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  • Michaela Brangan – Hey, Not You!: The Failure Politics of Misinterpellation: Review of James Martel’s “The Misinterpellated Subject”

    Michaela Brangan – Hey, Not You!: The Failure Politics of Misinterpellation: Review of James Martel’s “The Misinterpellated Subject”

    by Michaela Brangan

    The list of things which ought to register as politically dire on a mass scale but do not is long. It includes the “kettling”[1] and mass arrest of over two hundred people by DC Metro police at Donald Trump’s inauguration. The remaining defendants’ plight portends dimly for the right to assemble and protest without being targeted by police and arrested.[2] To defray the high costs of litigation and lives upended, two groups, Dead City Legal Posse and DefendJ20 Resistance, formed and work in tandem to organize support for the J20 defendants, prosecuted as “the Rioting Defendants.” The vast majority of support and media coverage for this activism has been provided by members of the left-anarchist community. Emphasized on the front page of Defend J20/DCLP’s fundraising site is the dangerous precedent convictions would set, and the “astonishing display of legal solidarity” of the defendants, almost all of whom are unified in fighting their charges in court. None of the few who have pleaded guilty to misdemeanors have cooperated with the prosecution in exchange for lesser charges.

    Maybe this gives pause to those who might assume anarchists don’t do legal strategy, which the phrase “legal solidarity” would imply. Procedural engagement with the state apparatus? Arguing the right to dissent under the First Amendment? Is DCLP/DefendJ20 using the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house? Is it uncovering state hypocrisy through the performance of legal theater, one piece of a multifarious project of resistance? Or, is the collective defense strategy rooted in a simple necessity: obtaining liberation for those threatened by the state, “Until everyone is free,” as DefendJ20 Resistance vows?

    Does it matter? Knowing how solidarity happens, how it is sustained, and why it is necessary, is more than a sidebar to resistance politics. In The Misinterpellated Subject (Duke University Press), James Martel points to one method of analyzing antiauthoritarian reactions to oppression. Martel, a political science professor at San Francisco State University, promises a “political agenda…[which is] to think about a phenomenon that is ongoing and to try to understand why it happens, how it could be multiplied and extended, and finally, what the results of such subversion are in terms of the kinds of subjects that emerge from the process.” This subversive process he names “misinterpellation”: what happens when you respond to a “call…not meant for you.”

    The need for a rehabilitated understanding of Louis Althusser’s famous concept goes unquestioned. But Martel is going further, with a “political agenda” of “discipline—a form of training,” to uncover “a conspiracy, a form of resistance based on a common rejection of the practices of law, politics, and economics—with an accompanying form of subjectivity…a deeper ‘we’…the anarchism of the soul.” If what is meant by the phrase “political agenda” is the outlay of steps available for enactment, Martel’s is hard to follow, especially his reluctance to theorize solidarity in regard to anarchist political action. Instead, he sources politics out of Nietzschean individualism, and stretches his theory over community struggles, such as the Movement for Black Lives. It seems human solidarity is a “liberal universal” trap, to be avoided.

    Martel intersperses clusters of historical events with philosophical and literary examples that point to different ways of calling (“Come, Come!” (Lauren Berlant); “Look! A Negro!” (Frantz Fanon)) over a wide swath of rebellions. I will cover some, beginning with the original interpellative call: “Hey, you there!” The respondent to this call is likely the intended hearer. Althusser explains, “they hardly ever miss…(nine times out of ten it is the right one);” the Man (almost) always gets its man. But “[w]hat,” Martel asks, “do we make of this [one out of ten] mistakenly hailed subject?” to whom the cop says, impatiently, looking past him: no, not you. Martel deftly exploits the interpellative misfire. Even a minor misfire undoes interpellation’s whole purpose; rather than error or “an occasional phenomenon,” the misinterpellative moment reveals the state’s inherent weakness. Misinterpellation gives the clearest view of the always failed subject, and then, the possibility for something else becomes visible: that we might have said “‘no’ to great systems that otherwise overwhelm us,” such as law, such as politics, such as economics.

    Is this resistance for which failure is always necessary? Revolution springing out of the failed subject resonates with the materialist’s mounting contradictions that prompt the shedding of false consciousness, but Martel categorically rejects what he calls the “dupes” theory and favors James Scott’s “hidden transcripts” of resistance. What appears “‘spontaneous’” or revelatory on the surface are offshoots of “deep roots in practices of resistance that effectively never cease.” (The book contains many scare-words. For example, “spontaneous” is in scare-quotes on first and second mentions with no referent, which indicates critique of the concept; when “spontaneous” is cited a third time, it is with approval. “Authentic,” truth,” “real,” “obvious” and “happy ending” may send some readers hunting before realizing that they are nudges, however inconsistent. “Happy ending” did make me laugh, though.)

    The Haitian Revolution is a perfect example of misinterpellative empowerment, as Martel sees it. When slaves heard of the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, a few leaders cynically latched onto the plain language meaning to mobilize slaves to fight behind them. But rank-and-file ex-slaves interpreted the Declaration as a document of unmediated self-determination, exposing their self-styled leaders’ hypocrisy, as well as the incoherence of the rights-declaring documents that excluded them. Martel rightly draws from this that “the concept of the universal serves as a site upon which we can clearly observe the failure of the universal to appear.” Another example falls a little more flatly. Mohammad Bouazizi, the Tunisian fruit-seller who self-immolated in front of the governor’s office, “attempt[ed] to assert his subject position,” his suicide “the only path he felt that he could” take “in order to assert his own form of counteragency, or at the very least, to allow his failure as a subject to be complete and undeniable.” According to Martel, the masses’ reaction to Bouazizi’s suffering was not as political solidarity, but a mimetic function. His suffering “became true for nearly everyone else in Tunisia as well,” as “[s]omehow the story…dramatized a form of injustice that was already present and already known but held back from…what had been borne…was no longer possible.” At the risk of sounding like a betrayer of the literary, my field: something is lost when reading revolutionary upheaval solely as dramatic catharsis.

    Martel wants us to reclaim failure as the impetus to conspire and create “radically contingent, agonal, and undetermined state[s]” of being. While he invokes Scott’s theory of hidden community resistance, he forgets to explain how he sees organizing working. He suggests the concept of unity is a phantasm of liberal desire. His anarchic soul opposes unity and forms “far messier and unstructured” politics, “temporary and shifting sets of relationships.” But it is hard to know what the moral or political problem is with structure. Sustainable structures can be for the mutual benefits of those who make, participate in, and rely on them. Decentralized structures are not necessarily messy. Mutual aid collectives work to undo perceptions that anti-statist and anti-capitalist organizing means a lack of structure or rootedness in existing community formations. A common rallying cry for political anarchists is “Solidarity, not charity,” which suggests a critique of one-off relations. In her account of the Tunisian uprising, which Martel cites, Alcinda Honwana describes an outpouring of solidarity across widely disparate groups, and catalogues the careful coordination of marches, strikes, and sit-ins. Though she does call the movement leaderless, there is little room to interpret Honwana’s as anything than an ethnography of organized mass struggle. What appears messy or unstructured may only be so in the eye of the statist, and all the better for the anti-statist.  Structures the state cannot understand are good assets.

    Virtuous messiness leads to interesting alignments. Frantz Fanon’s refusals of universalism and negritude is precisely a refusal of imposed ideologies, “of the false choices…he opts for neither ‘yes’ nor ‘no’ but both,” and this is well explained and named as political resistance. Yet Martel reads Nietzsche’s amor fati alongside Fanon, folding it into a kind of mantra that reads a little like a tricked-out version of dialectical behavioral therapy.

    If we love our fate, doesn’t that mean that we have to accept the world as it is? … Clearly, this is a ‘rhetorical’ question: I have already begun to suggest how this not necessarily the right way to read Nietzsche. [A]mor fati just means loving the present, accepting it, and, from that position rearticulating and reconceptualizing the subject position itself.

    Again:

    Amor fati means loving and accepting the mess that we are.

    Again:

    [F]or Nietzsche, we must love all of this messy self that we are, warts and all, including the part of us that hates and denies our self.

    And again:

    What the misinterpellated subject finds, via the process of amor fati, is herself, her crazy quilted, weird, multiple subjectivity.

    While I am intrigued by this notion, as it indulges my feelings of self-worth, I am hard-pressed to find a substantial difference between these maxims and Oprah’s (Oprah-man?), or those of the charismatic Cal Roberts, Hugh Dancy’s character on Hulu’s The Path. What I do know is that these do not form a political agenda but a method of personal growth that can just as easily lead away from politics than towards it. Messiness is mystifying.

    So it goes with Martel’s analyses of various fictional characters as practitioners of amor fati. He claims that his readings go “against the grain”: rather than being “read as losers, as boring or quiescent, or as angry or crazy” as readers “often…scorn” them, Martel privileges marginal characters as worthwhile subjects. This generalization about what readers “often” do struck me, and it was here that the theory began to reveal that its subversive power depends solely on detachment. Isolated subjects, supposedly rescued from the margins, are fried by the glare of Martel’s theoretical lens to become useful, if unrecognizable, objects. Martel argues against Agamben, asserting that Bartleby is not passive. “Prefer[ring] not to” indicates doing only what he wants, his object-like-ness becoming an anarchic choice. The novel’s fascinating and paradoxical descriptor for Bartleby’s irritating behavior, “passive resistance,” is left mysteriously unanalyzed. The “seemingly minor and irrelevant character” of To the Lighthouse, Lily Briscoe, is trashed as an unattractive loser—we take Mrs Ramsey’s opinion of Lily as truth—so she can then be sided with as the “ultimate protagonist.” Dozens of scholars have shown Lily Briscoe to be a major and relevant, and dignified, subject for study. None of these arguments are cited. Few would be interested in discovering an “ultimate protagonist” within this novel, but one would least of all expect Martel to think that is a worthy goal, since he rejects hero-centered analyses. “Woolf is not the kind of author or thinker who affords us…an easy conclusion,” he says, but also: “In looking at these two characters, Bartleby and Lily, we see that often it is the most despised and the lowliest of creatures who have the most to teach us.” Reading these novels as lessons in pathos is surely the easiest route, isn’t it? I cannot think of what “kind of…thinker” Martel would compare Woolf to, but I speculate that she would least like to be put in the moralist camp. (On the other hand, Melville seems to have lived for it.)

    Misinterpellated subjects learn to welcome the prospect of being mowed under, like Lilies growing out of place in the monocultural, universal field of existence. This is good because “these characters [Bartleby and Lily] succeed by failing [normatively]. Unnoticed, they are able to subvert from deep within the system that oppresses them.” Martel recommends the amor fati to brutalized, over-policed persons and communities of color. This is “not a passive acceptance of what must be but rather an active engagement with the world” by refusing “the liberal universal,” and embracing self-love. This subversion points the way out of immiseration. Franz Kafka, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Ralph Ellison, Michael Brown, and Fred Moten are mashed together to demonstrate this. While this literary assemblage is subversive, recommending how black people should think about themselves so they can get ahead in the world is not.

    Perhaps there is an alternative to “TINA,” Martel thinks, in amor fati and anarchism. But this will always be a hard row to hoe because, he warns, “archism will always promote itself as being better, flashier, funner, and easier” promising “wholeness and fulfillment…Anarchists will often be seduced by these shiny, empty promises, adopting archist practices in the midst of their anarchist politics and dooming them to failure.” No concrete example is provided for what “archist practices” and anarchists he’s referring to, but I deduce that this failure isn’t the kind he talks about with approval, like Bartleby dying in a prison yard, which compels his former boss to remember him. One might fill in the failed “archic practices of anarchists” blank with, say, Defend J20 Resistance. The failure would be buying into the con of “wholeness,” or structure, or unity, or solidarity, or humanity. Organizing for collective liberation. Hoping to beat the state.

    Margaret Thatcher’s famous “TINA”—“There Is No Alternative”—which Martel equates to liberalism ought to be squared with her not quite as famous, but much more seductive, vision of “No Society.”

    There are individual men and women and there are families…There is no such thing as society. There is living tapestry of men and women and people and the beauty of that tapestry and the quality of our lives will depend upon how much each of us is prepared to take responsibility for ourselves and each of us prepared to turn round and help…

    No great fan of the state herself, Thatcher never lost an opportunity to re-kick the British left as it was flailing. She dismisses the idea of society because it raises the possibility that society could be organized in the alternative. For his part, Martel dismisses “the liberal universal” to embrace a politics that consists of “the seeking out of failure rather than success and resolution.” I aver that, whatever the problems are with universalism, the opposite approach is not inherently political. A nihilist can embrace individualist anarchism, but political anarchism cannot easily become nihilist, since it relies on the assumption that solidarity will not fail.

    The activism around the J20 prosecutions is one example of the structures that arise when misinterpellated (accused) subjects conspire to resist oppression. To jointly agree to a statement of unity; to offer a statement of solidarity to the public; to engage with law’s formal practices to get free and prove a point; to make public-facing arguments about rights and legal precedent; to not sell out your comrades; to raise funds online. The state does not expect these actions from “the Rioting Defendants.” It would surely prefer they conceived of themselves and their politics as messy failures instead of a unified front. Solidarity, as they say, gets the goods and annoys the state. Not, David Palumbo-Liu has recently pointed out, a merely “imaginative” solidarity, “a sentimental kind of transitory alliance,”  but concrete, “risk-taking” solidarity. “[I]t is a call for generosity,” he argues, “what Paul Gilroy has termed ‘conviviality,’ rather than solitude and isolation.” Martel is right that the opportunity for political reinvention come in moments of misinterpellation, the chance to deny power by refusing imposed subjectivities. But if liberation from oppression relies on training up anti-joinerist, even morbid, habits of mind, then how will new subjects recognize and inhabit conspiracies and convivialities—the breaths, and lives, of others?

    Notes

    [1] A crowd control tactic that forces demonstrators into a confined area and traps them there between barricades and lines of armored police, and has been argued to be a human rights violation before the ECHR. The J20 protesters were confined for several hours without access to medical care, food, water, or facilities; some protesters claim to have been victims of excessive force while in custody. The ACLU is representing several J20 defendants as plaintiffs in a civil lawsuit against the District of Columbia.

    [2] As of March 25th, the number of defendants who originally faced prosecution has been reduced, through various dismissals and acquittals, from 194 to 59. The remaining defendants will go on trial in small groups every few weeks, starting April 17. Source: Jude Ortiz, National Lawyers Guild (phone interview) and defendJ20resistance.org

    Michaela Brangan holds a JD from Cardozo School of Law, and is a PhD candidate in the Department of English at Cornell University.

  • Olga V. Solovieva – Memory in Forgetful Times: Review of Svetlana Alexievich’s “Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets”

    Olga V. Solovieva – Memory in Forgetful Times: Review of Svetlana Alexievich’s “Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets”

    by Olga V. Solovieva

    This essay has been peer-reviewed by the boundary 2 editorial collective.

    One day when I was growing up in the Soviet Russia of the 1970s-80s, my grandmother pointed to the watchman of our dacha neighborhood in Abramtsevo. He used to work for the NKVD (the infamous secret police, predecessor of the KGB, now FSB) she said, so if ever one needed a sick pet to be shot, he could be asked to do the distressing job with unflinching professionalism. I don’t know what exactly triggered this conversation but it must have made an impression because I still remember well the image of a lean, dry old man in a uniformly grey linen outfit and a flat grey cap. He always walked around the neighborhood with a determined fast pace, leaning slightly forward, with his little grey eyes always focused on something in front of him and his narrow face frozen into a strange glassy smile. His hand clutched a rifle which he always carried in one arm, just above his knee, parallel to the ground. You could see him often in the summer making his rounds. He cut a strange figure in our peaceful retreat, and that day my grandmother must have been answering a question of mine.

    His name was Svistun, which translates into English as “whistler,” a typical criminal-argot nickname for an NKVD executioner. Our street, lined with dachas belonging to the members of the Association of Composers, segued into a street with bigger dachas and much bigger plots of land, which belonged to former employees of the NKVD. Most of them had long since retired and died by the time I was growing up. Svistun, who must have been in his 80s, was the last survivor. One summer he wasn’t seen anymore, and we heard that he had died, too. But the snapshot of his dark shadow sliding past the garden fences on a sunny summer day has stayed with me as a vestige of my own late witness to an excruciating period of Russian history which, as it turns out, tragically, has not become history yet, but continues haunting our present.

    Svetlana Alexievich’s last book Время Секонд Хэнд (2013), published in English translation by Random House in 2016 as Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets, conjured up this image of Svistun, along with so many similar memories which are as much personal as they are collective for every person of my generation who grew up in the Soviet Union and still remembers such bleak specters from the past whose quiet pursuits of everyday life were eerily suggestive of the Stalinist rule of terror. The surreal enmeshment of past and present, of victims and persecutors in the Soviet society would have been unbearable were it not covered up by the cloying optimism of Soviet ideology. Through Alexievich’s book we witness the human cost of this ideology’s formation as well as of its demise.

    Secondhand Time is the last in the author’s series of five investigations of the psychological make-up of the Soviet people, which she shows was conditioned by perpetual war. She has written about the Second World War as remembered by female veterans and by orphaned children, about the Afghanistan war, and about the traumatic Chernobyl disaster, combated in a war-like manner. The finale deals with the dissolution of the Soviet Union, inducing multiple civil wars in the former Soviet republics, military stand-offs in the constitutional crises of 1991 and 1993, and the war-like criminality and terrorist attacks of today.

    Set next to the rest of Alexievich’s output, this book stands out for its much wider historical scope: We hear the voices of people who survived the Stalinist labor camps of the 1930s, lived through the Second World War, and experienced postwar Soviet and then post-Soviet history, up to the present. Alexievich arranges this vast material so as to yield a unique insight into the failure of the post-Soviet democratization. “It is in the human being that everything happens,” she says in the prologue to her book “Remarks of an Accomplice,” and further explains that she is interested in tracing an emotional history of the Soviet people because “[h]istory is only interested in facts, and emotions stay out of bounds. It is unusual to take them into history. I look at the world through the eyes of a humanist, not a historian. I take wonder in human beings…” (2013: 11).

    Her wonder at human beings allows the author to reveal how deeply the psychological and social operation of ideology is rooted in human nature, which she sees as an important factor in preventing the former Soviet citizens’ recovery from the totalitarian mind-set. In her Nobel Prize acceptance speech “On the Battle Lost,” Alexievich lamented this failure:

    I will take the liberty of saying that we missed the chance we had in the 1990s. The question was posed: what kind of country should we have? A strong country, or a worthy one where people can live decently? We chose the former – a strong country. Once again we are living in an era of power. Russians are fighting Ukrainians. Their brothers. My father is Belarusian, my mother, Ukrainian. That’s the way it is for many people. Russian planes are bombing Syria… A time full of hope has been replaced by a time of fear. The era has turned around and headed back in time. The time we live in now is second-hand… (2015: 21, https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2015/alexievich-lecture_en.html).

    The “battle lost” of the Nobel Prize lecture title is a double metaphor. The phrase is drawn from Varlam Shalamov, a writer and gulag survivor, whom Alexievich quotes as follows: “I was a participant in the colossal battle, a battle that was lost, for the genuine renewal of humanity” (2015: 7). In her lecture, however, Alexievich uses Varlamov’s expression in relation to another defeat, that of the post-Soviet recovery and democratization. The achievement of Secondhand Time consists in conveying how tightly these two defeats are interconnected.

    The book offers an ironic spin on Varlamov’s dismay about the dictatorial hijacking of the 1917 revolution which led to the failure of the “genuine renewal of humanity.” It shows that the Stalinist genocide of the Soviet population, quite to the contrary, did lead to the emergence of a genuinely new, ideologically mutated human species, whom Alexievich, following common parlance, calls homo sovieticus and who, due to its very psychological make-up, was doomed to lose the battle for self-determination in the ideologically neutral, formalist proceduralism of democracy.

    What went into the formation of the Soviet psychology is best illustrated by the story of the architect Anna M-aya who grew up in a labor camp where her mother was imprisoned during the Stalinist rule of terror. When the beginning of perestroika made possible the recoveries of the gulag past, Anna felt drawn back to the site of her childhood in the Karaganda steppes of Kazakhstan. Upon her arrival, she learned that the former prison barracks had been torn down to give space to a new settlement that was built quite literally on thousands of human bones. Every spring, when the ground thaws, bones resurface in the residents’ potato beds. The residents throw them into the ditches between the beds and crush them with their boots.

    In Karaganda, Anna M-aya saw how former prisoners and guards continued living side by side in a prison city, as if in a gulag without walls: strangely bound by their shared history and – paradoxically – by their unrelenting dedication to the Soviet ideology. Like them, despite the harrowing experience of her camp childhood, Anna was emotionally invested in the Soviet version of history. In the camp, she tells the author, she was taught to love Stalin.

    Shaping the new socialist man on the premises of Marxist ideology was a brutal affair. A similar project of social anthropology in its national-socialist version was revealingly called Zucht, or “grafting,” where a natural branch of a tree is cut off in order to be replaced with a different species. The NKVD was literally performing such a grafting. The detectives, the survivors remember, were pressing for denunciations of “clever ones,” people who not necessarily opposed the regime but could be expected to resist it by reason of their education or natural intelligence.

    The “clever ones” (умные), even though the expression was used sarcastically, were precisely the type targeted for extermination. Their offspring, we learn from many stories, was like Anna M-aya especially prone to ideological indoctrination as an effect of their protective mimicry, of psychological coping mechanisms, or simply due to isolation and the impossibility of imagining an alternative. Children of those arrested were not allowed to stay behind with relatives but were sent along– babies to the camps, older children to schools. They often received new names in order to preclude future family reunification.

    The imprisoned parents were replaced with the Homeland (as mother) and Stalin (as father). Under conditions of hunger, fear, and dehumanization, no terrifying details of which Alexievich spares the reader, an ideology oriented toward the glowing future offered a psychological survival device. Only the emotional history of a traumatized people could explain how the persecutions of Stalinist rule shored up rather than undermined the longevity of the Soviet regime.

    Anna M-aya’s story, standing in for millions of similar stories, casts Soviet ideology as the Stockholm syndrome of an entrapped nation. When that ideology collapsed in the period of perestroika, what disappeared with it was precisely the last defense which had given victims as well as perpetrators a sense that an exalted purpose reigned over the unimaginable horrors they went through together.

    In this book as in her others, Alexievich is interested in the representation of suffering. Here it is the suffering of perestroika’s losers. “Socialism ended but we stayed” is the recurrent theme of the book. “Our country doesn’t exist and will never exist again, but we are still here… old and appalling… with horrific memories and prosecuted eyes… We are here!” exclaims Anna M-aya. “Soviet zombies!” (2013: 268). Her return to the Karaganda steppes, become a vast anonymous graveyard with here and there a nameless cross sinking into the ground, vividly stages the existential blow of the removal of ideological defenses. While wandering in the steppes, Anna begins to faint, stumbling to the ground while embracing an anonymous grave marker (possibly her father’s?). At this moment, the vanished shining future leaves behind only the consciousness of futile victimhood.

    The interviews collected in the book fall into two historical periods: The first part, “Consolation of the Apocalypse,” focuses on 1991-2001, that is, from the dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991 to the ascent of Vladimir Putin to power in 2000. The second part spans the years 2001-2012, the period of consolidation of new authoritarian rule under Putin. Symmetrically, both parts open with a medley of anonymous voices drawn “from the noise in the streets and the conversations in the kitchen”: individual stories emerge for a while from the mass, then recede into it again. This compositional device highlights the entanglement of the individual and the collective, suggesting that any other voice could have been singled out to yield its similar individual story.

    But the interview material also undergoes a literary transfiguration through the author’s editing, titles, and composition. Alexievich entitles a group of fragmentary interviews assembled in the first part of the book “Ten Stories in a Red Setting,” thus signaling their ideological underpinnings, whereas “Ten Stories without a Setting” in the second part, subtitled “The Enchantment of the Void,” point to the ideological vacuum that followed.

    The voiding of the past of homo sovieticus portrayed in this book has been brought about, ironically, by what were supposed to be the liberating reforms of perestroika. That the economic reforms were badly executed is a matter of common knowledge. (See, for example, Perry Anderson’s review, “Russia’s Managed Democracy,” London Review of Books 29:2, January 25, 2007, available at https://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n02/perry-anderson/russias-managed-democracy). Alexievich shows that above all they were psychologically misguided. From 1985, under the auspices of glasnost’, the newspapers were abruptly filled with photographs of anonymous mass graves, vivid testimonies to the horrible crimes committed by the Soviet regime. The avalanche of historical revelations in the press was so jarringly at odds with official historiography that in 1988 my high school’s graduation exam in contemporary history was cancelled. No one knew any more how to evaluate and grade students’ knowledge of Soviet history.

    The revelations of such crimes, however, led neither to reparations for the victims nor to official admission of wrongdoing by the government, either of which would have created a tangible and conclusive act of mourning and brought a sense of closure and moral judgment. An official condemnation of crimes would hardly be possible without condemning the ideological reversal of all the values that made them possible in the first place. But for decades the ideology in the name of which the crimes were committed had also sustained the survivors. The resulting cognitive dissonance and ethical limbo produced precisely that existential despair which Anna M-ay voiced to Alexievich.

    The book’s epigraph, taken from The Days of Our Death, David Rousset’s memoir about the National Socialist death camps, captures the nature of the Soviet legacy: “Victim and executioner are equally ignoble; the lesson of the camps is brotherhood in abjection.” With the disappearance of ideological justification, “the last of the Soviets” were left with nothing but abjection. It is this ultimate trauma that Alexievich with astonishing endurance captures in her book. In the words of Anna’s son: “We all live in different countries, although this is all Russia. But we are monstrously connected with each other. Monstrously! Everyone feels betrayed…” (2013: 284).

    Through her signature technique of montage, Alexievich conveys the intellectual and emotional confusion of the post-Soviet time while organizing her interview fragments into a coherent thesis about the fatal continuity and interdependence of Soviet and post-Soviet suffering. The resulting collage drives home the idea that the former Soviet citizens have not yet emerged from Stalinism’s division of the whole population into prisoners and prison guards. Quite to the contrary, the bottled-up vestiges of the gulag sensibility were shaken up and erupted with new vigor through the cracks of the dissolving Soviet empire into the post-Soviet everyday life.

    The most disturbing aspect of post-gulag existence is that hidden mutual resentment among the citizens which has led to the sadistic, irrational criminality characteristic of post-Soviet public space, and continued dividing the society into executioners and victims. One vividly terrifying example is the 1988 pogrom of Armenians in the city of Sumgait in Azerbaijan, an episode of extreme violence and inventive torture embedded within an account of the Baku pogroms of 1990 told by the Armenian refugee Margarita K.

    Alexievich provides little historical context, but it is worth pointing out that industrial Sumgait is one of many former camp cities, the core population of which grew from the former prisoners and their guards. Environmental pollution from chemical plants resulted in a child mortality so high as to merit a special cemetery. By 1988, according to statistics, every fifth citizen had at least one criminal conviction. Maybe it is no coincidence that the ethnic extermination of Armenians, who were perceived as more cultured and well-off, spearheaded and instigated by former Azerbaijani apparatchiks now striving for ethnic purity, found its willing executioners in this particular place.

    Alexievich chooses and arranges the material so as to show that the terror tradition of extrajudicial killings of 1930s continued during the war in the mutual exterminations of Soviet citizens and in the practice of partisans and Belarusian peasants who, like the Germans, robbed, raped and killed Jews. It survived further in the Soviet army with its denigrating practice of hazing (dedovshchina). It metamorphosed into post-Soviet ethnic killings and almost annual terrorist attacks; it is present in police and skinheads who ruthlessly exploit, rob, kill and rape with impunity Tadzhik guest workers; it has survived in abuse of children and domestic violence against women. “When the big dragon died, many small dragons reappeared,” Alexievich says in an interview. All these recorded forms of brutality and victimhood in the post-Soviet period mirror Stalinism’s naked face after the ideological decorum of internationalism and Soviet solidarity has evaporated.

    Alexievich’s endeavor is comparable to the ideology-critique of the Frankfurt School, especially its investigations of the roots and insidious afterlife of totalitarianism in the social and economic structures of postwar Germany. Her book participates in the work of coming to terms with the Soviet past as well as the present. The postwar Germans called this Vergangenheitsbewältigung, the overcoming of the past. In her ideology-critical impetus, she analyzes the causes of a great social catastrophe and the factors which continue to impede complete social and political recovery. Her unique achievement is to disclose the nature of totalitarianism, not from the analytical distance of a sociological perspective or philosophical reflection but from within the human being. The emotionally overwhelming power of her historical account stems from the immediacy of the voices represented.

    The most excruciating detail of Anna M-aya’s story is not even the resurfacing of bones but (characteristically and self-reflexively in regard to Alexievich’s own poetics) the return of the voice. Anna M-aya goes to find a former prison guard in the children’s ward who derived special psychological pleasure from torturing toddlers by badmouthing their imprisoned mothers: “Your mother is bad,” she used to tell them, “but I’m good!” After so many years, Anna M-aya couldn’t recognize her, but the moment the old woman started speaking, she could not but recognize her voice: “Your mother is bad…” The voice was ingrained into her memories for life and stayed there although everything else changed.

    This episode explains Alexievich’s preference for oral history with its insidious, almost unconscious, forms of memory hiding in spoken language itself, in the grain of the voice, in intonations. With her inevitable Dictaphone, she seeks to capture the most deeply hidden emotional dimensions of Soviet history and then builds them in an aural equivalent of cinematic montage into the powerfully expressive constructs of her books.

    Bela Shayevich has managed the excruciating task of rendering Secondhand Time into English: “Translating Alexievich is difficult – not only do I face the reader’s task of braving murder, suicide, deprivation, and war along with Alexievich’s protagonists, I must tell these stories in the first person, taking on the voices of trauma. It is a lonely task, putting anguish into words while not being able to help the people speaking. It’s a relief at least to know their voices will be heard” (2015). To make heard the voices of suffering is Alexievich’s humanitarian goal. She seeks out the injured, humiliated, and downtrodden, wins their trust, and incites them to speak. “This is an expression of love, with the intention being to show that you are relevant for me” (Griffin, Block 2013: 167).

    Her practical form of love recalls the social mission urged by liberation theology: “to accompany, to be close, and to mitigate the suffering of individuals.” When one of her interlocutors, the Armenian refugee Margarita K., shows her dismay that the emigration authorities don’t believe her love story with her Azerbaijani husband, Alexievich steps into her story answering: “I believe… […] I grew up in the same country as you. I believe!” Then she adds in parenthesis: “(We both cry.)”

    In the climactic moment of the book, Alexievich literally descends into the underworld of Tadzhik guest-workers living in the dark basements of Moscow high-rises. Only in this episode do extensive authorial remarks occur, describing the burrowed tunnels through which Alexievich passes with her crew. Abjection cannot go deeper than this in contemporary Russian society. In the atmosphere of Russia’s blossoming racism and islamophobia, her journey into this invisible world of the most unprotected, vulnerable human beings to hear and record their stories is a descent into hell.

    Alexievich’s unwavering affirmation of love for her downtrodden subjects signals her commitment to the task of redeeming the country. (The liberation theologian Gustavo Gutiérrez defined sin as “the refusal to love.”) This redemption starts with the task of understanding “what happened to us.” This understanding however comes not from the individual insights of the interviewed subjects, but from their authorial figuration. This aesthetically and ethically difficult task is Alexievich’s alone.

    The individual voices collected in the book don’t reflect much on the causes of their suffering. Rather, they capture the confused sensibility of an epoch. In the conversation with Natalia Igrunova which concludes the Russian-language edition of the book, Alexievich observes that in her characters’ stories “all ideas, words are from a stranger’s shoulder, as if of yesterday, worn-out. Nobody knows how things should be, what would help us, and everyone falls back on what they used to know some time ago, on what has been lived by somebody, on old experience” (2013: 503).

    In fact, many familiar topoi resurface in the discussion of the dissolution of the Soviet Union: the exchange of Soviet idealism for commercialism; the confusion of freedom with social Darwinism; the human cost of the dismantling of the social safety net; the question of who is to blame for the Stalinist repressions– the dictator himself, or his willing executioners; the failure of social and political reforms, and the metamorphosis of apparatchiks into oligarchs. But all these themes, in the end, are just subspecies of the major continuous complaint about the lack of mourning which was drowned out by the agitation of consumerism.

    This complaint is second-hand, too. It was famously captured already in 1975 in the title of Margaret and Alexander Mitchell’s study, Inability to Mourn, dealing with similar phenomenon of displacement of mourning through consumerism in postwar Germany. Alexievich strives to respond by performing the actual task of memory and mourning. She captures the voices with their second-hand tunes and arranges them into a dirge which fills the post-Soviet ideological emptiness with the religious sensibility of a mourning ritual. But her ultimate task is to transform the outpouring of emotion into a collective process of thinking-through. This transformation is possible thanks to the literary dimension of Alexievich’s work — the choices of composition and imagery that give shape to the verbal material collected.

    For example, the story of the mysterious suicide of fourteen-year-old Igor Poglazov, told by his mother, is entitled “About Alms of Remembrance and Desire for Meaning.” Neither family nor friends can figure out what really triggered the boy’s decision to die. His mother, a schoolteacher of literature, blames her son’s strange obsession with death on the glorification of heroic self-sacrifice in Soviet education. She refers specifically to Gorki’s romantic revolutionary parable “The Burning Heart of Danko,” where the Promethean figure Danko tears the heart from his chest to give warmth to his people. However, the boy’s morbid interest in funerals, ending with his own suicide in the toilet of his parents’ apartment, seems to have little in common with Danko’s revolutionary death for a cause.

    Alexievich includes the story as a symbol of the hopelessness of the perestroika generation. To achieve this effect, she adds several brief interviews with the boy’s classmates: ten years after Igor’s suicide, his surviving friends have either turned into passive, depressed alcoholics or fallen victim to the mafia while trying to conduct a business. Igor’s aimless death comes to stand for what the author sees as the failure of a generation. The excruciating pain of a mother who lost her son is displayed to the reader as a literary device that helps signify something beyond her loss itself. Whatever the theme, Igor’s story is not an end in itself but serves another cause. At this moment, as at many similar ones, the reader can’t but recoil from such appropriation of suffering.

    Inevitably, one comes to think of the historical counter-examples of documentary witness to human pain which are ethically unambiguous. The Holocaust video archive at the Jewish Museum in Berlin lets the survivors tell their stories in full, without interruption or editing for artistic effect. The census of victims of the Cultural Revolution in China assembled by Youqin Wang gives names, dates, and carefully recorded personal stories of suffering, persecution and death without transfiguring them artistically. (See Jake Smith, “Cultural Revelations,” The University of Chicago Magazine (Winter 17), available at https://mag.uchicago.edu/law-policy-society/cultural-revelations.) But Alexievich wants not just to record the voices but also to express her vision, to show, as she says, “what is behind it” through a meta-language of montage. The choice of this technique might be what throws a shadow of ethical ambiguity over her endeavor.

    Montage is a brutal, forceful technique of highlighting and pointing, a spatial technique which interrupts the flow of narration. By freezing the pieces of reality into images it inevitably tends to fetishize. Since what is fetishized here is pain and emotional exposure, one is at times reminded of the sculptured plastinated corpses of Body Worlds. Skinned, with exposed muscles, they stand sometimes holding their own intestines at arm’s length – artworks made from human suffering (some of the raw corpses apparently are supplied by prisons in China).

    Alexievich explains that “her theme is the metaphysical mystery of human life that ended up in the grinding-mill of history,” but it is an eerie image of the frozen corpses standing in the prison yard all winter long as glittering icy statues that stays with the reader as an image which self-reflexively captures the book’s poetics. Despite Alexievich’s claims that her book is not just a collection of horrors, sometimes it is difficult to ward off precisely that impression. The greatest challenge of her work is the clash of humanitarian intent with artistic implementation. The “mass-ornament” displayed here becomes an ideological liability for the author’s ideology-critical project.

    And yet, despite all its excesses of horror, this book is more optimistic than Alexievich’s other works. We meet characters who in various ways represent what can be called “freedom”—such as Gavhar Dzhuraeva, the director of the Migration and Law Center at the Moscow Foundation “Tadzhikistan” who rescues the kidnapped, illegally arrested, and endangered Tadzhiks out of the hands of police and skinheads. We read about a woman who leaves her happy family to marry a convict whom she thinks she saw in a dream when she was sixteen. Put at the end of the book, this story (previously the subject of a film by the documentary film-maker Irina Vassilyeva) is remarkable in its symbolism of the pursuit of redemptive love for a murderer. One can discern there a call for facing up to the past and going on a journey of understanding.

    And finally, at the very end of the book, we hear from an Everywoman who doesn’t care about the ideological wars of the past but mostly about the basic needs of survival. Ideological emptiness, we understand, can also feel like liberation: “Have you seen my lilacs? I go out at night to look at them – they glow. I’ll just stand there admiring them. Here, let me cut you a bouquet…” These are the last words of the book.

    Published in Russian in 2013 when Vladimir Putin’s rule seemed to be faltering, the book seemed to have a conclusive quality. Alexievich announced in an interview that her next book would be about love. Now, she wants to start building. “But we start coming to and realize ourselves in the world. Nobody wants to live forever in the ruins, one wants to build something out of rubble.” Unexpectedly, after its publication, Secondhand Time acquired a prophetic status, in its raising the question of what it meant to be “secondhand.” Alexievich’s theme of the post-Soviet ideological vacuum suggests the plausibility of the restoration of dictatorship on the premises of national-orthodox chauvinism under the former KGB officer Vladimir Putin, and clarifies why this restoration of totalitarian rule coincides with a new ostentatious worship of Stalin, whose name had been subject to a damnatio memoriae in the Soviet Union since the dictator’s death in 1953.

    Alexievich’s book attests to the collective trauma of the Russian population—the very trauma that Mr. Putin decided to exploit today to stay in power at all costs. In his speech about the annexation of Crimea (March 18, 2014), Putin signaled new mass persecutions by offering a new category of enemy for those who don’t support him: the “national traitor.” The term, of course, comes from Hitler’s Mein Kampf, where it was applied to the signers of the Treaty of Versailles and, by extension, for anybody standing in the way of Hitler’s vision of German grandeur; this was noticed right away. Mr. Putin also characterized Russian dissidents as a “fifth column” of saboteurs, using another expression of fascist origin. (Mikhail Iampolski, “Totalitarian Speech: Putin’s “National Traitors,” available at http://jordanrussiacenter.org/news/totalitarian-speech-putins-justification-annexation-crimea/#.U7wYfxa4nFI). This new spin on the Stalinist phrase “enemy of the people” was calculated to send a chill. Once that Pavlovian bell rang out, a country that had suffered through a century of severe abuse froze in protective mimicry. For precisely this reason, Lev Schlossberg, representative in the regional assembly of Pskov, attacked the very terms that Putin had put at the disposal of state officials:

    In the last weeks, for the first time in decades, the high officials have started talking again about “enemies of the people,” “enemies of Russia,” “fifth column,” and “traitors.” Another attempt at restoring a dictatorship at the beginning of the twenty-first century means that the state again becomes a machine for suppressing dissent. This fact in itself is very disquieting for society because any revival of the historical matrix of repressions against dissent shows that the Russian state is again ready to exterminate the part of the population which doesn’t agree with it. Our country has already once paid a very high price for attempts of this kind, but it looks like once more there are people who want to repeat it. (Lev Schlossberg, speech at the Pskov Assembly, March 27, 2014; my transcription and translation from Russian], available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YjZX9WBs-Y)

    In the post-Soviet choice between a “strong” nation and a “worthy” one, Alexievich opted for the latter, a country based on the rule of law, human and civil rights, expertise, and civil-society institutions. Individually, single-handedly, against all odds, she has continued working towards this goal. But contrary to Alexievich’s hopeful expectation, looking at the lilacs turned out to be not the first step of rebuilding from the rubble but a new sign of political escapism. We hear her sense of disappointment in the Nobel Prize lecture of 2015, the year when Perm-36, the gulag museum dedicated to the victims of Stalinist persecution, was officially repurposed to celebrate the patriotic work of the NKVD. Alexievich helps us understand how the economic and social injustice that has befallen the homo sovieticus had ultimately led to this new ideological entrapment. “The ‘Red’ man wasn’t able to enter the kingdom of freedom he had dreamed of around his kitchen table. Russia was divided up without him, and he was left with nothing. Humiliated and robbed. Aggressive and dangerous” (2015: 17-18).

    The English translation of Alexievich’s book couldn’t be timelier for the American readers. The slogan “Make America Great Again” expresses the desire for an uncanny secondhand time like the one Russia suffers through now, a yearning to return to a past before civil and human rights, before labor rights, before women’s suffrage and reproductive rights, indeed even before the freedom of speech and separation of church and state which the American constitution guaranteed its citizens after breaking from English patronage. In its unscrupulous cynicism and psychological abuse, this vision of greatness is akin to that of the greatness of Stalinism. Alexievich’s book shows the human cost of totalitarianism and its long-lasting repercussions. Americans seem to be slipping toward a future from which the former Soviet citizens have been struggling to emerge. Alexievich offers a preview of what they may expect.

    References

    Aleksievich, Svetlana. Vremya Second Hand. Moskva: Vremya, 2013. The translation from Russian is mine.

    Alexievich, Svetlana. “On the Battle Lost,” Nobel Lecture, December 7, 2015, available at https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2015/alexievich-lecture_en.html.

    Griffin, Michael and Jennie Weiss Block, eds., In the Company of the Poor: Conversations with Dr. Paul Framer and Fr. Gustavo, Gutiérrez. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2013.

    Shayevich, Bela. “Svetlana Alexievich builds individual voices into a mighty chorus,” The Guardian, bookblog, 10/08/2015, available at https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2015/oct/08/svetlana-alexievich-builds-individual-voices-into-a-mighty-chorus

  • Richard Hill – Review of Bauer and Latzer, Handbook on the Economics of the Internet

    Richard Hill – Review of Bauer and Latzer, Handbook on the Economics of the Internet

    a review of Johannes M. Bauer and Michal Latzer, eds., Handbook on the Economics of the Internet (Edward Elgar, 2016)

    by Richard Hill

    ~

    The editors of this book must be commended for having undertaken the task of producing it: it must surely have taken tremendous persistence and patience to assemble the broad range of chapters.  The result is a valuable book is valuable, even if at some parts are disappointing.  As is often the case for a compilation of articles written by different authors, the quality of the individual contributions is uneven: some are excellent, others not.  The book is valuable because it identifies many of the key issues regarding the economics of the Internet, but it is somewhat disappointing because some of the topics are not covered in sufficient depth and because some key topics are not covered at all.  For example, the digital divide is mentioned cursorily on pp. 6-7 of the hardback edition and there is no discussion of its historical origins, economic causes, future evolution, etc.

    Yet there is extensive literature on the digital divide, such as easily available overall ITU reports from 2016 and 2017, or more detailed ITU regional studies regarding international Internet interconnectivity for Africa and Latin America.  The historical impact of the abolition of the traditional telephony account settlement scheme is covered summarily in Chapter 2 of my book The New International Telecommunication Regulations and the Internet: A Commentary and Legislative History (2013).  One might have expected that a book dedicated to the economics of the Internet would have started from that event and explained its consequences, and analyse proposals regarding how to address the digital divide, for example the proposals made during the World Summit on the Information Society to create some kind of fund to bridge the gap (those proposals were not accepted).  I would have expected such a book to discuss the possibilities and the ramifications of an international version of the universal service funds that are used in many countries to minimize national digital divides between low-density rural areas and high-density cities.  But there is no discussion at all of these topics in the book.

    And there is little discussion of Artificial Intelligence (some of which is enabled by data obtained through the Internet) or of the disruption of labour markets that some believe is or will be caused by the Internet.  For a summary treatment of these topics, with extensive references, see sections 1 and 8 of my submission to the Working Group on Enhanced Cooperation.

    The Introduction of the book correctly notes that “Scale economies, interdependencies, and abundance are pervasive [in the Internet] and call for analytical concepts that augment the traditional approaches” (p. 3).  Yet, the book fails, on the whole, to deliver sufficient detail regarding such analytical concepts, an exception being the excellent discussion on pp. 297-308 of the Internet’s economic environment for innovation, in particular pp. 301-303.

    Of the 569 pages of text (in the hardcover edition), only 22 or so contain quantitative charts or tables (eight are in one chapter), and of those only 12 or so are original research.  Only one page has equations.  Of course the paucity of data in the book is due to the fact that data regarding the Internet is hard to obtain: in today’s privatized environment, companies strive to collect data, but not to publish it.  But economics is supposed to be a quantitative discipline, at least in part, so it would have been valuable if the book had included a chapter on the reasons for the relative paucity of reliable data (both micro and macro) concerning the Internet and the myriad of transactions that take place on the Internet.

    In a nutshell, the book gives good overall, comprehensive, and legible, descriptions of many trees, but in some cases without sufficient quantitative detail, whereas it mostly fails to provide an analysis of the forest comprised by the trees (except for the brilliant chapter by Eli Noam titled “From the Internet of Science to the Internet of Entertainment”).

    The book will be very valuable for people who know little or nothing about the Internet and its economics.  Those who know something will benefit from the extensive references given at the end of each chapter.  Those who know specific topics well will not learn much from this book.  A more appropriate title for the book would have been “A Comprehensive Introduction to the Economics of the Internet”.

    The rest of this review consists of brief reviews of each of the chapters of the book.  We start with the strongest chapter, followed by the weakest chapter, then review the other chapters in the order in which they appear in the book.

    1. From the Internet of Science to the Internet of Entertainment

    This chapter is truly excellent, as one would expect, given that it is written by Eli Noam.  It captures succinctly the key policy questions regarding the economics of the Internet.  We cite p. 564:

    • How to assure the financial viability of infrastructure?
    • Market power in the entertainment Internet?
    • Does vertical integration impede competition?
    • How to protect children, old people, and traditional morality?
    • How to protect privacy and security?
    • What is the impact on trade? What is the impact of globalization?
    • How to assure the interoperability of clouds?

    It is a pity that the book did not use those questions as key themes to be addressed in each chapter.  And it is a pity that the book did not address the industrial economics issues so well put forward.  We cite p. 565:

    Another economic research question is how to assure the financial viability of the infrastructure.  The financial balance between infrastructure, services, and users is a critical issue.  The infrastructure is expensive and wants to be paid.  Some of the media services are young and want to be left to grow.  Users want to be served generously with free content and low-priced, flat-rate data service.  Fundamental economics of competition push towards price deflation, but market power, and maybe regulation, pull in another direction.  Developing countries want to see money from communications as they did in the days of traditional telecom.

    Surely the other chapters of the book could have addressed these issues, which are being discussed publicly, see for example section 4 of the Summary of the 2017 ITU Open Consultation on so-called Over-the-Top (OTT) services.

    Noam’s discussion of the forces that are leading to fragmentation (pp. 558-560) is excellent.  He does not cite Mueller’s recent book on the topic, no doubt because this chapter of the book was written before Mueller’s book was published.  Muller’s book focuses on state actions, whereas Noam gives a convincing account of the economic drivers of fragmentation, and how such increased diversity may not actually be a negative development.

    Some minor quibbles: Noam does not discuss the economic impact of adult entertainment, yet it is no doubt significant.  The off-hand remark at the bottom of p. 557 to the effect that unleashing demand for entertainment might solve the digital divide is likely not well taken, and in any case would have to be justified by much more data.

    1. The Economics of Internet Standards

    I found this to be the weakest chapter in the book.  To begin with, it is mostly descriptive and contains hardly any real economic analysis.  The account of the Cisco/Huawei battle over MPLS-TP standards (pp. 219-222) is accurate, but it would have been nice to know what the economic drivers were of that battle, e.g. size of the market, respective market shares, values of the respective products based on the respective standards, who stood to gain/lose what (and not just the manufacturers, but also the network operators), etc.

    But the descriptive part is also weak.  For example, the Introduction gives the misleading impression that IETF standards are the dominant element in the growth of the Internet, whereas it was the World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C) HTML and successor standards that enabled the web and most of what we consider to be the Internet today.  The history on p. 213 omits contributions from other projects such as Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) and CYCLADES.

    Since the book is about economics, surely it should have mentioned on pp. 214 and 217 how the IETF has become increasingly influenced by dominant manufacturers, see pp. 148-152 of Powers, Shawn M., and Jablonski, Michael (2015) The Real Cyberwar: The Political Economy of Internet Freedom; as Noam puts the matter on p. 559 of the book: “The [Internet] technical specifications are set by the Steering Group of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), a small group of 15 engineers, almost all employees of big companies around the world.”

    And surely it should have discussed in section 10.4 (p. 214) the economic reasons that lead to greater adoption of TCP/IP over the competing OSI protocol, such as the lower implementation costs due to the lack of security of TCP/IP, the lack of non-ASCII support in the early IETF protocols, and the heavy subsidies provided by the US Defence Projects Research Agency (DARPA) and by the US National Science Foundation (NSF), which are well known facts recounted on pp. 533-541 of the book.  In addition to not dealing with economic issues, section 10.4 is an overly simplified account of what really happened.

    Section 10.7 (p. 222) is again, surprisingly devoid of any semblance of economic analysis.  Further, it perpetuates a self-serving, one-sided account of the 2012 World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT), without once citing scholarly writings on the issue, such as my book The New International Telecommunication Regulations and the Internet: A Commentary and Legislative History (2013).  The authors go so far as to cite the absurd US House proposition to the effect that the Internet should be “free of government control” without noting that what the US politicians meant is that it should be “free of foreign government control”, because of course the US has never had any intent of not subjecting the Internet to US laws and regulations.

    Indeed, at present, hardly anybody seriously questions the principle that offline law applies equally online.  One would expect a scholarly work to do better than to cite inane political slogans meant for domestic political purposes.  In particular when the citations are not used to underpin any semblance of economic analysis.

    1. The Economics of the Internet: An Overview

    This chapter provides a solid and thorough introduction to the basics of the economics of the Internet.

    1. The Industrial Organization of the Internet

    This chapter well presents the industrial organization of the Internet, that is, how the industry is structured economically, how its components interact economically, and how that is different from other economic sectors.  As the authors correctly state (p. 24): “ … the tight combination of high fixed and low incremental cost, the pervasive presence of increasing returns, the rapidity and frequency of entry and exit, high rates of innovation, and economies of scale in consumption (positive network externalities) have created unique economic conditions …”.  The chapter explains well key features such as multi-sided markets (p. 31).  And it correctly points out (p. 25) that “while there is considerable evidence that technologically dynamic industries flourish in the absence of government intervention, there is also evidence of the complementarity of public policy and the performance of high-tech markets.”  That is explored in pp. 45 ff. and in subsequent chapters, albeit not always in great detail.

    1. The Internet as a Complex Layered System

    This is an excellent chapter, one of the best in the book.  It explains how, because of the layered nature of the Internet, simple economic theories fail to capture its complexities.  As the chapter says (p. 68), the Internet is best viewed as a general purpose infrastructure.

    1. A Network Science Approach to the Internet

    This chapter provides a sound and comprehensive description of the Internet as a network, but it does not go beyond the description to provide analyses, for example regarding regulatory issues.  However, the numerous citations in the chapter do provide such analyses.

    1. Peer Production and Cooperation

    This chapter is also one of the best chapters in the book.  It provides an excellent description of how value is produced on the Internet, through decentralization, diverse motivations, and separation of governance and management.  It covers, and explains the differences between, peer production, crowd-sourcing, collaborative innovation, etc.  On p. 87 it provides an excellent quantitative description and analysis of specific key industry segments.  The key governance patterns in peer production are very well summarized on pp. 108-109 and 112-113.

    1. The Internet and Productivity

    This chapter actually contains a significant amount of quantitative data (which is not the case for most of the other chapters) and provides what I would consider to be an economic analysis of the issue, namely whether, and if so how, the Internet has contributed to productivity.  As the chapter points out, we lack sufficient data to analyse fully the impacts of the development of information and communication technologies since 2000, but this chapter does make an excellent contribution to that analysis.

    1. Cultural Economics and the Internet

    This is a good introduction to supply, demand, and markets for creative goods and services produced and/or distributed via the Internet.  The discussion of two-sided markets on p. 155 is excellent.  Unfortunately, however, the chapter is mostly a theoretical description: it does not refer to any actual data or provide any quantitative analysis of what is actually happening.

    1. A Political Economy Approach to the Internet

    This is another excellent chapters, one of the best in the book.  I noted one missing citation to a previous analysis of key issues from the political economics point of view: Powers, Shawn M., and Jablonski, Michael (2015) The Real Cyberwar: The Political Economy of Internet Freedom.  But the key issues are well discussed in the chapter:

    • The general trend towards monopolies and oligopolies of corporate ownership and control affecting the full range of Internet use and development (p. 164).
    • The specific role of Western countries and their militaries in supporting and directing specific trajectories (p. 165).
    • How the general trend towards privatization made it difficult to develop the Internet as a public information utility (p. 169).
    • The impact on labour, in particular shifting work to users (p. 170).
    • The rise and dominance of the surveillance economy (where users become the product because their data is valuable) (p. 175).
    1. Competition and Anti-Trust in Internet Markets

    This chapter provides a very good overview of the competition and anti-trust issues related to the Internet, but it would have been improved if it had referred to the excellent discussion in Noam’s chapter “From the Internet of Science to the Internet of Entertainment.”  It would have been improved by referring to recent academic literature on the topic.  Nevertheless, the description of key online market characteristics, including that they are often two-sided, (p. 184) is excellent.  The description of the actual situation (including litigation) regarding search engines on p. 189 ff. is masterful: a superb example of the sort of real economic analysis that I would have liked to see in other chapters.

    The good discussion of network neutrality (p. 201) could have been improved by taking the next step and analysing the economic implications of considering whether the Internet infrastructure should be regulated as a public infrastructure and/or, for example, be subject to functional separation.

    1. The Economics of Copyright and the Internet

    This is an excellent introduction to the issues relating to copyright in the digital age.  It provides little data but that is because, as noted on pp. 238-241, there is a paucity of data for copyright, whereas there is more for patents.

    1. The Economics of Privacy, Data Protection and Surveillance

    As one would expect from its author, Ian Brown, this is an excellent discussion of the issues and, again, one of the best chapters in the book.  In particular, the chapter explains well and clearly (pp. 250 ff.) why market failures (e.g externalities, information asymmetries and anti-competitive market structures) might justify regulation (such as the European data privacy rules).

    1. Economics of Cybersecurity

    This chapter provides a very good overview of the economic issues related to cybersecurity, but, like most of the other chapters, it provides very little data and thus no detailed economic analysis.  It would have benefited from referring to the Internet Society’s 2016 Global Internet Report, which does provide data, and stresses the key market failures that result in the current lack of security of the Internet: information asymmetries (section 13.7.2 of the book) and externalities (section 13.7.3).

    However, the section on externalities fails to mention certain possible solutions, such as minimum security standards.  Minimum safety standards are imposed on many products, such as electrical appliances, automobiles, airplanes, pharmaceuticals, etc.  Thus it would have been appropriate for the book to discuss the economic implications of minimum security standards.  And also the economic implications of Microsoft’s recent call for a so-called Geneva Digital Convention.

    1. Internet Architecture and Innovation in Applications

    This chapter provides a very good description, but it suffers from considering the Internet in isolation, without comparing it to other networks, in particular the fixed and mobile telephone networks.  It would have been good to see a discussion and comparison of the economic drivers of innovation or lack of innovation in the two networks.  And also a discussion of the economic role of the telephony signalling network, Signalling System Seven (SS7) which enabled implementation of the widely used, and economically important, Short Messaging Service (SMS).

    In that context, it is important to note that SS7 is, as is the Internet, a connectionless packet-switched system.  So what distinguishes the two networks is more than technology: indeed, economic factors (such as how services are priced for end-users, interconnection regimes, etc.) surely play a role, and it would have been good if those had been explored.  In this context, see my paper “The Internet, its governance, and the multi-Stakeholder model”, Info, vol. 16. no. 2, March 2014.

    1. Organizational Innovations, ICTs and Knowledge Governance: The Case of Platforms

    As this excellent chapter, one of the best in the books, correctly notes, “platforms constitute a major organizational innovation” which has been “made possible by technological innovation”.

    As explained on pp. 338-339, platforms are one of the key components of the Internet economy, and this has recently been recognized by governments.  For example, the Legal Affairs Committee of the European Parliament adopted an Opinion in May 2017 that, among other provisions:

    Calls for an appropriate and proportionate regulatory framework that would guarantee responsibility, fairness, trust and transparency in platforms’ processes in order to avoid discrimination and arbitrariness towards business partners, consumers, users and workers in relation to, inter alia, access to the service, appropriate and fair referencing, search results, or the functioning of relevant application programming interfaces, on the basis of interoperability and compliance principles applicable to platforms.

    The topic is covered to some extent a European Parliament Committee Report on online platforms and the digital single market, (2016/2276(INI).  And by some provisions in French law.  Detailed references to the cited documents, and to other material relevant to platforms, are found in section 9 of my submission to the Working Group on Enhanced Cooperation.

    1. Interconnection in the Internet: Peering, Interoperability and Content Delivery

    This chapter provides a very good description of Internet interconnection, including a good discussion of the basic economic issues.  As do the other chapters, it suffers from a paucity of data, and does not discuss whether the current interconnection regime is working well, or whether it is facing economic issues.  The chapter does point out (p. 357) that “information about actual interconnection agreements … may help to understand how interconnection markets are changing …”, but fails to discuss how the unique barter structure of Internet interconnections, most of which are informal, zero-cost traffic sharing agreements, impedes the collection and publication of such information.

    The discussion on p. 346 would have benefited from an economic analysis of the advantages/disadvantages of considering the basic Internet infrastructure to be a basic public infrastructure (such as roads, water and electrical power distribution systems, etc.) and the economic tradeoffs of regulating its interconnection.

    Section 16.5.1 would have benefited from a discussion of the economic drivers behind the discussions in ITU that lead to the adoption of ITU-T Recommendation D.50 and its Supplements, and the economic issues arguing for and against implementation of the provisions of that Recommendation.

    1. Internet Business Strategies

    As this very good chapter explains, the Internet has had a dramatic impact on all types of businesses, and has given rise to “platformization”, that is the use of platforms (see chapter 15 above) to conduct business.  Platforms benefit from network externalities and enable two-sided markets.  The chapter includes a detailed analysis (pp. 370-372) of the strategic properties of the Internet that can be used to facilitate and transform business, such as scalability, ubiquity, externalities, etc.  It also notes that the Internet has changed the role of customers and both reduced and increased information asymmetries.  The chapter provides a very good taxonomy of Internet business models (pp. 372 ff.).

    1. The Economics of Internet Search

    The chapter contains a good history of search engines, and an excellent analysis of advertising linked to searches.  It provides theoretical models and explains the important of two-sided markets in this context.  As the chapter correctly notes, additional research will require access to more data than are currently available.

    1. The Economics of Algorithmic Selection on the Internet

    As this chapter correctly notes (p. 395), “algorithms have come to shape our daily lives and realities.”  They have significant economic implication and raise “significant social risks such as manipulation and data bias, threats to privacy and violations of intellectual property rights”.  A good description of different types of algorithms and how they are used is given on p. 399.  Scale effects and concentration are discussed (p. 408) and the social risks are explained in detail on pp. 411 ff.:

    • Threats to basic rights and liberties.
    • Impacts on the mediation of reality.
    • Challenges to the future development of the human species.

    More specifically:

    • Manipulation
    • Diminishing variety
    • Constraints on freedom of expression
    • Threats to data protection and privacy
    • Social discrimination
    • Violation of intellectual property rights
    • Possible adaptations of the human brain
    • Uncertain effects on humans

    In this context, see also the numerous references in section 1 of my submission to the Working Group on Enhanced Cooperation.

    The chapter includes a good discussion of different governance models and their advantages/disadvantages, namely:

    • Laissez-fair markets
    • Self-organization by business
    • Self-regulation by industry
    • State regulation
    1. Online Advertising Economics

    This chapter provides a good history of what some have referred to as the Internet’s original sin, namely the advent of online advertising as the main revenue source for many Internet businesses.  It explains how the Internet can, and does, improve the efficiency of advertising by targeting (pp. 430 ff.) and it includes a detailed analysis of advertising in relation to search engines (pp. 435 ff.).

    1. Online News

    As the chapter correctly notes, this is an evolving area, so the chapter mostly consists of a narrative history.  The chapter’s conclusion starts by saying that “the Internet has brought growth and dynamism to the news industry”, but goes on to note, correctly, that “the financial outlook for news providers, old or new, is bleak” and that, thus far, nobody has found a viable business model to fund the online news business.  It is a pity that this chapter does not cite McChesney’s detailed analysis of this issue and discuss his suggestions for addressing it.

    1. The Economics of Online Video Entertainment

    This chapter provides the history of that segment of the Internet industry and includes a valuable comparison and analysis of the differences between online and offline entertainment media (pp. 462-464).

    1. Business Strategies and Revenue Models for Converged Video Services

    This chapter provides a clear and comprehensive description of how an effect of convergence “is the blurring of lines between formerly separated media platforms such as over-the-air broadcasting, cable TV, and streamed media.”  The chapter describes ten strategies and six revenue models that have been used to cope with these changes.

    1. The Economics of Virtual Worlds

    This chapter provides a good historical account of the evolution of the internal reward system of games, which went from virtual objects that players could obtain by solving puzzles (or whatever) to virtual money that could be acquired only within the game, to virtual money that could be acquired with real-world money, to large professional factories that produce and sell objects to World of Wonders players in exchange for real-world money.  The chapter explores the legal and economic issues arising out of these situations (pp. 503-504) and gives a good overview of the research in virtual economies.

    1. Economics of Big Data

    This chapter correctly notes (p. 512) that big data is “a field with more questions than answers”.  Thus, logically, the chapter is mostly descriptive.  It includes a good account of two-sided markets (p. 519), and correctly notes (p. 521) that “data governance should not be construed merely as an economic matter but that it should also encompass a social perspective”, a position with which I wholeheartedly agree.  As the chapter says (p. 522), “there are some areas affected by big data where public policies and regulations do exist”, in particular regarding:

    • Privacy
    • Data ownership
    • Open data

    As the chapter says (p. 522), most evidence available today suggests that markets are not “responding rapidly to concerns of users about the (mis)use of their personal information”.  For additional discussion, with extensive references, see section 1 of my submission to the Working Group on Enhanced Cooperation.

    1. The Evolution of the Internet: A Socioeconomic Account

    This is a very weak chapter.  Its opening paragraph fails to consider the historical context of the development of the Internet, or its consequences.  Its second paragraph fails to consider the overt influence of the US government on the evolution of the Internet.  Section 26.3 fails to cite one of the most comprehensive works on the topic (the relation between AT&T and the development of the internet), namely Schiller, Dan (2014) Digital Depression: Information Technology and Information Crisis, University of Illinois Press.  The discussion on p. 536 fails to even mention the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) initiative, yet that initiative undoubtedly affected the development of the Internet, not just by providing a model for how not to do things (too complex, too slow), but also by providing some basic technology that is still used to this day, such as X.509 certificates.

    Section 26.6, on how market forces affect the Internet, seems oblivious to the rising evidence that dominant market power, not competition, is shaping the future of the Internet, which appears surprising in light of the good chapter in the book on that very topic: “Competition and anti-trust in Internet markets.”  Page 547 appears to ignore the rising vertical integration of many Internet services, even though that trend is well discussed in Noam’s excellent chapter “From the Internet of Science to the Internet of Entertainment.”

    The discussion of the role of government on p. 548 is surprisingly lacunary, given the rich literature on the topic in general, and specific government actions or proposed actions regarding topics such as freedom of speech, privacy, data protection, encryption, security, etc. (see for example my submission to the Working Group on Enhanced Cooperation).

    This chapter should have started with the observation that the Internet was not conceived as a public network (p. 558) and build on that observation, explaining the socioeconomic factors that shaped its transformation from a closed military/academic network into a public network and into a basic infrastructure that now underpins most economic activities.

    _____

    Richard Hill is President of the Association for Proper internet Governance, and was formerly a senior official at the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). He has been involved in internet governance issues since the inception of the internet and is now an activist in that area, speaking, publishing, and contributing to discussions in various forums. Among other works he is the author of The New International Telecommunication Regulations and the Internet: A Commentary and Legislative History (Springer, 2014). He writes frequently about internet governance issues for The b2o Review Digital Studies magazine.

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  • Bruce Robbins – Thank You For Your Service

    Bruce Robbins – Thank You For Your Service

    by Bruce Robbins

    Even if they haven’t seen the movie, people above a certain age will remember Jack Nicholson’s final speech in A Few Good Men: “You don’t want the truth, because deep down in places you don’t talk about at parties, you want me on that wall. You need me on that wall.” Nicholson, a colonel in the Marines, is confessing to his guilt for having had one of his men beaten to death. He confesses because he believes he was right, and he believes that, deep down in places they don’t talk about at parties, his fellow Americans know he was right. Sometimes defending the nation will require breaking the rules.  It will require getting your hands dirty.

    In the midst of America’s many high-energy debates about immigration and the building and manning of walls, there is a simple moral truth that has been overlooked.  It’s that truth, I think, that has made this maiden effort by Aaron Sorkin one of the most quoted speeches in Hollywood history.  It’s the same truth that gives such emotional sizzle to the formula “thank you for your service,” and does so even when those words sound, as they often do, and not just to veterans, shallow, ignorant, and insufficient.  The truth is that we depend on people far away over the horizon, doing and suffering unspeakable things so that we can live our more or less ordinary, more or less comfortable lives.  We are the beneficiaries of their labors.  And we know it.

    This is clear enough where the subject is the uniformed men and women who are placed, as the saying goes, “in harm’s way.” As an Air Force pilot told journalist David Wood in 2014, “There are two kinds of people: those who serve, and those who expect to be served.”  The thing is, this division of humanity doesn’t only apply to civilians thinking about what is done and suffered by soldiers. As the pilot’s words involuntarily suggest, it also applies to patrons being served in a restaurant–very likely by people who have also come from somewhere beyond the horizon.  It applies to anyone who has a cup of coffee or checks her iPhone.  We are also the beneficiaries of the people who cultivated the coffee beans and put the chips in the iPhone. Many of whom have to deal with as much harm and unpleasantness as the soldiers who serve the country overseas.

    They too get their hands dirty. Perhaps dirtier.  And again, we know it.  The rash of suicides at Foxconn, where many of the chips are manufactured, became common knowledge in 2010, as did the installing of suicide nets to stop more workers from throwing themselves off the roof and further threats of mass suicide in 2016.  Brazil, the world’s largest coffee producer, has been accused of exploiting its workers under conditions “analogous to slavery.”  When we pronounce the innocent-sounding words “global economic inequality,” what we’re talking about is violence on the other side of the wall.

    In spite of this knowledge, little is being done about global economic inequality. Why not? It’s not enough to say that poor foreigners don’t vote in American elections. They don’t but neither do many poor Americans.  Where Americans feel responsible, they are often willing to take some sort of action.  The problem is that most people don’t feel responsible–don’t feel personally responsible–for global economic inequality. And as Yascha Mounk argued in The Age of Responsibility: Luck, Choice and the Welfare State, published by Harvard last year, we have been told again and again that the only real responsibility is personal responsibility.

    That’s why it’s good to remember “thank you for your service.”

    Anyone who pronounces those words of heartfelt gratitude or resonates to them when they are pronounced by others is offering evidence that they do, after all, believe in collective responsibility. Collective responsibility: our responsibility as beneficiaries of the system to feel the weight of what is done on our behalf beyond the horizon and to make sure that those who do it are justly rewarded for it.  If we are capable of feeling collectively responsible for the actions of the military, then we should be able to expand the geographical and social scale of our gratitude. Why should it not extend from those who serve not with arms, but by their work?  Why should it not pass from Americans on the wall (whom you may still want to reserve the right to judge) to non-Americans in the fields, on the assembly lines, and sometimes trying to escape violence by passing over to our side of the wall?  Deep down, in places you don’t talk about at parties, you know you owe them, too, a debt.

    Bruce Robbins is the author of The Beneficiary, which came out from Duke University Press in December 2017.

     

  • Zachary Loeb – Shackles of Digital Freedom (Review of Qiu, Goodbye iSlave)

    Zachary Loeb – Shackles of Digital Freedom (Review of Qiu, Goodbye iSlave)

    a review of Jack Linchuan Qiu, Goodbye iSlave: a Manifesto for Digital Abolition (Illinois, 2016)

    by Zachary Loeb

    ~

    With bright pink hair and a rainbow horn, the disembodied head of a unicorn bobs back and forth to the opening beats of Big Boi’s “All Night.” Moments later, a pile of poop appears and mouths the song’s opening words, and various animated animal heads appear nodding along in sequence. Soon the unicorn returns, lip-synching the song, and it is quickly joined by a woman whose movements, facial expressions, and exaggerated enunciations sync with those of the unicorn. As a pig, a robot, a chicken, and a cat appear to sing in turn it becomes clear that the singing emojis are actually mimicking the woman – the cat blinks when she blinks, it raises its brow when she does. The ad ends by encouraging users to “Animoji” themselves, something which is evidently doable with Apple’s iPhone X. It is a silly ad, with a catchy song, and unsurprisingly it tells the viewer nothing about where, how, or by whom the iPhone X was made. The ad may playfully feature the ever-popular “pile of poop” emoji, but the ad is not intended to make potential purchasers feel like excrement.

    And yet there is much more to the iPhone X’s history than the words on the device’s back “Designed by Apple in California. Assembled in China.” In Goodbye iSlave: a Manifesto for Digital Abolition, Jack Linchuan Qiu removes the phone’s shiny case to explore what “assembled in China” really means. As Qiu demonstrates in discomforting detail this is a story that involves exploitative labor practices, enforced overtime, abusive managers, insufficient living quarters, and wage theft, in a system that he argues is similar to slavery.

    illustration
    First published by Greenpeace Switzerland

    Launched by activists in 2010, the “iSlave” campaign aimed to raise awareness about the labor conditions that had led to a wave of suicides amongst Foxconn workers; those performing the labor summed up neatly as “assembled in China.” Seizing upon the campaign’s key term, Qiu aims to expand it “figuratively and literally” to demonstrate that “iSlavery” is “a planetary system of domination, exploitation, and alienation…epitomized by the material and immaterial structures of capital accumulation” (9). This in turn underscores the “world system of gadgets” that Qiu refers to as “Appconn” (13); a system that encompasses those who “designed” the devices, those who “assembled” them, as well as those who use them. In engaging with the terminology of slavery, Qiu is consciously laying out a provocative argument, but it is a provocation that acknowledges that as smartphones have become commonplace many consumers have become inured to the injustices that allow them to “animoji” themselves. Indeed, it is a reminder that, “Technology does not guarantee progress. It is, instead, often abused to cause regress” (8).

    Surveying its history, Qiu notes that slavery has appeared in a variety of forms in many regions throughout history. Though he emphasizes that even today slavery “persists in its classic forms” (21), his focus remains on theoretically expanding the term. Qiu draws upon the League of Nation’s “1926 Slavery Convention” which still acts as the foundation for much contemporary legal thinking on slavery, including the 2012 Bellagio-Harvard Guidelines on the Legal Parameters of Slavery (which Qiu includes in his book as an appendix). These legal guidelines expand the definition of what constitutes slavery to include “institutions and practices similar to slavery” (42). The key element for this updated definition is an understanding that it is no longer legal for a person to be “formally and legally ‘owned’ in any jurisdiction” and thus the concept of slavery requires rethinking (45). In considering which elements from the history of slavery are particularly relevant for the story of “iSlavery,” Qiu emphasizes: how the slave trade made use of advanced technologies of its time (guns, magnetic compasses, slave ships); how the slave trade was linked to creating and satisfying consumer desires (sugar); and how the narrative of resistance and revolt is a key aspect of the history of slavery. For Qiu,  “iSlavery” is manifested in two forms: “manufacturing iSlaves” and “manufactured iSlaves.”

    In the process of creating high-tech gadgets there are many types of “manufacturing iSlaves,” in conditions similar to slavery “in its classic forms” including “Congolese mine workers” and “Indonesian child labor,” but Qiu focuses primarily on those working for Foxconn in China. Drawing upon news reports, NGO findings, interviews with former workers, underground publications produced by factor workers, and from his experiences visiting these assembly plants, Qiu investigates many ways in which “institutions and practices similar to slavery” shape the lives of Foxconn workers. Insufficient living conditions, low wages that are often not even paid, forced overtime, “student interns” being used as an even cheaper labor force, violently abusive security guards, the arrangement of life so as to maximize disorientation and alienation – these represent some of the common experiences of Foxconn workers. Foxconn found itself uncomfortably in the news in 2010 due to a string of worker suicides, and Qiu sympathetically portrays the conditions that gave rise to such acts, particularly in his interview with Tian Yu who survived her suicide attempt.

    As Qiu makes clear, Foxconn workers often have great difficulty leaving the factories, but what exits these factories at a considerable rate are mountains of gadgets that go on to be eagerly purchased and used by the “manufactured iSlaves.” The transition to the “manufactured iSlave” entails “a conceptual leap” (91) that moves away from the “practices similar to slavery” that define the “manufacturing iSlave” to instead signify “those who are constantly attached to their gadgets” (91). Here the compulsion takes on the form of a vicious consumerism that has resulted in an “addiction” to these gadgets, and a sense in which these gadgets have come to govern the lives of their users. Drawing upon the work of Judy Wajcman, Qiu notes that “manufactured iSlaves” (Qiu’s term) live under the aegis of “iTime” (Wajcman’s term), a world of “consumerist enslavement” into which they’ve been drawn by “Net Slaves” (Steve Baldwin and Bill Lessard’s term of “accusation and ridicule” for those whose jobs fit under the heading “Designed in California”). While some companies have made fortunes off the material labor of “manufacturing iSlaves,” Qiu emphasizes that many companies that have made their fortunes off the immaterial labor of legions of “manufactured iSlaves” dutifully clicking “like,” uploading photos, and hitting “tweet” all without any expectation that they will be paid for their labor. Indeed, in Qiu’s analysis, what keeps many “manufactured iSlaves” unaware of their shackles is that they don’t see what they are doing on their devices as labor.

    In his description of the history of slavery, Qiu emphasizes resistance, both in terms of acts of rebellion by enslaved peoples, and the broader abolition movement. This informs Qiu’s commentary on pushing back against the system of Appconn. While smartphones may be cast as the symbol of the exploitation of Foxconn workers, Qiu also notes that these devices allow for acts of resistance by these same workers “whose voices are increasingly heard online” (133). Foxconn factories may take great pains to remain closed off from prying eyes, but workers armed with smartphones are “breaching the lines of information lockdown” (148). Campaigns by national and international NGOs can also be important in raising awareness of the plight of Foxconn workers, after all the term “iSlave” was originally coined as part of such a campaign. In bringing awareness of the “manufacturing iSlave” to the “manufactured iSlave” Qiu points to “culture jamming” responses such as the “Phone Story” game which allows people to “play” through their phones vainglorious tale (ironically the game was banned from Apple’s app store). Qiu also points to the attempt to create ethical gadgets, such as the Fairphone which aims to responsibly source its minerals, pay those who assemble their phones a living wage, and push back against the drive of planned obsolescence. As Qiu makes clear, there are many working to fight against the oppression built into Appconn.

    “For too long,” Qiu notes, “the underbellies of the digital industries have been obscured and tucked away; too often, new media is assumed to represent modernity, and modernity assumed to represent freedom” (172). Qiu highlights the coercion and misery that are lurking below the surface of every silly cat picture uploaded on Instagram, and he questions whether the person doing the picture taking and uploading is also being exploited. A tough and confrontational book, Goodbye iSlave nevertheless maintains hope for meaningful resistance.

    Anyone who has used a smartphone, tablet, laptop computer, e-reader, video game console, or smart speaker would do well to read Goodbye iSlave. In tight effective prose, Qiu presents a gripping portrait of the lives of Foxconn workers and this description is made more confrontational by the uncompromising language Qiu deploys. And though Qiu begins his book by noting that “the outlook of manufacturing and manufactured iSlaves is rather bleak” (18), his focus on resistance gives his book the feeling of an activist manifesto as opposed to the bleak tonality of a woebegone dirge. By engaging with the exploitation of material labor and immaterial labor, Qiu is, furthermore, able to uncomfortably remind his readers not only that their digital freedom comes at a human cost, but that digital freedom may itself be a sort of shackle.

    In the book’s concluding chapter, Qiu notes that he is “fully aware that slavery is a very severe critique” (172), and this represents one of the greatest challenges the book poses. Namely: what to make of Qiu’s use of the term slavery? As Qiu demonstrates, it is not a term that he arrived at simply for shock value, nevertheless, “slavery” is itself a complicated concept. Slavery carries a history of horrors that make one hesitant to deploy it in a simplistic fashion even as it remains a basic term of international law. By couching his discussion of “iSlavery” both in terms of history and contemporary legal thinking, Qiu demonstrates a breadth of sensitivity and understanding regarding its nuances. And given the focus of current laws on “institutions and practices similar to slavery” (42) it is hard to dispute that this is a fair description of many of the conditions to which Foxconn workers are subjected – even as Qiu’s comments on coltan miners demonstrates other forms of slavery that lurk behind the shining screens of high-tech society.

    Nevertheless, there is frequently something about the use of the term “iSlavery” that seems to diminish the heft of Qiu’s argument. As the term often serves as a stumbling block that pulls a reader away from Qiu’s account; particularly when he tries to make the comparisons too direct such as juxtaposing Foxconn’s (admittedly wretched) dormitories to conditions on slave ships crossing the Atlantic. It’s difficult not to find the comparison hyperbolic. Similarly, Qiu notes that ethnic and regional divisions are often found within Foxconn factories; but these do not truly seem comparable to the racist views that undergirded (and was used to justify) the Atlantic slave trade. Unfortunately, this is a problem that Qiu sets for himself: had he only used “slave” in a theoretical sense it would have opened him to charges of historical insensitivity, but by engaging with the history of slavery many of Qiu’s comparisons seem to miss the mark – and this is exacerbated by the fact that he repeatedly refers to ongoing conditions of “classic” slavery involved in the making of gadgets (such as coltan mining). Qiu provides an important and compelling window into the current legal framing of slavery, and yet, something about the “iSlave” prevents it from fitting into the history of slavery. It is, unfortunately, too easy to imagine someone countering Qiu’s arguments by saying “but this isn’t really slavery” to which the retort of “current law defines slavery as…” will be unlikely to convince.

    The matter of “slavery” only gets thornier as Qiu shifts his attention from “manufacturing iSlaves” to “manufactured iSlaves.” In recent years there has been a wealth of writing in the academic and popular sphere that critically asks what our gadgets are doing to us, such as Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together and Judy Wacjman’s Pressed for Time (which Qiu cites). And the fear that technology turns people into “cogs” is hardly new: in his 1956 book The Sane Society, Erich Fromm warned “the danger of the past was that men became slaves. The danger of the future is that men may become robots” (Fromm, 352). Fromm’s anxiety is what one more commonly encounters in discussions about what gadgets turn their users into, but these “robots” are not identical with “slaves.” When Qiu discusses “manufactured iSlaves” he notes that it represents a “conceptual leap,” but by continuing to use the term “slave” this “conceptual leap” unfortunately hampers his broader points about Foxconn workers. The danger is that a sort of false equivalency risks being created in which smartphone users shrug off their complicity in the exploitation of assembly workers by saying, “hey, I’m exploited too.”

    Some of this challenge may ultimately simply be about word choice. The very term “iSlave,” despite its activist origins, seems somewhat silly through its linkage to all things to which a lowercase “i” has been affixed. Furthermore, the use of the “i” risks placing all of the focus on Apple. True, Apple products are manufactured in the exploitative Foxconn factories, and Qiu may be on to something in referring to the “Apple cult,” but as Qiu himself notes Foxconn manufactures products for a variety of companies. Just because a device isn’t an “i” gadget, doesn’t mean that it wasn’t manufactured by an “iSlave.” And while Appconn is a nice shorthand for the world that is built upon the backs of both kinds of “iSlaves” it risks being just another opaque neologism for computer dominated society that is undercut by the need for it to be defined.

    Given the grim focus of Qiu’s book, it is understandable why he should choose to emphasize rebellion and resistance, and these do allow readers to put down the book feeling energized. Yet some of these modes of resistance seem to risk more entanglement than escape. There is a risk that the argument that Foxconn workers can use smartphones to organize simply fits neatly back into the narrative that there is something “inherently liberating” about these devices. The “Phone Story” game may be a good teaching tool, but it seems to make a similar claim on the democratizing potential of the Internet. And while the Fairphone represents, perhaps, one of the more significant ways to get away from subsidizing Appconn it risks being just an alternative for concerned consumers not a legally mandated industry standard. At risk of an unfair comparison, a Fairphone seems like the technological equivalent of free range eggs purchased at the farmer’s market – it may genuinely be ethically preferable, but it risks reducing a major problem (iSlavery) into yet another site for consumerism (just buy the right phone). In fairness, these are the challenges inherent in critiquing the dominant order; as Theodor Adorno once put it “we live on the culture we criticize” (Adorno and Horkheimer, 105). It might be tempting to wish that Qiu had written an Appconn version of Jerry Mander’s Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, but Qiu seems to recognize that simply telling people to turn it all off is probably just as efficacious as telling them not to do anything at all. After all, Mander’s “four arguments” may have convinced a few people – but not society as a whole. So, what then does “digital abolition” really mean?

    In describing Goodbye iSlave, Qiu notes that it is “nothing more than an invitation—for everyone to reflect on the enslaving tendencies of Appconn and the world system of gadgets” it is an opportunity for people to reflect on the ways in which “so many myths of liberation have been bundled with technological buzzwords, and they are often taken for granted” (173). It is a challenging book and an important one, and insofar as it forces readers to wrestle with Qiu’s choice of terminology it succeeds by making them seriously confront the regimes of material and immaterial labor that structure their lives. While the use of the term “slavery” may at times hamper Qiu’s larger argument, this unflinching look at the labor behind today’s gadgets should not be overlooked.

    Goodbye iSlave frames itself as “a manifesto for digital abolition,” but what it makes clear is that this struggle ultimately isn’t about “i” but about “us.”

    _____

    Zachary Loeb is a writer, activist, librarian, and terrible accordion player. He earned his MSIS from the University of Texas at Austin, an MA from the Media, Culture, and Communications department at NYU, and is currently working towards a PhD in the History and Sociology of Science department at the University of Pennsylvania. His research areas include media refusal and resistance to technology, ideologies that develop in response to technological change, and the ways in which technology factors into ethical philosophy – particularly in regards of the way in which Jewish philosophers have written about ethics and technology. Using the moniker “The Luddbrarian,” Loeb writes at the blog Librarian Shipwreck, and is a frequent contributor to The b2 Review Digital Studies section.

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    _____

    Works Cited

    • Adorno, Theodor and Horkheimer, Max. 2011. Towards a New Manifesto. London: Verso Books.
    • Fromm, Erich. 2002. The Sane Society. London: Routledge.