extensions

The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it…It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges subsist here and there, in the deserts which are no longer those of the Empire, but our own. The desert of the real itself. - Jean Baudrillard

In Henry Jenkins’s “Origami” chapter, he discusses the transmedia trend, where producers create, instead of media productions, media “worlds.” The Wachowski’s “The Matrix” exemplifies this best, a blend of films, comics, videogames, and anime, all built on a foundation of metaphysics and mythology. And while I’ll admit to be completely caught up in the Matrix media world as anyone else (just like I’ve rummaged across the Internet looking for clues to an equally in-depth world, the world of LOST), I think it’s important to also keep a critical distance to these works.

At the top of the criticality list, in my opinion, is what Julian Dibbell has called “ludocapitalism”:

I’m suggesting that when the economic system of the world has come to such a pass that the labor of online gamers can contribute more to the global GDP than 2 out of 3 sovereign nations, then no proper account of that system can neglect to account for its relationship to play. And I’m arguing, finally, that that relationship is one of convergence; that in the strange new world of immateriality toward which the engines of production have long been driving us, we can now at last make out the contours of a more familiar realm of the insubstantial—the realm of games and make-believe. In short, I’m saying that Marx had it almost right: Solidity is not melting into air. Production is melting into play.”

Dibbell’s essay is excellent, and provides many examples of production melting into play, such as TopCoder, a business that offers programming competitions and sells the winning software (no profits go to the game winner, just the thrill of victory).

But this idea of ludocapitalism can exist in much more subtle ways. In cyberspace, the line between public and private is, necessarily, made obscure. There are no secrets in a networked culture, and there is a monetary value to this openness, but it doesn’t end up in our pockets. It’s essentially free labor.

Take the example of Google — they use our “work,” that is, the searches that make up the zeitgeist of the web, and sell it, in the form of ads. There’s also an element of marketing — what price can Google put on the word “google” becoming a verb?

This is the flip side, then, the mirror image of what Jenkins talks about in “Convergence.” The fun we have spoiling “Survivor” translates to higher ratings, higher ad rates, more profit. The clues to LOST planted across the net create a buzz around the show. Again, more profit. Each click of our mouse in the spirit of play can be monetized in the spirit of capitalism.

It’s summed up here, in another piece by Dibbell, on China’s gaming workshops:

“When I was a worker,” Fan Yangwen, who is now 21 and in Donghua’s main office providing technical support, told me, “I loved to play because when I was playing, I was learning.” But learning to play or learning to work? I asked. Fan shrugged. “Both.”

Production, melting in play.

Last night on The Office, Second Life made an appearance:

Jim: You playing that game again?

Dwight: Second Life is not a game. It is a multi-user, virtual environment. It doesn’t have points, or scores. It doesn’t have winners or losers.

Jim: Oh, it has losers.

Good stuff. Dwight goes on to explain why he started using SL:

Dwight (direct to camera): I signed up for Second Life about a year ago. Back then, my life was so great, that I literally wanted a second one. In my second life, I was also a paper salesman, and I was also named Dwight. Absolutely everything was the same. Except I could fly.

For those keeping score, this is the second time Second Life has been prominently featured in a television show, in about as many weeks.

Does this mean Second Life has jumped the shark?

Brilliant:

For much of the last two weeks, on television-related Web sites, blogs and message boards, fans of “30 Rock,” the critically acclaimed but ratings-challenged NBC comedy, have been replaying and kvelling over “Werewolf Bar Mitzvah.” That six-second sketch imagines a 1980s novelty song and music video recorded by Tracy Jordan, the resident nut job on the show within a show on “30 Rock.”

C’mon — werewolf bar mitzvahs? That’s gold. Comedy gold.

30 Rock continues to be, hands down, the smartest writing on television today.

Microsoft invests in Facebook. And there is glee:

“Once a social operating system takes over a country it’s like it becomes the native language of that country,” said Lee Lorenzen, a venture capitalist who is bullish on Facebook and notes that Google’s Orkut dominates Brazil, Friendster dominates the Philippines and Facebook is becoming the dominant forum in the United States, Canada and Western Europe.

Facebook boosters say that social networking represents the future of online activity. Advertisers are attracted to these properties because they offer an opportunity to aim ads to particular users interested in their product or service.

Is Facebook, and social networking in general, the “social operating system” of the future? Maybe, and that’s why Microsoft is interested. Operating systems abstracted us from the inner workers of the computer. Web browsers abstracted us from the operating system. Why not a “social networking” layer?

But it seems like there are two big strikes against the Microsoft-Facebook deal becoming the Greatest Thing Ever. One, the fact that sites like Facebook are “attractive” to advertisers, likely just means “more ads” for the site’s users. Companies quickly forget about the users, and turn to making the next buck as the prime motivator for business.

The other problem is that Friendster, if you remember, at one point was the coolest site around. MySpace seems to have gone down in status, as people built up Facebook. Social networking sites seem to have a fickleness factor. More ads, and something else better comes around, and it’s a few billion dollars down the drain.

It very well may be that social networking sites are the new OS, but it’s not that clear that Facebook will remain at the center.

There’s a hacker conference going on this weekend in San Diego, and, from it, an interesting perspective on the real danger of the web:

The danger lies not in government monitoring, that’s been thoroughly recognized and railed against, Beetle says. It’s what we’re willing to let people do to our stuff so we can get it for free. Google’s autoscrubbing our searches for words to sell us stuff in the future is more dangerous to our privacy and future than pointless government monitoring, he says.

“We are letting strangers look at our bits in exchange for more free bits,” Beetle says. “What you are giving up now is tantamount to what you will give up in the future.”

Now, you might not be interested in advice from a hacker named “Beetle,” but it’s a valid point. Although it’s difficult to judge which is worse, government monitoring or the monetization of what we do on the web, the subtlety of the latter is what perhaps makes it more dangerous.

The web, by its very nature, is a place of surveillance. There are no secrets in cyberspace. The line between public and private is, necessarily, made obscure.

There is a monetary value to this openness, but it doesn’t end up in our pockets. It’s essentially free labor. Take the example of Google — they use our “work,” that is, the searches that make up the zeitgeist of the web, and sell it, in the form of ads. There’s also an element of marketing — what price can Google put on the word “google” becoming a verb? That’s a marketer’s dream!

The other interesting aspect of Beetle’s comments is a hacker calling the government’s use of surveillance “pointless.” I wonder if he’s suggesting the needle in a haystack effect — I always thought even if the government could tap everything that happened on the web, the sheer volume of data would be a real hurdle to zeroing in on anything worthwhile. Sure, there are data mining tools, but I have no idea how well they work.

Someone like Beetle would probably know.

What I like about Lev Manovich is how he forces us to realize that however new we might think our Brave New Digital World is, much of it is rooted in older media paradigms and sensibilities.

His essay, “The Paradoxes of Digital Photography“, seems so familiar. That’s because it's all in “The Language of New Media,” although it's split into two different sections in the book.

In the essay, he makes a big mistake regarding lossy compression — that “each time a compressed file is save, more information is lost” is completely incorrect. He must have noticed , because that statement did not make it in the book. More importantly, it doesn't even matter, because, the way people use digital files, it's compressed once, and then (perfect) copies of that file are passed around. No one re-compresses a file before sharing it.

But the more important points of the essay hold true. Photography has never been only about realism, and his example of advertising is on point. Much of advertising is about fantasy, and no one mistakes that for real life. More importantly, what Manovich is saying is that there is no “photography” — there is no single conception of it. It's not only “realism,” and it's not only a lie. There was never “normal photography”:

Straight photography has always represented just one tradition of photography; it always coexisted with equally popular traditions where a photographic image was openly manipulated and was read as such. Equally, there never existed a single dominant way of reading photography; depending on the context the viewer could (and continue to) read photographs as representations of concrete events, or as illustrations which do not claim to correspond to events which have occurred.

He also discusses the issue of representation and the real, but with a twist:

For what is faked is, of course, not reality but photographic reality, reality as seen by the camera lens. In other words, what computer graphics has (almost) achieved is not realism, but only photorealism — the ability to fake not our perceptual and bodily experience of reality but only its photographic image.[16] …And the reason we think that computer graphics has succeeded in faking reality is that we, over the course of the last hundred and fifty years, has come to accept the image of photography and film as reality.

Maybe the “truth” photography represents isn't “truth,” but only the lens's version of truth. We've been changed, bodily, by seeing through the camera. Here's Susan Sontag, from “On Photography”:

Cameras did not simply make is possible to apprehend more by seeing (through microphotograpy and teledetection). They changed seeing itself, by fostering the idea of seeing for seeing's sake. (93)

McLuhan, of course, also has much to say on this matter, as cameras are, for him, an extension of the visual sense, an extension of the eye.

Which returns me to Manovich, where I think he's at his most provocative. The perfectness of the computer image becomes the perfectness of vision:

The synthetic image is free of the limitations of both human and camera vision. It can have unlimited resolution and an unlimited level of detail. It is free of the depth-of-field effect, this inevitable consequence of the lens, so everything is in focus. It is also free of grain — the layer of noise created by film stock and by human perception. Its colors are more saturated and its sharp lines follow the economy of geometry. From the point of view of human vision it is hyperreal. And yet, it is completely realistic. It is simply a result of a different, more perfect than human, vision.

Whose vision is it? It is the vision of a cyborg or a computer; a vision of Robocop and of an automatic missile. It is a realistic representation of human vision in the future when it will be augmented by computer graphics and cleansed from noise. It is the vision of a digital grid.

If photography really has the ability to change our vision, if technology is an extension of our senses, then I think Manovich is undoubtedly correct. Computer vision is human vision of the future.

Our dependence on machines, now an interdependence, really, points us in that direction.

Ah, Mario’s been blogging. How could I have not known?

The Bits blog in the Times comments on the new Current TV, as they’ve now opened up a web site alongside their television network:

It’s a neat site, but I’m still not convinced that television – and Current in particular, with its spot in the ozone layer of most channel listings – matters enough to the young people Current wants to target. And YouTube and MySpaceTV exert what appears to be a stranglehold on the attentions of young video creators.

Two questions are raised. First, whether “television matters” — looking at the numbers of viewers on YouTube, it seems like it doesn’t. Or at least matters less. But there’s one nagging problem with YouTube that has always bothered me — the video quality sucks.

Really, really sucks. Not only that, but most times, the audio sucks, too.

Compare that to Current.tv, where pods are displayed in all their 42″ LCD screen glory, with the audio pumped through a 7.1 home theater system. Seen from the couch, not the desk. It’s quite different, both visually and experientially.

Second question is the stranglehold. Quality aside, there’s no doubt the masses are flocking to YouTube, and their market share seems quite impenetrable. It’s the same problem for a startup like Seesmic – why post there, when you’re already posting on YouTube?

My guess is that, for the Current crowd, television does still matter. The medium seems more “serious.” Seeing your video up on Current’s television network, in the comfort of one’s living room, from the comfort of one’s couch, seems to be something worthwhile to anyone who’s interested in documentary filmmaking.

The Current crowd is probably much more interested in Things That Matter, and less about things that happen to be popular on YouTube.

I just read Mike Davis’s “Planet of Slums” (from New left Review, interview on it here), and I’m surprised more people aren’t talking about this, in terms of what the world will look like in the years to come. His analysis of the population growth and shifts is remarkable, and I can’t imagine this growing urbanity of poverty isn’t going to have dramatic effects.

It’s such a pernicious combination: capitalist, neoliberal economics, combined with this postmodern condition of consumeristic simulacra. The result, clearly spelled out in Davis’s piece, is an ever-widening world-wide gap of have’s and have-not’s.

In it, Davis mentions Philip K. Dick at one point, and so much of the shantytown worlds he describes reminds me of some of Dick’s stories, these rotted-out places of destitution.

Dick has a short story, called “Pay For The Printer,” that strangely echoes (pre-cogs, really…) Davis’s piece:

Charlotte wasn’t listening. She was gazing vacantly through the ash-darkened window at the scene outside. To the right of the road, the jagged, yellowed remains of a town jutted up like broken teeth against the sooty midday sky. A bathtub here, a couple of upright telephone poles, bones and bleak fragments, lost amid miles of pocked debris. A forlorn, dismal sight. Somewhere in the moldy cave-like cellars a few mangy dogs huddled against the chill. The thick fog of ash kept real sunlight from reaching the surface.

In this particular PKD world, post-nuclear, as usual, humans have lost the ability to build things, for they have allowed machine-like creatures of an alien race — a Biltong — to do it for them. And the act of creation works through simulation — it “prints” a copy of whatever the humans need:

They had appeared in the closing days of the War, attracted by the H-bomb flashes — and found the remnants of the human race creeping miserably through radioactive black ash, trying to salvage what they could of their destroyed culture.

After a period of analysis, the Biltong had separated into individual units, begun the process of duplicating surviving artifacts humans brought to them. That was their mode of survival…

The twist in this story is, what happens when the Biltong’s start dying? What happens when the simulations stop coming? What, then, becomes of us?

That’s the future. Here we are, today, in some ways, not that much different. Caught in a trap of consumeristic simulacra, dependent on copies of copies for our knowledge, entertainment, culture. At the same time, at the edge of the city, mega-slums are growing, the hidden by-products of the “free markets,” except, with the numbers in the billions and growing, no longer all that hidden. Living in near post-apocalyptic conditions, at the margins of society, in land no one else wants to live in, because it’s subject to floods or landslides.

And back in the city, back in our world, the world of the Biltong. We no longer make “things,” we download them. Visual representation, as Paul Virilio points out in “The Lost Dimension,” is no longer restricted to the realm of “the real” — this “crisis of representation” in which “mental objects” are just as “real” as the real: “we now arrive at the emergence of the incorporeal.”

The simulacra of life.

In Dick’s short story, in the end, there is hope. A crude, wooden cup, not printed, but built by hand. Human hands. It represents hope, a way out of their ash-ridden dystopia.

The question for us, I think, is, where is our crude, wooden cup?

Stunning, really. Radiohead is allowing fans to set their own price for their new CD:

There is no maximum price, nor any other guidance, setting up what is may be the biggest experiment in digital-era music-industry pricing to date. What are people willing to pay for music? How many will pay full price? How will the average price compare to what a typical record company would likely have charged? Will people pirate it anyway?

I think six or eight or even ten dollars is probably a fair price for a CD. More like six or eight, if it’s just a download, no packaging (or distribution).

But, strangely, now I want to give them *more* money.