<nettime> Apropos of Richard Barbrook's post [to Cyber Society]

[Phil Graham <p.graham@qut.edu.au>]

     [orig to: Cyber Society <CyberSociety-owner@listbot.com>}

Happy new year all.

Apropos of Richard Barbrook's post: 

You seem, Richard, to think that the gift economy is "new". Of course, it
isn't. The net merely marks a change in its modality (as it does for the
modalities of all the other not-new "things" you mention). Nor is the
"free" distribution of "intellectual" labour new. But the new mode of
distribution is not free at all, neither in the vulgar sense you seem to be
construing the term "free" (free of monetary exchange, i.e. as the
generally accepted representative of wealth or value, hence as "free" from
capitalist exchange), nor in the Marxist sense of value as objectified
labour time. In fact, what you are talking about is not outside capital. It
is, rather, almost pure surplus-value, pure appropriation on the part of
the owners of the means of circulation (which in hypercapitalism is also a
means of intellectual labour, production, exchange, etc). Given your
Saint-Simonian leanings, perhaps you would prefer to see the phenomenon you
are trying to describe as pure "self-sacrifice". If so, say  it.

In any case, if we take either of the conceptions of value (or not-value,
"free") that I have mentioned above as your point of departure in terms of
defining a "free" economy of communal "giving", then both conceptions
render your characterisation inaccurate. 

First, if we take "free" as merely being the absence of wages for the
intellectual labour (a spurious means of maintaining a social distinction
in any case: all labour is both intellectual and physical, with ideal _and_
material aspects) which is so freely distributed, or as the absence of
monetary payment for these products of labour time, we enter into a series
of paradoxes. A neat demonstration of this by you of the gift economy at
the Cybersociety conference: you asserted that we had all come to "give a
paper" and that this was a part of the gift economy. 

Maybe. 

However, we gave our papers inside large buildings. They were printed and
sold in big fat books. The University employed people to run it. We paid
conference fees and so on for the opportunity to give our papers (or was it
the opportunity to be seen to be giving?) and to hear and see others. Many
of us get assessed as wage-earners on our ability to "give" such socially
specific gifts. Publishers' books were sold on-site. There were plastic
doodads and knicknacks manufactured specially for dozens of people.
Visiting luminaries were paid for their offerings. By the number of
overseas delegates, I would have to guess that the transport companies and
so on did quite well out of the Cybersociety conference "gift economy" too.
The moment of "giving" a paper at a conference - when seen as "free" in
this sense - is merely an historically, socially, and processually
isolated, decontextualised moment in a much larger economic field
constituted by legions of academics in the academic industry that merely
gives the illusion of being for "free". So is downloading "free" music off
the web. Behind these moments, supporting and surrounding them, is a
massive economic infrastructure that has very little to do with anything
other than the process of producing, reproducing, and expanding various
capitals, and thus capital as a whole. An analogy for your characterisation
might be one person giving another a lift to work. It's just a moment in
the larger process of capital, thoroughly embedded, thoroughly infused,
only apparently "free".

Continuing on with the conception of "free" as meaning "free of charge" (on
either side of the production process): you seem to think that the
distribution of free music is a new phenonenon. I disagree, and clearly
this an historical fact (cf. folk music, people playing at parties, charity
concerts, etc). But I think that less music is done for free (art pour
l'art) now than ever. That's because every third person wants to be a star
in the music industry. That's why they are willing to pay to play (see
below). MP3's just a shift in modality, a definitive example of McLuhan's
"juicy piece of meat" where the internet is concerned, no different from
porn, closely compared to it by some pundits in fact. But most people who
produce music for distribution using MP3 are just dodging the monopolistic
practices of the mainstream music industry in an effort to make some money
and a name for themselves. Fine. But let's not dress it up as anything
else. Further, people's use of MP3 has already sparked off a flood of
intellectual property debates, litigation, etc, as well as new lines of
hardware complete with international television advertising (I'm talking
about those annoying "D" ads for the MP3 players that look like walkmans
[TM] but play MP3 files). MP3 has the same centralising tendency as any
capital.

For people who _don't_ want their music distributed for "free", MP3 can
look more like a theft economy than a gift economy. But musicians are used
to being robbed, whether by outright plagiarism, pirate practices,
sampling, the pitiful fees paid to musicians, the extortionate practices of
the music industries, production "over-runs", dumping, coerced surrender of
copyright, or just straightforward non-payment for work done ... the ways
in which music can be stolen are myriad. MP3 is just another method in this
respect. For others, it's a useful way of getting around the big parasites
in the industry ("The perils of benefactors/The blessings of parasites
...": J. Mitchell).

To return to your assertion that music is "intellectual labour": that is
patent bullshit. Recorded music is materially produced using thousands of
dollars worth of equipment, even at the cheap end of the scale. It takes
weeks, months, and sometimes years of people's lives to produce music. For
musicians, by which I mean people who actually compose on and for
instruments (including voice), years of hard - in fact, tortuous - physical
and intellectual work goes into mastering their trade and art. The current
crop of un-musicians - remixers, samplers, dj's and so on - are merely
parasitic thieves who, thanks to the current cultural and technological
debasement of music as an art form, can parade as "musicians" without,
apparently, feeling any guilt whatsoever. But composing, playing, and
recording music of any quality is damned hard work, even for thieves.

*Pay to play*

As I said, musicians are used to being robbed. The extent to which this has
become the universal state of being in the music industry became very clear
to me as early as 1987 when I was touring the US and got to visit industry
"luminaries". Musos were queueing in one club - I forget which - to pay one
of the band members so that they could get up and jam for a song in the
hope of beeing "seen". I was also shown through a complex of warehouses in
which bands would audition at their own expense for the A&R morons from the
major labels. This included them hiring huge PAs and light shows, etc. They
were paying for the opportunity to be seen, both with money and labour. 

>From the record companies' perspective, this was for "free". In in fact it
was quite profitable for them, both directly and indirectly: one of them
actually owned the complex; another, the PA and lights hire company. I am
describing an inversion of the "payment for services rendered" model. You
figure out the analogy. MP3 is just a lower entry cost for musos where "pay
to play" is concerned. 

This brings me to the second conception of value: labour as value. Of
course, this can only be the case in capitalist relations. 

*The internet as social labour*

You said that the internet is a form of communism, social labour owned and
shared in common. In fact, it's pure capital, pure surplus value, pure
extortion, at least in most cases. I see your domain sig: "hrc.wmin.ac.uk".
I go to your site. It's one big advertisement. One big ad. An ad for you,
for the institution, an ad for the internet, your courses, etc. You and
your hi-tech infrastructure - rich in symbolic, economic, and cultural
capital - are engaged in a pure exercise of what Robins and Webster
describe as "perception management", just as me and my institution are.
"Educating for professional life" is wmin.ac.uk's communist manifesto. Ours
is "a university for the real world", as if there were another.

Traceroute me. See what infrastructure this work of communist
infrastructure between you and I - and all our colleagues - rests upon:
miltitary backbones, telcos, various ISPs, universities, etc, etc. My
message may seem like a gift to you, but there are centuries of combined
labour objectified in the internet and its objective existence, and it
generates value in the vulgar form of money for IS providers and other
institutional, profiteering monoliths who make money for every pair of
eyeballs that is counted on a page, whether it's gift-like or patently
commercial. This message creates value in general (money), but not for me,
and not for you. Advertising and ISP revenue is the most crude form of
this. I could go on at length about data mining, secondary and tertiary
revenues, and so on, but I don't have the time.

All we do by putting in our labour for "free" is add to the amount of
surplus value that ISPs and so on appropriate behind the scenes, invisibly.
We may eventually be made redundant, even in this respect, as the media
monoliths make short work of good intentions by way of their controlling
the means of production for really sophisticated content (cf the
Time-Warner/AOL merger ... by the way, the figure is $525 billion, not 350
as reported - the largest ever among the culture industries, but what's a
couple of hundred billion at that stage). The mighty myth machine keeps on
growing and diversifying, with a little "free" help from their friends:
viz, you and I. 

Other historical analogies which might do something to seal the somewhat
leaky seive of your utopian "gift-economy" theory include libraries,
traditional folk carnivals, community meetings, chats in the street,
informal seminars, potlatch events, etc. But the economic structure of the
internet - telcos, ISPs, etc - commodifies these ever-more thoroughly, it
does nothing to communalise them, it appropriates them outright: pure
surplus value. The gift economy is not a form of subversion or revolution,
at least not in any economic or social sense. 

Which brings me again to your conception of "free". You construe the gift
economy as "the free distribution of intellectual labour" - by which I take
it you mean use values, the products of "intellectual labour" - in the form
of gifts. What are the economic aspects of this economy? Free distribution
of the fruits of labour? free use-values? Products free from the trammels
of exchange value? Free labour? In what respect are these products free and
useful: are they free for you? free for their producers? Do they contain no
labour, it being purely "intellectual"? Or is the labour "given" merely
given without wages in return? Do these products  _not_ lend themselves to
commodification, or are they not commodities at all, not in any sense? Are
they products of labour that exist somehow outside capital? Are they
artefacts of simple circulation and so disappear with consumption? No.

You are fallaciously taking a moment of the social production process and
historically, socially, and economically decontextualising it. What you
call the "gift economy" is merely a transitional moment of capital that
gives the semblance of "free"ness, like when one person shouts another a
drink. No. It's more like Christmas: everyone giving, with retailers and
manufacturers laughing up their sleeves at the social and economic torture,
and the consumption frenzy, that massive ritualised giving causes, and at
the amount of money they'll make at each revolution of the calendar that
brings the nostalgia for, and hysteria of, potlatch - long dead in reality
- around again. In any case, even if it were a gift economy, it would soon
turn into an obligation economy, just like Christmas. Such is the nature of
competitive gift giving (cf Bourdieu, "The logic of practice", I think).

Regards,
Phil

At 12:51 10-01-00 +0000, you wrote:
>Cyber Society - http://www.unn.ac.uk/cybersociety
>
>Date:  Jan 10 2000 07:08:47 EST  
>From:  richard barbrook <richard@hrc.wmin.ac.uk>  
>Subject:  Re: NEW YEAR MESSAGE FROM MODERATORS  
>
>
>Hiya,
>
>I notice that you *still* leave out any reference to the gift economy of
>the Net in this section:
>>
>>*Cyber Economics -: cyber markets, industries, and corporations; Internet
>>and Intranet economics; electronic commerce; information services; R&D;
>>cyber employment; globalisation of information and communications
>>networks; intellectual property rights.
>
>Surely such things as:
>>markets, industries, and corporations and intellectual property rights
>have been features of capitalist countries for centuries? What is unusual
>about the Net in our present phase of modernity is the free distribution of
>intellectual labour through open source software, MP3, and, not least,
>listservers such as CyberSociety!
>
>[OK Richard, we will rectify this obvious mistake! John]
>
>Happy millennium.
>
>Later,
>
>Richard
>
>-------------------------------------------------------------------
>Dr. Richard Barbrook
>Hypermedia Research Centre
>School of Communications, Design & Media
>University of Westminster
>Watford Road
>Northwick Park
>HARROW HA1 3TP
>
><www.hrc.wmin.ac.uk>
>
>+44 (0)171-911-5000 x 4590
>
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Phil Graham
p.graham@qut.edu.au
http://www.geocities.com/SunsetStrip/Palms/8314/index.html

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