 |
 |
Sounds like an extensive description of techno-nomadic labour. regards Simon Biggs Research Professor edinburgh college of art [log in to unmask] www.eca.ac.uk [log in to unmask] www.littlepig.org.uk AIM/Skype: simonbiggsuk From: John Hopkins <[log in to unmask]> Reply-To: John Hopkins <[log in to unmask]> Date: Tue, 29 Apr 2008 15:26:57 +0200 To: <[log in to unmask]> Subject: Re: [NEW-MEDIA-CURATING] Leonardo and copyright regimes The cost you pay is directly correlated to the depth of your embeddedness, your degree of participation in the techno-social system. For example, to simply 'own' a laptop, I calculated over the past 15 years I spend around USD 120 / month. This does not include cost of upgrades and peripherals, telecom, electrical, or other costs. This is only having the machine sitting on my lap. Of course, to participate in the techno-social system that 'allows' me to make a posting to this list, or to receive incoming postings, requires much more than that single expense. There are ways of minimizing or reducing the relative level of participation, but in a developed country, there are absolute minimums which, if I slide under, I remove myself from any ability to participate. Things like a fixed address, a bank account, a national ID number, a passport -- each of which demands a certain set of other fixity/stability in regard to the system (which demands this to support its continued viability). I 'pay' for the privilege primarily by spending some of my life-time in the service of propping up that techno-social system. Spending life-time in participating in system-sanctioned interaction with others who are also seeking legitimacy within the system. When I spend that life-time, it's gone, I don't get it back. I convert some of that resource, life-time, life-energy into an abstracted currency which allows me the 'freedom' to convert my life-energy into other sanctioned expressions of the techno-social system for my perusal and consumption. Through participating I lend my life-energy as a signature of legitimacy of the entire techno-social system that I am helping to prop up as a participant. What a system 'sanctions' is not always clear, but in the long-term, it is anything that promotes my participation in the system in such a way that the system profits in using my submitted energies in expressions that it deems necessary to its survival (not mine!)... The ultimate payee in any social system are the individuals who participate in the system, at whatever level -- through the spending of life-time (think, for example, 'paying attention') into that system. There are relative 'winners' and 'losers' depending on how you judge the relative punishments and rewards meted out by the system as it seeks your optimal participation. I think that refusing participation at the degree of whether or not to publish based on an ideological detail within the system is a very small incremental shift in paying slightly attention to the 'dominant' system and slightly more to a subset of that dominant system. I use the word subset because the dominant system includes the entire globalized techno-social infrastructure of telecommunications and digital devices upon which in both cases we are totally dependent. In order to participate in this forum here (as one possible niche, taz, where we can play for a time, before going back to paying attention to the dominant system ...) or to write about these subjects or to circulate at all, we are dependent. I can understand the refusal as a statement against the hegemonic power of that system, and BRAVO for that. But what about a refusal to use tele-communications and instead only transmit orally the ideas to one person at a time. (Yeah, why not -- what is it about numbers and spatial reach that so seduces us to believe in our own 'influence' on others..?) Imagine that, if everyone on every mailing list in the world would instead take the same amount of time they spend in eye-lid-locked paralysed point-of-view gazing at the screen and instead engaged with those humans which were immediately around them... some musings... jh