The Estonian-Russian conflict is one that neither territorializes nor seems to have origins, if one were to believe official reactions. Russia denies official responsibility for the DDoS attacks on various Estonian institutions and Estonians merely moved a statue, right? Yet the Russians speak in language that is either a thinly veiled threat or a thinly veiled stereotypical Russian attitude: “The Estonia side has to be extremely careful when making accusations.” Meanwhile, the Estonians chose a fine plot in the graveyard for their bronze Russian.

This seems to be the first high-profile situation in which "cyberwarfare" (I will call it that as it seems to be the mot du jour) has functioned as a state-on-state action. Previous examples include spying – which, while state-on-state is not meant to have the immediate, disruptive social and economic effects of warfare as this does – or non-state actors carrying out attacks.

Yet despite the heavy coverage of the means by which this conflict has played out, I find it most interesting that it has taken place after the displacement of the beloved “Bronze Soldier.” Both the removal of the statue and the DDoS attacks are forms of non violent aggression: one symbolic, the other economic. I will not write “technological” nor “informational” in place of “economic,” for those merely describe the means, while obscuring their ends. The attacks on Estonia are economic through informational/technological methods. Just as the distributed attacks have the air of a more central state-driven source, the Estonians mean not peace when they move a prized Russian monument to a cemetery – all too literally revealing a view of the history with their neighbors.

Symbolic and economic battles may be a type of warfare that contrasts with what we associate with the term, but the concept of a symbolic and economic war is not an unfamiliar one. These are the grounds on which the Cold War was fought, except then we employed iron curtains and arms races.

Posted by Nathan at 09:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I've just read "What the MySpace generation should know about working for free" by Trebor Scholz, which I'd been meaning to do for some time now. What led me to the essay was Leisure Art's use of it as citation in a larger critique of the concept of immaterial labor as it is applied in contemporary contexts. I had originally intended to respond to this response, arguing against the notion that we should be creating new theoretical frameworks for each new media/socio-political environment we find ourselves in, but I found myself reacting more strongly to Scholz's suggesting that users of networked social media are the subject of exploitation.

Scholz is by no means the first to take this position, nor does he do it from any unreasonable perspective. In fact, his analysis is spot-on despite my disagreement with his conclusion. I found this quote to be a pithy way to phrase things:

"After the gruesome dotcom experiences, such massive investments would not be placed without predictable return. Certainly, the two examples of MySpace and YouTube are extremes but they are also the platforms where most people currently contribute online content. Networked sociality is the product."

Networked sociality is indeed the product. Yet I would claim that this sociality - in most cases - benefits the users, proportional to their constitutive labor, more than it does the creators. If the service does not provide a signficant value for the users, the users will cease to use it. Look at all the failed social networks, without venturing to far in to a guess, one can easily say that most of them were for-profit operations. No one uses them - no networked sociality was produced. As a result, the cretors saw no profit.

I use del.icio.us on a daily basis. My participation adds value to the site and was part of the aggregate participation that made it an attractive buy for Yahoo!. I use it to find interesting articles, pictures, and videos that interesting people in my network post. There is a great amount of value in this for me. I'm not about to call up strangers and ask them what they've been reading, then, if I like it, call them up every day to find out what's new. If what I give Yahoo! in exchange for exposing me to such texts as this very article is that shred of virtuosity, which in aggregate made del.icio.us valuable to a large corporation - I'm fine with that. I'd hardly think I've been duped.

One benefit of corporate dependence on network sociality is that it means there will always be space for creative and critical intervention. As soon as MySpace starts cracking down in a serious way on people bending its rules with such purposes, its value as a venue for network sociality diminishes.

Posted by Nathan at 11:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Today capital can no longer exploit the worker; it can only exploit cooperation amongst workers, amongst laborers. -Antonio Negri, Pisa 2003

I have no doubt that this quote from one of the authors of Empire and Italian political activist will strike any Web 2.0 disciples as familiar. The tension between exploitation and power comes up frequently in writing on networked social media. A good example is in discussions of Digg that have come up in the past and recently, after the HD-DVD key dust-up. I've often read stories of Digg's exploitation of users; how without the users the site would be nothing, using the tireless efforts of thousands of un-remunerated individuals to build a collaborative linking behemoth. At the same time, however, moments like the HD-DVD code posting frenzy, the ultimate power and control of the user has never been more apparent than on a site like Digg. This is similar to the tension Negri sees, and has long seen, in national and global labor movements.

Another recent blog post reminded me of this Negri quote: Jeff Jarvis' praise of CBS Interactive's new media strategy. Jarvis notes that CBS executive Quincy Smith's realization that they cannot expect users to "come to" them is the correct way to approach new and networked media. It seems then, that Mr. Smith has been reading up on his Italian autonomists. Instead of direct exploitation in the form of forcing viewers to watch ads or pay for content, CBS has apparently decided to exploit the potential inherent in letting viewers interact using CBS media as a vehicle. While I'm sure that such a situation was far from Negri's mind when he was speaking in Pisa that day in 2003, it has been a tough road for media companies to see (and I might even say exploit) what he has seen in larger socio-political arenas.

Posted by Nathan at 09:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Mere minutes after posting last week's entry, my computer met its long-awaited death. Since this left free-time and internet-time largely incongrous, I wasn't able to keep up on the reading that usually fuels this blog. So, I won't be writing anything much for now; expect a full entry next week.

I thought about addressing last week's dust-up at Digg over the HD-DVD codes, but the story is starting to wear thin and has already seen its share of hype. The incident does bring questions of public/private space to the forefront: to what extent do the users indeed have "control" over the service? To what extent can Digg determine the way in which both the users and the litigators interact with service? And so on.

To a large extent this seemed like a case of an "I'm Spartacus" style protest in the intellectual property arena, making it ineffectual to pursue significant legal action. In effect we're seeing this with peer-to-peer file sharing, but that debate has become muddled through a combination of factors over the years.

Posted by Nathan at 10:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Two recent entries on danah boyd's blog have gotten me thinking about the relationship between democracy, virtuosity, and narcissism in online social networks. The latter of these two entries addresses the recent flare up over Facebook.com's alleged (and disputed) banning of an "Arban LGBT" group, and the former revisits the connection between narcissism and the generation currently in their teens to mid-twenties (I fall within this range and have written on the topic of narcissism before as well).

Paolo Virno, perhaps best in A Grammar of the Multitude, writes about the concept of virtuosity and its connection to affective labor and a shift toward a new type of politics. Virtuosity, to perhaps over-simplify, is the creation of value in the process of production itself. To draw upon the familiar root of the word as an example, an expert pianist experienced on stage holds a higher value than that same pianist experienced through a CD. The act of performance in this case, is an act of virtuosity. The very same concept can easily be applied to production within online social networks: the value in the act of "friending" someone, for instance, is not in the pixelated real estate it occupies on one's profile, but rather the message this act sends when experienced by others. This can be extended to most aspects of subjective construction within these environments. The page itself hold little or no value, whereas the affect produced in its creation is ultimately the aim of the labor.

Virno and others, such as Ned Rossiter in his book Organized Networks for one, see this type of networked affective/creative labor as implying a new, post-democratic (or, even, a hyper-democratic) politics. Yet, at least within online environments, has this shift not been made possible by this alleged, rampant narcissism? If the users of social networks like Facebook were not so focused on the careful construction of their online personae, we would likely not see them flourish - with the maligned LGBT group as an example of their success. It seems that perhaps Virno's idea of virtuosity has found an ally in my generation's supposed masturbatory self-interest. Inflated self-esteem has perhaps led to a world in which affective labor and subjective production have gained increased status in relation to tradtional forms of labor.

Collaborative or navel-gazing? Masturbatory or communal? Perhaps these are no loinger disparate concepts in a space reaching toward a post-democratic, virtuosic politics.

Posted by Nathan at 09:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)