[p2p-research] How Can Open Source Software Open Up Facebook?

[Ned Rossiter]

an OS FB would indeed be a good move. I am quite paranoid about FB  
and rumours of data mining for intelligence agencies.  On the topic  
of FB, here is another recent text - one that's been on the lists, so  
apologies for the spamming - I won't be doing any more of it.  Ned

--


‘YourSpace is MyTime, or, What is the Lurking Dog Going to Do – Leave  
a Comment?’*

Ned Rossiter

You might know my second space, but do you know my first? Do I even  
know? In this time of ubiquitous media, the territory of offline  
existence is increasingly harder to define. These days you’ve made it  
when you’re able to log off. Google narcissism services our curious  
and always fragile egos, but after 50 pages the attraction has either  
worn off, run out or turned into Japanese. Like Pavlov’s salivating  
dog, we return a month later to the algorhythmic mirror to work out  
what’s gone on in our life. Who’s listening, who’s reading, who’s  
watching, who’s appraising, who’s attacking? Who knows and who cares?  
Just feed me data.

In the society of voluntary exposure, practice has outstripped  
pedagogy. Speed is the default of dissemination. And someone else is  
making bucks out of your expenditure of energy. Success requires a re- 
engineering of time. In the competitive attention economy of creative  
networks, cultural production becomes an art of lingering and  
resonance. Zero comments are equivalent to the dead link.

MySpace and Facebook continue the social networking tradition of  
compiling friends. But who are your enemies? What do friends mean for  
collaborative constitution? What happens to the creative logic of  
constitutive tension when all you have is endless affirmation? Maybe  
you go on a demo for the palpable thrill of confrontation, but where,  
really, is your enemy? Watching the replay three days later from a  
hundred CCTV recordings that your income tax paid for. Therein lies  
the auto-erotic drive of opposition. The imaginary reigns supreme.  
And you pay for it.

What is the role of critique in this kind of environment? With the  
Rise of the easyJet Class, some suggest that critique serves to  
eradicate the possibility of hotbeds of creativity.[1] Like  
politicians and mediocre consultants, critics contribute to the dirty  
appeal of emergent ‘creative cities’. Berlin is ‘poor but sexy’,  
claims the city mayor. Now that it can boast number one ranking  
according to the Floridarian spin-index of ‘3 T’s’ – Talent,  
Technology and Tolerance – Berlin is supposedly guaranteed of  
development via its creative economy.[2] The message? Stay Poor and  
Move East to Get Rich Fast.

And what happens then? Welcome to the Desert of a non-English Real.  
Your networks develop within the ghetto of Euro-American exodus. Self- 
affirmation, but with a difference. Everything is fast, dust sticks,  
lungs collapse but value is added in immaterial ways. Everyone awaits  
the call of repatriation. It’s a gamble against time, and the updated  
graduates of instituted creativity are stacking up fast. This sounds  
like evolutionary economics all over again.

TV real-estate shows belt out the mantra ‘Location, Location,  
Location!’ Tune in or give up. If you don’t have enough savings, then  
take a mortgage out on life. It’ll only cost you. But seriously, how  
and where do we locate ourselves in an era of rapidly diminishing  
returns? We know that every act of consumption is one of ecological  
destruction. Is the Slow Movement the only answer? Even that has  
succumbed to a dependency on earnest consumption by the Enlightened  
Middle Classes. Bring back the commons, we are told. But that only  
welcomes proprietary control through the backdoor cult of  
libertarianism. Free is only so good insofar as you’ve got a Second  
Life of income generation on the side.

Writing in his twilight years of productivity – the late 40s and  
early 50s – the Canadian political economist and communications  
theorist Harold Innis discerned a ‘bias of communication’ operating  
across the epochs of civilization. His novel insight was to connect  
the materiality of communications media with time and space.  
Examining the relation between the continuity of empires over time  
and their extension across space, Innis concluded, in correct  
negative fashion, that the history of mediated human life  
demonstrated that it was always off-balance. ‘Monopolies of  
knowledge’, he argued, are shaped by the spatial and temporal  
properties of technology.

The clay writing tablet in Ancient Babylonia endured over time,  
whereas the invention of papyrus by Egyptians enabled easy  
dissemination across space. The downfall of each of these empires was  
a result, he argues, of their bias of communication. Time or space.  
The secular technology of papyrus in Egypt marginalized a monarchy  
whose control over time centred around the use of stone and  
hieroglyphics. The Assyrians invaded Babylon due to their superior  
technologies of speed: the stirrup, chariot and experiments in horse- 
breeding made possible the rapid transport of cavalry across space,  
conquering the religious administration of Babylon. Without an  
adequate military reserve, the bureaucratic apparatus of an alluvial  
empire and its rule of law came tumbling down.

What lessons might we gain from the history of technology and  
culture? Explicit in Innis’ archaeology is an acknowledgment of the  
relationship between media, culture and the enemy. The enemy is  
revealed through the bias of communication. But how do we identify  
the enemy in social networking technologies that have one option  
only: links to our friends? In social networking sites such as  
Facebook, the enemy is loaded into the space-time continuum: often  
pictured but never present. Your friends make it impossible to avoid  
enemies.  Indeed, they can only be your friends. The enemy is never a  
guest blogger. Does the anonymous comment register the enemy voice,  
or the friend passing as enemy? We never know. What is an enemy  
without a face?

‘I don’t waste time despising people’, writes American legal  
philosopher Martha Nussbaum in The Guardian’s Weekend magazine.  
‘Anger is much more constructive than contempt’.[3] Emotions are fine  
so long as they can be made productive. Nussbaum’s protestant  
instrumentalisation of affect holds similarities with Facebook. There  
is no tragedy. There is no surprise. These are not options. The  
limits of Facebook are revealed through the trope of irony. One of my  
‘Very Conservative’ friends with ‘Serious’ religious views, whose  
Facebook face looks distinctly psychotic, discloses a failed romance  
we never had. This bi-modal form of public outing as conservative and  
gay within the closed circuit of friends might function as a minor  
disruptive device. But this is hardly a case of conflictual  
constitution. Instead, it gestures toward an uneven networked  
sociality of knowledge and affective proximity.

Nothing of consequence is at stake. Potential conflict is subsumed  
within the Facebook code of tolerance. The technics give you no other  
choice. The logic of tolerance reaffirms a cool, liberal world-view.  
Zizek is the exemplary embodiment of Facebook. His intolerance of  
tolerance is another variation of the ironic trope. Fightclub 2.0.  
And this is why nasty hate sites are so refreshing: their non-ironic  
mode broadcasts intolerance right from the start.

‘Tolerance is Suicide’, declares W.A.R. – White Aryan Resistance.[4]  
Yet hate sites in many ways are no different from their liberal  
counter-parts of networked affirmation. In both cases the addressee  
is always absent. They are never there, only you and your friends.  
With their form of indirect address, the disruptive potential of  
noise is rendered inoperable. There is no constitutive outside when  
you are blasting out hate or confirming your friends. We are not  
talking about cybernetics here. Nor, really, are we talking about  
networks. It’s all about associative desires. And if you’re migrating  
to Facebook from the proletarian parametres of MySpace, then you’re  
displaying symptoms of the aspirational impulse.

If you’re in any doubt about these claims, then go visit a site  
extolling the virtues of pet hate. Holy Shmoly!’s blog posts an entry  
on ‘8 reasons to hate cats’. With 355 comments, this rates as an A- 
list blog for sure. RICHSRD CAT HATER: ‘CATS ARE SHIT!!!! THEY SHOULD  
ALL DIE!!! SO SHOULD BIRDS’. some guy: ‘cats have a use by date, just  
like food’. Tim: ‘I hate fucking cats. the only fun part about a cat  
is blasting the hell out of it with a .22 rifle. the sons of a  
bitches should all die. indpendant lil bastards, fuck them all!’  
Jacky (smart scots girl): ‘P.S. We eat cats in Scotland’. matt: ‘How  
do you make a cat go woof? Dowse it in gas and light a match’.[5]

Online, nobody knows the person you hate is actually a dog. [6]

This is where activist cartographies of media control come in handy.  
The database technographies of Josh On’s ‘They Rule’ and Bureau  
d’études’ maps of the military-industrial complex combine political  
economy with the aesthetics of design. At best, they conjure a  
project of collaborative research that cuts through a particular  
slice of time. As web 1.0 productions, these are not cultural  
technologies of real-time. Both inform us of the relation between  
institutional and individual interests. Combined assets are revealed.  
But it is hard not to be seduced by the aesthetics of presentation in  
both of these works. Part of their success derives from a recognition  
factor. They Rule affirms our sense of how networks appear, but not  
how they might change. And for all its amazing research, the  
cartographies of Bureau d’études resemble the Paris, London or Berlin  
metro systems, albeit in a Stalinesque aesthetic form.

As with many media of vision, what we find in both of these examples  
is a bias toward space. Relations are mapped, but changes over time  
are nowhere to be found. The advent of open and interactive databases  
corrects this imbalance, to a certain extent. OpenStreetMap.org is a  
good example.[7] Brought to my attention by the Ljubljanian free  
software activist Luka Frelih, openstreetmap integrates GPS mapping  
technologies with a non-proprietary value system. It invites a  
collaborative platform for users to create an open version of  
everyday orientation. Using handheld GPS data loggers as a system of  
real-time updating of abstracted space, openstreetmap would seem to  
deliver Innis’ dream of social-technological balance: a technic of  
communication predisposed to neither time nor space, but both,  
simultaneously. In time, across space.

While it’s low on eye-candy, opensteetmap is a great example of  
techno-sociality that is secondary to outcomes – the generation of  
maps – but primary as a condition of possibility. First and foremost,  
openstreetmap invokes the potentiality of communication as a mode of  
collaborative constitution. For all the joy and narco-gratification  
that attends social networking technologies such as MySpace, in the  
first instance these are technologies of solitude. Don’t get me  
wrong: I’m not a great fan of mingling with the masses. Despite the  
pernicious dimensions of individualised sociality, there are few who  
don’t find considerable relief when exiting the office.

What I’m suggesting, then, is that collaborative constitution is  
necessarily an uncertain, unpredictable endeavour. It resists easy  
formulation. Concepts are contextual. Experimentation is key, and  
experience is crucial. Those who insist on predefined outcomes and  
lists of deliverables will only be disappointed. But such agents of  
administrative anxiety are essential for the collaborative  
constitution of creativity. See these procedural types as conflict  
generators that wish to police the borders of reason and the act of  
action. Don’t be concerned about the registration of denial. The  
negative affect will undoubtedly take hold and propel your  
investigation in one direction or many.

But what to make of all of this? Don’t reply to that Urgent! Email.  
Tell the boss to take a hike, and bend over instead for your buddy.  
Maybe then you make your enemy. Excess is easy. ‘Concrete research’  
in order to create ‘a strategy of the future’ (Tronti) is not. Techno- 
cultures are delicate, that much is certain. Life, even more so.  
There’s something to be said for religion. It rates as the most  
successful institution in history. But let’s face it, true believers  
are, quite literally, out of it. Our time requires substantial  
readjustment. That much is clear. But where to turn? That, I submit,  
is a question to you.


Notes:

* This paper was presented at New Cultural Networks: You Google My  
Second Space, Theater van't Woord, Openbare Bibliotheek Amsterdam,  
Stifo at Sandberg Institute of Design, Amsterdam, 2 November 2007,  
http://www.all-media.info/page.php?id=99. Thanks to Mieke Gerritzen  
for the invitation and to Julian Kücklich for kicking in with some  
one-liners.

[1] See Steffen Böhm, ‘Re: [My-ci] Correction – Berlin Tops Germany  
for “Creative Class”’, posting to mycreativity mailing list, 18  
October, 2007, http://idash.org/mailman/listinfo/my-ci. See also  
Matteo Pasquinelli, ‘Re: [My-ci] Berlin Tops Germany for “Creative  
Class”’, posting to mycreativity mailing list, 15 October, 2007,  
http://idash.org/mailman/listinfo/my-ci.

[2] ‘Economic Prospects Report: Berlin Tops Germany for “Creative  
Class”’, Spiegel International, 10 October, 2007, http:// 
www.spiegel.de/international/business/0,1518,510609,00.html.

[3] Martha Nussbaum, ‘Q&A: Interview by Rosanna Greenstreet’, The  
Guardian, 27 October, 2007, http://www.guardian.co.uk/weekend/story/ 
0,,2198680,00.html.

[4] http://www.resist.com/

[5] http://ocaoimh.ie/2005/03/15/8-reasons-to-hate-cats/

[6] For those of you who really hate Facebook, then try out Arsebook  
– ‘an anti-social utility that connects you with the people YOU  
HATE’, http://www.arsebook.org/. Thanks to Els Silvrants for the link.

[7] http://openstreetmap.org