Larry Hanley SFSU
[email protected] 2015 LAWCHA/WCSA “Cognitarian Literature: Digital Labor in Contemporary Fiction” “Networks [] oscillate between two related but incompatible formal structures,” writes the media scholar, Alex Galloway. “On the one side, the chain of triumph; on the other the web of ruin” (281) Further, he notes, the relation between these two structures, one of control and communication and the other of risk and dissolution, suggest “new scenes of political interest” (292). In looking at a handful of contemporary novels today, this is the scene that I want to explore. More specifically, as selfconscious efforts to explore the networks that circulate the information, bodies, and labor so central to contemporary capitalism, how do these novels point to similar “scenes of political interest”? Of all of the contemporary novels that explore the information revolution, Dave Eggers’ satirical novel, The Circle , takes its revolutionary claims most literally. Eggers’ dystopian vision of social networking centers on a monolithic GooglemeetsFacebook the Circle that owns “90 percent of the search market . . . [e]ightyeight percent of the freemail market, 92 percent of the text servicing” (173.). In this civil libertarian nightmare, Circle apps like “TruYou,” “YouthRank,” “Child Track,” “SoulSearch,”, “PastPerfect,” “NeighborWatch,” and CHAD (“Complete Health Data”) collect every user’s mouse clicks, likes, selfies, and moving offline, ultimately, every action. Nothing is deleted. “ALL THAT HAPPENS MUST BE KNOWN” (67) declares one of the company’s many motivational posters, and one of its most exciting projects, at least to the
Circlers, is an effort to count the sands of the Sahara (237). Eggers’ satire reaches its most gleeful and terrifying Orwellian depths when the Circle unveils its latest corporate slogans: “SECRETS ARE LIES” and “PRIVACY IS THEFT” (303). Eggers’ novel has relatively little to say about the ultimate rationale of platforms like Facebook or Google: to harvest and commodify user data. Instead, The Circle focuses its Swiftian energies on the immense sociality all the clicks, likes, shares, comments, tweets and other acts of connection these platforms must cultivate to function as data factories (Dijk) . The “Circleplex” dresses its radical agenda in the dream of human perfectibility complete informational transparency, opines one of the company’s founders, “would finally [ ] compel[ ] us to be our best selves” (290), but the novel relentlessly rehearses a basic contradiction of the “networked self” (Papacharissi): more information generates more anxiety and more precarious selves. [Summarize: For instance, as Mae Holland, the Carrie Meeberesque protagonist of The Circle , accrues an online audience who track her every Zing and selfie, she also acquires a more theatrical self, a double consciousness within which she “measures her words” to emulate “the quiet dignity [and] practiced composure” (461) of authority figures. If transparency breeds, paradoxically, new kinds of inauthenticity, the ecstasy of communication also makes us more sensitive and volatile. Mae, for instance, experiences a kind of nervous breakdown when she discovers that 97% of Circlers endorse her “awesomeness”: “she could only think of the 3 percent who did not find her awesome. . . Three hundred and sixtyeight people loathed her. She was devastated. . . . She felt full of holes, as if every one of them had shot her, from behind, cowards filling her with holes. She could barely stand” (4056). Mae’s mentor, Annie, later tries to commit suicide after PerfectPast reveals ancestors who were Southern slaveholders .] The ecstasy of communication (to coin a phrase) (Baudrillard), generates more
volatile selves. Rather than “eliminating uncertainty” (125), the Circle’s networked selfsurveillance introduces new precarities into social relations and identities. And, the precarity effects of the network extend to the workplace, where the computer monitors that surround Mae’s workspace proliferate from two to four and finally to nine, constantly updating her “Customer Experience” score, her “Participation Rank” (100), and her “Conversion Rate” and “Retail Raw” (250). Here, Eggers obviously satirizes the algorithmic machinery of worker accountability and performance measures, but his deeper target may be the ways in which sociality has become integral to the workplace, the ways in which distinctions between work and nonwork have been absorbed into a new regime of biopolitical production. “[B]eing social, and being a presence on your profile this is part of why you’re here,” one of Mae’s supervisors explains to her. “We consider your online presence to be integral to you work here. It’s all connected” (95). Producing your self via the the “free labor” (Terranova) of social networking that we contribute to sites like Facebook is subsumed by the Circle, (not “what you might call a clockin, clockout type of company” (176) as another character notes,) into a more generalized production of self and data that transforms earlier, Fordist distinctions between work and life into porous and precarious borders. In The Circle , labor circulates throughout the social factory of data production. Though Hari Kunzru titles his novel of sweated informational labor, Transmission , he might also have called it “circulation” for, like Egger, he too is interested in the circulation, at a global scale, of information, commodities, labor, and bodies. In Transmission , as the twinned narratives of Arjun Mehta, a coder exported from India to Redmond, Washington, as a member of the “global reserve army of ‘knowledge workers’” (Huws 43) and Guy Swift, a Londonbased advertising exec, demonstrate, this circulation is determined by class. As he walks through a postindustrial
wasteland to the apartment he shares with his fellow Databodies Inc. contract workers, Arjun reflects on “the sublime mobility of those who travel without ever touching the ground. [And,] the other mobility, the forced motion of the shoppingcart pushers, the collectors of cardboard boxes” (45). Guy, who jets between London, Dubai, New York City and Brussels, lives in a glasscladded apartment building called “In Vitro,” designed to create an “effect . . . of absolute calm, a heavenly sense of floating free of the cares of the world” (110). He thinks of life as “just a string of taxis. Hop into one and into another, like a sequence from a Beatles movie” (209). As Zygmaun Bauman describes our era of “light” as opposed to “heavy” capitalism: “The game of domination in the era of liquid modernity is not played between the 'bigger' and the 'smaller,' but between the quicker and the slower" (188). Speed, weightlessness, portability, and weak ties the hallmarks of nomadic capital have trumped “the principles of territoriality and settlement” (13). These two worlds can often share a space like the “Cibachrome prints of blownup urban detailing, manholes and rough sleepers and . . a crossprocessed shot of an industrial estate in Dalston” (113) that line Guy’s office walls, or his exhortations to colleagues to “get[] one’s hands dirty at the brandface” (115), or even like Arjun’s presence in the offices of Virugenix, an antivirus software firm but they rarely interact. Arjun finds workingclass Americans “so tall and heavy, so meaty ” (41), but he quickly discovers that trapped by a “slave visa” (62) he too is an object to be circulated rather than a subject who circulates. Transparency in The Circle , the work of becoming totally visible, erases borders and boundaries, for instance between places, people, work, and nonwork. In Transmission , on the other hand, networked surveillance reinforces boundaries; the networked self, rendered visible and “knowable” through Big Data, becomes subject to more direct forms of control and regulation. “The question of the border is a question of information,” a representative of PEBA,
the Pan European Border Agency, tells Guy as Guy pitches him a rebranding proposal over dinner in a restaurant called Seraphim. “The informatic dimension is central to the whole harmonization process” (234). Though both Kunzru and Eggers share a critical perspective on “databodies,” Kunzru offers us a more dialectical possibility. For if the network enables surveillance, in Transmission it also opens the system to glitches and failures. Citing the interference and distortion that plague all communication, the novel’s narrator explains: “In the real world . . . there is always noise. . . . Information transmission, it emerges, is about doing the best you can” (254). Thus it is that Arjun, in a desperate bid to make work for himself and avoid deportation, launches the Leela virus, a piece of malware that signals its intrusion with a clip of Leela Zahir, a Bollywood starlet, dancing merrily across your computer monitor. Within days of its release, Leela01 and its variants Leela02, 03, 04, produce a “furring of the global arteries” (184) which quickly precipitates an “informational disaster” (254) labeled “Grayday.” Carried by the “informatic dimenstion” that transmits surveillance data, Leela01 creates “heavy traffic across the border between the known and the unknown” (256) and, as the narrator tells us, “All that can be said with honesty afterward is that there were absences and gaps that have never been filled” (254). Among these absences: the disppearance of Arjun Mehta, on the run from FBI cybercops, and Leela Zahir, in flight from a set in Scotland and cinematic peonage, and Guy Swift who thanks to misplaced wallet and phone is mistaken for an Albanian “pyramid fraudster” (263) and rapidly deported to Tirana. Only Guy reappears, after Grayday, cast down to British earth as a “geopathic” potter, selfexiled to a remote Northumbrian cottage. According to Transmission , networked information represents both a solution and problem for “light” capitalism, but Cory Doctorow’s novel, Makers , rearranges these terms: capitalism poses problems for networked society. As its title implies, Doctorow’s novel dips deeply into the
“maker” movement: a diverse association of tinkerers and inventors headquartered in thousands of garages, for whom the decentralized networks of the web lower design and production costs, enable sharing and cooperation, and open up new routes to manufacture and distribution. For many makers, this punk, DIY mode of production represents the web’s ultimate migration from bits to atoms; the two protagonists of Makers , Lester and Perry, for instance, describe their greatest creation as ”a gigantic physical wiki” (137). When their New Work movement of workshops, makers, and 3D printers, funded by the Economy 1.0 remnants of Kodak and Duracell is defeated by falling Kodacell share prices and various Wall Street’s shenanigans, Lester and Perry respond by pushing the logic of networked production further: they create an amusement park ride that is constantly reprogrammed by its users to tell “The Story,” a personal representation of history shared and shaped by other users. To avoid the fate of New Work, Lester and Perry try to create a new “cool social institution” (137) that “route[s] around . . .parasites and bullies and middlemen” (286, 285). “The Story,” Lester explains, “is a protocol we all agree on, not a business arrangement” (141). As in Transmission , the network promises evasion and escape. Yet, as Mario Tronti reminds us in his formulation of the “autonomist thesis”: “Capitalist power,” whether of the light or heavy variety, perpetually “seeks to use the workers' antagonistic willtostruggle as a motor of its own development” (“The Strategy of Refusal”). Like its predecessor, “The Story” grinds to a halt amidst lawsuits and corporate sabotage, yet the success of its networked, participatory structure spurs its most powerful rival, Disney Parks, to develop its own wildly successful, distributed, 3D printed experience, called “DisneyinaBox” (308). The collapse of New Work and “The Story”’ points to a major flaw in arguments for “the new industrial revolution” (Anderson) of the maker movement. When, as with Lester and Perry’s “physical wiki,” “the cooperation and subjectivity
of labor have found a point of contact out side of the machinations of capital,” Antonio Negri writes of worker “selfvalorization,” “Capital becomes merely an apparatus of cap ture, a phantasm, an idol” (Negri 282). Yet, despite Negri’s “merely,” this dance between autonomy and control may actually constitute the central dynamic of contemporary cognitive capitalism. “Forced to mutate to survive” (36), according to Yann Moulier Boutang, today’s capitalism recognizes that “the digital and its appropriation by the largest possible number of people is a necessary precondition for being able to recuperate the work of collective intelligence” (108). The capture of this “invention power . . . defines the specific form of exploitation and surplus value extracted by cognitive capitalism” (54). In Makers , capitalism becomes a fetter on the maker means of production, and a revolution that can’t imagine life beyond the vampiric strategies of capitalism is doomed to failure. Unable to answer the question of “Why couldn’t we make stuff and do stuff? Why did it always have to turn into a plan for world domination?” (249), however, Lester admits defeat and joins Disney’s skunkworks, parting ways with Perry who, true to his maker roots, becomes an itinerant coder. Perhaps it’s best to end our short time together with Thomas Pynchon’s latest novel, Bleeding Edge . Pynchon has always, of course, been a supreme genealogist of late capitalism, deciphering the continuities and ruptures within history and compulsively mining the seams between historical periods, where the edge of one era seems to bleed ineffably into another. Reality, however, seems to have finally caught up with Pynchon in Bleeding Edge : network society, with its incessant circulation of signs, information, money, and identities represents the perfect medium for the plots within plots, proliferating characters, sinister serendipities (of language and action), shadowy organizations, and dark conspiracies that define Pynchon’s entire oeuvre. Set in pre and post911 New York City, Bleeding Edge chronicles the detective
work of Maxine Tarnow, a literary sister of Pynchon’s earlier Oedipa Maas, as she struggles to decipher the connections between venture capitalist Gabriel Ice, a suspicious startup called hashslingrz, the hawala network of informal money transfer, nefarious CIA operative, Nicholas Windust, exSpetznazturnedmafioso, Igor Dashkov, a bevy of other characters, and a shady fibre brokerage called Darklinear Solutions. In the end, all of this may be connected to a group of men rehearsing a Stinger missile attack from atop a nearby apartment building. Or, it all may be connected to the Montauk Project, a Long Island version of Area 51. Neither the reader nor Maxine ever discovers the truth. In this, the novel remains faithful to both Pynchon’s oeuvre and its dot.com miliueu: despite the temptations of paraonia, within the wild dissemination nurtured by network logic, centers always dissolve into edges and vice versa. Yet, Bleeding Edge also connects our contemporary moment to a longer history, perhaps the secret subject of Pynchon’s entire career. “[T]he colonizers are coming,” an avatar in Deep Archer says of the opensourced online world created by two California hackers, “Link by link, they’ll bring it all under control, safe and respectable” (241). “Whatever migratory visitors are down there [in Deep Archer],” Maxine notes to herself. They’ll all too soon “be rudely surprised by the whispering descent of corporate Web crawlers itching to index and corrupt another patch of sanctuary for their own farfromselfless ends” (167). As we know from Marx and his analysis of “primitive accumulation,” the struggle between enclosure and the commons birthed capitalism (Bonefeld). Today’s tech revolution, as Pynchon narrates it, doesn’t break with this history, it merely repeats it.
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