| Reinhold Grether on Tue, 6 Jun 2000 22:23:00 +0200 (CEST) |
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| <nettime> Blueprint for TOYWAR II |
------------------------------------------------------ Blueprint for TOYWAR II >From Net Criticism to a Politics of Code Theses on Network Economics and Network Politics ------------------------------------------------------ Written by Reinhold Grether <[email protected]> and translated by Brian Currid <[email protected]> ------------------------------------------------------ Lecture, Tulipomania Dotcom Conference June 2, 2000 Amsterdam <http://www.balie.nl/tulipomania/> ------------------------------------------------------ In memory of Benno Ohnesorg who was killed on this day 33 years ago during an Anti-Shah-Demonstration in Berlin. Kung Fu and Cheng Ho Around 1400, no region of the world could measure up to China. Since the eleventh century, all fertile lands were linked by a huge network of canals. Paper money accelerated the exchange of commodities, printing with movable type accelerated the transfer of knowledge. Gun powder and cannons had defeated the Mongols and secured the caravan routes to Russia and the Middle East. However, the new medium was fresh water -- even more so, salt water. Private and public fleets competed over trade in the canals, on the coast and over the Indian and Pacific Oceans to Africa and Japan. The navigation instrument of the seas, the magnetic compass, is a Chinese invention, it is conceivable that the official fleets of Cheng Ho could have "discovered" the Portuguese natives on the Southwest tip of Europe. But within a few years, the Confucian bureaucracy let the routes of the new medium silt up, and in 1436 even forbade the construction of sea-worthy ships. The Chinese spent the next 564 years around their canals, and they are still waiting today for entry into the World Trade Organization. Professionalization of Sects Imagine an infinite regress, leaving behind world, body, and the ego (das Ich). In a purely mental process, the empty reception faculties experiences itself as pure medium. Adepts from all around the world have created this condition of luminous self-medialization, and interpreters from all cultures have semanticized "notions" (Einfaelle) of transcendence into the conventional world to every form of belief system. Western philosophers theorized this pneumatic process as a reflection of eternal ideas, and the bearer of this reflective knowledge stretches from the ancient theoria through the medieval artes liberales to the modern humanities. In contrast, if we isolate a technological process in a black box, we are using a totally different form of knowledge. At issue here is a applicable, control knowledge, intent on obtaining from a process the most efficiently produced output possible. Here, the Western lines of tradition lead from the ancient techne through the medieval artes mechanicae to the modern engineering sciences. The object-oriented programming of computer science, in my opinion, professionalizes a third form of knowledge, which I term "network knowledge" (Netzwissen). Again, this begins with an encapsulation. The informatized "object" is encapsulated as a module. This is still all quite similar to the industrial black box. But the object would merely be a meaningless component on its own if it could not by definition communicate with other objects. A system of objects is structurally a communication network, the conditions of which are always in fluctuation. Object-oriented software is nothing but the "self-descriptive language" of the network knowledge implemented in it. Clash of Codes 1. In all human societies, there are three forms of knowledge: reflection knowledge, application knowledge, and network knowledge. 2. In all human societies, there are clashes of codes between the forms of knowledge and their representatives. 3. With the technological media, network knowledge is undergoing a tremendous burst of professionalization. 4. Beside reflection science and application science, network science (Netzwissenschaft) will establish itself as a third pillar of science. 5. Modularization creates degrees of freedom. 6. The communicability of objects will become increasingly intelligent. 7. The controlling powers find themselves strategically in the defensive. 8. The controlling powers must operate in codes of network knowledge. 9. All codes are beautiful, because they increase complexity. 10. The essence of the Net is flow, and in its disjointed character cannot be controlled. 11. The happy Chinese: a second 1436 will not take place. Informational Cultivation Information emerges as a local event in a narrow personal context. Fixed as a freely duplicable sequence of bits, the now mobile information loses its local horizon of understanding and reaches in a process of all world wide personal environments, which can use the information; this process has no monetary value and is temporally successive. Structurally speaking, information is not a good of scarcity, but a good of abundance, and there are essentially only three strategies to impose a fictional scarcity onto information. First: one can make the transmission channels scarce, and thus secure a transaction premium (Maut). This is precisely what is done by the current domain name system, which only makes a tiny spectrum of the in principle limitless space of addresses available, and thus cultivable. Second: individualize information, and thus create a positional surplus value which makes the free good tradable in the market sense (the formation of brands). If one imposes a lexicon of domain names on the asemantic field of numbers in the IP-address space, then all social differences which this lexicon contains are capitalized to become to positional goods with a monetary value. The first information transfer which here takes place is that of the social distribution of the power structure itself. Third, the abundant good information takes on commodity form through strategies for the informational production of surplus value. If one for example reconstructs the semantic environment where information makes sense, or if one develops a scenario of application options, or if one shortens the time interval required until the information reaches an interested customer, or if one translates it into another language, one adds to the information a monetizable informational surplus value. The DNS System can take credit for the fact that in relation to the IP-System it accelerates and simplifies search and bookmarking operations, and thus creates an informational surplus value. If information must be first produced, the theory of property rights, which predicts a more steep path of knowledge production for private rights of use, and open source theory, which expects comparative development advantages through prestige-driven cooperation chains, given open competition. An optimal information production and distribution, which both produces information and distributes it rapidly, can probably only be achieved in a hybrid mix -- which must constantly be renegotiated -- of property rights and open source, and from partial information cultivation with largely free information access. General solutions here arouse the most doubt. Research Agenda 1) The principle of counter-differentiation formed an enormous drive for European development. In this model, two irreducible antagonists are sent out to compete in expenditures -- for example, pope and emperor -- and both attempt to achieve hegemony by stimulating, evolving, and outdoing the resources of their counterparts. This leads at first to remarkable increases in internal differentiation on both sides, and at some point to a shared collapse, which allows those sailing along on board, protected from the wind -- for example mercantile territorial states -- to then set full sail. Instead of now require from the Internet economic theory a decision between market economy and gift economy, perhaps it is more productive to first play out the model of counter differentiation and to thematize the complex interplay of market and gift economy. 2) I consider the fact that highly developed societies, down into the upper margins of the lower classes, are pumping gigantic sums of money into high risk sectors like the Internet economy, to be a burst of vitality, regardless of any stock market crash, comparable to tattooing and piercing; it burns the ships it leaves behind, in order to then break out into the unknown. For just that reason, it would be good to know exactly where the money has ended up. We need to study the actual property and power relations in the Net. How much actually flows into the evolution of net technology, content and social structures? How much is spent consumeristically on the sweet trip of the dolcefarniente to bankruptcy? And how much is being skimmed off the top of the bubble economy, without having seen anything of the Net besides financial transfers? 3) Since the end of the 1960s, economists outdo one another with arguments about why national economies suffer a loss of prosperity due to inflationary tendencies. By now, every television viewer jumps at the word inflation. The high flights of the exchanges are however universally praised in the most glowing terms. The million dollar prize question is then why moderate inflation for consumer goods is an evil, but a galloping inflation on the stock markets a blessing? 4) We now need to separate the dotcom from the Net economy, and to study both separately. I see most of the dotcom economy as nothing else but a transfer of the paradigm of process control from the industrial age to the Net, in many cases doomed to failure. These are businesses with vision, corporate identity and business plan. None of this functions in the Net. Net economy is pure fluxus, micro-networking, modularization of the smallest units, work in parallel worlds. Following emerging paths, delete everything else. Fluid borders, fluid knowledge. Multilogic instead of monologic. Don't be afraid of dotcoms. In the 1950s, in the factories of the Northern Italian automobile industry, small groups of worker radicality formed which distinguished themselves from the traditional union and party representation with the term "operaismo." The basic idea of operaimso was to attack the capitalist production of surplus value at the center of the capitalist production process, and thus to block the capitalist dynamic of development. In order to do this, the entire production logistic of the automobile industry, across divisions and factories, was reconstructed, all by hand and without the help of a single computer. In the end, all neuralgic points of the entire matrix of value production were known, so that a counter matrix of absenteeism, blockades of deliveries and surprise strikes in the shortest period of time brought the entire automobile industry to a standstill. The trick was to bring a more powerful enemy to the mat without expense. EToys ran into a similar trap. After going public on May 20, 1999, it could barely walk, weighted down by all its financial muscle. In June, they began dealing with etoy, the first offer was $30,000 -- answer a smiley -- in order to get rid of the annoying domain neighbors once and for all . When etoy refused higher offers, they played the only trump card they had, to bury etoy in an avalanche of legal costs -- and disappeared until the end of the campaign from the radar screen. As a typical dotcompany lost in the Net, it was stuck in the circle of their business-plan economic monologic, and found no way to counter the possibilities of the Net which were breaking down on top of their heads. To refresh your memory: legally speaking, this was a disagreement about brand names. In the course of the legal battle, eToys' argumentation crumbled more and more. They even risked losing their legal claim on the trademark to etoy. On the business level, in direct contact with the opponent, etoy by no means limited itself to defending their domain. etoy even offered a merger, where they would have brought their own domain into the merged company. This kind of business logic confused the enemy as much as the gearing of the campaign to totally annihilate the stock value of eToys, which I developed and set up, together with RTMark . I have extensively described the motives for this strategy in "Telepolis," and therefore will here only give the pure numbers. When I threw out the suggestion to the lists, eToys stood at $55, when etoy was back on the Net at $13.75: this means a loss in stock value loss of $4.97 billion dollars. Stock market insiders attribute the loss in part to the campaign. In terms of the campaign, it is even more interesting how a seemingly decisive strategy element occupied minds on both sides. A direct shock to customer relations, which eToys can only build up on its web page, was threatened by a virtual sit-in; on the 10 days before Christmas, for five 15 minute periods, campaign participants called up the web page of the web server of eToys in masses, and sent it spinning. Shortly afterwards, a chain of 700 avatars formed on the Toywar platform, one more ready for battle than the next, and no one knew what they were plotting. Soon, there were 3 toy warriors for every eToys employee. To top it all off, a constant stream of protest mails, and a media campaign which spun faster and faster until it reached the peaks of the world press. Web campaigns are won by those who tax the time and fantasy of the management to an unimaginable extent. What isn't code, isn't real. A world cultural medium shaped by hundreds of millions of people needs other rules than an Internet for a few ten thousand military officers, scientists and computer freaks. First, because the cultural bearers of past epochs, modeled for reflection and control, legally attack the openness, freedom and transparency of implemented net architectures with their claims on copyright, patent, brand and liability and try to recode their ideological and mercantile interests accordingly. Second, the regulations governing of bourgeois collective life like anonymity, crypto, privacy, and security need new regulations. Third, because the incompatibilities between transnational attempts at regulation, national legal systems, and the system of developing rules are dramatically growing, this opens for some a nostalgia for the good old days of the pioneer years, for others, areas for action for a progressive politics of the code, and for still others hopes for a "contrat digital" of all netizens towards constructing a global net democracy. Areas of action for a progressive politics of the code In conclusion, a short sketch of possible areas for action, which -- like dotcoms and the rest of us -- must answer the following questions: what is to be networked? Why? Which kinds of network knowledge will be professionalized? Is the Internet making progress as a world culture medium? Are new chances opening up for the production of world cultural capital? 1.) ICANN. ICANN stands for a total control of the Internet by the US government and for an artificial limitation of domain names. ICANN is to take over the management of the A-Root Server and become the highest regulatory authority of the Internet. For this, there needs to be a double strategy: a relentless delegitimization from outside and a massive democratization movement from the inside. On the one hand, implementing new top level domains throughout the entire existing system, on the other hand obtaining ICANN membership and offering a progressive politics from the inside. 2) Directing development policies towards financing wireless broadband networks for developing regions. 3) A world-wide campaign towards introducing Open Source in international organizations, governments, administrative units, firm networks and schools. 4) Globalization of the multiplicity of languages. 90% of Net intelligence falls through the cracks due to the forced use of English. The Anglocrats are just the other side of the virtual class. 5) The development of peer-to-peer architectures. Peer-to-peer means that users give free access to files from their hard drive to the Net without a server between them. The future belongs to Open Source projects like Freenet, especially if they export all file formats, encrypt all files and make all computers anonymous. 6) Calling in old protocol promises. Further development of the WWW towards a multiplicity of versions on user-alterable web pages (editable documents) and towards free linking in existing web pages (reversible links). 7) The establishment of browserless networks as a further development of Netomat. 8) Technification of the Internet culture. Mailing lists embody the ideology of the status quo. They can be transformed into real cooperation platforms, so that multiple working groups can work on parallel projects. Mailing list archives gain in value, if the contributions are constantly re-linked with one another. Blaster technology can do this: it automatically links references to topics. 9) The construction of technical, media, and social infrastructures of virtual protest. In this direction, Alvar Freude, a co-author of the "association blaster", as a semester project for Olia Lialina's "Active Link"" seminar at the Merz Academy in Stuttgart, is developing a "virtual demonstration network" which can be used for virtual sit-ins. Parallel to this, an accompanying group of lawyers, political scientists, and journalists has formed, which will bring the discussion on the legitimacy and legality of net-activism to the public. (This text was written as a discussion paper for the Tulipomania Dotcom-Conference in Amsterdam and Frankfurt. The political part of the paper owes a great deal to the net politics debate in the mailing list "rohrpost". Much of my thinking on this owes a great deal to Dirk Schroeder. Brian Currid provided in no time the excellent English translation.) ----------------------------------------------------- Benno Ohnesorg http://www.hdg.de/lemo/objekte/pict/KontinuitaetUndWandel_photoTodBennoOhnesorg/index.html Code and other Laws of Cyberspace http://code-is-law.org/ ICANN http://www.icann.org/ Freenet http://freenet.sourceforge.net/ Netomat http://www.netomat.net/ Alvar Freude http://student.merz-akademie.de/user/alvar.freude/ Assoziations-Blaster http://www.assoziations-blaster.de/prixars/ rohrpost http://www.mikro.org/rohrpost/ ----------------------------------------------------- Reinhold Grether How the Etoy Campaign Was Won http://www.heise.de/tp/english/inhalt/te/5843/1.html Reinhold Grether Durchbruch zum Weltcode http://www.heise.de/tp/deutsch/inhalt/sa/8090/1.html Reinhold Grether Von der Netzkritik zur Politik des Code http://www.heise.de/tp/deutsch/inhalt/co/8212/1.html ----------------------------------------------------- # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [email protected] and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [email protected]