boundary 2

Tag: culture

  • Data and Desire in Academic Life

    Data and Desire in Academic Life

    a review of Erez Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel, Uncharted: Big Data as a Lens on Human Culture (Riverhead Books, reprint edition, 2014)
    by Benjamin Haber
    ~

    On a recent visit to San Francisco, I found myself trying to purchase groceries when my credit card was declined. As the cashier is telling me this news, and before I really had time to feel any particular way about it, my leg vibrates. I’ve received a text: “Chase Fraud-Did you use card ending in 1234 for $100.40 at a grocery store on 07/01/2015? If YES reply 1, NO reply 2.” After replying “yes” (which was recognized even though I failed to follow instructions), I swiped my card again and was out the door with my food. Many have probably had a similar experience: most if not all credit card companies automatically track purchases for a variety of reasons, including fraud prevention, the tracking of illegal activity, and to offer tailored financial products and services. As I walked out of the store, for a moment, I felt the power of “big data,” how real-time consumer information can be read as be a predictor of a stolen card in less time than I had to consider why my card had been declined. It was a too rare moment of reflection on those networks of activity that modulate our life chances and capacities, mostly below and above our conscious awareness.

    And then I remembered: didn’t I buy my plane ticket with the points from that very credit card? And in fact, hadn’t I used that card on multiple occasions in San Francisco for purchases not much less than the amount my groceries cost. While the near-instantaneous text provided reassurance before I could consciously recognize my anxiety, the automatic card decline was likely not a sophisticated real-time data-enabled prescience, but a rather blunt instrument, flagging the transaction on the basis of two data points: distance from home and amount of purchase. In fact, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that the gap between data collection and processing, between metadata and content and between current reality of data and its speculative future is still quite large. While Target’s pregnancy predicting algorithm was a journalistic sensation, the more mundane computational confusion that has Gmail constantly serving me advertisements for trade and business schools shows the striking gap between the possibilities of what is collected and the current landscape of computationally prodded behavior. The text from Chase, your Klout score, the vibration of your FitBit, or the probabilistic genetic information from 23 and me are all primarily affective investments in mobilizing a desire for data’s future promise. These companies and others are opening of new ground for discourse via affect, creating networked infrastructures for modulating the body and social life.

    I was thinking about this while reading Uncharted: Big Data as a Lens on Human Culture, a love letter to the power and utility of algorithmic processing of the words in books. Though ostensibly about the Google Ngram Viewer, a neat if one-dimensional tool to visualize the word frequency of a portion of the books scanned by Google, Uncharted is also unquestionably involved in the mobilization of desire for quantification. Though about the academy rather than financialization, medicine, sports or any other field being “revolutionized” by big data, its breathless boosterism and obligatory cautions are emblematic of the emergent datafied spirit of capitalism, a celebratory “coming out” of the quantifying systems that constitute the emergent infrastructures of sociality.

    While published fairly recently, in 2013, Uncharted already feels dated in its strangely muted engagement with the variety of serious objections to sprawling corporate and state run data systems in the post-Snowden, post-Target, post-Ashley Madison era (a list that will always be in need of update). There is still the dazzlement about the sheer magnificent size of this potential new suitor—“If you wrote out all five zettabytes that humans produce every year by hand, you would reach the core of the Milky Way” (11)—all the more impressive when explicitly compared to the dusty old technologies of ink and paper. Authors Erez Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel are floating in a world of “simple and beautiful” formulas (45), “strange, fascinating and addictive” methods (22), producing “intriguing, perplexing and even fun” conclusions (119) in their drive to colonize the “uncharted continent” (76) that is the English language. The almost erotic desire for this bounty is made more explicit in their tongue-in-cheek characterization of their meetings with Google employees as an “irresistible… mating dance” (22):

    Scholars and scientists approach engineers, product managers, and even high-level executives about getting access to their companies’ data. Sometimes the initial conversation goes well. They go out for coffee. One thing leads to another, and a year later, a brand-new person enters the picture. Unfortunately this person is usually a lawyer. (22)

    There is a lot to unpack in these metaphors, the recasting of academic dependence on data systems designed and controlled by corporate entities as a sexy new opportunity for scholars and scientists. There are important conversations to be had about these circulations of quantified desire; about who gets access to this kind of data, the ethics of working with companies who have an existential interest in profit and shareholder return and the cultural significance of wrapping business transactions in the language of heterosexual coupling. Here however I am mostly interested in the real allure that this passage and others speaks to, and the attendant fear that mostly whispers, at least in a book written by Harvard PhDs with Ted talks to give.

    For most academics in the social sciences and the humanities “big data” is a term more likely to get caught in the throat than inspire butterflies in the stomach. While Aiden and Michel certainly acknowledge that old-fashion textual analysis (50) and theory (20) will have a place in this brave new world of charts and numbers, they provide a number of contrasts to suggest the relative poverty of even the most brilliant scholar in the face of big data. One hypothetical in particular, that is not directly answered but is strongly implied, spoke to my discipline specifically:

    Consider the following question: Which would help you more if your quest was to learn about contemporary human society—unfettered access to a leading university’s department of sociology, packed with experts on how societies function, or unfettered access to Facebook, a company whose goal is to help mediate human social relationships online? (12)

    The existential threat at the heart of this question was catalyzed for many people in Roger Burrows and Mike Savage’s 2007 “The Coming Crisis of Empirical Sociology,” an early canary singing the worry of what Nigel Thrift has called “knowing capitalism” (2005). Knowing capitalism speaks to the ways that capitalism has begun to take seriously the task of “thinking the everyday” (1) by embedding information technologies within “circuits of practice” (5). For Burrows and Savage these practices can and should be seen as a largely unrecognized world of sophisticated and profit-minded sociology that makes the quantitative tools of academics look like “a very poor instrument” in comparison (2007: 891).

    Indeed, as Burrows and Savage note, the now ubiquitous social survey is a technology invented by social scientists, folks who were once seen as strikingly innovative methodologists (888). Despite ever more sophisticated statistical treatments however, the now over 40 year old social survey remains the heart of social scientific quantitative methodology in a radically changed context. And while declining response rates, a constraining nation-based framing and competition from privately-funded surveys have all decreased the efficacy of academic survey research (890), nothing has threatened the discipline like the embedded and “passive” collecting technologies that fuel big data. And with these methodological changes come profound epistemological ones: questions of how, when, why and what we know of the world. These methods are inspiring changing ideas of generalizability and new expectations around the temporality of research. Does it matter, for example, that studies have questioned the accuracy of the FitBit? The growing popularity of these devices suggests at the very least that sociologists should not count on empirical rigor to save them from irrelevance.

    As academia reorganizes around the speculative potential of digital technologies, there is an increasing pile of capital available to those academics able to translate between the discourses of data capitalism and a variety of disciplinary traditions. And the lure of this capital is perhaps strongest in the humanities, whose scholars have been disproportionately affected by state economic retrenchment on education spending that has increasingly prioritized quantitative, instrumental, and skill-based majors. The increasing urgency in the humanities to use bigger and faster tools is reflected in the surprisingly minimal hand wringing over the politics of working with companies like Facebook, Twitter and Google. If there is trepidation in the N-grams project recounted in Uncharted, it is mostly coming from Google, whose lawyers and engineers have little incentive to bother themselves with the politically fraught, theory-driven, Institutional Review Board slow lane of academic production. The power imbalance of this courtship leaves those academics who decide to partner with these companies at the mercy of their epistemological priorities and, as Uncharted demonstrates, the cultural aesthetics of corporate tech.

    This is a vision of the public humanities refracted through the language of public relations and the “measurable outcomes” culture of the American technology industry. Uncharted has taken to heart the power of (re)branding to change the valence of your work: Aiden and Michel would like you to call their big data inflected historical research “culturomics” (22). In addition to a hopeful attempt to coin a buzzy new work about the digital, culturomics linguistically brings the humanities closer to the supposed precision, determination and quantifiability of economics. And lest you think this multivalent bringing of culture to capital—or rather the renegotiation of “the relationship between commerce and the ivory tower” (8)—is unseemly, Aiden and Michel provide an origin story to show how futile this separation has been.

    But the desire for written records has always accompanied economic activity, since transactions are meaningless unless you can clearly keep track of who owns what. As such, early human writing is dominated by wheeling and dealing: a menagerie of bets, chits, and contracts. Long before we had the writings of prophets, we had the writing of profits. (9)

    And no doubt this is true: culture is always already bound up with economy. But the full-throated embrace of culturomics is not a vision of interrogating and reimagining the relationship between economic systems, culture and everyday life; [1] rather it signals the acceptance of the idea of culture as transactional business model. While Google has long imagined itself as a company with a social mission, they are a publicly held company who will be punished by investors if they neglect their bottom line of increasing the engagement of eyeballs on advertisements. The N-gram Viewer does not make Google money, but it perhaps increases public support for their larger book-scanning initiative, which Google clearly sees as a valuable enough project to invest many years of labor and millions of dollars to defend in court.

    This vision of the humanities is transactionary in another way as well. While much of Uncharted is an attempt to demonstrate the profound, game-changing implications of the N-gram viewer, there is a distinctly small-questions, cocktail-party-conversation feel to this type of inquiry that seems ironically most useful in preparing ABD humanities and social science PhDs for jobs in the service industry than in training them for the future of academia. It might be more precise to say that the N-gram viewer is architecturally designed for small answers rather than small questions. All is resolved through linear projection, a winner and a loser or stasis. This is a vision of research where the precise nature of the mediation (what books have been excluded? what is the effect of treating all books as equally revealing of human culture? what about those humans whose voices have been systematically excluded from the written record?) is ignored, and where the actual analysis of books, and indeed the books themselves, are black-boxed from the researcher.

    Uncharted speaks to perils of doing research under the cloud of existential erasure and to the failure of academics to lead with a different vision of the possibilities of quantification. Collaborating with the wealthy corporate titans of data collection requires an acceptance of these companies own existential mandate: make tons of money by monetizing a dizzying array of human activities while speculatively reimagining the future to attempt to maintain that cash flow. For Google, this is a vision where all activities, not just “googling” are collected and analyzed in a seamlessly updating centralized system. Cars, thermostats, video games, photos, businesses are integrated not for the public benefit but because of the power of scale to sell or rent or advertise products. Data is promised as a deterministic balm for the unknowability of life and Google’s participation in academic research gives them the credibility to be your corporate (sen.se) mother. What, might we imagine, are the speculative possibilities of networked data not beholden to shareholder value?
    _____

    Benjamin Haber is a PhD candidate in Sociology at CUNY Graduate Center and a Digital Fellow at The Center for the Humanities. His current research is a cultural and material exploration of emergent infrastructures of corporeal data through a queer theoretical framework. He is organizing a conference called “Queer Circuits in Archival Times: Experimentation and Critique of Networked Data” to be held in New York City in May 2016.

    Back to the essay

    _____

    Notes

    [1] A project desperately needed in academia, where terms like “neoliberalism,” “biopolitics” and “late capitalism” more often than not are used briefly at end of a short section on implications rather than being given the critical attention and nuanced intentionality that they deserve.

    Works Cited

    Savage, Mike, and Roger Burrows. 2007. “The Coming Crisis of Empirical Sociology.” Sociology 41 (5): 885–99.

    Thrift, Nigel. 2005. Knowing Capitalism. London: SAGE.

  • A Temporal Humanism: A Review of Joseph Frank's Responses to Modernity

    A Temporal Humanism: A Review of Joseph Frank's Responses to Modernity

    by Nick Levey

    Working in an Australian university, it’s easy to be persuaded by James Ley’s claim that a persistent quality of modern literary criticism is “a nagging sense of doubt about its necessity.”¹ In a familiar narrative, recent uncertainties in the Australian higher-education market (including the ever-looming deregulation of fees, which the Abbott government seems determined to leave as its education legacy)² continue to cast unease through student and academic cohorts, and it can be difficult not to let worries about enrollments and redundancies creep into the background of one’s writing. An institution I’m familiar with was this year forced to cut its first-year English offerings from six courses to two, for instance, not to mention almost proportional losses of departmental staff. And while there are pedagogical justifications for the reconfigured program, everyone certainly wonders what might happen to the remainders at the next shuffling of the cards.

    Unease is effortless to entertain, but one can make more productive use of doubts about the utility of criticism to show that what has sustained the activity of writing about writing is not just the usefulness of ideas, interpretations, and evaluations, but of characters. Like literature itself, the history of criticism is one defined by character types, writers who operate as necessary ciphers for certain kinds of cultural positioning, of manners, sensitivities, and standpoints that meaningfully stir and satisfy the needs of readers just as much as Hamlet or Philip Pirrip. The point is that the necessity of criticism can be articulated equally by the roles critics play as much as in anything they say.

    There are individual figures that predominate in this scene – Eliot and Richards, Moretti and Sontag. But there are wider subdivisions that describe their roles too, Ley’s aforementioned book suggesting we see at least two broad categories. The first is the figure of the “public critic,” the practitioner of what, following George Watson, Ley calls “descriptive criticism,” an “informal combination of personal responsiveness and literary analysis” (The Critic in the Modern World, 3). This persona speaks to practical concerns of working within the public sphere: the difficulty of achieving individuation while addressing a mass audience, of communicating mastery without seeming haughty, of working to tight deadlines. On the other side of the divide lies the academic critic. This character is more beholden to institutional considerations, and so has something of a vested interest in demonstrating the specialization of his or her pastime (if it needs to be taught in a university, literary criticism must inherently have something of a technical nature),³ and developing this specialization into an aesthetic. The history of modern criticism sees these two roles and their respective values in increasing conflict, with one side’s strengths appearing as weaknesses to the opposition. The public critic’s ready comprehensibility is, for example, touted as the sign of a thinker who is “not thinking hard enough” (The Critic in the Modern World, 3) while the abstruse academic is lambasted as a scion of institutional routinization.

    The late American critic Joseph Frank (1918-2013) was one of those interesting figures who managed to straddle both domains at different stages of his career. This is largely because he had the honor of being well known for two very different critical exercises: a founding work of narrative poetics promoting the spatial appraisal of modern literature, and a towering literary biography, his five-volume study of Fyodor Dostoevsky universally praised as a masterwork of the genre. Frank’s idea of spatial form has, as Kermode puts it “entered the jargon of the graduate school” (“A Reply to Joseph Frank”), but the Dostoevsky biography and much of the remainder of his critical work expresses an affinity for the practice and politics of the public critic, eschewing the academy’s technical values and mannerisms. The present volume under review, Responses to Modernity: Essays in the Politics of Culture (Fordham UP 2012) certainly operates most consistently within this non-academic role: totalizing comments on the humanistic value of literature and the encouragement to appreciate the importance of personal narrative show Frank’s preference for a style of criticism that works outside of institutional conventions. More than any coherence of reply to the current landscape, what is offered throughout is the history of a thinker engaging with the many characters of modern writing and thought, with Frank’s ultimate response to modernity describing literary criticism as a field from which the movements and tensions of culture can be clearly distilled.

    First published in 1945 and later collected in The Widening Gyre, “Spatial Form in Modern Literature” was the essay that built Frank’s reputation as a reader. Its argument posed that much of modern writing broke away from what Lessing had described as literature’s dependence on time, in favor of the spatial form more common to the plastic arts. In its literary manifestation, spatial form registered a questioning of historical progress, promoting cyclical, ‘mythical’ time through an increasing drive towards fragmentation and abstraction. The strategies for achieving this spatial form were varied: a text heavy in cross-references, a non-linear structure, the focus on freezing moments out of the stream of time. The Homeric parallels in Joyce, the self-referential language of The Waste Land, the maximalist detail in Proust all marked a growing interest in spatial form, and for Frank were to be seen as an attempt to escape the temporal and its incessant movement towards disorder. Following the ideas of Worringer, Frank argued that this spatial turn was a symptom of the ‘insecurity, instability, the feeling of loss of control’ typical of modernity (The Widening Gyre, 55). The fragmentation of Ulysses was not necessarily expressive of instability and chaos, then, but a wish to work against the flux of time, composing static and interconnected ‘linear-geometric’ chunks that secured a different kind of order. Hence the affinity in such works for mythic time, a comforting sense of repetition rather than the constant progression into uncharted territory. Spatial form, while seeming to mark an embrace of the new, was essentially conservative.

    When we read this essay today, nearly seventy years since its original publication, we witness an erudite and ambitious young reader trying to sum up his own age, synopsizing the moment in which he is present. As an act of totalization, the essay has been equally influential and controversial; Frank Kermode, among others, argued that spatial art’s ahistoricity seemed uneasily fascist (The Sense of An Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction, 110-111). But the essay still seems useful for approaching the peculiarities of some of today’s fiction. In a 2012 interview, Frank claimed that David Foster Wallace understood his biographical criticism better than he even understood it himself, Wallace’s review of the Dostoevsky project “being the best thing written on [his] work.” In Infinite Jest he might have seen confirmation of Wallace’s deep appreciation of his spatial theory too. It’s a well-known tidbit, for example, that the narrative of Infinite Jest was organized around the figure of a Sierpinski gasket, a fractal made up of recursively subdividing triangles, rather than a chronological timeline (Wallace discussed this in a 1996 interview with Michael Silverblatt). As such, the narrative has an obvious spatial element a reader must consider when trying to understand it. Events connect recursively to others, and the novel is often reticent to move forward in time, pointing deeper inwards to the detail of moments rather than along to the next event in its schedule. The ‘missing’ chunk at the end of Wallace’s novel expresses uncertainty in the ability of temporal narrative to act as an explanatory force, suggesting “the difficulty of understanding how what we have in the present came out of the work of the past,” as Samuel Cohen puts it in “To Wish to Try to Sing to the Next Generation: Infinite Jest’s History” (74). Such ambivalence for historical understanding lies at the core of Frank’s idea of spatial form. And the copious endnotes that force one to juggle the phonebook-sized novel as they flip back and forth through its pages instills the feeling that this object occupies a significant portion of space itself.

    It has been argued, however, that the reason Frank’s ideas still seem applicable today has more to do with spatial form’s presence across narrative art of all ages than with anything particular about the literature of modernity (see, for example,W.J.T. Mitchell’s Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology). At times, Frank’s definition can seem too flexible and vague, offering a list of qualities that strain to fit under the heading of ‘space.’ It’s a little arbitrary, for example, to see spatial as the necessary opposite of temporal, when atemporal form would just as easily describe much of The Waste Land, or Proust’s wish to freeze moments out of the flow of time. Perhaps the main problem one might have with Frank’s work is that it de-emphasizes the importance of the new temporal nuances developed in modernist works and their progeny. When Leopold Bloom wanders through the streets of Dublin, time moves at a pace unhurried by traditional literary form, shaped by different temporal criteria. That Wallace takes the time to describe all the objects in a waiting room that are blue, or catalogs at length a wall of banal photographs, shows a similar desire to make a reader conscious of the time of reading on top of whatever spatial aspect is performed by the contemporary literary work, similar to what we encounter in the long moments of near-stasis in the films of Andrei Tarkovsky.

    Writing an essay that continues to generate critical conservation seventy years after its publication is a feat of which we should all be envious. But ‘Spatial Form’ was Frank’s first and last sustained foray into the realm of poetics proper (if we ignore the somewhat awkward defense of the theory he wrote in 1977). In a brief introduction to Responses to Modernity, Frank tells us that many of the pieces it collects were written while occupied with the Dostoevsky project. Unsurprisingly, then, most are book reviews and occasional essays much closer to the form of literary biography than totalizing poetics; anyone looking for more of ‘Spatial Form’ will probably be a little disappointed if all they know of Frank’s work is what has circulated most commonly in academic circles. In an essay on Erich Kahler in which he quotes Kahler’s conviction that modern literature evidences an “all-embracement of discontinuity’, and a ‘spiritual transcendence of time” (124), it seems for a brief moment like spatial theory might gain another mention. But Frank is seemingly too humble to note the similarities.

    Responses to Modernity is divided into three sections: ‘France,’ ‘Germany and Romania,’ and ‘Critics and Criticism.’ Nearly half of the book is devoted to the literary and intellectual output of 19th and 20th century France. It’s interesting that Frank introduces many of these essays and reviews with a caution that his readers will probably not be familiar with the authors discussed within them, the worry so pervasive that three consecutive essays begin with much the same phrase. A piece on Jacques Maritain concedes that the philosopher’s name is ‘hardly likely’ to arouse in American readers “the thrill of excitement that marks an important intellectual encounter” (22). The account of Camus’s journalism hazards that American readers will only know him as philosopher or novelist. The essay on Malraux that follows these two begins by stating that such a name is “hardly likely to arouse the same turbulent response as it would have more than half a century ago” (45). This desire to be inclusive of his audience is a key component of Frank’s desired manner as a critic. It’s also clear that one of Frank’s first responses to modernity is the attempt to loosen this everyday reader’s focus from the Anglophone West, and to consider how many Joyces and Eliots reside in less familiar European traditions.

    Several of the pieces contain personal reflections that relate significant moments in Frank’s life as a reader, the biographical impulse becoming an autobiographical one, again showing his preference for working outside the terms of academic criticism. As Wallace notes in his review of the Dostoevsky biography, even though Frank was a child of New Criticism, his work proceeds as if such critical cornerstones as the Intentional Fallacy ‘didn’t even exist’, thereby giving ‘an enormous silent raspberry to his old teachers’ (Consider the Lobster, 259 n7.). In “Andre Malraux: A Hero of his Time”, Frank describes a formative scene of his youth, watching Malraux speak from a platform as part of a fund-raising tour in New York in 1937. Back then, the young Frank couldn’t understand a word of French, but still found it impossible “not to be swept away by the dynamic intensity of the passion [Malraux] managed to communicate above and beyond the limitations of language” (45). This ‘dynamic intensity’ behind the words, and the spectacle of the author as ‘hero of his time,’ battling against the injustices of history and impressing the public with his passion and vitality, is something that has fascinated Frank ever since, and threads its way through much of the present volume in one way or another. Frank’s view of the artist is of someone who affects and is affected by the history and politics of his time, but who also engages in something of a platonic lineage, defending the “genuine function of art” (73), and participating in a history that transcends the individual at the same time as he makes it. If the artist is a ‘hero’ he is also figure of cyclical return, arriving to rescue us from the undeserving suitors of culture.

    In ‘Paul Valéry: Masters and Friends,’ Frank offers a complex and insightful reading of the poet’s attempt to develop a mathematical schema that would account for the different moods and functions of the mind (reminding one, perhaps, of the psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion’s similarly ambitious ‘Grid,’ an attempt to chart the mechanisms of the Unconscious). Frank doesn’t note it here, but Valéry’s mathematics of the mental was primarily centered on geometry, and in it we see the development of a spatial view of mental life not dissimilar to supposed trends in modern art (again, Frank won’t highlight the parallels to his own work). We also see the poet attempting to raise the literary act above the mud of social and cultural life, into the realm of abstract symbols and the semi-autonomous language of mathematics. Frank’s success is in bringing him back to earth, showing that Valéry’s celebration of scientific rationality was actually the same thing he elsewhere despised about the modern world: “the moment he looked at the reality and actuality of the world created by his mathematical predilections, the poet and man of letters could not prevent himself from uttering a cry of protest” (18). The obsession with form and function over context develops through a complex recognition and denial of the situation of modernity. Likewise, Valéry’s attempt to attach the mind and its art to an impersonal schema is marred by his personal intransigence, an inability to measure himself “by the standards he applies so sternly to others” (20).

    A relaxed and humorous review of Sartre’s psychobiography of Jean Genet provides several polite jabs at the philosopher’s apparent inconsistencies and interpretive excesses, as well as showing us how literary biography shouldn’t be done. Frank argues that Sartre’s ‘existential psychoanalysis’ is inherently contradictory, and not much more than interpretive mania. While “this specially patented Sartrean method assumes that every aspect of a life, down to the minutest detail, is symbolically linked with the choice an existent makes among his own possibilities” (in Genet’s case, that of being a thief), it ultimately disavows Genet of any responsibility for his own actions: “their ultimate cause is not located in Genet himself.” Instead, “the trauma of his childhood is always to blame” (106). Distilling as unwieldy and prolix a tract as Saint Genet, comedien et martyr down to this simple contradiction shows Frank at his best as a reader.

    Throughout these first two sections we see that Frank has a fondness for ambitious (sometimes Quixotic) thinkers committed to universal abstractions and totalizations, but also for showing how social circumstances often work to undercut such impulses. Modernity simultaneously inspires and tempers human ambitions of mastery. Hitler and WWII, for example, appear often enough throughout the first two sections, enriching American culture by sending German intellectuals to its shores, ruining traditions of intellectual pursuit through their association with Nazism, and throwing authors in and out of popularity. One of the most interesting examples of this comes in Frank’s review of Alexandra Laignel-Lavastine’s book exposing the ties between Fascism and the early work of Ionesco, Eliade, and Cioran. Many readers and academics in postwar America, where the three Romanians had emigrated, had no knowledge of these writers’ pasts, and Eliade in particular was shrewd and shameless in covering his tracks, confident that the archives of prewar Romania were distant enough from the U.S. to conceal his association with the Iron Guard and fascist ideology. Even when word started to seep out, Eliade’s defenses never faltered. In these cases Frank seems to find affirmation of the particular approach to criticism he encourages in the field of biography, the importance of joining the life of the author to his work proven. Saul Bellow’s appearance at the funeral of the once openly anti-Semitic Eliade shows what embarrassments occur without the work of patient and world-ranging scholarship to recover what lies hidden in the archives of the past.

    “Erich Kahler and the Quest for a Human Absolute,” a combination of what were originally two separate essays, sees Frank writing most explicitly about his own ‘politics of culture’, but in a manner that points to some of the problems in his response to modernity. Frank quotes Kahler’s claim that never before has a malaise spread across the world on such a massive scale as in the twentieth century. Kahler believes that the emotional distress of modernity is unique, and stems from not just the absence of objective values, but a withering of the ‘faculty of valuation altogether’ (126). Frank agrees with Kahler, and suggests that nothing in the “past fifty years [has] infirmed the acuity of his diagnosis,” calling it “prophetic” (126). But he is probably too easily lured into Kahler’s dramatics here. Yes, the sustained spread of ‘existential’ malaise might appear unique and previously undocumented, but this has as much to do with the technological and communicational situation of modernity than anything particularly calamitous about our ‘values’. The nature of all kinds of modern technology (from cruise missiles to social media) means that experiences are increasingly shared across greater distances, and recorded more widely and easily. So to note, as Kahler does, that we “do not know of any document relating such a consciously sustained and far-reaching existential experience before the beginning of our century” (124) is a bit of a moot point when we consider that it is only in modernity (with globalization and the spread of international media) that the having and recording of such globalized experiences has become truly possible. Objective values won’t erase the malaise of widespread experience either, presumably, despite what Kahler prescribes as panacea; only a devolution of modern industry and communicational technology will. And that’s just not going to happen any time soon, at least without the coming of an even worse ‘predicament’ (e.g. catastrophic climate change). Globally pervasive moods come with the territory of modernity, but are not necessarily signs of its inherent brokenness.

    Frank’s fondness for Kahler betrays his predominantly conservative response to modern culture. For although he began his career as a celebrator of avant-garde poetics, he has ended it as something of a nostalgic piner, which to be fair might just be the inevitable consequence of having such a long career in the critical limelight (Blake wrote that the man who never changes his mind is like standing water, but there probably comes a point when all the mind wants to do is be still). As expressed in the Kahler essay, Frank sees the work of Foucault and Derrida as symptoms of the technological rationalization of modern culture, carrying further the “functionalization of the human in abject imitation of the physical sciences” (127). Foucault would argue, of course, that this is precisely what his thought is directed against. Nevertheless, throughout Responses to Modernity Frank has a bone to pick with these strands of French thought, and their influence on Anglophone literary criticism in particular. Although, as noted above, Frank feels that French literature is under-read in America today, he implies on several occasions that French theory is over-read, responsible for much of what he resists in the role of the academic critic. In an essay on the poetry and criticism of Yves Bonnefoy, he exclaims that when it has “when criticism all too often turns into a literal murder of the artist by the critic, what a relief it is to read Bonnefoy’s serene meditations on art and literature as part of man’s eternal metaphysical quest for the ultimate meaning of human life!” (72). Frank is mocking his own nostalgic passions just a little here, but throughout many of these essays he consistently expresses frustration with the manner in which the institutionalized form of criticism has supposedly taken to reading and writing about literary works.

    Dissatisfaction with capital-T theory is a common interest among many readers who work within the domain of Ley’s ‘public criticism’, and is an interesting historical phenomenon in its own right. Theory’s association with institutional values sees it posed often enough as an enemy to ‘organic’ literary principles and production, even though much current literature is a form of institutional output itself (here I have in mind Mark McGurl’s essential The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing). It’s not as if Frank has remained entirely divorced from modern literary theory; he was responsible, after all, for bringing both Paul de Man and Derrida to America to give Gauss seminars at Princeton. But his dismissal of modern critical practice is often a little hasty and reactionary. To be fair, sometimes his thoughts are elegant and perceptive: he sees the shift from structuralism to post-structuralism, for example, as just another cycle in the continual oscillation between viewing works of art as autonomous objects or as productions that interact with key areas of human life (181). At other points his reductions seem more intransigent than illuminating, offering only curmudgeonly dismissals of a “younger generation” of readers. In one such jab he bemoans the “recent critical orthodoxies” that describe language as “entirely non-referential and thus isolate literature from any true human significance” (72). Frank must be forgetting that non-referential (or at least self-referential) language featured in his account of Eliot’s poetry in “Spatial Form in Modern Literature,” and there it was still able to express something of the human condition. And I’m not sure how any writing produced by a human wouldn’t express something of human significance; even a novel written by a computer would surely have such resonances. A basic term lacking from Frank’s vocabulary seems to be post-humanism, which might offer him a way of speaking more productively about developments he can only define as dehumanizing.

    Coming out the other side of these criticisms, Frank appears as an unashamed humanist. There is of course nothing wrong with this, were it not that humanism is often just a word used to preclude certain kinds of critical work, preferring essentialisms like the “fundamental issues of human life” (74) or “genuine function of art” (73). What humanism seems to mean for Frank can probably be traced back to that youthful encounter with Malraux in which he grew overwhelmed by language figured as a communication of pure feeling, beyond the sense of words. Many of the other essays express similar closeness to authors as people, and this closeness as a necessary factor in their appreciation. To write about Nicola Chiaromonte is “to say farewell to an old friend” (86). For those who knew it well, the personality of Richard Blackmur shone through his work and accounted “for the influence he exercised and the loyalty he inspired” (186). Reflecting on his personal acquaintance with the above-mentioned Cioran, Frank cannot find it within himself to believe that “the brilliantly sardonic, self-mocking, totally engaging and fascinating personality that I knew could not have been a conscious manipulator who would set out deliberately to deceive” (153-54). We’ll take Frank at his word, but one wonders: if he had not known Cioran in person would he be so ready to defend the genuineness of his reformed status? The force of personality convinces Frank more than other evidence, and his own character and mannerisms in these essays should, he hopes, convince us too. In some ways, Frank sees good literature and criticism as secondary productions of a generosity and brilliance of ‘spirit,’ entry points into the personality of the human behind them, which is the real point of it all.

    The last section of Responses of Modernity contains reviews of American and British works of criticism. Reflecting elsewhere on the lay of the literary land in 2012, Frank said that ‘even the book reviews are written in a way that disappoints me’, and criticized reviewers for ‘staying on top of the book, on its surface’ (407), rather than penetrating it. Much of this closing section thus seems included to show how he thought the job best done. Mostly all of the projects he considers here are totalizing ones attempting to sum up a form or a field (the novel, literary realism, etc.), continuing his fondness for ambitious thinkers. Some of the books reviewed are well-known titles, such as Ian Watts’ Rise of the Novel, and Eliot’s To Criticize the Critic; others less so, including Ian Williams’ The Idea of the Novel in Europe, and Patricia Dreschel Tobin’s Time and the Novel. One of the highlights is his generous treatment of Tobin’s book. Despite his distaste for the intellectual trends Tobin has imbibed, Frank can still see through to merits at the core of her work. One wishes he treated other texts influenced by Theory with as much patience as he does here.

    The overall difficulty of reviewing a book consisting mostly of reviews itself is that one feels obliged to try and discover an overall consistency when often the title is the primary organizing thread. Thankfully, there are common themes appearing throughout the book: the struggle to come to terms with the value of rationality in the wake of the wars; the placing of literary history in a transatlantic context; the difficulty of totalization in an era defined by complexity. But, in the end, to quote Frank’s review of Eliot’s To Criticize the Critic, these pieces are probably as valuable “for their occasional personal glimpses than for anything they have to say” (157). This might sound disparaging, but it’s not intended to be. And given Frank’s passion for the personal I don’t think he would find it that way either. How he chooses to respond to modernity – as a condition, a literature, an engagement with people – is defined by his character as a critic and the manner in which his work raises personality as an integral part of literary value. Frank’s personality and passions make this a consistent and worthwhile collection, especially for readers interested in how the complicated history of the twentieth century is articulated in the competing habits, mannerisms, and values of public intellectuals. If it’s overly easy to focus on the institutional problems affecting criticism in the current scene, Frank’s work reminds us that a large part of what is vital about criticism cannot be removed from the personal.

    Nick Levey teaches in the Department of English at La Trobe University (AUS). His doctoral dissertation, entitled “Giants and Junk: Contemporary Maximalism and the Uses of Detail,” was devoted to writers such as David Foster Wallace, Thomas Pynchon, and Nicholson baker, among others. He is currently writing about Post-Press Literature and the recent rise of digitally self-published authors, the anxieties of legitimacy that surround self-publishing in the current market and how means of publication affect our understanding of literary value, enjoyment, and agency.

    Notes

    1. James Ley, The Critic in the Modern World: Public Criticism from Samuel Johnson to James Wood (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), 1.
    2. Michelle Grattan, ‘University Fee Deregulation Blocked but Pyne Pledges to Fight On,’ The Conversation, March 17, 2015, accessed April 5, 2015. https://theconversation.com/university-fee-deregulation-blocked-but-pyne-pledges-to-fight-on-38912.
    3. See for example Stephen Schryer, Fantasies of the New Class: Ideologies of Professionalism in Post-World War II American Fiction (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 31.
  • Who Big Data Thinks We Are (When It Thinks We're Not Looking)

    Who Big Data Thinks We Are (When It Thinks We're Not Looking)

    Dataclysm: Who We Are (When We Think No One's Looking) (Crown, 2014)a review of Christian Rudder, Dataclysm: Who We Are (When We Think No One’s Looking) (Crown, 2014)
    by Cathy O’Neil
    ~
    Here’s what I’ve spent the last couple of days doing: alternatively reading Christian Rudder’s new book Dataclysm and proofreading a report by AAPOR which discusses the benefits, dangers, and ethics of using big data, which is mostly “found” data originally meant for some other purpose, as a replacement for public surveys, with their carefully constructed data collection processes and informed consent. The AAPOR folk have asked me to provide tangible examples of the dangers of using big data to infer things about public opinion, and I am tempted to simply ask them all to read Dataclysm as exhibit A.

    Rudder is a co-founder of OKCupid, an online dating site. His book mainly pertains to how people search for love and sex online, and how they represent themselves in their profiles.

    Here’s something that I will mention for context into his data explorations: Rudder likes to crudely provoke, as he displayed when he wrote this recent post explaining how OKCupid experiments on users. He enjoys playing the part of the somewhat creepy detective, peering into what OKCupid users thought was a somewhat private place to prepare themselves for the dating world. It’s the online equivalent of a video camera in a changing booth at a department store, which he defended not-so-subtly on a recent NPR show called On The Media, and which was written up here.

    I won’t dwell on that aspect of the story because I think it’s a good and timely conversation, and I’m glad the public is finally waking up to what I’ve known for years is going on. I’m actually happy Rudder is so nonchalant about it because there’s no pretense.

    Even so, I’m less happy with his actual data work. Let me tell you why I say that with a few examples.

    Who Are OKCupid Users?

    I spent a lot of time with my students this summer saying that a standalone number wouldn’t be interesting, that you have to compare that number to some baseline that people can understand. So if I told you how many black kids have been stopped and frisked this year in NYC, I’d also need to tell you how many black kids live in NYC for you to get an idea of the scope of the issue. It’s a basic fact about data analysis and reporting.

    When you’re dealing with populations on dating sites and you want to conclude things about the larger culture, the relevant “baseline comparison” is how well the members of the dating site represent the population as a whole. Rudder doesn’t do this. Instead he just says there are lots of OKCupid users for the first few chapters, and then later on after he’s made a few spectacularly broad statements, on page 104 he compares the users of OKCupid to the wider internet users, but not to the general population.

    It’s an inappropriate baseline, made too late. Because I’m not sure about you but I don’t have a keen sense of the population of internet users. I’m pretty sure very young kids and old people are not well represented, but that’s about it. My students would have known to compare a population to the census. It needs to happen.

    How Do You Collect Your Data?

    Let me back up to the very beginning of the book, where Rudder startles us by showing us that the men that women rate “most attractive” are about their age whereas the women that men rate “most attractive” are consistently 20 years old, no matter how old the men are.

    Actually, I am projecting. Rudder never actually specifically tells us what the rating is, how it’s exactly worded, and how the profiles are presented to the different groups. And that’s a problem, which he ignores completely until much later in the book when he mentions that how survey questions are worded can have a profound effect on how people respond, but his target is someone else’s survey, not his OKCupid environment.

    Words matter, and they matter differently for men and women. So for example, if there were a button for “eye candy,” we might expect women to choose more young men. If my guess is correct, and the term in use is “most attractive”, then for men it might well trigger a sexual concept whereas for women it might trigger a different social construct; indeed I would assume it does.

    Since this isn’t a porn site, it’s a dating site, we are not filtering for purely visual appeal; we are looking for relationships. We are thinking beyond what turns us on physically and asking ourselves, who would we want to spend time with? Who would our family like us to be with? Who would make us be attractive to ourselves? Those are different questions and provoke different answers. And they are culturally interesting questions, which Rudder never explores. A lost opportunity.

    Next, how does the recommendation engine work? I can well imagine that, once you’ve rated Profile A high, there is an algorithm that finds Profile B such that “people who liked Profile A also liked Profile B”. If so, then there’s yet another reason to worry that such results as Rudder described are produced in part as a result of the feedback loop engendered by the recommendation engine. But he doesn’t explain how his data is collected, how it is prompted, or the exact words that are used.

    Here’s a clue that Rudder is confused by his own facile interpretations: men and women both state that they are looking for relationships with people around their own age or slightly younger, and that they end up messaging people slightly younger than they are but not many many years younger. So forty year old men do not message twenty year old women.

    Is this sad sexual frustration? Is this, in Rudder’s words, the difference between what they claim they want and what they really want behind closed doors? Not at all. This is more likely the difference between how we live our fantasies and how we actually realistically see our future.

    Need to Control for Population

    Here’s another frustrating bit from the book: Rudder talks about how hard it is for older people to get a date but he doesn’t correct for population. And since he never tells us how many OKCupid users are older, nor does he compare his users to the census, I cannot infer this.

    Here’s a graph from Rudder’s book showing the age of men who respond to women’s profiles of various ages:

    dataclysm chart 1

    We’re meant to be impressed with Rudder’s line, “for every 100 men interested in that twenty year old, there are only 9 looking for someone thirty years older.” But here’s the thing, maybe there are 20 times as many 20-year-olds as there are 50-year-olds on the site? In which case, yay for the 50-year-old chicks? After all, those histograms look pretty healthy in shape, and they might be differently sized because the population size itself is drastically different for different ages.

    Confounding

    One of the worst examples of statistical mistakes is his experiment in turning off pictures. Rudder ignores the concept of confounders altogether, which he again miraculously is aware of in the next chapter on race.

    To be more precise, Rudder talks about the experiment when OKCupid turned off pictures. Most people went away when this happened but certain people did not:

    dataclysm chart 2

    Some of the people who stayed on went on a “blind date.” Those people, which Rudder called the “intrepid few,” had a good time with people no matter how unattractive they were deemed to be based on OKCupid’s system of attractiveness. His conclusion: people are preselecting for attractiveness, which is actually unimportant to them.

    But here’s the thing, that’s only true for people who were willing to go on blind dates. What he’s done is select for people who are not superficial about looks, and then collect data that suggests they are not superficial about looks. That doesn’t mean that OKCupid users as a whole are not superficial about looks. The ones that are just got the hell out when the pictures went dark.

    Race

    This brings me to the most interesting part of the book, where Rudder explores race. Again, it ends up being too blunt by far.

    Here’s the thing. Race is a big deal in this country, and racism is a heavy criticism to be firing at people, so you need to be careful, and that’s a good thing, because it’s important. The way Rudder throws it around is careless, and he risks rendering the term meaningless by not having a careful discussion. The frustrating part is that I think he actually has the data to have a very good discussion, but he just doesn’t make the case the way it’s written.

    Rudder pulls together stats on how men of all races rate women of all races on an attractiveness scale of 1-5. It shows that non-black men find their own race attractive and non-black men find black women, in general, less attractive. Interesting, especially when you immediately follow that up with similar stats from other U.S. dating sites and – most importantly – with the fact that outside the U.S., we do not see this pattern. Unfortunately that crucial fact is buried at the end of the chapter, and instead we get this embarrassing quote right after the opening stats:

    And an unintentionally hilarious 84 percent of users answered this match question:

    Would you consider dating someone who has vocalized a strong negative bias toward a certain race of people?

    in the absolute negative (choosing “No” over “Yes” and “It depends”). In light of the previous data, that means 84 percent of people on OKCupid would not consider dating someone on OKCupid.

    Here Rudder just completely loses me. Am I “vocalizing” a strong negative bias towards black women if I am a white man who finds white women and Asian women hot?

    Especially if you consider that, as consumers of social platforms and sites like OKCupid, we are trained to rank all the products we come across to ultimately get better offerings, it is a step too far for the detective on the other side of the camera to turn around and point fingers at us for doing what we’re told. Indeed, this sentence plunges Rudder’s narrative deeply into the creepy and provocative territory, and he never fully returns, nor does he seem to want to. Rudder seems to confuse provocation for thoughtfulness.

    This is, again, a shame. A careful conversation about the issues of what we are attracted to, what we can imagine doing, and how we might imagine that will look to our wider audience, and how our culture informs those imaginings, are all in play here, and could have been drawn out in a non-accusatory and much more useful way.


    _____

    Cathy O’Neil is a data scientist and mathematician with experience in academia and the online ad and finance industries. She is one of the most prominent and outspoken women working in data science today, and was one of the guiding voices behind Occupy Finance, a book produced by the Occupy Wall Street Alt Banking group. She is the author of “On Being a Data Skeptic” (Amazon Kindle, 2013), and co-author with Rachel Schutt of Doing Data Science: Straight Talk from the Frontline (O’Reilly, 2013). Her Weapons of Math Destruction is forthcoming from Random House. She appears on the weekly Slate Money podcast hosted by Felix Salmon. She maintains the widely-read mathbabe blog, on which this review first appeared.

    Back to the essay

  • The People’s Platform by Astra Taylor

    The People’s Platform by Astra Taylor

    image

    Or is it? : Astra Taylor’s The People’s Platform

    Review by Zachary Loeb

    ~

    Imagine not using the Internet for twenty-four hours.

    Really: no Internet from dawn to dawn.

    Take a moment to think through the wide range of devices you would have to turn off and services you would have to avoid to succeed in such a challenge. While a single day without going online may not represent too outlandish an ordeal such an endeavor would still require some social and economic gymnastics. From the way we communicate with friends to the way we order food to the way we turn in assignments for school or complete tasks in our jobs – our lives have become thoroughly entangled with the Internet. Whether its power and control are overt or subtle the Internet has come to wield an impressive amount of influence over our lives.

    All of which should serve to raise a discomforting question – so, who is in control of the Internet? Is the Internet a fantastically democratic space that puts the power back in the hands of people? Is the Internet a sly mechanism for vesting more power in the hands of the already powerful, whilst distracting people with a steady stream of kitschy content and discounted consumerism? Or, is the Internet a space relying on levels of oft-unseen material infrastructures with a range of positive and negative potentialities? These are the questions that Astra Taylor attempts to untangle in her book The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age (Metropolitan Books, 2014). It is the rare example of a book where the title itself forms a thesis statement of sorts: the Internet was and can be a platform for the people but this potential has been perverted, and thus there needs to be a “taking back” of power (and culture).

    At the outset Taylor locates her critique in the space between the fawning of the “techno-optimists” and the grousing of the “techno-skeptics.” Far from trying to assume a “neutral” stance, Taylor couches her discussion of the “techno” by stepping back to consider the social, political, and economic forces that shape the “techno” reality that inspires optimism and skepticism. Taylor, therefore, does not build her argument upon a discussion of the Internet as such but builds her argument around a discussion of the Internet as it is and as it could be. Unfortunately the “as it currently is” of this “new media” evinces that: “Corporate power and the quest for profit are as fundamental to new media as old.” (8)

    Thus Taylor sets up the conundrum of the Internet – it is at once a media platform with a great deal of democratic potential, and yet this potential has been continually appropriated for bureaucratic, technocratic, and indeed plutocratic purposes.

    Over the course of The People’s Platform Taylor moves from one aspect of the Internet (and its related material infrastructures) to another – touching upon a range of issues from the Internet’s history, to copyright and the way it has undermined “cultural creators” ability to earn a living, the way the Internet persuades and controls, across the issues of journalism and e-waste, to the ways in which the Internet can replicate the misogyny and racism of the offline world.

    With her background as a documentary filmmaker (she directed the film The Examined Life [which is excellent]) Taylor is skilled in cutting deftly from one topic to the next, though this particular experience also gives her cause to dwell at length upon the matter of how culture is created and supported in the digital age. Indeed as a maker of independent films Taylor is particularly attuned to the challenges of making culturally valuable content in a time when free copies spread rapidly on-line. Here too Taylor demonstrates the link to larger economic forces – there are still highly successful “stars” and occasional stories of “from nowhere” success, but the result is largely that those attempting to eke out a nominal subsistence find it increasingly challenging to do so.

    As the Internet becomes the principle means of dissemination of material “cultural creators” find themselves bound to a system wherein the ultimate remuneration rarely accrues back to them. Likewise the rash of profit-driven mergers and shifting revenue streams has resulted in a steady erosion of the journalistic field. It is not – as Taylor argues – that there is a lack of committed “cultural creators” and journalists working today, it is that they are finding it increasingly difficult to sustain their efforts. The Internet, as Taylor describes it, is certainly making many people enormously wealthy but those made wealthy are more likely to be platform owners (think Google or Facebook) than those who fill those platforms with the informational content that makes them valuable.

    Though the Internet may have its roots in massive public investment and though the value of the Internet is a result of the labor of Internet users (example: Facebook makes money by selling advertisements based on the work you put it in on your profile), the Internet as it is now is often less of an alternative to society than it is a replication. The biases of the offline world are replicated in the digital realm, as Taylor puts it:

    “While the Internet offers marginalized groups powerful and potentially world-changing opportunities to meet and act together, new technologies also magnify inequality, reinforcing elements of the old order. Networks do not eradicate power: they distribute it in different ways, shuffling hierarchies and producing new mechanisms of exclusion.” (108)

    Thus, the Internet – often under the guise of promoting anonymity – can be a site for an explosion of misogyny, racism, classism, and an elitism blossoming from a “more-technologically-skilled-than-thou” position. There are certainly many “marginalized groups” and individuals trying to use the Internet to battle their historical silencing, but for every social justice minded video there is a comment section seething with the grunts of trolls. Meanwhile behind this all stand the same wealthy corporate interests that enjoyed privileged positions before the rise of the Internet. These corporate forces can wield the power they gain from the Internet to steer and persuade Internet users in such a way that the “curated experience” of the Internet is increasingly another way of saying, “what a major corporation thinks you (should) want.”

    image

    Breaking through the ethereal airs of the Internet, Taylor also grounds her argument in the material realities of the digital realm. While it is true that more and more people are increasingly online, Taylor emphasizes that there are still many without access and that the high-speed access enjoyed by some is not had by one and all. Furthermore, all of this access, all of these fanciful devices, all of these democratic dreams are reliant upon a physical infrastructure shot through with dangerous mining conditions, wretched laboring facilities, and toxic dumps where discarded devices eventually go to decay. Those who are able to enjoy the Internet as a positive feature in their day to day life are rarely the same people who worked in the mines, the assembly plants, or who will have to live on the land that has been blighted by e-waste.

    While Taylor refuses to ignore the many downsides associated with the Internet age she remains fixed on its positive potential. The book concludes without offering a simplistic list of solutions but nevertheless ends with a sense that those who care about the Internet’s non-corporate potential need to work to build a “sustainable digital future” (183). Though there are certainly powerful interests profiting from the current state of the Internet the fact remains that (in a historical sense) the Internet is rather young, and there is still time to challenge the shape it is taking. Considering what needs to be done, Taylor notes: “The solutions we need require collective, political action.” (218)

    It is a suggestion that carries a sentiment that people can band together to reassert control over the online commons that are steadily being enclosed by corporate interests. By considering the Internet as a public utility (a point being discussed at the moment in regards to Net Neutrality) and by focusing on democratic values instead of financial values – it may be possible for people to reverse (or at least slow) the corporate wave which is washing over the Internet.

    After all, the Internet is the result of massive public investment, why is it that it has been delivered into corporate hands? Ultimately, Taylor concludes (in a chapter titled “In Defense of the Commons: A Manifesto for Sustainable Culture”) that if people want the Internet to be a “people’s platform” that they will have to organize and fight for it (“collective, political”). In a time when the Internet is an important feature of society, it makes a difference if the Internet is an open “people’s platform” or a highly (if subtly) controlled corporate theme park. “The People’s Platform” requires people who care to raise their voices…such as the people who have read Astra Taylor’s book, perhaps.

    * * * * *

    With The People’s Platform Astra Taylor has made an effective and interesting contribution to the discussion around the nature of the Internet and its future. By emphasizing a political and economic critique she is able to pull the Internet away from a utopian fantasy in order to analyze it in terms of the competing forces that have shaped (and continue to shape) it. The perspective that Taylor brings, as a documentary filmmaker, allows her to drop the journalistic façade of objectivity in order to genuinely and forcefully engage with issues pertaining to the compensation of cultural creators in the age of digital dissemination. Whilst the sections that Taylor writes on the level of misogyny one encounters online and the section on e-waste make this book particularly noteworthy. Though each chapter of The People’s Platform could likely be extended into an entire book, it is in their interconnections that Taylor is able to demonstrate the layers of interconnected issues that are making such a mess of the Internet today. For the problem facing the online realm is not just corporate control – it is a slew of issues that need to be recognized in total (and in their interconnected nature) if any type of response is to be mounted.

    Though The People’s Platform is ostensibly about a conflict regarding the future of the Internet, the book is itself a site of conflicting sentiments. Though Taylor – at the outset – aims to avoid aligning herself with the “cheerleaders of progress” or “the prophets of doom” (4) the book that emerges is one that is in the stands of the “cheerleaders of progress” (even if with slight misgivings about being in those stands). The book’s title suggests that even with all of the problems associated with the Internet it still represents something promising, something worth fighting to “take back.” It is a point that is particularly troublesome to consider after Taylor’s description of labor conditions and e-waste. For one of the main questions that emerges towards the end of Taylor’s book – though it is not one she directly poses – makes problematic the book’s title, that question being: which “people” are being described in “the people’s platform?”

    image

    It may be tempting to answer such a question with a simplistic “well, all of the people” yet such a response is inadequate in light of the way that Taylor’s book clearly discusses the layers of control and dominance one finds surrounding the Internet. Can the Internet be “the people’s platform” for writers, journalists, documentary filmmakers, and activists with access to digital tools? Sure. But what of those described in the e-waste chapter – people living in oppressive conditions and toiling in factories where building digital devices puts them at risk of cancer or disassembling such devices poisons them and their families? Those people count as well, but those upon whom “the people’s platform” is built seem to be crushed beneath it, not able to get on top of it – to stand on “the people’s platform” is to stand on the hunched shoulders of others. It is true that Taylor takes this into account in emphasizing that something needs to be done to recognize and rectify this matter – but insofar as the material tools “the people” use to reach the Internet are built upon the repression and oppression of other people, it sours the very notion of the Internet as “the people’s platform.”

    This in turn raises another question: what would a genuine “people’s platform” look like? In the conclusion to the book Taylor attempts to answer this question by arguing for political action and increased democratic control over the Internet; however, one can easily imagine classifying the Internet as a “public utility” without doing anything to change the laboring conditions of those who build devices. Indeed, the darkly amusing element of The People’s Platform is that Taylor answers this question brilliantly on the second page of her book and then spends the following two hundred and thirty pages ignoring this answer.

    Taylor begins The People’s Platform with an anecdote about her youth in the pre-Internet (or pre-high speed Internet) era, wherein she recalls working on a small personally assembled magazine (a “zine”) which she would then have printed and distribute to friends and a variety of local shops. Looking back upon her time making zines, Taylor writes:
    “Today any kid with a smartphone and a message has the potential to reach more people with the push of a button that I did during two years of self-publishing.” (2)

    These lines from Taylor come only a sentence after she considers how her access to easy photocopying (for her zine) made it easier for her than it had been for earlier would-be publishers. Indeed, Taylor recalls:

    “a veteran political organizer told me how he and his friends had to sell blood in order to raise the funds to buy a mimeograph machine so they could make a newsletter in the early sixties.” (2)

    There are a few subtle moments in the above lines (from the second page of Taylor’s book) that say far more about a “people’s platform” than they let on. It is true that a smartphone gives a person “the potential to reach more people” but as the rest of Taylor’s book makes clear – it is not necessarily the case that people really do “reach more people” online. There are certainly wild success stories, but for “any kid” their reach with their smartphone may not be much greater than the number of people reachable with a photocopied zine. Furthermore, the zine audience might have been more engaged and receptive than the idle scanner of Tweets or Facebook updates – the smartphone may deliver more potential but actually achieve less.

    Nevertheless, the key aspects is Taylor’s comment about the “veteran political organizer” – this organizer (“and his friends”) were able to “buy a mimeograph machine so they could make a newsletter.” Is this different from buying a laptop computer, Internet access, and a domain name? Actually? Yes. Yes, it is. For once those newsletter makers bought the mimeograph machine they were in control of it – they did not need to worry about its Terms of Service changing, about pop-up advertisements, about their movements being tracked through the device, about the NSA having installed a convenient backdoor – and frankly there’s a good chance that the mimeograph machine they purchased had a much longer life than any laptop they would purchase today. Again – they bought and were able to control the means for disseminating their message, one cannot truly buy all of the means necessary for disseminating an online message (when one includes cable, ISP providers, etc…).

    The case of the mimeograph machine and the Internet is the question of what types of technologies represent genuine people’s platforms and which result in potential “people’s platforms” (note the quotation marks)? This is not to say that mimeograph machines are perfect (after all somebody did build that machine) but when considering technology in a democratic sense it is important to puzzle over whether or not (to borrow Lewis Mumford’s terminology) the tool itself is “authoritarian” or “democratic.” The way the Internet appears in Taylor’s book – with its massive infrastructure, propensity for centralized control, material reality built upon toxic materials – should at the very least make one question to what extent the Internet is genuinely a democratic “people’s” tool. Or, whether or not it is simply such a tool for those who are able to enjoy the bulk of the benefits and a minimum of the downsides. Taylor clearly does not want to be accused of being a “prophet of doom” – or of being a prophet for profit – but the sad result is that she jumps over the genuine people’s platform she describes on the second page in favor of building an argument for a platform that, by book’s end, seems to hardly be one for “the people” in any but a narrow sense of “the people.”

    The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age is a well written, solidly researched, and effectively argued book that raises many valuable questions. The book offers no simplistic panaceas but instead forces the reader to think through the issues – oftentimes by forcing them to confront uncomfortable facts about digital technologies (such as e-waste). As Taylor uncovers and discusses issue after bias after challenge regarding the Internet the question that haunts her text is whether or not the platform she is describing – the Internet – is really worthy of being called “The People’s Platform”? If so, to which “people” does this apply?

    The People’s Platform is well worth reading – but it is not the end of the conversation. It is the beginning of the conversation.

    And it is a conversation that is desperately needed.

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    The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age
    by Astra Taylor
    Metropolitan Books, 2014

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    Zachary Loeb is a writer, activist, librarian, and terrible accordion player. He earned his MSIS from the University of Texas at Austin, and is currently working towards an MA in the Media, Culture, and Communications department at NYU. His research areas include media refusal and resistance to technology, ethical implications of technology, alternative forms of technology, and libraries as models of resistance. Using the moniker “The Luddbrarian” Loeb writes at the blog librarianshipwreck, which is where this review originally appeared.

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