PJ Rey's Sociology Blog Feed

Why We Disrupt

PJ Rey — Sun, 08 Jan 2012 20:55:52 +0000

Originally published on Inside Higher Education.

Colleges and universities increasingly face tough decisions regarding how to deal with manifestations of the growing Occupy movement on their campuses. We are all now well aware of the intense negative press the University of California at Davis and its chancellor, Linda Katehi, received after a group of peacefully seated protesters were pepper-sprayed by a campus police officer. Since then, new incidents have made headlines: Students associated with the Occupy movement have been disrupting public presentations by academics, activists, and politicians (most of whom identify as conservative). The protesters delivered messages or rebuttals to the person on stage using a practice called "the human microphone." The human microphone amplifies a speaker’s voice by having many people repeat the speaker's words in unison. The speaker initiates the practice by calling out "mic check" and the speaker’s fellow protestors demonstrate that they are ready to act by repeating "mic check." The chorus then repeats the speaker's words one sentence at a time. This practice — which originated as means to communicate at Occupy encampments where electronic amplification was forbidden — has become an important and recognizable symbol of the movement.

A recent news article in Inside Higher Ed reports on several such instances occurring on university campuses. The article’s author, Allie Grasgreen, notes many people believe that the Occupy tactic of mic checking powerful speakers is tantamount to "censorship." This common assertion shares the logic of the demands made by Karl Rove when he was mic-checked at John Hopkins University: "If you believe in free speech and you have a chance to show it ... if you believe in the right of the First Amendment to free speech … then you demonstrate it by shutting up and waiting until the Q&A session … Line up behind the mic…."

But Grasgreen and Rove both miss the point. Occupiers are trying to demonstrate — through the very performance of this act — that "free speech" is not evenly distributed. The point is that only the 1 percent ever find themselves at the podium. The 99 percent are left to fill the seats in the audience, and, if they are lucky, they may have the chance to do as Rove commands and line up behind the mic for a few brief seconds in the spotlight. This is, of course, because the opportunity to speak and to be heard is inextricable from issues of wealth and power. The few who hold these assets in abundance have more purchasing power in the attention economy. K Street is nothing if not an industrialized machine for converting money and power into speech that will be heard. Sure, we all may have "free speech," but as George Orwell quipped in Animal Farm, "some animals are more equal than others."

When universities intervene to stop these protest actions, administrators tend to portray the institution as an impartial moderator attempting to uphold free speech for all political groups. Yet, these administrators fail to grasp the extent to which their own notions of free speech are politicized. Freedom of speech, like all freedom, has many dimensions and gradations. When we say "free speech," of course, we really mean "free political speech." The current discourse surrounding "free speech," as it pertains to the Occupy movement, has been cast in a radically conservative tone: It is backward-looking, toward the white, male, and aristocratic thinkers of the Enlightenment, who did not have to worry about power because they already had it. Yet, without attention and access, free speech is wholly inconsequential. Unfortunately, the contemporary public discourse has inherited a tendency is to assume that, despite all evidence to the contrary, we all somehow have equal access to the public sphere.

For political speech to be meaningful, it requires attention, which is a finite resource — and, a resource that has been highly marketized. Attention goes to the highest bidder — the person with most economic, social, cultural, or symbolic capital to trade. The attention economy is an ever-shifting field where those already in power seek to consolidate their position by establishing exclusionary practices that distinguish them from others and continue to draw attention their way. Those who control institutions get to write the rules and the rules will always ensure that they are heard at the expense of others. Only those at the very top have the luxury of (naïvely) assuming their speech is interpreted on its own intrinsic merits. And, this elite benefits when others embrace this same power-blind ideology. As a result, C.W. Mills observed long ago in The Power Elite, "American men of power tend, by convention, to deny that they are powerful." The world is not flat, and those at the top of the hill have an easier time projecting their voices. And, while universities certainly tolerate a few of what Patricia Hill Collins called "outsiders within" — who speak on behalf of the 99 percent — we should not fall into the trap of confusing the exception for the rule.

The current debate surrounding Occupy’s mic-check tactic is in desperate need of an updated notion of free speech that accounts not only for negative freedom (i.e., freedom from constraints) but also for positive freedom (i.e., freedom to be recognized) as well. That is to say, for the right to free (political) speech to have a practical significance, it must also imply a right of equal access to the public sphere. Of course, there are practical limits to equal access. Attention given to one individual or group usually comes at the expense of attention to others. But what the Occupy movement seems to be rejecting is the current (arguably anti-democratic) reality where distribution of access is left to be determined by market forces. Occupiers are struggling for the democratization of political speech. The primary purpose of Occupy’s use of the human microphone at public speaking events is not to disrupt, but to be heard. It is not an assault on free speech but a tactic for obtaining it.

The logic of this debate over access and control extends beyond issues of free speech and the human microphone. Political opponents have made similar criticisms of the Occupy movement's tactic of indefinite encampment on (often privately owned) public spaces. These detractors have argued that by camping in a public space, Occupiers are, simultaneously, denying others the freedom to use that space. Again, this concept of freedom is blind to power. Like speech, space is not evenly distributed. If the mic-check tactic aims at the democratization of speech, encampments aim at the democratization of space. Occupiers are protesting a society in which the town square has given way to the shopping mall. The encampments are, in part, a statement about the forfeiture of public space to the private sector — that is, out of the hands of the 99 percent and into the hands of the 1 percent. Absence of public space precludes public assembly. The thought of protests on Las Vegas’ sidewalk-less strips is difficult to entertain. As such, claims that the encampments constitute a denial of their freedom to assemble (especially when articulated by those who already control the vast majority of the space) ring hollow.

Beyond the fact that university administrators are using politically charged interpretations of freedom to justify their crackdown on protests, the underlying motivations of the institutional actors are also suspect. Though administrators have a tendency to try to positively spin crackdowns by valorizing the police who interrupt these mic checks as defenders of free speech, such claims are naïve, if not outright deceptive. The real reason why universities break up these actions is because they want to preserve and protect the routine operation of the bureaucracy; it has little to do with freedom and is, instead, about rationalization (what sociologist Max Weber described as the tendency of Modern bureaucratic institutions to value efficiency, calculability, predictability, and control above all else). Universities are frightened that speakers might back out or avoid their campus if they develop a reputation for disorder. The primary stakes for universities are prestige and profit, not freedom and democracy. We should not conflate the maintenance of order and the protection of institutional reputation (zwecktrational action) with struggles motivated by the pursuit of an abstract ideal of freedom (wertrational action).

Both administrators and journalists will sound hopelessly out of touch as long as they continue to apply to Occupy the very concept of freedom that the movement is criticizing. Occupy affirms what Cicero observed long ago: "Freedom is participation in power." While this aphorism may be a bit simplistic, it is certainly true that a concept of freedom that is blind to power merely serves to reinforce it

xkcd Comic Reveals Common Misunderstanding of WikiLeaks

PJ Rey — Mon, 26 Dec 2011 03:42:49 +0000

This xkcd comic humorously highlights a seeming tension in WikiLeaks' so-called "anti-secrecy agenda:" While secrecy facilitates the systemic aabuses of institutional power that WikiLeaks opposes, it also protects extra-institutional actors working to disrupt conspiracies (i.e., uneven distributions of information) that benefit the few at the expense of the many. However, as I discuss a recent Cyborgology post and a chapter (co-authored with Nathan Jurgenson) for a forthcoming WikiLeaks reader, Julian Assange's approach to secrecy is far more sophisticated than just unconditional opposition. For example, he explains in a 2010 TIME interview:

secrecy is important for many things but shouldn't be used to cover up abuses, which leads us to the question of who decides and who is responsible. It shouldn't really be that people are thinking about: Should something be secret? I would rather it be thought: Who has a responsibility to keep certain things secret? And, who has a responsibility to bring matters to the public? And those responsibilities fall on different players. And it is our responsibility to bring matters to the public.

Assange is saying that secrecy is not a problem in and of itself; in fact, society generally benefits when individuals and extra-institutional actors are able to maintain some level of secrecy. Secrecy only become a problem when it occurs in institutional contexts, because institutions have an intrinsic tendency to control information in order to benefit insiders. This conspiratorial nature of institutions is what WikiLeaks truly opposes, and enforced transparency (i.e., leaking) is merely a tactic in that struggle. For this reason, WikiLeaks and Anonymous (the extra-institutional Internet community and hacker collective) are allies, despite the superficial tension highlighted in this comic

Occupy’s Mic Check: A Tactic to Disrupt Power, Not Free Speech

PJ Rey — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 06:26:48 +0000

Author's Note: This piece was originally posted to Sociology Lens on December 10th. On December 13th, the piece was temporarily removed and I was asked to make revisions to make more explicit the conventional sociological themes in this piece. This request was made as the result of pressure from a senior professor who deemed this piece too "polemical" and not "sociological." While I and many others in the discipline have epistemological objections to very concept of value-free social science, and thus view with suspicion any implication that sociology can be separated from politics, I agreed to make revisions, because I think that argument in this piece important and can only be strengthened by further reference to the social theory canon. The downside is that the post is now less accessible to a popular audience than it was originally intended to be, so I have archived a copy of the original here. Finally, I must note that, while examining power is, perhaps, the oldest and most important task of sociology, it is (and has always been) political by nature.

A recent news piece for Inside Higher Ed reports on several instances where students have disrupted public presentations by conservative academics, activists, or politicians. The students used “the human microphone”—i.e., a practice of amplifying a speaker’s voice by having many people repeat the speaker’s words in unison—to offer counterpoints to the arguments being made by the presenter. The article’s author, Allie Grasgreen, asserts that the mic checking the conservative presenters is tantamount to “censorship.” This assertion shares the logic of what Karl Rove demanded when he was mic checked at John Hopkins:

If you believe in free speech and you have a chance to show it… if you believe in the right of the First Amendment to free speech… then you demonstrate it by shutting up and waiting until the Q&A session… line up behind the mic…

American men of power tend, by convention, to deny that they are powerful [...] So firm a part of the style of power-wielding have they become that conservative writers readily misinterpret them as indicating a trend toward an 'amorphous power situation." [...] But the "power situation" of America to is less amorphous than is the perspective of those who see it as a romantic confusion. It is less a flat, momentary 'situation' than a graded, durable structure. [...] It is the form and the height of the gradation of power that we must examine if we would understand the degree of power held and exercised by the elites.

In short, Mills is saying we are a society comprised of institutions (most importantly, military, political, and financial institutions) and our positions within these institutions determine the levels of power and influence we have. These institutions perpetuate historical inequalities, transmitting unequal power relations across generations. Mills goes on to connect link power and freedom, saying, "[m]oney provides power and power provides freedom." Mills highlights the mistake of talking about freedom in binary "free or unfree" terms. Freedom of speech, like all freedom, has many dimensions and gradations. When we say "free speech" we really mean "free political speech." For political speech to be meaningful, it requires attention, which is a finite resource—and, a resource that has been marketized. Attention goes to the highest bidder—the person with most economic, social, cultural, or symbolic capital to trade (as Pierre Boudieu would say). More recent theorists have termed these conditions "the attention economy." This economy is an ever-shifting field where those already in power seek to consolidate their position by establishing exclusionary practices (i.e., a habitus) that distinguish them from others and continue to draw attention their way. Those who control institutions get to write the rules and the rules will always ensure that they are heard at the expense of others.

Michel Foucault made a similar argument from a historical perspective. In his (post-)structuralist interpretation of history, various chronological epochs—discursive regimes as he sometimes called them—are define by the relationship between power and the articulation of certain situated knowledges. Foucault obseved that certain ideas, speakers, and media had more traction than others at any given point in history. For example, the pronouncement of the priest may hold sway in one era, but be almost insignificant compared to the written records of the clinic in another era. When we speak, we are always implicitly invoking our institutional position. As I write this piece, I am ever-conscious of the fact professors will read it as the work of a grad student. In some countries, it is even customary to ask the age of a speaker before listening to his/her argument. We might also consider observations in intersectional works like Black Feminist Thought, where Patricia Hill Collins demonstrates that being black and being women makes one's voice less likely be heard, regardless of content. Only those at the very top have the luxury of (naïvely) assuming their speech is interpreted on its own intrinsic merits. The world is not flat (Thomas Friedman not withstanding); those a the top of the hill have an easier time projecting their voices.

We must ask ourselves: Who benefits from the belief that we have equal access to political speech? The obvious answer: Those who already control it. Marx recognized long ago that those in power benefit when they can convince others to adopt an ideology that reinforces their own position. When it comes to free speech, America appears to have fallen into a state of "false consciousness," where we blissfully deny that the obvious lack of representation that most of us experience. How can we, in good faith, claim equal access to political speech in light of the Supreme Court’s recent Citizens United decision, which makes the linkage between access to money and access to speech de jure and not merely de facto? American politics is explicitly and affirmatively runs on a pay to play model. Were this not true, the lack of competitive elections and the sham that is modern broadcast media would render most political speech irrelevant anyway. Occupy's mic check tactic is controversial because it challenges the prevailing ideology that political speech is uniformly accessible. It is performative critique: The voiceless demand a voice and are immediate silenced via institution mechanisms of force and coercion. It is for us academics to articulate the argument, the Occupiers have done their part in demonstrating it.

Importantly, this criticism of contemporary discourse surrounding free speech is not new. There are many detractors to those who believe that the de jure existence of the First Amendment (or its analogs in other countries) as well as some basic democratic institutions somehow guarantee de facto equal representation in public discourse. Thinkers such as Jürgen Habermas who cling to idealistic Enlightenment conceptions of radically free, rational, and (as Charles Taylor describes) "atomistic" individuals have been criticized by commentators with communitarian, neo-Marxist, feminist, post-Modern, and many other backgrounds. Many of these critics have argued that the only way to challenge system characterized by systematic exclusion is from without. Habermas's mentor, Herbert Marcuse, for example, called for a "Great Refusal" by those on the margins. Similarly, Audre Lourde argued that "[t]he master's tools will never dismantle the master's house." Occupy's mic check strategy embodies this sort of theoretical perspective, seeking to rupture the norms of public discourse to which they have been systematically denied inclusion.

What we need is an updated notion of free speech that accounts not only for negative freedom (i.e., freedom from constraints) but also for positive freedom (i.e., freedom to be recognized) as well. That is to say, for the right to free (political) speech to have a practical significance, it must also imply a right of equal access to the public sphere. Of course, there are practical limits to equal access. Attention given to one individual or group comes at the expense of attention to others. But what the Occupy movement seems to be rejecting is the current (arguably anti-democratic) reality where distribution of access is left to be determined by market forces. Occupiers are struggling for the democratization of political speech. The primary purpose of Occupy’s use of the human microphone at public speaking events is not to disrupt, but to be heard. It is not an assault on free speech but a tactic for obtaining it.

To fully understand extent of and limits to free speech, we must also examine the justifications used when suppressing the activists' attempts at having their voices heard. The police who interrupt these mic checks are often publicly valorized as protecting free speech. Such claims are naïve, if not outright deceptive. The real reason why universities break up these actions is because they want to preserve and protect the routine operation of the bureaucracy; it has little to do with freedom and is, instead, about rationalization (what sociologist Max Weber described as the tendency of Modern bureaucratic institutions to value efficiency, calculability, predictability, and control above all else). We should not conflate the maintenance of order and the protection of institutional reputation (zwecktrational action) with struggles motivated by the pursuit of an abstract ideal of freedom (wertrational action).

It is also important to recognize that the logic of this debate over access and control extends beyond issues of free speech and the human microphone. Political opponents have made similar criticisms of the Occupy movement’s tactic of indefinite encampment on (often privately-owned) public spaces. These detractors have argued that by camping in a public space, Occupiers are, simultaneously, denying others the freedom to use that space. Again, this concept of freedom is blind to power. Like speech, space is not evenly distributed. If the mic check tactic aims at the democratization of speech, encampments aim at the democratization of space. Occupiers are protesting a society in which the town square has given way to the shopping mall. The encampments are, in part, a statement about the forfeiture of public space to the private sector—that is, out of the hands of the 99% and into the hands of the 1%. Absence of public space precludes public assembly. The thought of protests on Las Vegas' sidewalk-less strips is difficult to entertain. Systematic denial of space is also systematic denial of speech. For this reason, claims that the encampments constitute a denial of their freedom to assemble (especially when articulated by those who already control the vast majority of the space) ring hollow.

Both critics and journalists will sound hopelessly out of touch so long as they continue to apply to Occupy the very concept of freedom that the movement is criticizing. Occupy affirms what Cicero observed long ago: “Freedom is participation in power.” While this aphorism may be a bit simplistic, it is certainly true that a concept of freedom that is blind to power merely serves to reinforce it.

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If the mic check tactic aims at the democratization of speech, encampments aim at the democratization of space.

Occupy’s Mic Check: A Tactic to Disrupt Power, Not Free Speech

PJ Rey — Sat, 10 Dec 2011 19:36:38 +0000

If you believe in free speech and you have a chance to show it… if you believe in the right of the First Amendment to free speech… then you demonstrate it by shutting up and waiting until the Q&A session… line up behind the mic…

But Grasgreen and Rove both miss the point. Occupiers are trying to demonstrate—through the very performance of this act—that “free speech” is not evenly distributed. The point is that only the 1% ever find themselves at the podium. The 99% are left to fill the seats in the audience, and, if they are lucky, they may have the chance to do as Rove commands and line up behind the mic for a few brief seconds in the spotlight. This is, of course, because the opportunity to speak and to be heard is inextricable from issues of wealth and power. The few who hold these assets in abundance have more purchasing power in the attention economy. K Street is nothing if not an industrialized machine for converting money and power into speech that will be heard. Even more concerning is the Supreme Court’s recent Citizens United decision that makes the linkage between access to money and access to speech de jure and not merely de facto. Sure, we all may have "free speech," but as George Orwell quipped in Animal Farm “some animals are more equal than others.”

The problem with the current discourse surrounding “free speech,” as it pertains to the Occupy movement, is that it has been cast in a radically conservative tone—it is backward looking, towards the white, male, and aristocratic thinkers of the Enlightenment who did not have to worry about power because they already had it. The tendency is to assume that, despite all the evidence to the contrary, we all somehow have equal access to the public sphere. Without such access, free speech is meaningless. What we need is a notion of free speech that accounts not only for negative freedom (i.e., freedom from) but also for positive freedom (i.e., freedom to) as well. That is to say, for the right to free (political) speech to have a practical significance, it must also imply a right of equal access to the public sphere. Of course, there are practical limits to equal access. Attention given to one individual or group comes at the expense of attention to others. But what the Occupy movement seems to be rejecting is the current (arguably anti-democratic) reality where distribution of access is left to be determined by market forces. The primary purpose of Occupy’s use of the human microphone at public speaking events is not to disrupt, but to be heard. It is not an assault on free speech but a tactic for obtaining it.

It is also important to examine the justifications used when suppressing these actions. The police who interrupt these mic checks are valorized as protecting free speech. Such claims are naïve, if not outright deceptive. The reason why universities break up these actions is because they want to preserve and protect the routine operation of the bureaucracy; it has little to do with freedom and is, instead, about rationalization (what sociologist Max Weber described as the tendency of Modern bureaucratic institutions to value efficiency, calculability, predictability, and control above all else). We should not conflate the maintenance of order and the protection of institutional reputation (zwecktrational action) with struggles motivated by the pursuit of an abstract ideal of freedom (wertrational action).

This debate over access and control extends beyond issues of free speech and the human microphone. Commentators have made similar criticisms of the Occupy movement’s tactic of indefinite encampment on (often privately-owned) public spaces. Opponents have argued that by camping in a public space, Occupiers are, simultaneously, denying others the freedom to use that space. Again, this concept of freedom is blind to power. Like speech, space is not evenly distributed. Occupiers are protesting a society in which the town square has given way to the shopping mall. The encampments are, in part, a statement about the forfeiture of public space to the private sector—that is, out of the hands of the 99% and into the hands of the 1%. When articulated by those who already control the vast majority of the space, claims that the encampments constitute a denial of their freedom to assemble ring hollow.

Both critics and journalists will sound hopelessly out of touch so long as they continue to apply to Occupy the very concept of freedom that the movement is criticizing. Occupy believes in what Cicero observed long ago: “Freedom is participation in power.” While this aphorism may be a bit simplistic, it is certainly true that a concept of freedom that is blind to power merely serves to reinforce it

How Cyberpunk Warned against Apple’s Consumer Revolution

PJ Rey — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 19:47:01 +0000

It's a notable coincidence that Steve Job died exactly two decades after Neil Stephenson completed Snowcrash, arguably, the last great Cyberpunk novel. Stephenson and Jobs' work exemplified two alternative visions of humans' relationship with technology in the Digital Age. Snowcrash offers a gritty, dystopian vision of a world where technology works against human progress as much as it works on behalf of it. Strong individuals must assert themselves against technological slavery, though ironically, they rely on technology and their technological prowess to do so.

Apple, on the other hand, tells us that the future is now, offering lifestyle devices that are slick (some might say, sterile). Despite being mass produced, these devices are supposed to bolster our individuality by communicating our superior aesthetic standards. Above all, Apple offers a world where technology is user-friendly and requires little technical competency. We need not liberate ourselves from technology; there's an app for that.

Values and style are inextricably linked (as Marshal McLuhan famously preached). So, unsurprisingly, the differences between Apple's view of the future and that of Cyberpunk authors such as Stephenson run far deeper. The Cyberpunk genre has a critical mood that is antithetical to Apple's mission of pushing its products into the hands of as many consumers as possible. The clean, minimalist styling of Apple devices makes a superficial statement about the progressive nature of the company, while the intuitive interface makes us feel that Apple had us in mind when designing the product—that human experience is valued, that they care. Of course, this is all a gimmick. Apple invokes style to "enchant" its products with an aura of mystery and wonderment while simultaneously deflecting questions about how the thing actually works (as discussed in Nathan Jurgenson & Zeynep Tufekci's recent "Digital Dialogue" presentation on the iPad). Apple isn't selling a product, it's selling an illusion. And to enjoy it (as I described in a recent essay), we must suspend disbelief and simply trust in the"Mac Geniuses"—just as we must allow ourselves to believe in an illusionist if we hope to enjoy a magic show. Thus, the values coded into Apple products are passivity and consumerism; it is at this level where it is most distinct from the Cyberpunk movement.

In the "The Gernsback Continuum," William Gibson—Cyberpunk's best-known author—makes a similar critique of 1930s Futurism / Art Deco for its naive optimism, in which the present masquerades as a Utopian future. Gibson explains:

The Thirties had seen the first generation of American industrial designers; until the Thirties, all pencil sharpeners had looked like pencil sharpeners your basic Victorian mechanism, perhaps with a curlicue of decorative trim. After the advent of the designers, some pencil sharpeners looked as though they'd been put together in wind tunnels. For the most part, the change was only skin-deep; under the streamlined chrome shell, you'd find the same Victorian mechanism. Which made a certain kind of sense, because the most successful American designers had been recruited from the ranks of Broadway theater designers. It was all a stage set, a series of elaborate props for playing at living in the future.

Today's popular consumer electronic devices—typified by Apple products—have revived this futurist pattern of enveloping technology in a fantastical veneer, though exchanging chrome and Bakelite for brushed aluminum and pristine white plastic. The important parallel between Gibson's pencil sharpener and the iPhone is that, by burying the inner-workings of its devices in non-openable cases and non-modifiable interfaces, Apple diminishes user agency—instead, fostering naïveté and passive acceptance.

Jobs delivered consumers a clean, safe future in the here and now—a future which, paradoxically, brings pollution and exploitation to much of the rest of world, who are not so lucky as to indulge in this illusion (a story told in this game, which, tellingly, has been censored by Apple’s app store). The problem with this sort of fetishistic techno-Utopianism—as 30s Futurism and the Apple corporation both demonstrate—is that, by living with our heads in an idyllic future, we tend to ignore, or simply paper over, the problems of the present. In conventional Marxian terms, we might say Utopian Futurism is form of "false consciousness," a buoyant ideology disconnected from real material conditions. Futurism is also, arguably, a post-Modern phenomenon, insofar as in implodes the present and the future. Of course, because this future has not yet happened, it is an imaginary future. In attempting to pass the present off as an imaginary future, Futurism negates both, creating a simulation (present qua future) of a simulation (the imaginary future)—what philosophers call a simulacrum. By asserting that the future has arrived, Futurism negates the real conditions of the present as well as any constructive imaginings of the future.

Even before the Internet Age blossomed, the Cyberpunk movement anticipated the potential for this new breed of (cyber-)Utopianism and offered itself as a sort of vaccine against the irrational exuberance that we, nevertheless, witnessed in the 1990s. The genre is characterized by the marriage of a deep interest in (and embrace of) modern technology with pessimism regarding the potential social consequences of this technology's pervasive use. Far from being techno-evangelists, Cyberpunk authors warn against a future they nonetheless portray as inevitably. Loss of individual liberty is almost invariably a central concern—however, scenarios created by Cyberpunk authors tend to promote an anarchist (as opposed to libertarian) concept of freedom. Stephenson, in particular, portrays worlds in which government institutions have become ineffective at regulation so that life or death decision are left to whims of market forces. In light of such conditions, Stephenson details a world with stark contrasts between those who have power and status and those left to languish on the margins. In Snowcrash, for example, a wealthy media baron drugs tens of thousands of people and drags them off to an enormous chain of rafts where they are used as living hosts to breed a virus. Under such conditions of extreme exploitation, a neoliberal ideology that encourages personal expression through consumer devices—as celebrated by Apple—hardly seems plausible. (Admittedly, in Stephenson's Diamond Age, a lead protagonist finds salvation through a self-customizing virtual reality device, but it is not fetishized; it works because it allows her to make a meaningful, albeit indirect, connection with another human being).

Cyberpunk's allegiance is not to technology itself, but to a culture that values freedom for individuals. Technology is a means to an end. However, it would be misleading to say that the wired and well-equipped characters merely use technology in pursuit of liberation. Technology is not a "neutral" thing to be consumed when convenient. Instead, technology itself become a site of struggle. In fact, the focal technologies in these narratives are often destructive or oppressive by nature. The protaganists are generally hackers who must subvert intentions of the technology's creators by fundamentally altering the nature of the technology itself to function in accordance with a competing set of values. In short, the protagonists and the antagonists are wrestling to shape technology to best fit there own goals and values. [More...]

The Future of the #Occupy Movement (in Memes)

PJ Rey — Thu, 24 Nov 2011 05:21:13 +0000

With police dismantling Zuccotti Park and other #Occupy encampments throughout the country and impending Winter weather, pundits and activist alike are asking: Does the #Occupy movement have a future? To survive, #Occupy must begin—and, in fact, has already begun—a tactical shift. However, before I attempt to discuss #Occupy’s future, let me first be clear: The #Occupy movement is already a success. Recent months have witnessed a radical shift in mainstream political discourse, where concerns over America’s widening income and wealth gaps now have near equal footing with the deficit-reduction agenda. It has become common knowledge that the top 1% receive roughly a fifth of America’s collective income and control a third of the wealth. More Americans view Occupy Wall Street favorably (35%) than Wall Street (16%), government (21%), or the Tea Party (21%); and, though the country is gripped by a state of general cynicism, more people hold unfavorable impressions of big business (71%), government (71%), and the Tea Party (50%), than of #Occupy Wall Street (40%). Put simply, #Occupy is the most popular (and least unpopular) thing we’ve got.

The success of the #Occupy movement has thus far been a product of both its visibility and its endurance. Occupiers have been adept at leveraging mobile computing and social media technologies (as well as tourists!) to ensure that an abundance of content circulates both virally and through traditional media outlets. Moreover, by continuing to tax local and federal resources, the physical presence of the occupiers has ensured continued media attention. Finally, the lack of leaders or spokespeople has meant that the mainstream media has been unable to reduce the movement to a simplistic and easily dismissible narrative.

Can it survive? Arguably, the recent spate of raids is the best thing that could have happened to the #Occupy movement for two reasons: 1.) The brutal manner in which raids were carried out attracted media coverage and garnered widespread sympathy; these images were particularly striking, given that the Arab Spring is still fresh on the minds of many Americans. 2.) It gave occupiers a graceful exit strategy—they are able to leave the encampments, not as deserters, but as heroic victims of state repression. The raids provided the movement one last moment of explosive confirmation, rather than allowing the occupiers to lose a long the war of attrition against winter cold.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p7kS3Ic4-lE[/youtube]

However, it is clear that the environment will only grow increasingly hostile to the occupation of physical space. Thus, if the movement is to survive, it must transform, while continuing to capitalize on what has thus made it successful. By combining tech savvy with now widely-recognizable memes such as “occupy [fill-in the-blank],” “we are the 99%,” and “we are unstoppable, another world is possible,” #OWS has built what is, essentially, a new brand of political activism. Except, in the age of social media, brands are no longer a thing that is created by the few at the top and consumed by the many on the bottom, brands—or, more broadly speaking, memes—are circulated and recirculated, simultaneously being produced and consumed by participants. These little cultural nuggets are, at once, decentralized and universally recognizable. Regardless of origin, memes take on a life of their own, being reinvented with each repetition. Sarah Wanenchak provided and excellent example of this process unfolding with respect to the "evolving human microphone." What was originally invented as an analog amplifier for use where electronic amplification was prohibited is now an instrument for disrupting and appropriating events serving the interests of the 1%. Similarly, the "casually pepper spraying cop" meme has used humor to draw attention to the excessive use of force by police against protestors. It was only a matter of time before this cultural neologism—the Internet meme—was brought to bear on politics. That is to say, activism in the 21^st Century can learn as much from the Rickroll as it can Civil Rights Movement

Trust and Complex Technology: The Cyborg’s Modern Bargain

PJ Rey — Thu, 24 Nov 2011 02:33:41 +0000

A few weeks back, I wrote a post about special pieces of technology (e.g., backpacks, glasses, a Facebook profile), which become so integrated into our routines that they become almost invisible to us, seeming to act as extension of our own consciousness. I explained that this relationship is what differentiates equipment from tools, which we occasionally use to complete specific tasks, but which remain separate and distinct to us. I concluded that our relationship with equipment fundamentally alters who we are. And, because we all use equipment, we are all cyborgs (in the loosest sense).

In this essay, I want to continue the discussion about our relationship with the technology we use. Adapting and extending Anthony Giddens' Consequences of Modernity, I will argue that an essential part of the cyborganic transformation we experience when we equip Modern, sophisticated technology is deeply tied to trust in expert systems. It is no longer feasible to fully comprehend the inner workings of the innumerable devices that we depend on; rather, we are forced to trust that the institutions that deliver these devices to us have designed, tested, and maintained the devices properly. This bargain—trading certainty for convenience—however, means that the Modern cyborg finds herself ever more deeply integrated into the social circuit. In fact, the cyborg’s connection to technology makes her increasingly socially dependent because the technological facets of her being require expert knowledge from others.

Let us begin by further exploring why Giddens claims that the complexity of the Modern world requires a high degree of trust. Consider the experience of flying on an airplane. Perhaps the typical passenger has vague notions of lift and drag, but these passengers are certainly not privy to the myriad formulas used to calculate the precise mechanics that keep the craft airborne. Unlike the Wright Brothers and their famous “Flyer,” a single engineer can no longer be expected to understand all the various systems that comprise modern aircraft. In fact, the design team for a plane is likely so segmented and specialized that it would be impossible to fit a team capable of understanding a craft inside the craft itself. Giddens explains that complex technologies such as airplanes are “disembedded” from the local context of our lives and our social relations; that is to say we lack direct or even indirect experiential knowledge of modern technology. Instead, our willingness to, say, hurl ourselves 30,000 feet above the Earth in an aluminum cone, derives solely from our trust in expert systems. Importantly, this trust is not in individual experts, but in the institutions that organize and regulate their knowledge as well as the fruits of that knowledge.

[caption id="attachment_5877" align="aligncenter" width="460" caption="Anthony Giddens"][/caption]

Modern day cyborgs are characterized by profound trust in both technology and the expert systems that create it. That is to say, in order to make use of complex technology, we have to accept limited understanding of it and simply assume that it was properly designed and tested. However, trust is not merely passive acceptance of a lack of understanding; it also involves a commitment. Giddens (CoM, p. 26-7) explains:

Trust [...] involves more than a calculation of the reliability of likely future events. Trust exists, Simmel [a Classical sociologist] says, when we "believe in" someone or some principle: "It expresses the feeling that there exists between our idea of a being and the being itself a definite connection and unity, a certain consistency in our conception of it, an assurance and lack of resistance in the surrender of the Ego to this conception, which may rest upon particular reasons, but is not explained by them.'' Trust, in short, is a form of "faith," in which the confidence vested in probable outcomes expresses a commitment to something rather than just a cognitive understanding.

The use of complex technology involves an element of risk (e.g., crashing back to Earth). The cyborg’s confidence in the expert systems behind technology must be sufficiently strong to mitigate any perceived risks from use of that technology. Once we have equipped a piece of technology, we become dependent on it. We make decisions that assume its full functioning, and its failure can be perilous. A rock climber, for example, places her life in the hands of her harness (and the experts that engineered it) every time she scales a rock face. She cannot know with certainty that the molecules of her carabineer have been properly alloyed, but her confidence, and her life, rest on the belief that the expert system will not have failed. This trust in equipment demonstrates an existential commitment to technology. Giddens (CoM, p. 28) elaborates:

Everyone knows that driving a car is a dangerous activity, entailing the risk of accident. In choosing to go out in the car, I accept that risk, but rely upon the aforesaid expertise to guarantee that it is minimised as possible. […] When I park the car at the airport and board a plane, I enter other expert systems, of which my own technical knowledge is at best rudimentary.

Being a cyborg is risky business; we must depend on the expertise of others to ensure that our equipment is fit for use. This radical dependency on expert systems—and the societies that create them—makes cyborgs fundamentally social beings. In fact, it is through dependency on technology, and the subsequent loss of self-sufficiency, that we express our commitment to society. Technology has always been part and parcel to the division of labor. Think bows and shovels. In this sense, being a cyborg requires not only trust in technology producers, but trust in other technology users. There is no such thing as a lone cyborg. The birth of cyborg marks the death of the atomistic individual (if such a thing every existed). Donna Haraway rightly contrasts the cyborg to Romantic Goddesses channeled in small lakeside cabins. Cyborgs are cosmopolitan.

This is not to say that Modern day cyborgs are incapable of being critical of technology or expert systems. On the contrary, the cyborg’s humility in admitting her own dependencies leads her to acknowledge the importance of struggling to enforce certain values within techno-social systems, rather than plotting a Utopian escape (the sort that had currency with Thoreau and other Romantics and that continues to be idealized by cyber-libertarians who view the Internet as a fresh start for society). My favorite Haraway quote explains:

This is not some kind of blissed-out technobunny joy in information. It is a statement that we had better get it – this is a worlding operation. Never the only worlding operation going on, but one that we had better inhabit as more than a victim. We had better get it that domination is not the only thing going on here. We had better get it that this is a zone where we had better be the movers and the shakers, or we will be just victims.

Cyborgs always see the social in the technological; the “technology is neutral” trope is a laugh line.

Nowhere are mutual trust and co-dependency more apparent than with social media. Few of us have any clue how the Internet’s infrastructure delivers our digital representations across the world in an instant. This lack of knowledge means simply that we must trust that platforms such as Facebook or Google are delivering information accurately. As the Turing test has demonstrated, computers can easily fool us into believing we are communicating with someone who is not present or who does not even exist, if the system allows. Moreover, on platforms such as Facebook, we also must trust the system to enforce a norm of honesty. If we cannot trust that other users are honestly representing themselves, we become unsure of how to respond. Honesty and accuracy of information are preconditions to participation. And because, as individuals, we lack the capacity to ensure either, we must place our trust in experts. We users do not understand the mechanics of Facebook, we simply accept it as reality; that is to say, Facebook is made possible through widespread suspension of disbelief. Thus, use social media is a commitment to pursuit the benefits of participation, despite the risk that we could be fooled or otherwise taken advantage of. Facebook is not merely social because it involves mutual interaction, it is social because trust in society’s expert systems is a precondition to any such interaction.

Follow PJ Rey on Twitter: @pjrey

Ambient Documentation: To Be is to See and To See is to Be

PJ Rey — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 03:15:13 +0000

This post was co-authored with Nathan Jurgenson.

We begin with the assumption that social media expands the opportunity to capture/document/record ourselves and others and therefore has developed in us a sort-of “documentary vision” whereby we increasingly experience the world as a potential social media document. How might my current experience look as a photograph, tweet, or status update? Here, we would like to expand by thinking about what objective reality produces this type of subjective experience. Indeed, we are increasingly breathing an atmosphere of ambient documentation that is more and more likely to capture our thoughts and behaviors.

As this blog often points out, we are increasingly living our lives at the intersection of atoms and bits. Identities, friendships, conversations and a whole range of experience form an augmented reality where each is simultaneously shaped by physical presence and digital information. Information traveling on the backs of bits moves quickly and easily; anchor it to atoms and it is relatively slow and costly. In an augmented reality, information flows back and forth across physicality and digitality, deftly evading spatial and temporal obstacles that otherwise accompany physical presence.

When Egyptians dramatically occupied the physical space of Tahrir Square this past January (as they do, again, at this very moment), the events unfolded live before the eyes of the world, despite considerable geographic barriers. The authors write this post in one browser tab and, in another, watch live streaming footage of protests in Tahrir Square thousands of miles away. Less dramatically, but still important, we get a first-hand perspective of several #Occupy encampments being dismantled, despite police efforts to diminish visibility by performing the raids under the cloak of night. With an eye on the Twitter streams of protesters exchanging information and strategizing movements, it has become clear that physical events transmit digitally, and vice versa. Our augmented reality is an atmosphere increasingly capable of documenting and transmitting information fluidly across atoms and bits.

When information transmission becomes less costly both in terms of resources and effort, documentation becomes more ubiquitous. An obvious example is the invention of the digital camera. Photographers not so long ago had to be judicious in an attempt to save film for the 24 or 36 best shot. In the digital paradigm, the photographer has virtually unlimited resources to capture nearly everything and only retroactively selects the best images. Digital photography gives new meaning to the cliché “shoot first, ask questions later;” our capacity to document well exceeds our capacity to process those documents in real time.

Once captured, we tend to share and disseminate much of our documentation of ourselves and others. Indeed, this is what social media is: (1) the documenting of ourselves, our lives and others, and (2) sharing, interacting and collaborating with those documents in a social way.

The ease of digital documentation and our desire to gain social benefits from sharing these documents creates an environment where documentation is nearly ubiquitous. The default assumption—even when in a semi-private location such as a house party—is that cameras are rolling. Most every action is potentially just one smartphone click away from becoming a (quasi-)public document, and those around us often have a vested interest in creating such documents, be they photos, tweets, check-ins, or status updates.

We are increasingly in the spotlight even if we are unaware that we are performing. When online, many of our searches, shares, and clicks are registered in innumerable databases; sometimes visibly and sometimes invisibly. The abundance of documentation mechanisms means that simply existing implies that we are leaving a trail of recorded information behind us. Ambient documentation is what we call the condition of documentation that occurs as result of one’s mere presence in an environment.

As such, we are constantly confronted with the means of documentation (e.g., cameras, phones, keyboards, etc.) as well as the documents themselves, leading us to assume that we are always being recorded. As Nathan has stated before, the consequence is that our present is increasingly lived as a potential document; the present is now always a future past. A condition that can be described as “documentary vision.”

Spotify, the music streaming service that syncs with one’s Facebook account, offers an excellent example of the pathway by which ambient documentation leads to documentary vision. Spotify users sign up using their Facebook profile, and then watch as what their music choices are published to Facebook in a stream that also includes what their friends are listening to, watching, and reading. Friends can then comment on a user’s choices, serving as a constant reminder of pervasive documentation.

We, of course, make choices with this in mind. What music makes me look good? What selections, when documented for all to see, will make the best impression? This could mean, for example, Top40 is out and Pitchfork darlings are in—or vice versa—depending, of course, on the social circle one is performing for. Newspapers such as the Washington Post and The Guardian are now similarly tracked by Facebook. Will I click on a certain newspaper article if I know my choice will be documented and disseminated? Or, will my reading habits change? Similar questions can be asked in light of Foursquare or Facebook Places: Will I choose the same bar whether or not I intend to “check in?”

The point is that we weigh decisions differently in environments that are capable of documenting much of what we do. With new technologies, from smart phones to social media, the atmosphere of documentation is far more pervasive than ever before.

As it always has, documentation takes on new cultural forms and norms. None of this neglects the important point that much of what we do and think remains anonymous, hidden, and undocumented. But we are living in a state of heightened publicity; one where the fact of our existence guarantees public documentation, and public documentation guarantees our existence.

Incidental Productivity: Value and Social Media

PJ Rey — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 02:00:04 +0000

For nearly two centuries, the term “production” has conjured an image of a worker physically laboring in the factory. Arguably, this image has been supplanted, in recent decades, by office worker typing away on a keyboard; however, both images share certain commonalities. Office work and factory work are both conspicuous—i.e., the worker sees what she is making, be it a physical object or a document. Office work and factory work are also active—i.e., they require the workers’ energy and attention and come at the expense of other possible activities.

The nature of production has undergone a radical change in a ballooning sector of the economy. The paradigmatic images of active workers producing conspicuous objects in the factory and the office have been replaced by the image of Facebook users, leisurely interacting with one another. But before we delve into this new form of productivity we must take a moment to define production itself. .

Following Marx, we can say that any activity that results in the creation of value is production of one sort or another. Labor is a form of production specific to humans because human are capable of imagination and intentionality. He explains in the Philosophical and Economic Manuscripts of 1844 that

Conscious life activity distinguishes man immediately from animal life activity. It is just because of this that he is a species-being. Or it is only because he is a species-being that he is a conscious being, i.e., that his own life is an object for him. Only because of that is his activity free activity.

Labor is production that is imagination-driven. However, production need not be intentional. Marx acknowledges this fact in Capital saying:

We pre-suppose labour in a form that stamps it as exclusively human. A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality. At the end of every labour-process, we get a result that already existed in the imagination of the labourer at its commencement. He not only effects a change of form in the material on which he works, but he also realises a purpose of his own that gives the law to his modus operandi, and to which he must subordinate his will. And this subordination is no mere momentary act. Besides the exertion of the bodily organs, the process demands that, during the whole operation, the workman’s will be steadily in consonance with his purpose. This means close attention. The less he is attracted by the nature of the work, and the mode in which it is carried on, and the less, therefore, he enjoys it as something which gives play to his bodily and mental powers, the more close his attention is forced to be.

Now, we are in a position to observe that production in the factory and in office are united by a third characteristic: value is produced via labor (specifically, alienated labor).

What is most remarkable about the much of the value produced on social media is that it comes from activities that can hardly be described as labor. The best example is, probably, the self-improving Google algorithm, which tracks individual usage patterns then aggregates the data to make itself more intelligent. Each individual is user is merely a passive consumer seeks a specific pieces of information; however, they also, simultaneously, generate valuable information for Google. The users are not active in the process. They do not imagine the end product in their minds before creating as Marx described. In fact, this product is completely invisible to them, buried deep in the infrastructure of the site. Similarly, Facebook silently derives value from the mundane interaction of its users.

We might compare this process to a waterwheel. The following is the one-sentence definition of a water wheel from Wikipedia:

A water wheel is a machine for converting the energy of free-flowing or falling water into useful forms of power, the development of hydropower.

Value is produced from everyday activities much like a waterwheel harnesses the power of flowing water. This fact has profound implications, potentially requiring us to rethink traditional critiques of capitalism. However, before diving into these implications it would be useful to develop a vocabulary describe these new conditions in which production can occur without active laboring.

We might start by considering some previous attempts to discuss immaterial production. In a presentation at the VII Annual Social Theory Forum on Critical Social Theory, Nathan Jurgenson and I used the term "ambient production" to describe an environment in which production simply occurs as result of one's mere presence. We discussed how various modes/mechanisms of production on the Web might be placed on a visibility-invisibility continuum. However, this notion is complicated by the fact that as certain things are concealed (e.g., Facebook's use of person data in targeted marketing) other things are more likely to be revealed (e.g., Facebook's users are likely to share more data when they are not focused on how that data might be used to manipulated them).

More recently, we described the social media as populated with "digital paparazzi" (i.e., invisible data collection mechanisms that track and surveil users). However, we also demonstrated that there is a tendency for users to be made aware of the ubiquitous documentation in their environment and to alter their behaviors accordingly. Jurgenson labels as "documentary vision" this tendency to view one's actions in the present through the lens of the future documents they will produce. Though the mechanisms themselves are concealed, one might aptly argue that Facebook users are reacting to this environment of omnipresent documentation with the expectation that they are always being recorded. As such, users begin posing all the time and actively use these mechanisms to produce (or “prosume”) their own identities. Certainly, this kind of identity work is an active labor for many users and has visible consequences.

There are, clearly, coextensive modes of production operating on social-networking sites such as Facebook: On the one hand, individuals conspicuously labor to shape their identities. On the other hand, their presence on the platform allows for the ambient production of valuable data that company can sale to marketers. In fact, these two modes of production are intertwined. Active identity work creates data for targeted market, while marketing provides new consumer objects through which identity is expressed. This environment, where social activity becomes productive activity is not dissimilar to what Mario Tronti (1966) and Antonio Negri (1989) respectively described as a “factory without walls” or a “social factory.”

Does ambient production qualify as labor?

The conspicuousness of the thing being produced becomes extremely important. If we are able to see what we are producing (as with self-presentation via Facebook's new "frictionless sharing" application), then we will likely attempt to shape the end product by actively managing our own behavior (which amounts to labor). However, if the thing we are producing is concealed from us (as with our contributions to the Google algorithm), then we are largely denied any agency with respect to the final product. Yet, unlike alienated factory workers, our attention is not occupied by this production. In fact, this sort of of inconspicuous creation of value is largely incidental to the task that is really occupying our attention (e.g., using Google to locate a particular piece of information). Our relationship to such invisible objects is necessarily passive. As such, it does not meet Marx's (and, likely, most other) criteria for labor. I will define this passive and inconspicuous creation of value as "incidental productivity." Users engaged in incidental productivity don't know or don't care about about the valuable data they are creating; it is simply byproduct of other activity.

Why does "incidental productivity" matter?

For many commentators, our rights over the data that we create is an extension of an abstract notion that these data are fruits of our labor. The economic conditions of social media users have been described as "precarious labor" or, even, "over-exploitation." Both allude to one of Marx’s major critiques of capitalism: that laborers are exploited (i.e., their wages to not amount the full value of their work because some of that value is skimmed off by the employer). Much of the identity work done on social media is active and intentional labor. And, this labor is often exploited (I discuss this in depth in an article titled "Alienation, Exploitation & Social Media" soon to be published in the American Behavioral Scientist). However, much of the value created on the Web does not even result from labor; it is incidental value. This leaves us with the question: If a productive activity is not labor, can it be exploited? This question requires considerably more examination as it was not a phenomenon observed by Marx himself. However, Marx is not certainly not irrelevant. A quintessentially Marxian question remains: Who should control the means of incidental production? Just as Marx concluded that the means of production do not work in the best interest of worker when controlled by a separate ownership class, we have reason to be skeptical that the means for harnessing incidental productivity will work in the best interest of users who exercise little control over them. Revelations, such as Apple's clandestine use of the iPhone to collect data about changes in users' geographic location or Yahoo! and Blackberry's cooperation with the intelligence agencies of various authoritarian regimes, demonstrate the the interests of users and owners are often out-of-sync

Julian Assange: Cyber-Libertarian or Cyber-Anarchist?

PJ Rey — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 23:59:11 +0000

Julian Assange, the notorious founder and director of WikiLeaks, is many things to many people: hero, terrorist, figurehead, megalomaniac. What is it about Assange that makes him both so resonant and so divisive in our culture? What, exactly, does Assange stand for? In this post, I explore two possible frameworks for understanding Assange and, more broadly, the WikiLeaks agenda. These frameworks are: cyber-libertarianism and cyber-anarchism.

First, of course, we have to define these two terms. Cyber-libertarianism is a well-established political ideology that has its roots equally in the Internet's early hacker culture and in American libertarianism. From hacker culture it inherited a general antagonism to any form of regulation, censorship, or other barrier that might stand in the way of "free" (i.e., unhindered) access of the World Wide Web. From American libertarianism it inherited a general belief that voluntary associations are are more effective in promoting freedom than government (the US Libertarian Party's motto is "maximum freedom, minimum government"). American libertarianism is distinct from other incarnations of libertarianism in that tends to celebrate the market and private business over co-opts or other modes of collective organization. In this sense, American libertarianism is deeply pro-capitalist. Thus, when we hear the slogan "information wants to be" that is widely associated with cyber-libertarianism, we should not read it as meaning gratis (i.e., zero price); rather, we should read it as meaning libre (without obstacles or restrictions). This is important because the latter interpretation is compatible with free market economics, unlike the the former.

Cyber-anarchism is a far less widely used term. In practice, commentators often fail to distinguish between cyber-anarchism and cyber-libertarianism. However, there are subtle distinctions between the two. Anarchism aims at the abolition of hierarchy. Like libertarians, anarchists have a strong skepticism of government, particularly government's exclusive claim to use force against other actors. Yet, while libertarians tend to focus on the market as a mechanism for rewarding individual achievement, anarchists tend to see it as means for perpetuating inequality. Thus, cyber-anarchists tend to be as much against private consolidation of Internet infrastructure as they are against government interference. While cyber-libertarians have, historically, viewed the Internet as an unregulated space where good ideas and the most clever entrepreneurs are free to rise to the top, cyber-anarchists see the Internet as a means of working around and, ultimately, tearing down old hierarchies. Thus, what differentiates cyber-anarchist from cyber-libertarians, then, is that cyber-libertarians embrace fluid, meritocratic hierarchies (which are believed to be best served by markets), while anarchists are distrustful of all hierarchies. This would explain while libertarians tend to organize into conventional political parties, while the notion of an anarchist party seems almost oxymoronic. Another way to understand this difference is in how each group defines freedom: Freedom for libertarians is freedom to individually prosper, while freedom for anarchists is freedom from systemic inequalities.

In many ways, the Internet community / hacker collective known as “Anonymous” are the archetypical cyber-anarchist group. As their namesake indicates, they embrace a principle of anonymity that places inherent limits on hierarchy within the group. Members often work collectively to disrupt the technology infrastructure of established institutions (often in response to perceived abuses of power). All actions initiated by the group are voluntary and it is said that anyone can spontaneously suggest a target. The ethos of the organization was well-captured in a quote from one of its Twitter feeds: "RT: @Asher_Wolf: @AnonymousIRC shouldn't be about personalities. The focus should always be transparency for the powerful, privacy for the rest." Note that this implicit linkage between transparency and accountability is what distinguishes a cyber-anarchist from other run-of-the-mill anarchists. For the cyber-anarchist, the struggle against power is a struggle for information.

So, is Julian Assange a cyber-libertarian or a cyber-anarchist? This proves difficult to sort out. Assange is an activist, not a philosopher, so we ought not to expect his theoretical statements to be completely coherent; nevertheless, he does appear to be operating with a consistent and quite nuanced philosophy. A recent Forbes interview is revealing. Though, Assange is quite evasive in his own ideological self-identification:

It’s not correct to put me in any one philosophical or economic camp, because I’ve learned from many. But one is American libertarianism, market libertarianism.

So, Assange is relatively clear in is his affinity for both markets and libertarianism. In fact, Assange justifies Wikileaks’ activities, in part, through pro-market rhetoric, saying, for example, that:

WikiLeaks means it’s easier to run a good business and harder to run a bad business, and all CEOs should be encouraged by this. […] it is both good for the whole industry to have those leaks and it’s especially good for the good players. […] You end up with a situation where honest companies producing quality products are more competitive than dishonest companies producing bad products.

Yet, WikiLeaks frequently engages in what might be interpreted in as anti-business activity—distributing proprietary information (e.g., documents that indicate insider trading at JP Morgan, a list of companies indebted to Iceland’s failing Kaupthing Bank, legal documents showing that Barclays Bank sought a gag order against the Guardian, a list of accounts concealed in the Cayman Islands, etc.). In fact, Assange claims that 50% of the data in their repository is related to the private sector.

Why would Assange threaten these businesses if he is so pro-market? Assange offers a clue when he says, “I have mixed attitudes towards capitalism, but I love markets.” The two parts of this statement are reconcilable because capitalism is primary about private ownership of the means of productions, while markets are primarily about the decentralization of supply and demand. Historically speaking, markets certainly preceded capitalism. He believes Wikileaks assists markets in the following way:

To put it simply, in order for there to be a market, there has to be information. A perfect market requires perfect information.

In any case, Assange seems to be saying that he favors minimal interference in the relationship between supply and demand, but he is skeptical as to whether private ownership of the means of product (as opposed to collectivist or government control) is the best means of accomplishing this goal. He explains the thinking behind this nuanced position of supporting markets, while being skeptical towards capitalism:

So as far as markets are concerned I’m a libertarian, but I have enough expertise in politics and history to understand that a free market ends up as monopoly unless you force them to be free.

The next question is, naturally: Who should be responsible for forcing markets to be free? Given his generally negative assessment of governments, it is unsurprising when Assange balks at the notion the governments are up to the task. Assange seems to favor the promotion of culture of transparency as a substitute for regulations. He explains:

I’m not a big fan of regulation: anyone who likes freedom of the press can’t be. But there are some abuses that should be regulated […].

Traditionally, regulations are controls placed on one set of institution (i.e., businesses) by another institution (i.e., government). Here, I think, is where Assange’s fundamental thinking is revealed. He does not trust institutions to regulate each other, because he does not trust institutions. He seems to believe that institutions, and their propensity for secrecy, have a corrupting effect. This is why he champions individuals and small groups—extra-institutional actors—as change agents. Anti-institutionalism appears to be Assange’s driving principle—even more so than his appreciation for markets. This, paired with his skepticism toward capitalism, seems to indicate that Assange better fits the ideal-type of the cyber-anarchist than that of the cyber-libertarian. The arc of Assange's argument is not so much that the public sector's role in decision-making should be minimized in favor of private entrepreneurs, rather he seems to believe that—insofar as it is possible without descending into complete chaos—institutions should be diminished in favor of extra-institutional actors (i.e., individuals and small voluntary associations). Wikileaks is attempt, on the part of extra-institution, to exercise more accountability over institutions through the mechanism of transparency.

It should be noted that Assange has resisted attempts to label him as “anti-institutional,”explaining that he has visited countries where institutions are non-functional and that this sort of chaos is not what he has in mind. One, thus, has to infer that Assange believes institutions are a necessary evil—one that must be guarded against through enforced transparency. In the classic sociological framework, we might position Assange as a sort of conflict theorist: People require institutions for order and stability, yet are perpetually threatened by the tyrannical inclinations of such institutions; he believes the people can only gain the upper hand in the struggle by preventing/exposing institutional secrets.

From the previous statements, we can conclude that Assange has two central assumptions about our social world: 1.) Institutions, by their nature, will always become corrupt when not closely monitored. 2.) Secrecy is a necessary precondition for corruption; diminish secrecy and you diminish corruption. To take a bit of a critical angle, it appears that the degree of faith in transparency expressed by Assange and his compatriots seems to necessitate either a lack of attentiveness to power and/or a sort of naïve optimism that deeply embedded power relations can be easily overturned. Does simply knowing that an institution is corrupt really sufficiently empower us to end that corruption? The lack of prosecutions in light of the all the malfeasance and outright criminality that led to the recent collapse of the financial sector would seem to indicate otherwise. As Michel Foucault and countless other theorists have argued, there is a definite relationship between visibility and power; however, it may not be as direct or as simplistic as Assange appears to believe. To be fair to Assange, he is not necessarily arguing that, through transparency, individuals are empowered to hold institutions accountable but, instead, that information can be used strategically to play institutions against one another.

In this way, Assange is more nuanced than he often appears in media caricatures. WikiLeaks is not, simply, an effort at maximal transparency; rather, it is involved in a complex game of reveal and conceal, motivating institutions oppose or compete with one another. In fact, in a separate interview, Assange even praises secrecy, saying that:

secrecy is important for many things but shouldn't be used to cover up abuses, which leads us to the question of who decides and who is responsible. It shouldn't really be that people are thinking about, Should something be secret? I would rather it be thought, Who has a responsibility to keep certain things secret? And, who has a responsibility to bring matters to the public? And those responsibilities fall on different players. And it is our responsibility to bring matters to the public.

At his most cynical and, perhaps, megalomaniacal, Assange sounds as if the only person that can be trusted to regulate governments and businesses is Julian Assange. More generously, we can interpret that Assange’s rhetoric and WikiLeak’s actions indicate a general antagonism to institutions that places them much closer to the cyber-anarchists of Anonymous than the cyber-libertarians barons of Silicon Valley (e.g., Mark Zuckerberg, Eric Schmidt) who support enforced transparency, primarily, for their own financial gain.

Follow PJ Rey on Twitter: @pjrey