The Politics of Information: the Electronic Mediation of Social Change

The Politics of Information: The Electronic Mediation of Social Change edited by Marc Bousquet and Katherine Wills Alt X Press electronic book review cc 2003 by the authors and Alt-X Press. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs-NonCommercial License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by-nd-nc/1.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 559 Nathan Abbott Way, Stanford, California 94305, USA. This work may be freely distributed, in whole or in part, for non-commercial purposes, provided that names of author, editor, and publisher are included. Contents Introduction by Marc Bousquet v 1. Beyond the Voting Machine 1 Section Introduction, Marc Bousquet, 3 Charles Bernstein, “Electronic Pies in the Poetry Skies” 7 Bennett Voyles, “The Selling of E-thePeople” 12 DeeDee Halleck, “The Censoring of Burn!” 18 Fran Ilich, “Delete the Border!” 45 Bruce Simon, “Illegal Knowledge: Strategies for New-Media Activism” (dialogue with Ricardo Dominguez and Geert Lovink) 55 Mark Amerika and Katherine Wills, “Resisting the Interview: An Anti-Interview with Mark Amerika about Internet Art” 66 2. Technocapitalism and The Politics of Information 79 Section Introduction, Marc Bousquet, 81 David Golumbia, “Metadiversity: On the Unavailability of Alternatives to Information” 85 Tiziana Terranova, “Free Labor, Producing Culture for the DigitalEconomy” 99 Nick Dyer-Witheford, “Sim Capital: General Intellect, World Market, Species Being and the Video Game” 122 John Monberg, “Social Worlds of the Information Society: Lessons from the Calumet Region” 141 Matt Kirschenbaum, “Virtuality and VRML: Software Studies After Manovich” 149 Donna Haraway, “Prospects for a Materialist Informatics” (interview with Lisa Nakamura) 154 iv Contents 3. Intellectuals and Their Property 169 Section Introduction, Marc Bousquet, 171 Mark Poster, “What’s Left?: Materialist Responses to the Internet” 177 Kembrew McLeod, “Intellectual Property Law, Freedom of Expression, and the Web” 182 Caren Irr, “On ®™ark, or, The Limits of Intellectual Property Hacktivism” 195 Tara McPherson, “Patched In: A Conversation with Anne-Marie Schleiner” 204 Paul Collins, “What’s Mine is Mine, What’s Yours is Mine: Ownership in Online Universities” 213 Harvey Molloy, “Before and after the Web” (interview with George Landow) 219 4. The Information University 227 Section Introduction, Marc Bousquet, 229 Marc Bousquet, “The Informatics of Higher Education” 233 Ken Saltman, “Rehabilitation for Milkin’s Junk Habit” 258 Timothy W. Luke, “The Digital Downside: Moving from Craft to Factory Production in Online Learning” 272 Stephanie Tripp, “From Utopianism to Weak Messianism: Electronic Culture’s Spectral Moment” 258 5. Teaching the Cyborg 297 Section Introduction, Marc Bousquet, 299 Katie King, “Women in the Web” 303 Laura L. Sullivan, “Resistance Through Hypertext: ACTing UP in the Electronic Classroom” 315 Susan Schreibman, “Next Generation Student Resources: A Speculative Primer” 343 Harvey Molloy,“The Fan’s Desire and Technopower” 351 Chris Carter and Gregory Ulmer, “The Florida Research Ensemble and the Prospects for an Electronic Humanities” (dialogue with Chris Carter) 362 Afterword by Victor Vitanza, “Two Gestures, While Waiting for a Third” 373 The Politics of Information: An Introduction Marc Bousquet The recent invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan by the United States rested in part upon unprecedented domination of information flow through military and commercial chan- nels. Among the most obvious dimensions of this control include the sheets of data streaming through U.S. munitions, the corresponding degree to which the U.S. was able to interrupt opposing communication, and the various ways in which U.S.-based corporate media collaborated with the military in creating battlefield spectacle for global consumption. The Web of data enfolding U.S. military logistics enables central executive authority to act on the battlefield with the speed of a video game, and the media cooperated in giving the event a game-like affect for U.S. viewers. Like any game, the invasion of Iraq had its own rules and terminology for would- be participants to learn. Within hours of the commencement of hostilities against Iraq, the public sphere was tagged throughout by a kind of “language of opportunity,” a set of new terms to be learned and circulated by those with a desire to participate in the war game. Adopting the militarized terminology of the spectacular moment (“shock and awe,” “decapitation,” “regime change,” “embeds,” “target of opportunity”) functions as a cheap and nearly effortless way for reporters and citizens to effectively participate in the spectacle itself. The new language is a kind of freemason’s handshake: strangers using the language of the Iraq invasion are able to recognize each other as persons who share the worldview, aims, and values of that invasion. Furthermore, in a feedback loop, just as control over military and commercial information flow enabled the invasions, the invasions enabled previously unimaginable controls over military and commercial information flow, such as the “Patriot” act and such would-be sequels as Poindexter’s “Total Information Awareness” and Ashcroft’s Domestic Security Enhancement initiative (“son of Patriot”). With the assistance of a secret court, the U.S. executive enjoys substantial new freedoms to surveil, wiretap, and monitor the activities of its citizens. Even where a political will to oppose such excesses has surfaced (as in the limitation of data-mining by the government to non-citizens), the government has found it relatively easy to bypass these strictures – for instance, by v vi The Politics of Information: An Introduction making police and intelligence use of data bases prepared for commercial use in direct marketing (which have not traditionally been covered by the same degree of privacy restraints as government data). In the early 1990s, technological optimists represented the World Wide Web as an actual or potential public sphere or, alternatively, as an anarcho-subcultural new fron- tier, a place of self-fashioning where the liberal dream of autonomy and self-determi- nation could be performed and realized. Many on the left additionally hoped, with Manuel Castells and others, that the proliferation of online interaction would foster new solidarities and social movements. To a very real extent, some of this promise has been realized. The worldwide oppo- sition to the invasion of Iraq, for instance, was in part coordinated by Web-mediated communications, and through this hijacking of the former Arpanet for purposes of peace, certain peace groups were able to stage massive demonstrations that compelled even the corporate broadcast media to transmit their message. For many political dissi- dents, Web-delivered independent news accounts of the conflict and the communications of the resistance movement constructed an alternative solidarity to the culture of “supporting our troops.” There were episodes of successful hacktivism, as when a spam campaign coordinated by Spain’s www.noalaguerra.com shut down the website of that country’s pro-war ruling party. Yet much of the hacktivist activity was not anti-war, but a partisan contribution to the conflict, as in the successful shutdown of the website belonging to Arabic television network Al-Jazeera by U.S. hackers who redirected the site’s visitors to a map of the U.S. with the slogan “God Bless Our Troops,” many of the weblogs posted by laptop- toting combatants, or the Al-Qaeda sympathizers who converted a U.S. student’s bul- letin board into a propaganda outlet. In the past decade, the World Wide Web and other virtual locations have become increasingly recognizable as managed and regulated space. It is by now clear that technological utopianism represented a widespread suspension of consciousness regarding the still-accelerating growth of commercial and state ideology, as well as a plethora of direct controls – an explosion of gateway structures, surveillance procedures, copyright protections, trademarks, standardization, advertising, certification processes, and other markers of intellectual property. The mutual intelligibility of commercial and state interests evident in the dizzying proliferation of technocapitalism and cybernetic gov- ernmentality over the past ten years make it clear that if the Web and other online spaces do in fact represent a public sphere, it is a public sphere vigorously traversed by property law and other structures of security, surveillance, command and control—the “informatics of domination” described by Donna Haraway in her 1986 cyborg manifesto. How can students and citizens respond to this informatics of domination except with an answering informatic practice? The five sections of this collection are devoted to exploring the possibilities of electronically-mediated resistance to a domination itself electronically mediated. In the first Marc Bousquet vii section, “Beyond the Voting Machine,” indie-media icons like DeeDee Halleck of DeepDish TV and Paper Tiger Television, Mark Amerika, Geert Lovink, and poet Charles Bernstein discuss the possibilities for forming oppositional consciousness and alternative solidarities. The next section, “Technocapitalism and the Politics of Information,” features a new interview with Donna Haraway by Lisa Nakamura, reflecting on the reception of the Cyborg Manifesto, essays on the social costs of digital capitalism by Tiziana Terranova, David Golumbia,

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