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.

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.

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?

The city of Sao Paulo has decided to fight the corporate takeover of their public spaces by calling a halt to outdoor advertising:

…billboards, outdoor video screens and ads on buses have been eliminated at breakneck speed. Even pamphleteering in public spaces has been made illegal, and strict new regulations have drastically reduced the allowable size of storefront signage. Nearly $8 million in fines were issued to cleanse São Paulo of the blight on its landscape.

…Although legal challenges from businesses have left a handful of billboards standing, the city, now stripped of its 15,000 billboards, resembles a battlefield strewn with blank marquees, partially torn-down frames and hastily painted-over storefront facades. While it’s unclear whether this cleanup can be replicated in other cities around the world, it has so far been a success in São Paulo: surveys indicate that the measure is extremely popular with the city’s residents, with more than 70 percent approval.

Take that, Capitalism.