ENGL 5380 Blog

So I am on this quest over spring break to try to learn something – anything – about the “occupy movement,” and I click on this link on Titan Pad about this group called Anonymous who is calling for a boycott of media product purchases during the month of March with the purported intent of letting the media companies know “we will not tolerate censorship of the Internet.”   Once I got past the highly overblown and violent tone of the rhetoric,  not to mention a the blatant refusal to take responsibility for ones own ideas, I was amazed at the naivete in the main message.

It demonstrates a clear ignorance regarding the nature of the economic discourses that it seeks to selfishly enter and thwart.  First of all, I have difficulty believing that an attack on the first quarter profits of a significant sector of our economy isn’t politically implicated in the divisive discourses unfolding during this election year.  Obviously certain political groups have something to gain from an extension of the recession, which in the end only impairs the job recovery that so many of the 99%, that “occupiers” claim to represent, are so desperately waiting for.  Secondly,  media conglomerates and stock holders alike are very savvy.  They are not going to risk directing all their resources and capital towards one outlet, especially with the uncertainty prevailing in the market over the past several quarters.

Instead most of these companies and investors are extremely diversified in their holdings, so as to better withstand the volatility of the market.   A single minded strategy, such as the one envisioned by Black March, isn’t going to bring anyone down, especially when these companies perceive they can recover in the second quarter after the “four weeks” have elapsed.  The real question, in my opinion, involves whether or not the occupiers are similarly positioned to display the resilience they will need to withstand the volatility of their own movement?

Finally it should be noted that consumer purchase power is only one part of a very complex system of capital flows, that includes built in buffers that minimize the impact of these “financial” protests.  In other words, the connection between the consumer product and the capital that it generated it is much more indirect that it used to be in earlier societies.   In fact most large companies dump a significant amount of their capital and profits back into the stock market and exchange trades.  In my opinion, if you are going to try to effect change in an economic environment you need to spend a little less time developing untenable rhetorical threats and more time studying how markets work.

In Chapter 2 of his book Noise Channels: Glitch and Error in Digital Culture Peter Krapp attempts to make the case for a distinction between terrorism and hactivism, a project that echoes the efforts of Rita Raley in Tactical Media.  Is there a distinction between terrorism and hactivism?  I don’t know for sure.  I am willing to entertain the possibility that there may be, but the arguments that these two scholars make for hactivism, seem to be equally sound premises for terrorism.

Krapp tries to define the line between the terrorist and the hactivist using the OED’s definition of terrorist as “Any one who attempts to further his views by a system of coercive intimidation” or “One who entertains, professes, or tries to awaken or spread a feeling of terror or alarm; an alarmist, a scaremonger” (49).

But these descriptions are based on internal/subjective states of the agent (whether terrorist or hactivist), as well as the person(s) being acted on.  What may not be thought of as coercive by one person may easily be construed so by another.

Is there a difference “between dragging down Domain Name System servers and hijacking airliners” (50)?  Of course there is, but beyond the subjective evaluations of such events, the only logical argument that I can see is a difference of degree.  If the underlying logic that allowed certain people to reach a conclusion to hijack airliners is still in place and that logic is used to do something different, even of a lesser degree, I still see that as a problem.   If there is some other logic or theoretical underpinning for hactivism, a possibility that I am willing to entertain, I don’t see it fully fleshed out in Krapp’s argument, although in his defense he is working in a fairly recent field.

Krapp states: “To equate the security of airline Web sites with the vulnerability of air traffic control or to lump the real importance and value of medical or credit information together with the mere loss of marketing opportunities is indeed to engage in coercive intimidation” (50).   For me, this vague reference to a “loss of marketing opportunity” could easily make or break me, as I only have part-time work.  I, like many other Americans, am barely making it, and really when you do the math, I am not making it.  So for “hactivists” to ignore the fact that large businesses pass down these relatively, “negligible” and “harmless” losses to be absorbed by employees and consumers, just shows a general disregard for basic economic science.

Krapp goes onto state that “hactivism, in reaction to conflict and interventions from Chechnya to Chaipas and from Honk Kong to Hamburg, never set off an electromagnetic bomb” (50). I am reminded of the argument about how you are more likely to be struck by lightning than (fill in the blank).  But all it takes is once, and when it happens to you or to someone you care about that’s all that matters, statistics are irrelevant to the individual suffering.  I don’t think it’s to farfetched to assume that it is only a matter of time before digital terrorism makes an entrance.

In the meantime, the hactivist phenomenon could use much more serious critical attention.  Statements such as, “Hactivism aims to capture attention; it is calculated for maximum media effect,trying to raise the awareness of citizens regarding certain rights and liberties, including free speech, privacy, and access.  An act of hacktivism can involve many people or only one; it can forge links and coalitions between people whose politics run the gamut” (50), just don’t work, especially in contemporary America.  In my opinion, if I accept such statements, then I also have to accept this logic for events like the Oklahoma City bombing or the Virginia Tech shootings, or even Kennedy’s assassination.

Nevertheless, the question still remains of what to do about hactivists?  Just because they use the similar reasoning to justify their behaviors, doesn’t mean that all hactivists should automatically be assumed and treated as terrorists.  But what it does mean is that hactivists need to be prepared to assume the risk of being profiled and suspected of potential wrongdoing.  The behavior that they engage in is a choice, not an inalienable aspect of their identity such as race or gender.  If hactivists are not better prepared to answer to society for what they do, then they are better off finding some more productive way to enact change in their world.  Krapp’s argument may be convincing in emergent theoretical circles, but it’s not very practical from a legal standpoint, at least not in this day and age.

I enjoyed the concept behind College Park Maryland’s Electronic Literature Collection.  The layout of the site seemed to work well, although I found the red background to be somewhat difficult on the eyes.   The individual projects that I explored were interesting and innovative, but they reminded me more of conceptual art than some form of “digital” literature.  In fact, the whole thing seemed more like it was a portfolio for a final project in a “Flash” or other web design type class.

I thought David Jhave Johnston’s “Soothe” worked really well as a different way of reading and experiencing poetry.  The poem that unfolded on the snow background was particularly relevant to the explorations of the subjective paradoxes that seem to infuse much of contemporary literary theory.  However, the underlying sound pattern eventually became a conspicuous distraction and a reminder of the limitations of a text that is controlled by a code.

I suppose all texts have these covert processes going on beneath the surface, and that as literary scholars some of us enjoy uncovering and developing those deeper subtexts.  But HTML as a subtext doesn’t seem as dynamic or as engaging to work with.  After all for a digital text, HTML is literally always already there, there doesn’t seem to be much room for us to develop, interpret, or rewrite what it is doing in or for a digital text.

We need more scholarship about what kind of critical insights HTML can offer us in respect to digital texts, as well as how to approach HTML as a living language rather than as a mere functional tool.

I also thought about how if Johnston were to make his code “open source,” how easy it would be for someone to appropriate a large part of his work and add their own poetic lines.

There is aura of uncertainty about the creative process that goes into these sorts of works, and with the structural code being invisible upon first glance and somewhat arcane when accessed, it seems like it would be impossible to authenticate work like this and very easy just to copy it without giving credit to the original author or programmer in this case.  If we want to abolish copyright for the digital, then I suppose this works.  But how are these works to be evaluated from an academic standpoint, is it acceptable to cut and paste someone else’s code, and if so, do I have to disclose it?  And if I don’t disclose it, in the case of digital work such as this, how is anyone ever going to find out?

If we phase out or seriously restrict copyright application, does that phase out the issue of plagiarism as well, and is the amount of time spent researching and developing a work irrelevant to any evaluation of that work and/or its creator?  “Open source” isn’t the panacea to our current dilemma’s with cultural activity on the web.  With open source comes a loss of privacy and a transformation of the ways in which we assign value and import to education.  In my opinion, open source risks elevating copy and paste over critical reading and reflection.

In his conclusions about the multitude Mark Poster encourages his readers to consider Samuel Beckett’s question “What does it matter who speaks?”  This question, depending on its context, could prompt a sincere inquiry about subjectivity or it could foster a more dismissive attitude of the concept.  It is difficult to gauge exactly how Poster is employing it in his analysis.

First he endorses “the challenge of a planetary system of networked information machines and human assembleges” that he claims is raised by Beckett’s question (65).    Then he challenges Hardt and Negri’s call for the mutltitude by asserting that “a critical theory of globatlization…must not look for a revolutinary subject but for a matrix of dispositifs, for a cluster of technologies of power that constructs networked computer and human assemblages” (65).   He then follows with his claim that “the question of how to get beyond modern society can by no means simply assume that a new subject needs to be designated” (65).

Is he calling for a reimagining of the subject or a dissolution of the subject?  In what sense are the “netizens, who will be multiple, dispersed, and virtual nodes of a network of collective intelligence” constitutive of a “planetary political subject” (84)?  If political power is not concentrated somewhere, even if only temporarily, but instead infinitely dispersed across a network, how will anything get done?

This seems to be the structure of the seemingly ineffective Occupy movement in America.  Is this perhaps part of their message, to reject goal-oriented approaches maybe because they are economically defined?  Is there some other way Occupiers measure their progress or are they simply anti-progress because progress is part of the economic model they are trying to undermine?

In his book The Secret War Between Downloading and Uploading, Peter Lunenfeld describes and explores the imbalance between the consumption of culture and the production of culture.  However the language that he uses to discuss this topic suggests an sense of urgency and paranoia that I fail to understand.

I understand that intellectually there is a lot at stake, but using metaphors of war and disease to characterize and describe social ills hasn’t proven to be the most useful conceptual technique when engaging with other equally troubling social problems.  Think of the “war on drugs” or the “war against poverty.”   This language is divisive in nature and suggests that there is an enemy and a victim, but it seems to me that Lunenfeld is arguing for a balance, not an annihilation or a submission.  These associations with war, triage, and epidemic disease seem somewhat counterproductive when trying to resolve this troubling dichotomy between uploading and downloading.

Instead I think it might be more useful to think in terms of  economic metaphors , such as imports and exports and trade deficits.  We are a consumer culture that imports far more than it exports, a trend that is reflected not only in our cultural consumption but also in our material consumption.  How is it that we can talk about reducing the deficit in our cultural output without seriously engaging with the deficit in our economic output?  Yet we continue to attack the industries at the foundation of our economy, especially the advertising industry and the media industry,  for producing more in order to increase our overall exports and balance out our economy.

I am not saying that market profits should inevitably trump our intellectual freedoms, but this is the economic system on which we all depend for our sustenance, not to mention our advanced quality of life.  It’s just disappointing to me that we can’t find or create a space outside the infamous courtroom where all parties involved can speak and dialogue constructively about these issues.