Ping me baby*

'There's No Such Thing as (Offline) Society'

2011-12-19T09:20:00.000-08:00

The standard line from the British media and our politicians is that the rioters attacked their own communities. "How could this happen?" - they ask without conviction while sweeping all manner of issues under a rug of shrill disgust. Rather than list them all, let us at least observe that the rioters' perception of community is radically different to the sortattributed to their nearest high street or physical environment. It is virtualand global, conditioned by shared platforms – often privileging commodity theft(filesharing) above legal and local geographical constraints. Indeed, ofthe suspected looters, 22% were under 18 years old, 51.1% between 18 to 24, and11.35% between the ages of 25 to 29.1A recent survey has shown that 43% of persons within the age range of themiddle set are members of online communities or networks designed specificallyfor filesharing.2 It is alsoreported that almost half the music in the average MP3 player collectioncomprises tracks that have not been paid for. Within the same demographic, thisadds up to around £750-worth of ‘stolen’ content per person.3

When one wonders at the lack of a manifesto or equivalent overtpolitical/ideological statement by the rioters we forget that the manifestoform – once avant-garde – seems positively baroque in relation to the economyof internet search terms. The nearest equivalent to statements produced by therioters were their text messages. These exhibited an instrumental economy oflanguage and – in the manner of searches – were conceptually organized aroundtwo propositions: hating cops (law breaking) and commodity desire.

Everyone from all sides of London meet up at the heart of London(central) OXFORD CIRCUS!!, Bare SHOPS are gonna get smashed up so come get some(free stuff!!!) fuck the feds we will send them back with OUR riot! >:O Deadthe ends and colour war for now so if you see a brother... SALUT! if you see afed... SHOOT!

Consider the fact that the cited text subordinates gang rivalrybased on the ends [neighbourhoods] and colours [ethnicities] to the overarchingsocial network. The text message is a boot command activating a new supra-gang/community:As Galloway and Thacker correctly state, ‘if there is one truism to the studyof networks, it is that networks are only networks when then are “live,” whenthey are enacted, embodied and rendered operational’.

Does this analysis paints a bleak picture? Alone, such virtualcommunities/networks for data theft might not be strong enough to make the jumpinto actions in the street. However, where the ‘real life’ conditions areamenable – through weakened social platforms in offline space – it is morelikely. Consider the fact that the riots began in Tottenham, where eight out oftwelve youth centres were closed in the couple of months immediately prior. Theerosion of offline societies strengthens online ones, or at least it doesnothing to fetter their influence in real life.

Beyond the UK, the rise of the pirate party in Sweden – as a directactivist response to the issue of government crackdown on filesharing – and nowin Germany shows that the supra-national, extra-territorial consumer-libertariancommunity forms born online have reached a key stage in their influence on theoffline world. That which is becoming formalized in Sweden and in Germany ismore chaotic on the UK streets but both are facets of the same trajectory. Inthe future there will be more surprises of this sort.5If one should doubt this claim it is worth considering a factestablished by a 2006 survey conducted by the Center for the Digital Future,which found that forty-three percent of online networkers in the United Statesfelt ‘“as strongly” about their Web community as they did about theirreal-world friends’.6

[1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/8698443/UK-riots-suspected-looters-statistics-and-court-cases.html

[2] Nearly twice as many as those between the ages of 25 to 44. http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/market-data-research/market-data/communications-market-reports/icmr06/overview/keythemes/

[3] http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/apr/07/digitalmusic.drm

[4]http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/aug/08/london-riots-facebook-twitter-blackberry

[5] One writer goes even further: ‘In the future, loose knit networksand open-source communities may sit side by side as equal powers with bothgovernments and the free market.’ Matt Mason, The Pirate’sDilemma, Allen Lane, London, 2008, p.207., p.240

[6] Matt Mason, The Pirate’sDilemma, Allen Lane, London, 2008, p.207.

Grotesque Futures

2011-11-13T16:55:00.001-08:00

Increasingly, when new forms of youth culture survive, its becausethey are things the media wouldn’t touch with a ten foot pole […] its only inthe outer limits of acceptability in society that grassroots movements can findmeaning. And pushing people to the limits of acceptability isn’t always a greatidea.[1]

This analysis by a digital generation marketeer almost reaches theprovocative conclusion that the Happy Slapping scourge, circa 2004, was as muchabout producing social cohesion – among uploaders and downloaders – as it was paradigmatically‘anti-social’ behaviour.[2]The last sentence is ventured as a kind of fig leaf but the rest of theanalysis is on point:

The reason happy slaps were a hit was because they were off limits[…] Happy slap TV was one thing left that kids could own without fear ofcorporate takeover […] New youth cultures can’t be safe as those of days goneby, because if they stay within socially acceptable limits, marketers pounce,and before long they are just another spectacle.[3]

Organic youthcultures, he continues, are covered with ‘branded pesticide’ before they candevelop and ‘only social weeds’ are left alone.[4]Leaving aside the issue of youth, briefly, we observe that the same process conditionedthe flash mob trend. In fact, we suspect that the apparent bad taste of theriots, like the horror of happy slaps, was as much a conscious attempt to avoidthe recuperative poison of marketeers as it was ‘senseless’. In the case of theformer, the politics of the grotesque seems to have emerged as an end game inwhat is now, quite openly, a war for public space and the practical definitionsof community. [5]

Bauman observes that even fear is eminently commodifiable – broughtto market in the form of CCTV cameras, security services, armored cars and aplethora of alternatives. Like liquid cash ready for any kind of investment, hestates, ‘the capital of fear can be turned into any kind of profit’.[6]By the same token, and contrary to some of the rioters’ intentions, even thepolitical grotesque of looting and chaos finds use in the work of RecreationalData, a group that – depending on who is asking or what reward is at stake – iseither a trend forecasting agency offering brand optimization for the digitalera or an art project staging ironiccriticism of such initiatives. The fact that the group’s identificatoryposition is unclear is perfectly suited to the moment, making them both goodtrend forecasters and good artists.[7]Whichever way, they are exemplars of entrepreneurial capitalistic practice,asking all the right questions:

Whencurrency collapses, what will take its place? How do you build brand equitywhen the markets are freewheeling? How do you turn the vague evidence of a memeinto solid wealth creation? How can you make mass civil disobedience work foryour brand? And how do you even begin to assess your cultural equity when fearand uncertainty are the order of the day?[8]

Addressing such urgent concerns in the promotionaldocument Currency Zones of the Future– distributed via USB – the group proposes to recuperate the riots as consumerdata-generation, replacing the pejorative designation ‘feral youth’ with the shoplifteras market indicator.[9] Despite the proposeddomestication of wild behavior the document’s rhetoric is unsurprisingly centredaround the issue of power play:

Dominatingthe market means dominating the psychological landscape of the crisis. TheState may be forced to interact with the looter and rioter as ‘criminal’, butwe may see the looter in terms of potential: as market-modifier and as trendbroadcaster.[10]

This advicecan’t be reduced to the status of mere provocation, as comments by at least onecorporate boss confirm. Rioters stole £700,000 worth of stock from JD SportsFashion outlets during the unrest and yet this news was welcomed by the company’sdirector who stated that it indicated ‘a strong demandfor our products on the high street’.[11]

Relational Data also discerns commodifiable authenticity in thepolitical grotesque, outlining ever more radical marketing opportunities:

The looterholds a golden opportunity for any brand, an uncommodified, unsculpted form of ‘realness’that fills the credibility deficit of the saturated market. The young looter offersa human form for pushing a brand on a level of reach and depth unseen since thebirth of rock ‘n’ roll and blue jeans. It will take a daring marketeer to ridethe wave, but taking advantage of this “rupture of the real” in the totalsocial conscience will touch a nerve to a real-world social identity thatp.49is both neglected and far more vital than constructed social identitiesfavoured by marketeers.[12]

As suggested, the cooption of an ‘unsculpted’ form of real worldidentity in the guise of street disorder by the purveyors of yesterday’s youth culture– ‘rock ‘n’ roll and blue jeans’ – should amount to a daring future strategy. However,this apparently novel prescription it is not so far from being realized. LeviStrauss’s Legacy commercial, part ofits Go Forth series, was being airedacross the UK while parts of London, Manchester and Birmingham went up inflames. The clip features scenes of couples kissing and live rock bands, beachsunsets and city streets thick with tear gas and riot police facing down goodlooking youths clad in skinny jeans.[13]The collision of marketing fiction and protest, in all of its grotesque permutations,is the new rule. Levi’s pulled the ad but if Relational Data is correct nexttime they won’t.

[1] Matt Mason, ThePirate’s Dilemma, Allen Lane, London, 2008, p.223-224

[2] “Happy slap TV” videos started to appear in numbers in 2004, filmedon camera phones and transmitted virally to other phones and over the Net […]The frightening fad became a national nightmare. Commuters worried for theirsafety as more and more people were slapped, punched, or kicked on the wayhome. In January 2005 more than ten people were charged with serious assaultfor happy slapping in London’. Ibid. p.224.

[3] Ibid. pp.224-225.

[4] Ibid. p.227.

[5] Of course, any social structure – however fleeting – whose foundingconditions are violent viral videos or flash mob civil disorder is a prettypoor form of community or ‘culture’. Nevertheless, such brutal reductions aresymptomatic of the ongoing privatization of public space and the consequentfall of ‘public man’.Richard Sennett, TheFall of Public Man, Knopf, New York, 1977.

[6] Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Times, Polity, London, 2007, p.12.

[7] As Groys would have it, there is ‘a new ambiguity between critique andadvertisement that is charicteristic of our time. In our media-driven culture,the fact that a certain political attitude or religious belief is publicallymentioned is of greater relevance that the way in which it is mentioned – be itpositive or negative, affirmative or critical’Boris Groys, History Becomes Form, MIT Press, London, p.70.

[8] Recreational Data, CurrencyZones of the Future, LuckyPDF, London, 2011. (USB stick/PDF).

[9] Ibid. p.45.

[10] Ibid. pp.47-48.

[11] http://www.metro.co.uk/news/876108-jd-sports-losing-700k-of-stock-in-uk-riots-shows-demand-is-strong-boss#ixzz1dCsHAxOT

[12] Recreational Data, Currency Zones of The Future,pp.49-51.

[13] http://www.forbes.com/sites/matthewnewton/2011/08/10/levis-latest-go-forth-ad-romanticizes-youth-riots-at-the-wrong-time/

Hacking Justice?

2011-10-28T04:14:00.000-07:00

Today, the law is considered more pure technicality than moral edifice - whether one is talking about lawyers, tax avoiders or looters. After the putative 'death of god' (ie. the birth of science - mechanical and informatic) its prohibitions look more like locks/phones that need 'cracking'. Young people's experience of consumer hardware and software teach the lesson: They areused to the passing parade of outmoded operating systems – Windows 97, SnowLeopard etc. This is just a basic fact of consumer technology. The perspective is only compounded bythe massive culture of loopholes – the exploit – known not justto hackers but to sub-hackers and, effectively, most youth in the West. Justice has been collapsed into material, ultimately disposable if desire is strong enough.

Masks 2 / Rites of Passage

2011-10-25T17:48:00.000-07:00

It would beinteresting to compare the demographics of illegal filesharers with those of the rioters. Both are commonly thought to be young people. But how different are the two activities? Arguably, some young rioters effected a transposition of the widespread anonymous ‘freedom to’ - piracy - practiced online intooffline space. It is provocative to consider how the underage status ofsome of the participants intersects with this reading. Aware of not being seen as adults they considered themselves invisible to law. At least, this is what thecops and press have already complained about. Thus, youth status was being deployed in a manner akinto an online pseudonym and an offline mask concealing the ‘real person’: a ‘freedomfrom’ enabling a piratical ‘freedom to’. The brazen lack of material masks worn by someof the underage actors registers this attitude and, paradoxically, represents a claim to 'adult' behaviour.

Although age ‘protects’ from some aspects oflaw (freedom from) by the same token it rules out full participationin all aspects of civil life, such as voting etc. In this sense, young people’s ‘freedom to’ islimited offline. The lore of teenage rebellion, invented in the mid twentieth century,was built around a manifest rejection/reaction to this fact, performed - in part - by expressions of ‘freedom to’ through sexuality –enacting or at least willing physical liberty in spite of hegemonic morality. Losing ones virginity in an overt way was the watershed mark of independence and a claim on adulthood even before 'legal age' was reached. Now, consider the kindof discussions taking place online at 4chan, where every user post is creditedto Anonymous – a site which has also generated a notorious hacker network ofthe same non-referential name – where losing one’s virginity has been eclipsedby another ultimate marker of ‘freedom to’:

Anonymous 09/12/11(Mon)20:13:32 No.353125661 [Reply]

At what ages did the following happen to you:

1) Learn to use torrents

2) Lose virginity

The majority of the respondents posted youngerages for torrent use than for sex. Using torrents – at least as implied by the question here, because everyseeking is guided by what is sought – is not just any old thing. In quarters suchas 4chan it represents the ultimate immaterial freedom – the non-physicalexpression of liberty. If the teenager was invented in the twentieth century -or made visible – then at least part of its structure waspremised on overturning the trauma of social/legal/cultural invisibility. Now the key trauma is being too visible and rites of passage areinvisible/anonymous and piratical.

Masks 1 / Anonymous & Pseudonymous Identification

2011-10-25T17:38:00.000-07:00

Another way in which online space conditioned the riot is through its commonplace cultures ofanonymity and pseudonymity. There are at least two modes of digital anonymity, and they accord to different visions of political liberty/agency. The same can be saidof online pseudonymity. The uptake of both by millions of users may precede a general/state realization that these gambits amount to actual political tactics/postions. Yet,the spread of such phenomena in the digital sphere is nevertheless setting the stagefor the offline acts. Or, put otherwise, perhaps the government andcommentators have failed to discern the ideological dimension of the riotsbecause their understanding of the relationship between ‘real life’ an onlineis impoverished. The ideology of the riots is playing out across the two fields and so far the state and corporate media have onlybeen looking for reasons in the latter. We need a new understanding of political agency that takes into accountthe liberties enacted online, with a view to understanding how these are beingenacted in and affecting real space. Until then, the riots will seem like a waking dream.

Whereas in the previous century anonymity was often seen as an alienatingcondition that threatened self-worth now the vast majority of us are subscribingto an equation of anonymity with political agency/liberty. Irrespective of ‘political’realization on the part of individuals, most digitally connected people use andabuse online psuedonymns – ie. filter email accounts, pseudonymous socialnetworks etc. This is a negative form of networked liberty/agency, an attemptat ‘freedom from’ interference which finds its offline parallel to thisin masked demonstrators avoiding data capture by cctv cameras (and rioters looting fancy dress shops).

The positive sense of anonymous liberty, the ‘freedom to’ aspect, isnow commonplace and spreading: It is illegal filesharing. As a critical mass ofpeople do it the ideology of ‘freedom to’ is perpetuated. Despite its criminal/nonconformistcachet this phenomenon has consumerist undertones – as unfettered gratificationof desire for commodities is pursued even above law of the land. The easyanonymity afforded by the internet is not just contributing towards the economicerosion of the entertainment industries, it is creating a much larger class ofconsuming agents willing to break the law for entertainment purposes.

As Jaron Lanier notes, design underlies ethicsin the digital world and ‘People who can spontaneously invent a pseudonym inorder to post a comment on a blog or on YouTube are often remarkably mean’. Crucially,according to him, this is not so much a function of human nature as it is theresult of bad digital architecutre. For there is such as thing as ‘troll-evoking’design that facilitates ‘effortless, consequence-free, transient anonymity inthe service of a goal […] that stands entirely apart from one’s identity orpersonality. Call it drive-by-anonymity’. Going further, Lanier worries that such designs can ‘accentuate negativepatterns of behavior or even bring about unforeseen social pathology’. In a speculative moment he displays great foresight vis a vis the London unrest.

‘It’s not crazy to worry that, with millions of people connectedthrough a medium that sometimes brings out their worst tendencies, massive,fascist-style mobs could rise up suddenly. I worry about the next generationof young people around the worldgrowing up with internet-based technology that emphasizes crowd aggregation, asis the current fad. Will they be more likely to succumb to pack dynamics whenthey come of age? [1]

Notwithstandingthe hyperbole about ‘fascist’ mobs, anonymous pack dynamics were certainly visible.

[1] Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto, Penguin, London, 2011, p.63,64.

Ping Me Baby!

2011-10-25T16:53:00.000-07:00

the tune

What has been consistently overlooked in discussions about the riots is the connection between ostensibly ‘mindless’ displays of unlawful acquisition – the grabbing offlat-screen tvs – and the techonological conditions that allowed such events to happen. We all know thatthe rioters coordinated their gatherings and encouraged acts of looting through use of a specific make of mobile phone – Blackberry (via its BBM application which allows messaging between with other blackberry-owning contacts without recourse to the easily interceptable and more widespread technology of text messaging). We also know that the state lacked amechanism to control this technology once it had become, for all intents and purposes, ‘weaponized’by its users. However, the use of BBM necessitates more than a future agenda for the government’s security apparatus. It is a phenomenon that helps us to understand whatthe looting actually was (about).

One month prior to the riots I was in a takeaway food shop on RidleyRoad market, Dalston, just metres from where a hastily convened mob would laterstorm the Kingsland shopping centre in an attempt to ransack its shops. Forlack of something to read while waiting for my fast food I perused a large pileof glossy brochures for club nights stacked next to the till. I found myselfstrangely fascinated by one in particular: ‘Ping Me Baby’, it read, is thenightclub for blackberry owners:

ANYBODY WHO IS ANYBODY HAS A BLACKBERRY AND THEY SHOULD BEAWARDED!!!!!! SO ON FRIDAY 22ND JULY PING ME BABY IS BACK WITH THE MASSIVE FREEBLACKBERRY PARTY!!!! EVERYBODY WITH A BLACKBERRY IS 1000% FREE B4 11PM (£5WITHOUT) .... THIS IS GUARANTEED TO BE A ROADBLOCK AFFAIR & IF YOU'RECELEBRATING ANYTHING GIVE US A CALL NOW FOR SOME GREAT DEALS. SEE YOU THERE!!!!FREE B4 11PM WITH A BLACKBERRY OR £5 WITHOUT

The reason there is an independent club night dedicated toBlackberry owners (rather than convened as a marketing strategy by the company)is that there is a critical mass of users in central London and this groupconstitutes a particular economic body. BBM is a free – unlimited – messagingapplication and in this sense represents a ‘value’ option for mobile communication.It allows users to send one-to-many messages to their network of contacts. Thisis the equivalent of a fixed price buffet and, in a similar way, a cheapindustrially produced meal – of the sort that I was buying at the chicken shopand which the attendees of Ping me Baby! eat too. It implies consumers oflesser means. We know that Blackberry handsets are the smartphone of choice forthe majority of British teens – 37% according to an Ofcom study conducted insame month as the unrest?1 During the riots we were informed thatthe government was in frantic talks with the makers of Blackberry (RIM) aboutlimiting its service in order to restore public order. One wonders if they arenow taking the time to access their customer statistics in order tounderstand which ‘public’ was acting.

Blackberry/BBM is a consumer choice that, as the existence of a clubnight suggests, is a potential identity – one defined by the unlimitedsatisfaction of a desire (to communicate by text) available to those withlimited financial means and the willingness to create a social network mediatedby a branded consumer apparatus. The club night worked in this manner: freeentry to a carnival space for Blackberry owners, pay to play for the rest. Infact, the riots operated in a similar fashion. In material terms the closednetwork of the BBM is what allowed mobs to come together almost instantaneously.Yet, underlying/ subtending the radical social intensity of this phenomenon wasthe functional logic of consumer-technological society – physically manifest inthe kind of phones in people’s pockets and present in their desires. Note, for instance,the apparent Freudian-slip in the advertising text: the author probably meansto say that blackberry owners ‘should be rewarded’. Instead, the grammaticalstructure indicates that blackberrys should be ‘awarded’ to people who alreadyown them! We need not be surprised that the rioters chose to loot electronicgoods instead of smashing banks.

After some research it became clear than the club night was namedafter a song by a contemporary urban/rnb singer. It’s not clear if he wasemployed by Blackberry to create the song, if he is courting them so they mightlicence his music, or if he is adopting a viral marketing strategy to piggybackoff consumers' identification with their mobile phones. The lack of clarity onthis issue is symptomatic of viral marketing – either its practice or itsinfluence. This discovery seems to suggest that the advent of viral marketing hasin some way brought about the birth of viral looting. The announcement that itwould a ‘roadblock affair’ seems less hyperbolic than the marketers firstintended.

The mob’s clamour for consumer items clearly reflects the structural violence of our economy.

burnin like a torch