Mobile networks, Ubiquitous Computing, and Capitalism

Through Rheingold, we understand the emergent posthuman as mobile, networked, and more fully integrated with (immersed in?) responsive environments of intelligent and “invisible” (pervasive) media technologies. With ubiquitous and intelligent computing, the boundaries between physical and virtual worlds are further blurred, resulting in less physical constraints as the physical world itself “becomes browsable and clickable” (Sentient Things 95).

 

The posthuman is empowered because of the community building and collective intelligence/action, made possible by the networking capabilities of new media technologies. Rheingold makes some interesting observations about the manifestations of this “decentralized self-organization,” which he compares to flocks of birds; individuals in the group enter into a symbiotic interaction with each other, in which the group functions as a single entity, i.e. in a musical performance, where communication between members of the group is “continuous and two-way, and it does not involve symbolic mediation” (Smart Mobs 178). Not quite the posthuman (or superhuman?) disembodied, collective consciousness portrayed in many sci fi narratives, but similar to Hayles’ notion of an interplay between body and embodiment, “dynamic partnerships between humans and intelligent machines” (Hayles 288). Rheingold points out that many believe “networks constitute the newest major social organizational form, after tribes, hierarchies, and markets” (Smart Mobs 163).

The democratic potentialities of wireless networks/mobile smart mobs, and the increased intelligence and efficiency afforded by wearable computers portend good things for the future. But of course, there is the proverbial fork in the road in terms of which direction we will choose to take, with and through these technologies. Public and private spaces are collapsing into one another; as in the Internet Research Ethics article where a delineation between public and private space on the net is technically impossible, the phenomenon is carrying over from virtual space to real space. GPS and location services have large Big Brother implications, although I think it’s naïve to think that surveillance hasn’t already become a large part of our electronic infrastructure – data mining, for instance, and MySpace as a voluntary virtual panopticon.

 

Will increased mobility and the continual erosion of physical constraints (both spatial and temporal) lead to a deterritorialization of institutionalized culture, or will we simply reinscribe dominant cultural paradigms onto the new technologies as we have been doing thus far (the overwhelming power of capital and the culture industry never ceases to amaze me)? What will we do with our posthuman intelligence and efficiency? Are we making it easier to be human, or are we making it easier to work and consume? Or has being human and work/consumption become one in the same?

 

I am reminded of an article I read by Steven Shaviro in which he discusses the development of MUDS, early text-based virtual worlds which eventually came to simulate the “free-market” economy. He points out that “any market economy, mercantile or capitalist, presupposes an underlying condition of scarcity,” (Money For Nothing 10) and questions why the community would develop an artificial scarcity in an abundant and “endlessly replicable” virtual environment. One attitude was that a risk-reward structure, gives a sense of meaning and purpose to people’s lives, just as a set of rules gives a game its objective. Shaviro makes a more interesting observation, drawing on Deleuze’s concepts of the “real,” the “virtual,” and the “actual” (which rely on a conception of time in which the past and present are contemporaneous: since the present is in constant motion, it is always becoming the past at the same time it is present – the virtual needs only to be actualized to become real – so, if actualization occurs in the present from a virtual past, and the two temporal planes are contemporaneous, then the virtual takes on essential properties of the real). The “real” and the “virtual” are both real, just as “real” and “virtual” economies are both real. Shaviro points out that RL trade in financial derivatives “exceeds many times over the buying and selling of actual commodities” (13) and has real economic effects, yet it is virtual capital in that it is immaterial. Shaviro calls the phenomenon “ludocapitalism” in which real life has taken on the conditions of game space, work is play, and this type of play is productive in generating profit. Through their respective economies, we can see the real and the virtual overlap through SL and RL.

 

The growing economy of Second Life and the “attentive billboards” (responsive, intelligent advertisements) Rheingold talks about support the idea of ludocapitalism. The market has already transformed the internet into a data mining vehicle (facebook, gmail, etc.) for which to generate profits through increasingly intrusive target advertising. The mobile platform is on its way, with Google’s new advertising network developed for cell phones launching just this week. As for SL, creating a commodified virtual world was always part of the plan. When asked how value is realized in SL, CEO and founder Philip Rosedale said:

“One of the things that’s been underscored is the degree to which we value objects to the extent of seeing the amount of creative energies that have gone into them. A Mercedes is valued because of intangibles, not the number of screws and the technology used to put it together. It’s its service record. If things have that associated with them, they are real. They don’t need to be physically tangible to be real.

Scarcity is another way of creating value, but brand, lifestyle and meaning are important as well. Clothing from [in-game clothing designer] Nephilaine Protagonist is highly valued because it’s her stuff. I talked with a head guy at Vercace who said to me, “I sell jeans for $5,000. There’s no reason for that, but people will pay that much for the pleasure of wearing the brand.”

Should virtual property be treated as real? It’s moot; what’s happened in common law is that it’s been determined to be real. Case closed.”

Rosedale is dedicated to the fostering of ludic play in SL, as he contends in the interview, as long as it remains within the parameters of a capitalist infrastructure.

In this commodified context of new media technologies, the positive, as Rheingold points out, is more consumer awareness and control over products through the increased information provided by things like penny tags.

~ by glycerine517 on September 26, 2007.