In Protocol Alex Galloway uses the concepts in Deleuze's Postscript on Control Societies to examine the mechanisms of control through the the language of code and network protocol. I would like to take the Postscript one step further and apply it to control and interaction within swarming media and the Social Web, especially in relation to my posts about the Social Web as a fragment of th archive, Foucauldian folksonomies (1,2, 3) and projected identity. Deleuze does explicitly mention the computer in this essay, specifically as the archetypal machine for the stage following Foucault's disciplinary society:
"the societies of control operate with machines of a third type, computers, whose passive danger is jamming and whose active one is piracy or the introduction of viruses."
Yet, writing in 1990 he could not have forseen the social structures that are currently developing with the Web 2.0 ideology's renewed, and often blindly utopian, focus on the
produser, on emergent results from collective participation. To look to the computer, the physical object, as a tool can only tell part of the story. The complex set of interactions that a computer enables exist physically within but socially and culturally outside of code and protocol. I wonder now if Deleuze's mention of the computer as the central tool of control in this third stage has perhaps pulled analysis of the text away from the other - more abstract - areas of signification and control, areas of networked interaction.
There are many ways that the Social Web (and online participatory media in general) reflect Deleuze's observation of a shift from a disciplanary society to a control society, but it seems that the environment in which we currently act lies somewhere between the two and, in some cases, is becoming even more disciplnary. In the more light-hearted MadLibby post below I began to draw connections between what Deleuze recognizes as a shift from institutions to more ephemeral yet constant entities. It is not so much of a stretch to see the blogospheres (plural on purpose) as a parallel to "the corporation" Deleuze describes. The central characteristics that make up this new entity are, generally, modulation (the ability for control mechanisms to adapt to fit new situations), perpertuity (these controls are constant, e.g. education), and competition (the separating and contrasting of two individuals). These are also some of the central characteristics/ideals of the Web 2.0 mode of thought, of the Social Web.
Modulation: Think of del.icio.us; a site is defined by its tags in this system. If the meaning of the site changes due to a change of context, the tags will adapt as more people participate. The emergent "meaning" of the site, as seen through tags, modulates according to the objects context and environment. This can be extended to people since there are very often individuals behind the pages that we tag, and some sites have literally begun tagging people directly (albeit for dating purposes). This is essentially the ephemeral, speedily changing type of control Deleuze writes about. Modularity is also a key aspect of open-source development. One person creates one piece, another creates another, etc, until a community developed, and entirely adaptable, entity arises.
Perpetuity: This can be seen in two areas. The first is in the constant drive for improvement in Social Web/Web2.0 apps. The ultimate goal is user-produced media based on the swarm like intelligence of the mass. It seems unlikely that this goal will be reached despite progress (like trying to walk 5 feet by advancing half the distance with each step) thus this becomes an exercise in perpetuity. "Advancement" cannot end.
This characteristic can also be seen in the very format of a blog. Posts proceed in a chronological order and a blogger is expected to update with reasonable frequency. Blogs have beginnings, but they do not have logical ends as books might.
Competition: This is perhaps the most obvious, but also the least flattering for the Social Web. Since these networks are ideally made up of a large number of autonomous individuals, both collaboration and competition are natural results. The fact that "everyone and their mother has a blog" to quote a phrase I've often heard, shows how we have isolated ourselves from a collective identity into an individual identity (this is not to say singular). This is the exact same process Deleuze describes in the transition from a disciplinary society to a control society. The competition comes in, however, in places like Technorati's blog rankings and "authority" slider. These imply competition despite the collaborative ethos among most bloggers.
So we can see that it's not simply the code and the protocol that demonstrates the beginnings of a shift to a control society, but the development of the Social Web among these swarming media have begun to resemble Deleuze's description. And, I suppose predictably, we are marching down this road not out of fear, or coercion, but because we want to, because it makes our lives easier. This reminds me a little of what Simon Ings wrote in his 1999 science-fiction novel, Headlong: “When our machines overtook us, too complex and efficient for us to control, they did it so fast and so smoothly and so usefully, only a fool or a prophet would have dared complain.”
Except, of course, it is not the machines who are overtaking us. And it's not simply statist, hegemonic power structures either as Deleuze suggests. What we are witnessing is a development of a control society where control, to a large extent, is the emergent result of the collective action of the swarm. Our inherently multiple projected identities, our tagging systems, our social networks, our blogs have the potential to become the ultimate mechanisms of control when aggregated. Just as Cory Doctorow's "whuffie" tracks the actions and deeds of an individual as s/he interacts in a social environment, our interactions in the Social Web, collectively and individually, have emergent results. If the website is defined by its del.icio.us tags, we are defined by our interaction with the archive.
In an interview at Switch Galloway states:
"Many today say that new media technologies are ushering in a new era of enhanced freedom and that technologies of control are waning. This is supposedly due to the bidirectional quality of interactivity. Eugene [Thacker] and I say, on the contrary, that double the communication leads to double the control. Since interactive technologies such as the Internet are based on multidirectional rather than unidirectional command and control, we expect to see an exponential increase in the potential for exploitation and control through such techniques as monitoring, surveillance, biometrics, and gene therapy."
What he doesn't mention here is that as a result of the increased "bidirectional" qualities, the location of power is beginning to shift to a multiple formation of the social subject. If the disciplinary society was defined by the controlling individual / controlled mass duality, then this
new control society is defined by the reversal of that duality: the controlling mass / controlled individual.
One final point as the clock inches toward 4am. Through this brief analysis I've realized what it is that has been bothering me about the concept of the attention economy and attention trackers: what these trackers essentially do is centralize an otherwise distributed and deterritorialized portion of a projected identity. I can't help but see the connections between this and what Deleuze writes that Guattari imagines in a control society:
"Felix Guattari has imagined a city where one would be able to leave one's apartment, one's street, one's neighborhood, thanks to one's (dividual) electronic card that raises a given barrier; but the card could just as easily be rejected on a given day or between certain hours; what counts is not the barrier but the computer that tracks each person's position--licit or illicit--and effects a universal modulation."
This is already occurring in other cultural venues, especially in the UK where CCTV and
national ID cards are all the rage. I think that as we go forward in these new media, we should be wary of over centralization. The ideals behind the attention economy are certainly well-meaning and sound, but the Social Web will be defined on terms of emergent control and tracking attention data seems like one step closer to complete internalization.
