Re: <nettime> social media critique: next steps?

I hate to look like a self-promotor here - sorry - but Jan Söderqvist and I analysed "attentionalism" as the deeper and even more complex continuation of "capitalism" in our Marxist digital age manifesto "The Neotocrats" already in 2000. The full scary pyramid of networks (class divisions are no longer between individuals but in between the networks themselves), "you are those you are allowed to communicate and exchange information with" in Chapter 9. And as Slavoj Zizek among others have pointed out, the resistance against the new unfairnesses and injustices of the attentionalist system is laid out for "eternalist activists" in Chapters 4 and 5. Don't focus too much on the algorithms themselves but rather on who has access to them and know how to exploit them (those with 400,000 rather than 40 twitter followers and with higher positions in Facebook's dreaded sociogram etc). A keyword here is "imploitation" and "imploitative power". The pwer of information is namely one of exclusivity and timing. It is when you access and can extract information, not if you do, that determines power in an attentionalist world. Which we empirically showed had shifted in 2012 (attention outscored any other forms of capital value precisely in the search algorithms by then, even the ad had become a sign of desperation. The benfit of our analysis is that you can establish three rather than just one netocratic class category. Information owners (say current Silicon Valley) after all only possess the means of (re)production within the system. Like nobility and factory owners before them. But power also needs a truth-producing vector (previously priests and academia, now both powerless) and an imaginary power (previously kings and politicians, now increasingly ironic and powerless, we predicted "a TV celebrity would become U.S. President soon for ironic reasons",16 years before Trump happened). It is where these two further netocratic elites pop up that we are working to find out now. And it is dirty, we need not only Hegel and Marx but increasingly Freud to understand how mortido and libido clash and preversely interact in digital culture today. Think Frankfurt School revival. Which is our next, fifth book.

All the best intentions

Alexander Bard

2018-01-16 13:46 GMT+01:00 Sean Cubitt <s.cubitt@gold.ac.uk>:

that should of course have read:

the ruling algorithms are in every epoch the algorithms of the ruling class

>From The German Ideology to German Media Theory (and you’re right Patrice, via Therborn . . and Lefebvre and Stuart hall)

have algorithms taken over the role of ideology? Clearer if posed in Foucauldian power-knowledge-institution terms of discourse: has the construction of truth passed over to algorithms, whose operation favours a class that owns the means of their distribution?

subordinate question: is this the work of a distinct class that owns the means of production, or is distribution now more significant in the age of financialisation? Or, have the algoithms extended the work of autonomisation Marx saw happening in the factory system, from purely productive to reproductive sectors, no longer therefore under the control of capitalists but rewarding them with obscene bonuses as a form of benign parasite that helps them survive and grow - capitalists as symbionts, the gut flora of algorithmic capital.

If any of these hypotheses are true, the forms of struggle against them take very different shapes.

s

> On 16 Jan 2018, at 12:20, Patrice Riemens <patrice@xs4all.nl> wrote:
>
>
> Sounds like "What Does The Ruling Class Do When It Rules"
>
> https://www.versobooks.com/books/292-what-does-the-ruling-class-do-when-it-rules
>
> Ciaoui, p+7D!
>
>
> On 2018-01-16 12:27, Sean Cubitt wrote:
>> The algorithms of the ruling class are in every epoch the algorithms
>> of the ruling class
>> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>>> Message: 1
>>> Date: Mon, 15 Jan 2018 20:16:59 +0100
>>> From: Florian Cramer <flrncrmr@gmail.com>
>>> Cc: Nettime <nettime-l@kein.org>
>>> Subject: Re: <nettime> social media critique: next steps?
>>> Message-ID:
>>> <CADCyihTuCJWc5ed0DcvFxZV5AmpQfFK5V03Tt1t=PHj8vbYUKw@mail.gmail.com>
>>> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
>> <snip>
>>> It means that no Chinese "social credit" algorithm is necessary to
>>> discourage social engagement or political resistance. It is not even
>>> a
>>> question of "better" algorithms - whether "better" algorithmic
>>> governance
>>> within existing social networks or through the creation of
>>> "different"/alternative social networks -, since the issue will
>>> remain,
>>> being one of an 'apparatus' or an 'actor network' transcending
>>> binary
>>> distinctions of machinic and human agency. (The question whether a
>>> troll is
>>> a human or a bot, isn't very relevant.)
>>> Articulation of positions [including artist's positions outside
>>> self-chosen
>>> safe spaces] is rapidly becoming a privilege of those who can afford
>>> their
>>> defense.
>>> -F
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