legibility – Leapfroglog

I am going to try my hand at the occasional blogging again. And I have decided to do this not at my tumblr, but back here. It was fine to post things to Tumblr occasionally, but I have started to dislike not having these notes on my own server. And perhaps more importantly, I started to get really annoyed by Tumblr’s lack of a functioning search. So, I’ve imported all the things I posted to Tumblr over the past few years into this blog, and we’ll continue where we left off.

In this first post of the new year, some things related to inequality under late capitalism. To begin with a bit of video from Adam Curtis for Charlie Brooker’s enjoyable end-of-the-year review Wipe 2014.

I was pointed to this by Hans de Zwart and on Twitter I responded that the idea of non-linearity reminds me of the ideas on warfare developed by John Boyd, which I am currently knee-deep in. And Boyd’s ideas of winning by decreasing mismatches between your model of external reality and reality itself while increasing those mismatches for your opponent in turn connects with James C. Scott’s concept of legibility.

Meanhwile, James Bridle has been charting technological infrastructures of control for The Nor, a project commissioned by the Hayward Gallery. The essays James has written on his charting of surveillance cameras, radar and high-frequency trading infrastructure are hugely enjoyable reads because James has gone out there and done the legwork. This isn’t idle theorising, these are ideas grounded in lived experience of today’s reality on the ground. While recounting his experiences tracing these technological infrastructures, James makes many interesting connections to literature, as well as non-obvious observations about how these technologies relate to today’s social injustices. Long story short: you should go and read the lot of them.

Inequality is engineered, and deliberate. It is an arbitraging of social conditions, a perpetuation of the existing situation by those who seek to profit from its differences.

—Low Latency, James Bridle

The reason I am blogging these things is that I continue to be interested in new forms of resistance against the non-linear warfare described by Curtis and Bridle’s technologies of control. The first step is to become aware of these strategies, but to return to Boyd, the question then is how to operate in such a way that you can survive on your own terms, by using tempo and agility and basically a better understanding of reality.

To close things off, a few recent things I read which are all about capitalism, and its instrumentalisation of everyday life. First off, Andres O’Hehir on the perceived death of adulthood, a phenomenon which I sort of recognise, and which he aptly describes not as some kind of conscious lifestyle choice or megatrend, but as a thing emerging from the demands put on us by the market and the cultural industry.

The suit-wearing, gin-drinking 35-year-old Organization Man of 1964 and the couch-bound, action-figure-collecting 35-year-old fanboy of 2014 are dialectical mirror images of each other, economic archetypes called forth by their respective eras.

—The “death of adulthood” is really just capitalism at work, Andrew O’Hehir

It’s curious to think that “becoming an adult” is something the market does not want you to do.

And finally, two pieces on the sharing economy. One, by Avi Asher-Schapiro, clearly describing how Uber’s blueprint makes the livelihood of workers even more precarious, while at the same time forcing them to tell their customers they love their jobs. The other, by the infamous Evgeny Morozov, rightly points out the sharing economy alleviates some of the pains of living under late capitalism, while doing nothing to solve the root causes of those ails.

But under the guise of innovation and progress, companies are stripping away worker protections, pushing down wages, and flouting government regulations. At its core, the sharing economy is a scheme to shift risk from companies to workers, discourage labor organizing, and ensure that capitalists can reap huge profits with low fixed costs.

There’s nothing innovative or new about this business model. Uber is just capitalism, in its most naked form.

—Against Sharing, Avi Asher-Schapiro

There’s no denying that the sharing economy can – and probably does – make the consequences of the current financial crisis more bearable. However, in tackling the consequences, it does nothing to address the causes. It’s true that, thanks to advances in the information technology, some of us can finally get by with less – chiefly, by relying on more effective distribution of existing resources. But there’s nothing to celebrate here: it’s like handing everybody earplugs to deal with intolerable street noise instead of doing something about the noise itself.

—Don’t believe the hype, the ‘sharing economy’ masks a failing economy, Evgeny Morozov

I blog these things as a reminder to myself of some of the arguments against the current vogue of digitally mediated service delivery platforms. They can be so seductive and many clients and peers seem blinded by their promises. I am interested in salvaging the good bits of these services, they are after all potentially empowering, while coming up with solutions to the injustices they perpetrate and enlarge.

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Political play is a mode of thinking critically about politics, and of developing an agonistic approach to those politics. This agonism is framed through carnivalesque chaos and humour, through the appropriation of the world for playing. By playing, by carefully negotiating the purpose of playing between pleasure and the political, we engage in a transformative act.

Quote taken from PARTICIPATORY REPUBLICS: PLAY AND THE POLITICAL by Miguel Sicart on the Play Matters book blog.

I love where Miguel is going with his thinking on the relationship between play, politics, appropriation and resistance.

I am interested in this because at Hubbub we have been exploring similar themes through the making of games and things-you-can-play-with.

The big challenges with this remain in the area of instrumentalisation – if you set out to design a thing that encourages this kind of play you often end up with something that is far from playful.

But the opportunities are huge because so much of today’s struggles of individuals against the state relate to legibility and control in some way, and play is the perfect antidote.

For example shortly after reading Miguel’s piece I came across this McKenzie Wark piece on extrastatecraft via Honor Harger. Extrastatecraft shifts the focus from architecture and politics to infrastructure.

Infrastructure is how power deploys itself, and it does so much faster than law or democracy.

You should read the whole thing. What’s fascinating is that Wark briefly discusses strategies and tactics for resisting such statecraft.

So the world might be run not by statecraft but at least in part by extrastatecraft. Easterling: “Avoiding binary dispositions, this field of activity calls for experiments with ongoing forms of leverage, reciprocity, and vigilance to counter the violence immanent in the space of extrastatecraft.” (149) She has some interesting observations on the tactics for this. Some exploit the informational character of third nature, such as gossip, rumor and hoax. She also discusses the possibilities of the gift or of exaggerated compliance (related perhaps to Zizek’s over-identification), and of mimicry and comedy.

“Gossip, rumor and hoax” sound a lot like the carnivalesque reflective-in-action political play Miguel is talking about.

To finish off, here’s a video of the great James C. Scott on the art of not being governed. He talks at length about how peoples have historically fled from statecraft into geographical zones unreachable by power’s infrastructure. And how they deploy their own, state-resistant infrastructure (such as particular kinds of crops) to remain illegible and uncapturable.