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

[Paul B. Hartzog]

much thx
lots of nodes in there to connect to other things....

At the very least, we have a lot of literature and history of
engagement in political theory with the paradox of tolerance:  to
tolerate the intolerant?  whom to tolerate?

>From Locke's vision of a bounded tolerance, to Montaigne's
(e?)valuation and exclusion of those without pants ( ;-) )  toleration
always ressurrects the basic political problem of inclustion/exclusion
and NEVER solves or circumvents it.

-p



On Nov 22, 2007 11:05 AM, Ned Rossiter <ned at nedrossiter.org> wrote:
> 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
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> p2presearch mailing list
> p2presearch at listcultures.org
> http://listcultures.org/mailman/listinfo/p2presearch_listcultures.org
>



-- 
--------------------------------------------------------
http://www.PaulBHartzog.org
http://www.panarchy.com
PaulBHartzog at PaulBHartzog.org
PaulBHartzog at panarchy.com
PHartzog at umich.edu
--------------------------------------------------------
The Universe is made up of stories, not atoms.
                 --Muriel Rukeyser

See differently, then you will act differently.
                 --Paul B. Hartzog
--------------------------------------------------------