Freddie Mac says on its website" (NPR, "Freddie Mac Betting Against Struggling Homeowners"). Freddie Mac would not exist without the backing and taxation power of the federal government, yet it operates as a private corporation. It is a "government sponsored enterprise," traded on the New York Stock Exchange until it delisted amid scandal in 2010.

In the past few weeks, NPR and ProPublica have revealed that Freddie Mac, while it largely controls access to mortgage refinancing, also has essentially placed bets against homeowners being able to refinance, through an internal hedge fund. The hedge fund branch of the Freddie Mac corporation held sophisticated mortgage derivatives that would make the company money if homeowners were unable to refinance, while the corporation's main "statutory mission is to provide liquidity, stability and affordability to the U.S. housing market." Freddie Mac executives saw nothing wrong with this contradiction and maintained that their first job is to make money for the company, especially with the goal of paying back the roughly $169 billion bailout it received from the federal government in 2008. They also argued that the hedge fund branch of the company is walled off from the main corporation and has no power over access to mortgage refinance.