[p2p-research] Economic Options for Organizing Networks in Beijing

[Ned Rossiter]

[here is my paper from the workshop. It really is preliminary - a  
working paper - with heaps of undeveloped points (particularly on  
experimental economics - a lot more to say there) and many disjointed  
paragraphs etc etc. so it goes. Ned]

---

The Political Economy of Peer Production
Workshop in Nottingham (UK), 15-16 November 2007
http://www.ntu.ac.uk/p2pworkshop2007/

Ned Rossiter

‘Economic Options for Organizing Networks in Beijing’

Notwithstanding the commercialisation of the net, the hierarchical  
systems embedded in social-technical infrastructures and dynamics,  
and the impact of national and surpranational government policy on  
network cultures, to what extent can we really speak of a political  
economy of peer-to-peer network practices? If political economy is  
traditionally understood in terms of the role institutions and their  
concomitant interests play in the structuring and regulation of  
economic life, then what might it mean to transpose this axiom to the  
culture of networks? How, in other words, might organized networks as  
nascent institutional forms provide new insights into the political  
economy of peer production? More specifically, how might the social- 
technical properties of organized networks situated within the urban  
and political context of Beijing facilitate new models for  
interventions in local, regional and transnational ‘creative  
economies’? What might such activity tell us about the geopolitical  
variations of neoliberal capital? This paper outlines some  
preliminary models of economic sustainability for the OrgNets  
platform and considers the political implications for networks  
cultures that take seriously the problematic of political economy.

It seems to me that a social economy preconditions the possibility of  
a political economy of network cultures. Without a social economy,  
there is no political economy. Indeed, in many instances the social  
economy within p2p networks marginalises or displaces the operative  
force of political economy. Open publishing and bit torrents of  
pirate cinema, software and music are obvious examples that come to  
mind. However, even in these instances of ostensibly ‘free  
culture’ there lurks in the system a political economy, one that is  
closely connected to infrastructure and info-governance. In a recent  
dialogue with Paul Hartzog, Trebor Scholz frames this tension as  
follows: ‘the means of production are available to networked  
publics; these tools and platforms are, however, owned by  
corporations’.[1] Aside from the ever-present potential of unruly  
workers, the trouble so often faced by the owners of infrastructure  
is that they suffer from limited imagination. Without a few tinkerers  
in the shop, capital is left without the invention of difference  
necessary for its renewal. Thus a mutually parasitic relation exists  
between owners and users of the means of production. As we know,  
historically this relation is one of constant oscillation that  
constitutes the force of hegemony. A central interest of this  
workshop is to discern how this relation plays out in the p2p culture  
of networks.

By way of addressing the question of political economy, I wish to  
focus my talk on the social-technical aspects of an experiment in  
transdisciplinary urban-media research in Beijing built around the  
logic of networks. My interest is in the ways in which such social- 
technical endeavours in institution formation might operate as what  
Fabian Muniesa and Michel Callon term ‘economic experiments’ that  
shape the construction of markets. The communication of relations  
between emergent institutional forms and their invention of markets  
is underscored by the technics of mediation. Mediation, in turn, is  
registed in the following key forms: systems of governance, rituals  
and materialities of practice, discourses with uncertain borders and  
technologies of collaborative constitution. The arrangement of these  
elements produces new territories for potential exploitation by  
capital. The political and economic challenge is to produce  
interventions into markets that enable economic resources for  
experiments in organizing networks and living wages for participants.  
(Due to constraints of time I will not address typologies of  
mediation in this talk.)


OrgNets in Beijing

 From May-July this year I coordinated a transciplinary research  
platform that produced a counter-mapping of the creative industries  
in Beijing.[2] In the first instance this project was financed  
through parasitical means, with funds from the research centre that I  
work in enabling participants from Europe, India, Australia and New  
Zealand to collaborate with local researchers and media practioners  
in Beijing. Such a model of financing research is a one-off, and self- 
generating means of funding are required in order to sustain this  
platform as a partially autonomous research network.

By undertaking a collaborative anthropology of new institutional  
forms – what I term ‘organized networks’ – this project is  
interested in the transdisciplinary dimension of creative industries  
in Beijing. The project is organized around six key vectors of research:
  migrant networks and service labour; network ecologies of creative  
waste; informational geographies vs. creative clusters; centrality of  
real-estate speculation for creative economies; import cultures and  
export innovations in architecture and urban design; and artist  
villages and market engineering. In migrating media education outside  
of the university, the project recomposes media education as a  
collaborative research process focussed on critique and analysis of  
urban transformations and the politics of creative and service labour.

The project adopted the model of a mobile research laboratory as a  
framework for collaborative research on the creative industries,  
urban transformation and media practice in Beijing. As a laboratory  
the OrgNets project was an assemblage of experimentation and testing,  
one that will continue to develop throughout the next year. And as a  
laboratory, the OrgNet project was excised or temporarily suspended  
from the outside force of the real market. But the mobile and social  
nature of OrgNets makes its borders porous. The distinction between  
inside and outside is not fixed; borders are defined by the continuum  
of change that comes into play with the addition or departure of  
participants, the particularities of urban situations, the topics of  
investigation and the institutions of temporary connection.

As an assemblage whose spatial and temporal coordinates undergo  
constant transformation, the relation between inside and outside is  
subject to processes of translation. It would be a mistake to think  
the range of contingencies – many of which may register  
imperceptably on the action of networks – can ever be brought under  
control. But within the territory of the known, faintly perceived and  
vaguely intuited, it is not unreasonable to suppose an economy is  
possible for networks that, at this stage, are without money.

Given the transdisciplinary orientation of the OrgNets project, the  
prevailing policy discourse of creative industries, the intense  
economic and social changes underway in China and the exotic allure  
the city as urban laboratory holds for intellectural tourists, the  
expanding international market of education is an obvious economy  
awaiting intervention by non-traditional ‘providers’. In fact,  
this is already the case for mainstream external providers. As an  
outsourced form of education provision, OrgNets offer established  
institutions of education and research the possibility of value- 
adding at a cost that is going to be cheaper than if these  
institutions hired staff on full benefits whose capacity to invent is  
rapidly dulled by the burden of bureacracy and audit cultures.


Experimental Economics and Evidence Machines

The field of experimental economics in its contemporary form emerged  
out of game theory from the late 1940s and early 1950s. Francesco  
Guala notes two distinct approaches within experimental economics –  
theory-testing and institution-building; the former tends toward  
experiments in decision-making, the latter experiments in market  
performativity.[3] Orthodox game theory combines or traverses these  
two approaches, and plays the market as an institution whose  
problematics are ‘solved’ by rational agents within controlled  
laboratory settings.[4] But what happens in occasions of ‘irrational  
exuberance’ that define bubble economies, as seen in real-estate  
speculation, dotcom-mania or the caffeine induced palpitations of day  
traders?

There is undoubtedly a logic at work in such instances, but it is not  
one that conforms to rational intent. The logic of irrational  
economics is one whose particularities are immanent to the  
contingencies of the event. The experimental economics of game theory  
attempt to overcome or at least minimise contingency by designing  
markets in which the desired results come to fruition. The world is  
their laboratory. The structural adjustment programs of the World  
Bank and IMF are good examples of experimental economics in  
operation. However, the desire to see the world in their own image is  
the primary catalyst of failure for such models. Certainly, this  
point is disputable; arguably the model of structural adjustment has  
succeeded insofar as the World Bank and IMF agenda for countries in  
Africa and South America to ‘leapfrog modernity’ in such a way  
that bypasses European models of state formation into a neoliberal  
paradigm of governmental dependency on outsourcing to private  
providers has proven financially beneficial to foreign investors. But  
such a view is limited in scope, to say the least. The production of  
global poverty and massive disparities in wealth can hardly be rated  
a success.

My proposal, then, is to see a project like OrgNets as a form of  
experimental economics that are open to the contigencies of the event  
and the social-technical and disciplinary dynamics of conflictual  
constitution. Contigencies necessitate factoring in the elusive  
dimension of experience. My interest is not to exploit economic or  
social vulnerabilities, but rather to enhance capacities and address  
trans-institutional economic realities and disciplinary foreclosure  
brought about by intellectual property regimes, internal competition  
and limits placed on research by the avalanche of adminstration.

The trick with a project like OrgNets is to treat it as a symbiotic  
device that both facilitates the generation of concepts and affects  
the allocation of economic resources. The latter may take the form of  
direct funding, commissions, participant fees for summer schools, or  
in-kind support by institutional partners – e.g. office space, use  
of equipment, personnel, etc. Of course any proposal to play the  
neoliberal game of outsourcing education is going to meet the wrath  
of some leftists and activists. But it is hypocritical to dish out  
critique without offering alternatives for economic subsistence.

Muniesa and Callon refer to platforms (as distinct from laboratories  
and in situ experiments): 'the platform is an intermediate  
configuration, more open to compromises with several kinds of actors  
than the laboratory' and refers to 'flexible organizational forms in  
[sic] where surprise is more a resource than a problem' for  
'strategic innovation'. OrgNets also share these features of a  
platform – flexibility, most certainly, but the element of surprise  
is less clear for OrgNets. A genealogy of OrgNets would establish the  
connection with tactical media, reknowned for its hit-and-run  
approach to semiotic warfare. Where OrgNets corresponds with surprise  
is perhaps most clear when OrgNets is brought in to relation with  
established institutions of education and research, namely the  
university, which is characterised by a transdisciplinary deficiency  
and has a limited capacity of invention.

As a collaborative anthropology of new institutional forms, the  
project investigates how the emergence of organized networks  
illuminate some of the material qualities and tensions of creative  
industries in Beijing. The project holds the precept that  
transdisciplinary urban-media research is an autonomous expressive  
capacity that subsists within a field of translocal and supranational  
structural forces. This is not to suggest a form of structural  
determination, but it is to recognise that tensions of a particular  
order are inherent to media education that refuses the stagnant  
methods and orthodox theoretical approaches that by and large  
characterise the state of play, be that in Chinese universities or  
the rest of the world.


The Neoliberal University

As government funding for higher education has diminished over the  
past decade (or longer, in some national cases), universities have  
found themselves increasingly positioned within a market economy.  
This structural relation alone locates education as a commodity  
object. Inevitably there will be barriers to access learning in such  
instances. An alternative – open access learning – has great  
merit, but there are some fundamental issues to do with cost of  
delivery (labour, production, infrastructure, etc.) and technological  
modes of communication that must be addressed. In building open  
access repositories of research findings, this project investigates  
the connection between peer-to-peer collaboration and new business  
models.

The glacial temporality of university curriculum development and  
subjugation of teachers by the life-depleting demands of audit  
cultures sets a challenge for media education programs that wish to  
synchronise their curricula with the speed of popular media  
literacies. To distinguish market and user hype from quality that  
makes a substantive difference is near impossible. Consensus will not  
be found beyond the fleeting moments of micro-adoption among A-list  
bloggers and their links, or whatever other community of users you  
care to name. Ratified standards for media education within the  
cultures of networks do not exist.

As the university increasingly loses its monopoly on the provision of  
knowledge as a result of neoliberal governance and the advent of peer- 
to-peer and user-producer media systems, media education is in crisis  
mode. Best practice is frequently found outside of university degree  
programs. Expertise has become distributed across a population of  
practioners and everyday users. How, then, might such knowledge feed  
back into university programs? Can formal accreditation for  
autonomous education be extended to non-university actors? Are such  
processes even desirable?

Crucial here are the different temporalities afforded by research  
platforms positioned outside of the temporal order of the market and  
its post-Fordist modality of just-in-time production, which  
underscores the habitus of the university today. In a posting earlier  
this year to the edu-factory mailing list – an initiative by mostly  
young activist researchers associated with Negri’s uni-nomadi (an  
informal teaching program across a network of media and social  
centres in Italy) – Taiwan based academic Jon Solomon phrases the  
predicament of time and the university as follows:

'The students have been so disempowered by the compulsory national  
primary and secondary education system (which favors the production  
of an elite) that when it comes to the university organization of  
their own temporal rythms, they are completely passive in their forms  
of resistance (and the faculty doesn't provide any relief or  
alternative resources)'.[5]

How, then, to create different temporalities which enable process of  
counter-subjectivisation? A number of core elements come into play in  
the repositioning of research and teaching outside of the university.  
And these, I would add, are not without precendents: think of the  
mechanics institutes as sites of popular learning for the working  
classes in the 19th century (albeit enframed by the morally uplifting  
values of the middle-classes), adult education classes after the  
second world war, the rise of alternative schooling movements such as  
Montessori in the 60s and 70s, and so on and so forth.

My point is that counter-sites of learning at the current conjuncture  
are imbued with qualities special to the social-technical dimension  
of network cultures, and conditioned by the political economy of the  
informational university.[6]

As a pilot study, the counter-mapping project in Beijing provides  
inititial research data for future comparative research that examines  
the inter-relations between geopolitics (regional trade agreements,  
national and multi-lateral policies on labour mobility, security and  
migration, etc.) and the peculiarities of intraregional, translocal  
and global cultural flows within the creative industries. A  
comparative focus on the creative industries enables new questions to  
be asked about the mutually constitutive tensions between these  
forces, practices, histories and policies.

The project establishes a prototype for new cross-cultural  
educational and research institutions organised about the logic of  
networks. As signalled in policy milestones such as the Bologna  
Process (1999), scholarly monographs and OECD reports, the landscape  
in higher education has been undergoing gradual, and in some  
instances rapid, transformation toward a market model.
The Bologna Process is more complex than a simple transition toward a  
market model, but its modularization of educational processes should  
nonetheless be considered as a core dynamic of the contemporary  
second wave of globalization (services economy). This dynamic is also  
how educational changes intersect with the emergent economy of  
culture after the first wave (trade) has been nearly completed, which  
is why the Bologna Process holds important implications beyond the  
realm of education.
The role of universities as exclusive providers of higher education  
is changing as small and medium enterprises obtain government  
accreditation for provision of ‘educational services’. We are yet  
to see organisations develop out of the field of network cultures as  
providers of high quality research and teaching.

Collaborative practices within the creative industries and network  
cultures are now well established as the primary mode of production  
and communication. The business models which sustain the combination  
of service labour and innovation as they are located on the margins  
of industry are less understood. Primarily comprising of 'informal  
economies' (symbolic, voluntary, word-of-mouth) and sustained  
economically by various forms of financial support (parental, small  
government funds such as the ‘citizen wage’ or grants,  
associations with universities) and wealth generation (e.g. the 'long  
tail'[7]), there is great scope for further development and  
understanding of new business models.[8]


Notes:

[1] http://www.re-public.gr/en/?p=201

[2] http://orgnets.net

[3] See Francesco Guala, ‘How to Do Things with Experimental  
Economics’, in Donald MacKenzie, Fabian Muniesa and Lucia Siu (eds)  
Do Economists Make Markets? On the Performativity of Economics,  
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007, p. 131.

[4] Ibid., p. 145.

[5] Jon Solomon, ‘Knowledege Conflicts, Self-Education and Common  
Production’, posting to edu-factory mailing list, 22 April 2007,  
http://www.edu-factory.org.

[6] See, for example, the recent Summit: Non-Aligned Initiatives in  
Education Culture, Berlin, 24-28 May, 2007, http://summit.kein.org.

[7] Chris Anderson, 'The Long Tail', Wired 12.10 (2004), http:// 
www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html

[8] For a study of working conditions and experiences of new media  
workers in Amsterdam, see Rosalind Gill, Technobohemians or the New  
Cybertariat? New Media Work in Amsterdam a Decade after the Web,  
Network Notebooks no. 1, Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures,  
2007, http://www.networkcultures.org/_uploads/17.pdf