Perhaps what all this points to is how focused we are on our present tenses - what is happening now in our narrowed world(s) is the extent of what matters. If so this might highlight some of the reasoning behind each 'sphere outburst. In the case of Palin, the focus on the family's pregnancies (both of rumor and of admission) are the topic of the moment thanks to McCain's seizure of the new, but will be long forgotten by the time voters step into their booths in the world of continual present tenses. Meanwhile, Google's "leak" of their browser project equally capitalizes on such world of present tenses since writers will masturbatorily try to associate themselves with the breaking news and subsequent fawning - allowing Google to sneak in their improved ability to track every online movement you make.

I suppose the only one here no focused on present tenses is Google itself; they're betting on the value of the future perfects.

The idea of enterprise Twitter brings idle talk into the explicit grasp of the controlling levels of capitalist production. Virno, among others, seemed to imagine idle talk taking a back-channel role in post-Fordist production - an additive role, but not a forward one. Here, we see the implicit recognition that loosely related conversation within the productive environment might actually be something the encourage and promote within the organizational structure itself.

I started this back in late 2005 and much has changed, both on this blog and the routines that surround it. Back then, "Web 2.0" was still a term folks liked to use in a hopeful, unironic way; I had never used the term "autonomism"; and blogging seemed to be at the rare cultural convergence of newness, edginess, and broad familiarity.

Going through my feed reader today - the core of which I constructed six or so months before I created this blog - I noticed that a good 13 blogs have died in the past two months since I last went through it. Either they have shifted over to posting entirely automatic del.icio.us links or they've ceased to post anything at all; that's dead enough to call it such I'd say. Swarming Media was close to joining these ranks.

What got to me in the moments of writing the blog's obituary in my mind was straying from what Fred points to in his post closing out his chimprawk.blogspot.com URL (moving to fstutzman.com):

"I had no idea of what the blog would become, and if I knew the blog would be part of my professional identity I might have chose a different name [than chimprawk]. But I'm glad I didn't, and I think my blog's name was a reminder not to take any of this too seriously. This is all an experiment."

Blogs are a good way to maintain disassociated web-based and meat-space subject positions. Perhaps I've been letting my idea of Swarming Media get in the way of its purpose.

As of tonight, I resolve to make sure that - as Fred put it - I don't take any of it too seriously and most importantly, that this is all an experiment.

A quick quote from Paul de Armond's piece in that collection, "Netwar in the Emerald City":

"Netwar is nothing new as a form of conflict. What is new is the richer informational environment, which makes the organization of civil (and uncivil) society into networks easier, less costly, and more efficient."

Back to reading.

I was looking forward to the n+1 panel because they are a bunch of intelligent people who could probably bring an interesting perspective to contemporary life in a networked world. At best, the speakers seemed well-thought yet uninformed, at worst they were petulant - reducing The Internet to merely a series of Gawker comments saying bad things about them. Mark Grief was easily the least self-obsessed, yet his broad questions concerning interaction spurred by and within the confines of the web have largely already been asked by internet and digital media thinkers before. His speech was a fish-out-of-water case, not realizing that critical thought has in many cases moved beyond his thinking. I left the panel thinking that we should not leave cultural criticism of networked culture to the literary-types.

As for the Rhizome panel, I was pleased to see Tim Whidden ad Tom Moody speak and was looking forward to hearing from Petra Cortright, one of the contributors to Nasty Nets. While most of the panelists were interesting, I was severely disappointed with Petra and Damon Zucconi. I posted these thoughts on Art Fag City's review earlier tonight:

"Damon made attempts to refer to some interesting theory-esque threads in digital media studies, but ultimately he came across as someone who has perhaps read some fancy terms before but is clueless when it comes to how to use them. He may actually have known what he was saying, and it could have been a problem with nerves in front of a crowd, but to me it seemed like he needs to do a lot more research.

As for Petra, I really do like her work and think what she’s doing is significant in the trajectory (sorry Tim) of net art (sorry again). After hearing her speak, however, it seems like she should leave the analysis of her work to others."

The fault I found with Petra on the other hand was her seeming inability to grasp the significance of her own work. She didn't seem to realize the statements about nostalgia, production, and affect that something like Nasty Nets is constantly making. I suppose this might be the very reason she is able to create these works in the first place, though.

I don't like the idea of writing negatively about these young artists, but in this case - as with the n+1 panel - the problems were utterly remediable by the speakers doing some basic background research on the topic.

If we are to view Virno's multitude as consisting of a distributed network of nodes (subjects) and edges (labor, affect), then this quote would imply that the shepherd of this state is a broad cultural, social, political, and subjective nostalgia. I don't mean nostalgia in the restorative, conservative sense, but one derived from the construction of the word itself - with nostos meaning to return home and algos meaning pain or longing. The pain of longing to return home - this seems quite close to Virno's own (translated) construction.

So what does it mean that the multitude is essentially nostalgic? Mostly it is indicative of the state of constant flux and unease that characterizes Virno's multitude, with its pinion of affect and immateriality. There is no fixed state for the multitude it is a construction that is characterized by constant subjective shifting and slippage. This, combined with the lack of centrality in a decentralized conceptual organization, sets the stage for nostalgia. The 'home' necessary for reference in nostalgia is imaginary, is always that which has just passed - or that which is believed to come.

The multitude is a state of perpetual nostalgia.

"This is the risk of criticism as a genre when it disconnects from progressive movements and locks itself up in an elitist hide-out. However messy the situation, we have to promote the Internet as a tool for global mass education[...] Sinking prices for storage, traffic and data processing result in data centres and new monopolies, but these developments are only a result of much broader policies—and it is time a new generation of net critics to situate the medium into the techno-social context it now operates in."

Leaving trails of data through our everyday business on the web - search history, social networking profiles, credit card transactions, blog posts, instant messages, e-mail, and so on - is the easiest way to see the ways a networked environment acts as a simultaneously individualizing and multiplying subjective force. We are at once going through a process of individuation in our ceaseless stream of archived data, yet wit every step forward we leave another footprint behind. This footprint does not cease to signify once your foot leaves it however, in fact, in the case of social network profiles especially they continue to signify as something of a subjective prosthesis. It is the tendrils of these multiple paths we wear that ultimately serve to individuate and deindividuate us.

So what are we to do about personal data archived in a networked environment? Should we legislate our problems away as Bruce Schneier suggests in his article on Wired.com? This seems to be a flaccid solution at best; one that has been debunked time and time again by hacktivists, pranksters, and criminals alike.

Perhaps we should make like China and some aspects of the loss of control and use our constant stream of data in our favor? A more friendly example of this is TrackMeNot, the Firefox extension that provides a degree of privacy through the creation of random meaningless data. How might such a thing affect the implicit indivuating processes involved in online interaction?

I suppose the answer might shake out over the next few years, but I'd say it's more likely that the issue of personal data on the web will be a perpetual battleground.

• "Twitter, Imagined Identity and Flux" - Unit Structures. Specifically, take a look at Fred's bullet points about imagined identity and constant flux.


• "A framework for sustaining user labor across the web" - userlabor.org. It is good to see people are approaching this issue in interesting ways.


• "Unraveling Identity" - CTheory. Pivoting on memory, forgetting, and identity.

In his 20s, Guy Debord began to develop what would end up being an elaborate, chess-like war simulation game. The late 70s saw this game released in limited quantities, with a book following a decade later. As non sequitur as this may at first seem coming from the author of The Society of the Spectace, it does go hand in hand with that text's inherent longing for a simpler epoch.

Regardless, Alex Galloway - who teaches at NYU and whose work I've written about a number of times on this blog - created an online version of the game called Kriegspiel in an effort with the Radical Software Group. Galloway has been looking into real-time strategy games such as Starcraft for some time now as an expression of - if not metaphor for - network culture, so such a move on his part would seem largely academic in nature.

It was a bit of a surprise, then, to learn that Galloway and NYU received a threat of a IP infringement lawsuit from Debord's widow. Surely she sees the absurdity in taking such a strict stance in defending the intellectual property rights of a seminal member of the Situationist International? If not that, then she at least could recognize that Galloway's repositioning of her dead husband's game can only serve to nurture its success - at least as much as a game heralded for its opaque complexity can be judged so.

Then again what more bitingly appropriate way to remember Debord than for both sides to conjure multiple signifying representations of the deceased thinker.

First of all, Matt really gets it. He really does. He is looking a piracy as reflective not of a failure in the legal structure, but failure in companies' approach in their own market. I hate to put too much of a commercial/free-market spin on this, for what I'm going to connect it with is at times orthogonal to that perspective, but he's right when he says that pirates:

• identify gaps within and outside the existing marketplace


• may do damage, but carry valuable information in their actions


• can often harness the collective consciousness of their audience and turn that into social change

As with many things, I couldn't help but start comparing some of his talk to things I've read by Paolo Virno - specifically about opportunism an virtuosity. Firstly - and I've covered this in the blog before - competing with piracy in many sectors is a matter of recognizing that main players must begin to locate value in non-physical products, the product of immaterial labor. As Virno points out, McDonalds has this down with their "service with a smile." You aren't going there for the burgers, but for the service (quick, friendly, etc).

More interestingly, it seems that what Matt is pointing out is the opportunism of the pirates. Virno would probably say that this is a natural result of the shift to a post-fordist world. Opportunism is a virtue, if not necessity, rather than something to be frowned upon. In an interview with Archipelago in 2002 he said:

"...if it is certain that postfordist labor has at its center communication - culture in the most full sense of the term - then, it is necessary to commence analysis starting from certain emotions, but not emotions in the psychological sense, but rather emotions understood as forms of being, forms of being in the world, and we began to discuss the negative feelings: before all others, opportunism, later cynicism and finally fear. We believed that opportunism understood as mass emotion, signified that each individual worked in contact with many distinct opportunities, opportunites understood in a technical sense."

So to blend these two sources, ultimately Matt Mason is suggesting that companies take a hint from the pirates and wake up to their post-fordist existence. It will not be an easy task to theorize the role of a company acting as a post-fordist subject, but perhaps that is where we are headed.

I was originally intrigued by the title, expecting the review to look at the formation of machine-based collective subjectivities. Instead, Spencer succinctly highlighted H&N's dual description of the general intellect. For them the term at once applies to the process of pushing machines toward subjectivity through autonomy, as well as the movement of the collective, socialized worker toward a machinic state. He draws this point as part of his larger purpose of calling for academics to defetishize the technological aspect of multitude and instead focus on the centrality of labor.

Where Spencer's analysis starts to rub me the wrong way is in his fixation on H&N's discussion of the cyborg. He argues that their use of the cyborg as a concept points to a failure to move beyond workerist sentiments that have since become irrelevant - and which the two texts are supposed to step beyond. Yet, at least in Multitude, I find that their discussion of the cyborg is used less to underscore the technological or machinc aspects, but to discuss the worker as an essentially network form.

And perhaps that point shows where my opinion differs from Spencer's. I do not see academics' focus on the role of the technological in the potentialities of the multitude as a distraction from its core. Rather, the subjectively-aware machine, or network enabling technology more broadly, should be seen as an influence that enables and catalyzes the formation of pre- and post-individual subject formation on the ontological level.

I am no fan of the hundreds of spam comments this blog - and that's not much compared to blogs with better traffic. Nor am I a supporter of folks who use message boards as tools to degrade their fellow users. At the same time any sort of call for "a rational discourse" is very troubling.

The point I take most issue with is the singular nature of the clause. To imply that there should be one, or even several, accepted modes of discourse in online communication would serve to do nothing more than sterilize a large swath of activity. Message board trolls, spam blogs, and rickrollings may not be desirable, but they represent the relative fluidity of the medium that has also allowed the development of peer-to-peer networks, social network sites, and even the World Wide Web itself.

What makes online communication and development so wonderful is not simply the broad access to information, but also its ability to nurture subaltern communities and projects. It is in the holes of the facade that nearly every successful online venture we see today had their start. We are dealing with a medium whose cracks offer as much - if not more - potential than its surfaces. To ask for "a rational discourse" is to ask for the denial of this central appealing property.