Dear friends, I send my last essay to this list as it covers many
issues debated in the last days. It is actually an extract of a
forthcoming book (autumn 2008) for the Studies in Network Cultures (a
book series of the Institute of Network Cultures published by NAi
Publishers, Rotterdam). Please download the printer-friendly PDF.
Best /M
------
Matteo Pasquinelli
The Ideology of Free Culture and the Grammar of Sabotage
http://www.rekombinant.org/docs/Ideology-of-Free-Culture.pdf
http://www.rekombinant.org/mat
Abstract. Bringing post-Operaismo into network culture, this text
tries to introduce the notion of surplus in a contemporary media
debate dominated by a simple symmetry between immaterial and material
domain, between digital economy and bioeconomy. Therefore a new
asymmetry is first shaped through Serres' conceptual figure of the
parasite and Bataille's concepts of excess and biochemical energy.
Second, the crisis of the copyright system and the contradictions of
the so-called Free Culture movement are taken as a starting point to
design the notion of autonomous commons against the creative commons.
Third, a new political arena is outlined around Rullani's cognitive
capitalism and the new theory of rent developed by Negri and
Vercellone. Finally, the sabotage is shown as the specular gesture of
the multitudes to defend the commons against the parasitic dimension
of rent.
* The living energy of machines.
* Michel Serres and the cybernetic parasite
* Digitalism: the impasse of media culture
* The ideology of Free Culture
* Against the Creative Anti-Commons
* Towards an Autonomous Commons
* Rent is the other side of the Commons
* The four dimensions of cognitive capitalism
* A taxonomy of the immaterial parasites
* The bicephalous multitude
* The grammar of sabotage
------
The parasite invents something new. He
obtains energy and pays for it in information.
He obtains the roast and pays for it with
stories. Two days of writing the new contract.
He establishes an unjust pact; relative to the
old type of balance, he builds a new one. He
speaks in a logic considered irrational up to
now, a new epistemology and a new theory
of equilibrium. He makes the order of things
as well as the states of things - solid and gas
- into diagonals. He evaluates information.
Even better: he discovers information in his
voice and good words; he discovers the Spirit
in the wind and the breath of air. He invents
cybernetics.
- Michel Serres, The Parasite
The living energy of machines: Michel Serres and the cybernetic parasite
Below technology, there is energy - living energy. In The Accursed
Share Bataille described society as the management of energy surplus
that constantly reincarnates itself in new forms of state and economy.
1 Being consequent with his intuition, even the contemporary
mediascape can be framed as an ecosystem driven by the growth of
natural energies. Media are indeed feral habitats whose underground
belly is crossed daily by large torrents of pornography and whose
surface provides the battlefield for geopolitical warfare. Media are
fed by the same excess of energy that shapes economy and social
conflicts. But has the energy surplus of media ever been described in
an effective way? If not, which understanding of energy is
unconsciously employed by the schools of media criticism? What is the
role of technology in the production, consumption and sacrifice of
surplus? And exactly what kinds of surplus are involved: energy,
libido, value, money, information? Looking at today's media
discourse, Bataille is enrolled only to justify a sort of digital
potlatch - a furious but sterile reproduction of digital copies. On
the contrary, under his "general economy," energy seems to float
around and inside the machines, crossing and feeding a multitude of
devices. To overcome an endogamic destiny media culture should be
redesigned around a radical understanding of surplus. Bataille
himself considered technology as an extension of life to accumulate
energy and provide better conditions for reproduction. Like "tree
branches and bird wings in nature" technology opens news spaces to be
populated.2 However something new happened when information networks
entered the biosphere. What kind of energy do digital machines
incarnate? Are they a further extension of biochemical energy like
the classical technologies that Bataille had in mind? Digital
machines are a clear bifurcation of the machinic phylum: semiotic and
biologic domains represent two different strata. The energy of
semiotic flows is not the energy of material and economical flows.
They interact but not in a symmetrical and specular way, as
propagated by the widespread digital ideology (that I will introduce
later as digitalism).
Energy always flows one way. Acquainted with the scenario of
the network society and the celebration of its space of flows,3 a
safari with Bataille along the ecosystems of excess is useful to
remind the dystopian nature of capitalism. In Bataille economic
surplus is strictly related to libidinal excess, enjoyment and
sacrifice. Yet between endless fluxes and their "glorious
expenditure"4 a specific model that explains how surplus is
accumulated and exchange is missing. In his inspiring and seminal
book The parasite Michel Serres catches the asymmetry of universal
life in the conceptual figure of the parasite: there is never an
equal exchange of energy but always a parasite stealing energy and
feeding on another organism. At the beginning of the computer age
(the book was published in 1980), the parasite inaugurates a
materialistic critique of all the forms of thought based on a binary
model of energy: Serres' semiconductors steal energy instead of
computing.
Man is a louse for other men. Thus man is a host for other men. The
flow goes one way, never the other. I call this semiconduction, this
valve, this single arrow, this relation without a reversal of
direction, "parasitic."5
If Bataille calls attention to the expenditure of energy after its
production, Serres shows how "abuse" is at work since accumulation:
"abuse appears before use." Serres introduces an abuse-value
preceding both use-value and exchange-value: "quite simply, it is the
arrow with only one direction." The parasite is the asymmetrical
arrow absorbing and condensing energy in a natural continuum from
small organisms to human beings: "the parasite parasites the
parasites." The parasite is not binary but ternary. The concept of
parasite appears like a dystopian version of Deleuze and Guattari's
desiring machines, as it is focused more on surplus exploitation than
on endless flows. Serres shares the same vitalism of Bataille, but
provides in addition a punctual model to understand the relation
between material and immaterial, biologic and semiotic, economy and
media. In this sense the organic model of the parasite should be
embraced as the core concept of a new understanding of media
ecosystems.6 Indeed Serres prophetically introduced cybernetics as
the latest manifestation of the parasitic food chain (as the opening
quote of this text reminds).
Moreover, Serres uses the same parasitic model for intellectual
labour and the network itself (as Technology is an extension of the
deceptive nature of Logos): "this cybernetics gets more and more
complicated, makes a chain, then a network. Yet it is founded on the
theft of information, quite a simple thing." Serres' opportunistic
relation between intellectual and material production may sound
traditionalist, but even when Lazzarato and Negri started to write in
1991 about the "hegemony of intellectual labour"7, the exploitive
dimension of capital over mass intellectuality was clear. Today the
immaterial parasite has become molecular and endemic - everybody is
carrying an intellectual and cybernetic parasite. In this scenario
what happens to the notion of multitude when intellectual labour
enters the political arena in the form of a parasite? What happens to
network subcultures when the network is outlined as a massive
cybernetic parasite? It is time to re-introduce a sharp asymmetry
between the semiotic, technological and biological levels, between
material and immaterial.
By the conceptual figure of the immaterial parasite I name precisely
the exploitation of the biological production through the semiotic
and technological domain: material energy and economic surplus are
not absorbed and consumed by digital machines but simply allocated.
The immaterial flow extracts surplus from the material flow and
through continuous exchanges (energy-commodity-technology-knowledge-
money). The immaterial parasite functions first as a spectacular
device: simulating a fictional world, building a collaborative
environment or simply providing communication channels, it
accumulates energy through and in favour of its physical substratum.
The immaterial parasite belongs to a diverse family, where rents
seems to be the dominant form of metabolism. It survives in different
kinds of habitat. Its tentacles innervate the metropolis (real estate
speculation through the Creative Industries hype), the media (rent
over material infrastructures and monopoly of online spaces),
software (exploitation of Free Software to sell proprietary
hardware), knowledge (revenues on intellectual property), financial
markets (stock exchange speculation over collective hysteria) and
many other examples.
Digitalism: the impasse of media culture
Digitalism is a sort of modern, egalitarian and cheap gnosis, where
knowledge fetishism has been replaced by the cult of a digital
network.8 Like a religious sect it has its peculiar theology.
Ontologically the dominant techno-paradigm believes that the semiotic
and biologic domains are perfectly parallel and specular to each
other (like in the Google utopia of universal digitisation). A
material event can be easily translated on the immaterial plane, and
conversely the immaterial can be embodied into the material. This
second passage is the passage of a millenary misunderstanding and
anthropology has a lot to say about the relation between magic and
logocentrism. Economically digitalism believes that an almost energy-
free digital reproduction of data can emulate the energy-expensive
material production. For sure the digital can dematerialise any kind
of communication but it can not affect biomass production.
Politically digitalism believes in a mutual gift economy. Internet is
supposed to be virtually free of any exploitation and tends naturally
towards a social equilibrium. Here digitalism works as an disembodied
politics with no acknowledgement of the offline labour that is
sustaining the online world (a class divide that precedes any digital
divide). Ecologically digitalism promotes itself as an
environmentally friendly and zero emission machinery against the
pollution of the old Fordism. Yet it seems that an avatar on Second
Life consumes more electricity that the average Brazilian.9
As Marx spotlighted commodity fetishism right at the beginning of
Capital, a fetishism of code should be put at the basis of the
network economy. "God is the machine" was the title of Kevin Kelly's
digitalist manifesto whose points proclaimed distinctly: computation
can describe all things, all things can compute, all computation is
one.10 Digitalism is one of those political models inspired by
technology and not by social conflicts. As McLuhan once said, "We
shape our tools, and afterwards our tools shape us."11 Internet in
particular was fuelled by the political dreams of the American
counter-culture of the '60s. Today according to the Autonomist
Marxist tradition12 the network is at the same time the structure of
the Empire and the tool for the self-organisation of the multitudes.
But only the Anglo-American culture conceived the faith in the
primacy of technology over politics. If today activists apply the
Free Software model to traditional artefacts and talk of a "GPL
society"13 and "P2P production"14 the do so precisely because they
believe in a pure symmetry of the technological over the social. In
this sense the definition of Free Culture gathers all those
subcultures that shaped a quasi-political agenda around the free
reproduction of digital file. The kick-off was the slogan
"Information wants to be free"15 launched by Stewart Brand at the
first Hackers' Conference in 1984. Later the hacker underground
boosted the Free Software movement and then a chain of new keywords
was generated: Open Source, Open Content, Gift Economy, Digital
Commons, Free Cooperation, Knowledge Sharing and other do-it-yourself
variants like Open Source Architecture, Open Source Art and so on.
"Free Culture" is also the title of the book of Lawrence Lessing,
founder of Creative Commons. Without mentioning the social
improvements and crucial battles of the Free Software movement within
the digital sphere, what it is questioned here is the off-line
application of these paradigms.
An old saying still resounds: the word is made flesh. A
religious unconscious is at work behind technology. Florian Cramer in
his book Words made flesh16 provides a genealogy of code culture
rooted in the ancient brainframes of Western world belonging to
Judaism, Christianity, Pythagoreans and Hermeticism. However, as
Serres may suggest, the primordial saying must be reversed: the flesh
is made code. The spirit itself is a parasitic strategy of the flesh.
The flesh is first, before the Logos. There is nothing digital in any
digital dream. Merged with a global economy, each bit of "free"
information carries its own micro slave like a forgotten twin.
The ideology of Free Culture
Literature on freeculturalism is vast but can be partially unpacked
through focusing the lens of surplus. Reading authors like Stallman
and Lessig, a question rises: where does profit end up in the so-
called Free Society? Free Culture seems to focus only on the issue of
immaterial property rather than production. Although given a closer
look, the ghost of the surplus reappears. In his book Free Culture
Lawrence Lessig connect the Creative Commons initiative to the Anglo-
American libertarian tradition where free speech always rhymes with
free market.17 Lessig takes inspiration from the copyleft and hacker
culture quoting Richard Stallman,18 but where the latter refers only
to software, Lessig applies that paradigm to the whole spectrum of
cultural artefacts. Software is taken as an universal political
model. The book is a useful critique of the copyright regime and at
the same time an apology of a generic digital freedom, at least until
Lessig pronounces the evil word: taxation. Facing the crisis of the
music industries, Lessig has to provide his "alternative compensation
system"19 to reward creators for their works. Lessig modifies a
proposal coming from Harvard law professor William Fisher:
Under his plan, all content capable of digital transmission would (1)
be marked with a digital watermark [...]. Once the content is marked,
then entrepreneurs would develop (2) systems to monitor how many
items of each content were distributed. On the basis of those
numbers, then (3) artists would be compensated. The compensation
would be paid for by (4) an appropriate tax.
In the "tradition of free culture" the solution is paradoxically a
new tax. Tracking internet downloads and taxation imply a public and
centralised intervention quite unusual for US and imaginable only in
a Scandinavian social-democracy. The question remains unclear. More
explicitly another passage suggests the sacrifice of intellectual
property to gain a larger internet. Here Lessig's intuition is right
(for capitalism). Lessig is aware that the market needs a dynamic and
self-generating space to expand and establish new monopolies and
rents. A dynamic space is more important than a lazy copyright regime.
Is it better (a) to have a technology that is 95 percent secure and
produces a market of size x, or (b) to have a technology that is 50
percent secure but produces a market of five times x? Less secure
might produce more unauthorized sharing, but it is likely to also
produce a much bigger market in authorized sharing. The most
important thing is to assure artists' compensation without breaking
the Internet.
In this sense Creative Commons licences help to expand and lubricate
the space of market. As John Perry Barlow puts it: "For ideas, fame
is fortune. And nothing makes you famous faster than an audience
willing to distribute your work for free."20 Despite of its political
dreams, the friction-free space of digitalism seems to accelerate
towards an even more competitive scenario. In this sense Benkler in
his The Wealth of Networks is absolutely wrong when he writes that
"information is nonrival." The nonrivalry of information is another
important postulate of freeculturalism: Lessig and Benkler take for
granted that the free digital reproduction does not cause more
competition but only more cooperation. Of course rivalry is not
produced by digital copies but by their friction on real space and
other limited resources. Benkler celebrates "peer production" but
actually he is merely covering immaterial reproduction. Free Software
and Wikipedia are extensively over-quoted as the main examples of
"social production" but these examples actually only points to online
social production.
Against the Creative Anti-Commons
After an initial honey-moon the Creative Commons (CC) initiative is
facing a growing criticism that comes especially from the European
media culture. Scouting articles from 2004 to 2006, two fronts of
critique can be distinguished: those who claim the institution of a
real commonality against Creative Commons restrictions (non-
commercial, share-alike, etc.) and those who point out Creative
Commons complicity with global capitalism. An example of the first
front, Florian Cramer provides a precise and drastic analysis:
To say that something is available under a CC license is meaningless
in practice. [...] Creative Commons licenses are fragmented, do not
define a common minimum standard of freedoms and rights granted to
users or even fail to meet the criteria of free licenses altogether,
and that unlike the Free Software and Open Source movements, they
follow a philosophy of reserving rights of copyright owners rather
than granting them to audiences.21
Berlin-based Neoist Anna Nimus agrees with Cramer that CC licences
protect only the producers while consumer rights are left
unmentioned: "Creative Commons legitimates, rather than denies,
producer-control and enforces, rather than abolishes, the distinction
between producer and consumer. It expands the legal framework for
producers to deny consumers the possibility to create use-value or
exchange-value out of the common stock."22 Nimus claims the total
freedom for consumers to produce use-value out of the common stock
(like in Free Software) but more important to produce even exchange-
value (that means commercial use). For Nimus a commons is defined by
its productive consumers and not merely by its producers or passive
consumers. She claims that CC licences close the commons with many
restrictions rather than opening it to a real productivity. In a new
nickname, they are "Creative Anti-Commons."
Both Nimus and Cramer's critiques remain closer to the
libertarian tradition with few accounts of the surplus-value
extraction and big economy behind IP (in any form: copyright,
copyleft or CC). On the opposite among post-Autonomist Marxists a
stronger criticism is moved against the ideology implicitly pushed by
CC and other forms of a digital-only commonism. For instance activist
Martin Hardie thinks that "The logic of FLOSS seems only to promise a
new space for entrepreneurial freedom where we are never exploited or
subject to others' command. The sole focus upon 'copyright freedom'
sweeps away consideration of the processes of valorisation active
within the global factory without walls."23 Hardie criticise FLOSS
precisely because it never questions the way it is captured by
capital and its relations with the productive forces.
In conclusion a tactical notion of autonomous commons can be
imagined to include new projects and tendencies against the hyper-
celebrated Creative Commons. In a schematic way, autonomous commons
1) allow not only passive and personal consumption but even a
productive use of the common stock - implying commercial use by
single workers; 2) question the role and complicity of the commons
within the global economy and put the common stock out of the
exploitation of large companies; 3) are aware of the asymmetry
between immaterial and material commons and the impact of immaterial
accumulation over material production (e.g. IBM using Linux); 4)
consider the commons as an hybrid and dynamic space that dynamically
must be built and defended.
Towards an Autonomous Commons
Among all the appeals for "real" commons only Dmytri Kleiner's idea
of 'Copyfarleft' condenses the nodal point of the conflict in a
pragmatic proposal that breaks the flat paradigm of Free Culture. In
his article "Copyfarleft and Copyjustright"24 Kleiner notices a
property divide that is more crucial than any digital divide: the 10%
of the world population owns the 85% of the global assets against a
multitude of people owning barely nothing. This material dominion of
the owning class is consequently extended thanks to the copyright
over immaterial assets, so that they can be owned, controlled and
traded. In the case of music for example the intellectual property is
more crucial for the owning class than for musicians, as they are
forced to resign their author rights over their own works. On the
other side the digital commons do not provide a better habitat:
authors are sceptical that copyleft can earn them a living. In the
end wage conditions of the authors within cognitive capitalism seem
to follow the same old laws of Fordism. Moving from Ricardo's
definition of rent and the so-called "Iron Law of Wages"25 Kleiner
develops the "iron law of copyright earnings."
The system of private control of the means of publication,
distribution, promotion and media production ensures that artists and
all other creative workers can earn no more than their subsistence.
Whether you are biochemist, a musician, a software engineer or a film-
maker, you have signed over all your copyrights to property owners
before these rights have any real financial value for no more than
the reproduction costs of your work. This is what I call the Iron Law
of Copyright Earnings.
Kleiner recognizes that both copyright and copyleft regimes keep
workers earnings constantly below average needs. In particular
copyleft does not help neither software developers nor artists as it
reallocates profit only in favour of the owners of material assets.
The solution advanced by Kleiner is copyfarleft, a license with a
hybrid status that recognises class divide and allow workers to claim
back the "means of production." Copyfarleft products are free and can
be used to make money only by those who do not exploit wage labour
(like other workers or co-ops).
For copyleft to have any revolutionary potential it must be
Copyfarleft. It must insist upon workers ownership of the means of
production. In order to do this a license cannot have a single set of
terms for all users, but rather must have different rules for
different classes. Specifically one set of rules for those who are
working within the context of workers ownership and commons based
production, and another for those who employ private property and
wage labour in production.
For example "under a copyfarleft license a worker-owned printing
cooperative could be free to reproduce, distribute, and modify the
common stock as they like, but a privately owned publishing company
would be prevented from having free access". Copyfarleft is quite
different from the 'non-commercial' use supported by some CC licences
because they do not distinguish between endogenic (within the
commons) commercial use and exogenic (outside the commons) commercial
use. Kleiner suggests to introduce an asymmetry: endogenic commercial
use should be allowed while keeping exogenic commercial use
forbidden. Interestingly this is the correct application of the
original institution of the commons, that were strictly related to
material production: commons were land used by a specific community
to harvest or breed their animals. If someone can not pasture cows
and produce milk, that will not be considered a real common. Kleiner
says that if money can not be made out of it, a work does not belong
to the commons: it is merely private property.
Rent is the other side of the Commons
How does cognitive capitalism make money? Where does a digital
economy extract surplus? While digerati and activists are stuck to
the glorification of peer production, good managers but also good
Marxists are aware of the profits made on the shoulders of the
collective intelligence. For instance the school of post-Operaismo
has always carried on a dystopian vision of the general intellect
produced by workers and digital multitudes: it is potentially
liberating but constantly absorbed before turning into a true social
autonomy. The cooperation celebrated by freeculturalists is only the
last stage of long process of socialisation of knowledge that is not
improving the life conditions of the last digital generations: in the
end online "free labour"26 appears to be more dominant than the
"wealth of networks." The theory of rent recently advanced by the
post-Operaist school can disclose the digital economy more clearly.
Autonomist Marxism has become renown for shaping a new toolbox of
political concepts for the late capitalism (such as multitude,
immaterial labour, biopolitical production and cognitive capitalism
to name only a few). In an article27 published in 2007 in Posse Negri
and Vercellone make a further step: they establish rent as the nodal
mechanism of contemporary economy thus opening a new field of
antagonism. Until then Autonomist Marxism has been used to focus more
on the transformations of the labour conditions than on the new
parasitic modes of surplus extraction. In classical theory rent is
distinguished from profit. Rent is the parasitic income an owner can
earn just by owning an asset and traditionally is referred to land
property. Profit on the contrary is meant to be productive and is
referred to the power of capital to generate and extract surplus
(from commodity value and workforce). 28 Vercellone criticises the
idea of a "good productive capitalism" pointing the becoming rent of
profit as the driving force of current economy: below the hype of
technological innovation and creative economy, the whole of
capitalism is breeding a subterranean parasitic nature. So
Vercellone's motto goes "rent is the new profit" in cognitive
capitalism. Rent is parasitic because it is orthogonal to the line of
the classic profit. Parasite means etymologically "eating at
another's table," sucking surplus not directly but in a furtive way.
If we produce freely in front of our computers, certainly somebody
has his hands in our wallet. Rent is the other side of the commons -
once it was over the common land, today over the network commons.
Becoming rent of profit means a transformation of management
and cognitive workforce too. The autonomisation of capital has grown
in parallel with the autonomisation of cooperation. Today managers
are dealing more and more often with financial and speculative tasks,
while workers are in charge of a distributed management. In this
evolution the cognitariat is split into two tendencies. On one side
the high-skilled cognitive workers become "functionaries of the
capital rent"29 and are co-opted within the rent system through stock
options. On the other side the majority of workers faces a declassing
(declassement) of life conditions despite skills get more and more
rich in knowledge. It is not a mystery that the New Economy has
generated more McJobs. This model can be easily applied to the
internet economy and its workforce, where users are in charge of
content production and web management but do not share any profit.
Big corporations like Google for instance make money over the
attention economy of the user-generated content with its services
Adsense and Adwords. Google provides just a light infrastructure for
web advertisement that infiltrates websites as a subtle and mono-
dimensional parasite and extracts profit without producing any
content. Part of the value is shared of course with users and the
Google coders are paid in stock options to develop more sophisticated
algorithms.
The four dimensions of cognitive capitalism
The digital revolution made the reproduction of immaterial objects
easier, faster, ubiquitous and almost free. But as the Italian
economist Enzo Rullani points out, within cognitive capitalism,
"proprietary logic does not disappear but has to subordinate itself
to the law of diffusion."30 Intellectual property (and so rent) is no
longer based on space and objects but on time and speed. Apart from
copyright there are many other modes to extract rent. In his book
Economia della conoscenza Rullani writes that cognitive products
easy to reproduce have to start a process of diffusion as soon as
possible in order to maintain control over it. As an entropic
tendency affects any cognitive product, it is not recommended to
invest on a static proprietary rent. More specifically there is a
rent produced on the multiplication of the uses and a rent produced
on the monopoly of a secret. Two opposite strategies: the former is
recommended for cultural products like music, the latter for patents.
Rullani is inclined to suggest that free multiplication is a vital
strategy within cognitive capitalism, as the value of knowledge is
fragile and tends to decline. Immaterial commodities (that populate
any spectacular, symbolic, affective, cognitive space) seem to suffer
of a strong entropic decay of meaning. At the end of the curve of
diffusion a banal destiny is waiting for any meme, especially in
today's emotional market that constantly tries to sell unique and
exclusive experiences.
For Rullani the value of a knowledge (extensively of any
cognitive product, artwork, brand, information) is given by the
composition of three drivers: the value of its performance and
application (v); the number of its multiplications and replica (n);
the sharing rate of the value among the people involved in the
process (p). Knowledge is successful when it becomes self-propulsive
and pushes all the three drivers: 1) maximising the value, 2)
multiplying effectively, 3) sharing the value that is produced. Of
course in a dynamic scenario a compromise between the three forces is
necessary, as they are alternative and competitive to each other. If
one driver improves, the others get worse. Rullani's model is
fascinating precisely because intellectual property has no central
role in extracting surplus. In other words the rent is applied
strategically and dynamically along the three drivers, along
different regimes of intellectual property. Knowledge is therefore
projected into a less fictional cyberspace, a sort of invisible
landscape where cognitive competition should be described along new
space-time coordinates.31 Rullani describe his model as 3D but
actually it is 4-dimensional as it runs especially along time.
The dynamic model provided by Rullani is more interesting than
for instance Benkler's plain notion of "social production" but it is
not yet employed by radical criticism and activism. What is clear and
important in his perspective is also that the material can not be
replaced by the immaterial despite the contemporary hypertrophy of
signs and digital enthusiasm. There is a general misunderstanding
about cognitive economy as an autonomous and virtuous space. On the
contrary, Rullani points out that knowledge exists only through
material vectors. The nodal point is the friction between the free
reproducibility of knowledge and the non-reproducibility of the
material. The immaterial generates value only if it grants meaning to
a material process. A music CD for example has to be physically
produced and physically consumed. We need our body and especially our
time to produce and consume music. And when the CD vector is
dematerialised thanks to the evolution of digital media into P2P
networks, the body of the artist has to be engaged in a stronger
competition. Have digital media galvanised more competition or more
cooperation? An apt question for today's internet criticism.
A taxonomy of the immaterial parasites
A taxonomy of rent and its parasites is needed to describe the
cognitive capitalism in detail. Taxonomy is not merely a metaphor as
cognitive systems tend to behave like living systems.32 According to
Vercellone, a specific form of rent introduced by cognitive
capitalism is the cognitive rent that is captured over intellectual
property such as patents, copyrights and trademarks. More precisely
Rullani contextualises the new forms of rent within a speed-based
competitive scenario. He shows how rent can be extracted dynamically
along mobile and temporary micro-monopolies, skipping the limits of
intellectual property.
The possibility of the cognitive rent has been strictly
determined by the technological substratum. Digital technologies have
opened new spaces of communication, socialisation and cooperation
that are only virtually "free." The surplus extraction is channelled
generously along the material infrastructure needed to sustain the
immaterial "second life." Technological rent33 is the rent applied on
the ICT infrastructures when they established a monopoly on media,
bandwidth, protocols, standards, software or virtual spaces
(including the recent social networks: Myspace, Facebook, etc.). It
is composed by different layers: from the materiality of hardware and
electricity to the immateriality of the software running a server, a
blog, a community. The technological rent is fed by general
consumption and social communication, by P2P networks and the
activism of Free Culture. The technological rent is different from
the cognitive one as it is based on the exploitation of (material and
immaterial) spaces and not only knowledge. Similarly attention
economy34 can also be described as an attention rent applied on the
limited resource of the consumer time-space. In the society of the
spectacle and pervasive media the attention economy is responsible of
the commodity valorisation at a large degree. The attention time of
consumers is a like a scarce piece of land that is constantly
disputed. At the end the technological rent is a large part of the
metabolism sustaining the techno-parasite.
It is well known how the new economy hype was a driver of the
speculation over stock markets. The dot-com bubble exploited a spiral
of virtual valorisation channelled across the internet and the new
spaces of communication. More generally the whole finance world is
based on rent. Financialisation is precisely the name of rent that
parasites domestic savings.35 Today even wages are directly enslaved
by the same mechanism: workers are paid in stock options and so
fatally co-opted in the destiny of the owning capital. Finally even
the primordial concept of land rent has been updated by cognitive
capitalism. As the relation between artistic underground and
gentrification show, real estate speculation is strictly related to
the "collective symbolic capital" of a physical place (as defined by
David Harvey in his essay "The Art of Rent"36). Today both historical
symbolic capital (like in Berlin or Barcelona) and artificial
symbolic capital (like in Richard Florida's marketing campaigns37)
are exploited by real estate speculation on a massive scale.
All these types of rent are immaterial parasites. The parasite
is immaterial as the rent is produced dynamically along the virtual
extensions of space, time, communication, imagination, desire. The
parasite is indeed material as the value is transmitted through
physical vectors like commodities in the case of cognitive rent and
attention rent, media infrastructure in the case of technological
rent, real estate in the case of the speculation over symbolic
capital, etc. (only the financial speculation is a completely
dematerialised machine of value). The awareness of the parasitic
dimension of technology should inaugurate the decline of the old
digitalist media culture in favour of a new dystopian cult of the
techno-parasite.
The bicephalous multitude and the grammar of sabotage
Many of the subcultures and political schools emerged around
knowledge and network paradigms (from Free Culture to the 'creative
class' and even many radical readings of these positions) do not
acknowledge cognitive capitalism as a conflictive and competitive
scenario. Paolo Virno is one of the few authors to underline the
"amphibious" nature of the multitude, that is cooperative as well as
aggressive if not struggling "within itself."38 The Bildung of an
autonomous network is not immediate and easy. As Geert Lovink and Ned
Rossiter put it: "Networks thrive on diversity and conflict (the
notworking), not on unity, and this is what community theorists are
unable to reflect upon."39 Lovink and Rossiter notice that
cooperation and collective intelligence have their own grey sides.
Online life especially is dominated by passivity. Digitalism itself
can be described as a sublimation of the collective desire for a pure
space and at the same time as the grey accomplice of a parasitic mega-
machine. A new theory of the negative must be established around the
missing political link of the digital culture: its disengagement with
materiality and its uncooperative nature. Networks and cooperation do
not always fit each other. Geert Lovink and Christopher Spehr ask
precisely this: when do networks start not to work? How do people
starts to un-cooperate? Freedom of refusal and not-working are put by
Lovink and Spehr at the very foundation of any collaboration (an echo
of the Autonomist refusal to work).40
"Free uncooperation" is the negative ontology of cooperation
and may provide the missing link that unveils the relation with the
consensual parasite. Furthermore, a new right and freedom to sabotage
must be included within the notion of uncooperation to make finally
clear also the individualistic and private gesture of "illegal" file-
sharing. Obfuscated by the ideology of the Free, a new practice is
needed to see clearly beyond the screen. If the positive gesture of
cooperation has been saturated and digitalised in a neutral space,
only a sharpened tool can reveal the movements of the parasite. As
profit has taken the impersonal form of rent, its by-effect is the
anonymity of sabotage. As rent changed its coordinates of the
exploitation, a new theory of rent demands a new theory of sabotage
before aiming to any new form of organisation. Which kind of sabotage
is affecting the social factory? In cognitive capitalism competition
is said to be stronger, but for the same reasons sabotage is easier,
as the relation between the immaterial (value) and the material
(goods) is even more fragile.
The grey multitude of online users are simply learning a
grammar of sabotage against capital and its concrete revenues along
the immaterial/material conflict. To label as Free Culture the
desolate gesture of downloading the last Hollywood movie sounds
rather like armchair activism. If radical culture is established
along real conflicts, a more frank question is necessary: does "good"
digital piracy produce conflict, or simply sell more hardware and
bandwidth? Is "good" piracy an effective hazard against real
accumulation or does it help other kinds of rent accumulation?
Alongside and thanks to any digital commonism, accumulation still
runs. Nevertheless in contemporary hype there is no room for a
critical approach or a negative tendency. A pervasive density of
digital networks and computer-based immaterial labour is not supposed
to bring any counter-effect. Maybe as Marx pointed out in his
"Fragments on machines," a larger dominion of the (digital) machinery
may bring simply an entropy and slowing down of the capitalistic
accumulation. That means a more clouded and dense parasitic economy.
A therapeutic doubt remains open to a dystopian destiny: is cognitive
capitalism simply tending to slow-down capitalism instead of
fulfilling the self-organisation of the general intellect?
A breaking point of the capitalist accumulation is not found
only in the cognitive rent of the music and movie corporations. The
previous taxonomy of cognitive parasites has shown how the symbolic
and immaterial rent affects daily life on different levels. The
displaced multitudes of the global cities are starting right now to
understand gentrification and how to deal with the new symbolic
capital. In his novel Millennium People Ballard prophetically
described the riots originating within the middle class (not the
working class!) and targeting cultural institutions like the National
Film Theatre in London. Less fictionally and less violently new
tensions are rising today in East London against the urban renovation
in preparation of the 2012 Olympics. In recent years in Barcelona a
big mobilisation has been fighting against the gentrification of the
former industrial district Poble Nou following the 22@ plan for a
"knowledge-based society."41 Similarly in East Berlin the Media
Spree42 project is trying to attract big media companies in an area
widely renown for its cultural underground. It is not a coincidence
then the Kafkaesque saga of Andrej Holm - an academic researcher at
Humboldt University - who was arrested in July 2007 and accused of
terrorism because of his research around gentrification and radical
activism in Germany.43 As real estate speculation is one of the
leading force of parasitic capitalism, these types of struggles and
their connections with cultural production are far more interesting
than any Free Culture agenda. The link between symbolic capital and
material valorisation is symptomatic of a phenomenon which
digitalists are not able to track and describe. The constitution of
autonomous and productive commons does not pass through the
traditional forms of activism and for sure not through a digital-only
resistance and knowledge-sharing. The commons should be acknowledged
as a dynamic and hybrid space that is constantly configured along the
friction between material and immaterial. If the commons becomes a
dynamic space, it must be defended in a dynamic way. Because of the
immateriality and anonymity of rent, the grammar of sabotage has
become the modus operandi of the multitudes trapped into the network
society and cognitive capitalism. The sabotage is the only possible
gesture specular to the rent - the only possible gesture to defend
the commons.
Matteo Pasquinelli
Amsterdam, January 2008
Thanks to Geert Lovink, Wietske Maas and Arianna Bove for the
precious suggestions.
A copy of this file can be downloaded from:
www.rekombinant.org/mat
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Notes:
[ please find notes in the online PDF ]
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