archive : s0metim3s

Interesting how pervasive the language of credit is, well beyond the terrain of banking …

Anyway, below the fold, parts - still in draft form - of “The Social SoftWar.” Plus the epigrams, all of which should indicate the direction of essay. Though, you’ll have to wait for the more, I think, interesting questions of the intersections between labour, rights, technics and war.

The cylons were created by man. They were created to make life easier on the twelve colonies. And then the day came when the cylons decided to kill their masters. – Battlestar Galactica, opening titles, miniseries/pilot.

The cylons were created by man. They evolved. They rebelled. They look and feel human. Some are programmed to think they are human. There are many copies. And they have a plan. – opening titles, Battlestar Galactica.

… the human body and not the steam engine, and not even the clock, was the first machine developed by capitalism. – Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch.

As Clausewitz put it, “War is regarded as nothing but the continuation of politics by other means.” Here, war is an instrument – to be defended, opposed, or explained according to its ends, usually political, but also economic, civilisational, humanitarian, theological and so on. In this sense, war is often reckoned as technology, with all the associated senses in which technology is so often considered an instrument. That is, something whose causes and or ends lie outside it. Foucault’s similarly famous reversal of Clausewitz’s dictum – “that politics is war continued by other means” – suggests the intersection of technics, politics and life as the condition of war, or differently put: a permanent global war. In discussion of the internet, the association between the temporality of the seemingly permanent global war and the entanglements of politics, technics and life has barely begun to be articulated. I do not propose here to do more than outline how this articulation might proceed, and to do so by emphasising some of what I see as the more difficult questions that arise from the intimate networking of ‘social software’: weblogs, ‘user-generated’ websites such as wikis, youtube and similar, and as they relate to conflicts over copyright and such.

That said, the first thing to note is that the question of technology is often posed in such a way that this nexus between politics, life and technics is denied – usually for the purposes of clinching either a pessimistic or optimistic stance – or it is credited with an infinite, at times overtly theological sway. In both these cases, the question of technology too often becomes, or perhaps parallels, the theologisation of politics (and history) that has often animated both conservative and radical critiques of capitalism. Whether assigned with almighty powers from which, according to Heideggerian lamentation, “only a God can save us,” or serving as placeholder of eschatalogical hopes for the reclamation of a divine-like mastery over the world, the question of technology presents itself as the answer to a political question that has – to modify Althusser’s remark on the structure of ideology – not been overtly posed. In this respect, Arthur Kroker is right to ask whether “technology is the name given today to the ancient language of metaphysics.”

[…] Locke’s understanding of society and property rights is of some significance here, being revived in debates over intellectual property, digital content and the like. While Locke was no socialist, he accorded an eminent status to labour in the definition of the social contract and the determination of rights. For him, the goal of society is the preservation of property rights – and, one can claim rights because labour has been exerted. Moreover, Lockean arguments are a cliché of anti-piracy campaigns, serving to conflate the work of musicians with the legal ownership of that work by record companies, filmakers with studios, and so on, for obvious effect. But if Locke’s contentions have reinforced juridico-commercial property as rightful, they have also been the ethico-political ground of various socialist – from social democratic to national socialist – claims for a properly remunerated labour (or is it life?). Proposals for an ‘alternative compensation system’ from the ‘digital commons’ are a version of this, coupling rights and labour together almost as precisely as Locke did, understanding revenues derived from copyright as commensurate with a wage. In this way, differences are slid under the equilibriating heading of “stakeholders” and, as the Berlin Declaration on Collectively Managed Online Rights put it, the goal of balancing rights.

But if one response to this to insist that there is a crucial asymmetry between wage and profit – without which there would be no profit –, the issue becomes more complex if considered through the relation between labour and rights. Here, juridico-commercial precepts radiate as politics and/or morality, which is to say: as the quasi- or openly transcendental determination of merit and its rewards and, not least, justice

[…] Battlestar Galactica, like most current television series, readily illustrates the various skirmishes and strategies over copyrighted distribution and filesharing over the net, as well as the bonds and tensions between so-called social software and market. The copyfight aspects that have accompanied Galactica are more or less well known. Having postponed the initial broadcast in the US, three months after its screening in the UK, distinct broadcast regions yielded to the concurrence of the internet as thousands uploaded and downloaded episodes by way of tv capture devices and peer-to-peer software, undoubtedly urged on by discussions on fansites, weblogs and messageboards that presupposed concomitant viewing or risked spoilers. With a good deal of exaggeration, Mark Pesce announced that “Battlestar Galactica killed broadcast tv,” and – by implying a correspondence between the producers of the series and its owners – went on to speculate about how advertisers might better deliver their “payload,” given broadband “hyperdistribution.”

Since then, broadcasters scrambled to close the gap with ‘simultaneous’ screenings, the promotion of iPod downloads or, as with subsequent Galactica webisodes shown on scifi.com, by blocking non-US IP’s – though without much success, given the webisodes were readily available through fansites, youtube, and across p2p. Nevertheless, insofar as the webisodes appeared during negotiations between Google and youtube, as well as mounting copyright infringement notices served on the former, it is not surprising that the webisodes were removed almost as quickly as they were uploaded onto its site. Nor was it unexpected that youtube (and the relevant studios) would begin logging those who regularly post and watch copyrighted material, going so far as to pass along a name to Viacom-Paramount. None of which, however, halted the uploading of either webisodes or episodes onto youtube for long or, for that matter, the increasing production of fanvids, including of the slash variety. After all, youtube would have much less content without copyright infringements of one kind or another.

But if all of this also suggests that the line between copyright breaches and marketing is unclear – as is the demarcation between conventional advertising and unofficial Galactica weblogs, blogging, wikis and fansites – it nevertheless shows that the traversal of that distinction does not necessarily have to be played out to the advantage of juridico-commercial determinations of property. Rather, it makes those determinations more explicit. Recently NBC Universal, claiming that the Galactica webisodes were advertising material rather than episodes of the series, declined to pay writers and crew the relevant residuals or credit them. Galactica’s Executive Producer, Ron Moore, responded by rolling the credits on his weblog and refusing to deliver over the rest of the webisodes, including those already completed, to the studio. NBC Universal subsequently charged that the Writers Guild of America had “unlawfully pressured producers not to perform.” In this, fansites predictably though notably lined up against NBC Universal.