Network Culture , livre ebook

Network Culture
Network Culture
Politics for the Information Age
Tiziana Terranova
First published 2004 by Pluto Press 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA
www.plutobooks.com
Distributed in the United States of America exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010
Copyright © Tiziana Terranova 2004
The right of Tiziana Terranova to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 0 7453 1749 6    Hardback ISBN 978 0 7453 1748 9    Paperback ISBN 978 1 8496 4500 3    PDF eBook ISBN 978 1 7837 1443 8    Kindle eBook ISBN 978 1 7837 1442 1    EPUB eBook
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Terranova, Tiziana, 1967- Network culture : politics for the information age / Tiziana Terranova. p. cm. ISBN 0-7453-1749-9 (hb) — ISBN 0-7453-1748-0 (pb) 1. Information society. 2. Information technology—Social aspects. 3. Information technology—Political aspects. I. Title. HM851.T47 2004 303.48’33—dc22
2004004513
This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental standards of the country of origin.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4
Designed and produced for Pluto Press by Chase Publishing Services, Sidmouth, England Typeset from disk by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton, England Simultaneously printed digitally by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham, UK and Edwards Bros in the United States of America
Contents
Acknowledgements

Introduction
1. Three Propositions on Informational Cultures The Meaning of Information Information and Noise The Limits of Possibility Nonlinearity and Representation 2. Network Dynamics Network Time Of Grids and Networks The Paradox of Movement A Tendency to Differ Fringe Intelligence Afterthought 3. Free Labour The Digital Economy Knowledge Class and Immaterial Labour Collective Minds Ephemeral Commodities and Free Labour The Net and the Set 4. Soft Control Biological Computing From Organisms to Multitudes Searching a Problem Space Global Computation Social Emergence Hacking the Multitude The Unhappy Gene Coda on Soft Control 5. Communication Biopower The New Superpower The Masses’ Envelopment An Intolerant World Networked Multitudes

Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgements
Many people, groups and institutions played a fundamental part in the writing of this book. The University of Berkeley’s Engineering and Science Libraries (for their open doors policy of access and consultation); Danan Sudindranath, Mr Gary Pickens and Carol Wright for technical intelligence; the friends and former colleagues at the Department of Cultural and Innovation Studies, University of East London (and in particular Ash Sharma, Paul Gormley, and Jeremy Gilbert); the Signs of the Times collective; Martha Michailidou, Nicholas Thoburn and David Whittle (for reading and/or discussing parts of this work);Nick Couldry and the OUR MEDIA network; the ESRC, for funding part of this project; the Department of Sociology at the University of Essex (for granting two study leaves that allowed the writing of this book);Andrew Ross at the American Studies Centre, NYU, for his friendship and enduring support; Patricia Clough and the students at the CUNY Graduate Center for enthusiastic support and challenging feedback; the collective intelligences of nettime, Rekombinant, Syndicate and e-laser (for everything);Marco d’Eramo for his kind interest and bibliographical gems; the staff and students at the Center for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths’ College (Scott Lash and Axel Roch and for extra special support Sebastian Olma and Sandra Prienekenf); Riccardo and Simonetta; Betti Marenko from InSectCorp; the Mute collective (special thanks to Pauline van Mourik Broeckmann, Ben Seymour, Josephine Berry Slater, and Jamie King); my mentors and friends at the Istituto Universitario Orientale in Naples (especially Lidia Curti, Ian Chambers, Silvana Carotenuto and Anna Maria Morelli);the friends of the Hermeneia project at the Universitat Oberta de Barcelona (thanks to Laura Borras Castanyer, Joan Elies Adell and Raffaele Pinto for some wonderful workshops); to Anne Beech and Judy Nash at Pluto Press, for their patience and for trusting their authors; Kode 9 from hyperdub.com and Daddy G from uncoded.net (for the bass lines and visions); and of course my family and friends back in Sicily, who provided free sunshine, blue sea, good food and warm company during the last stages in the writing of this book – the hot, hot summer of 2003.
Finally, special thanks to Luciana Parisi – for being a friend and a sister throughout our turbulent and co-symbiotic becomings.
To the Memory of Vito Terranova (1935–1992)
Introduction
This is a book about (among other things) information and entropy, cybernetics and thermodynamics, mailing lists and talk shows, the electronic Ummah and chaos theory, web rings and web logs, mobile robots, cellular automata and the New Economy, open-source programming and reality TV, masses and multitudes, communication management and information warfare, networked political movements, open architecture, image flows and the interplay of affects and meanings in the constitution of the common. It is a book, that is, about a cultural formation, a network culture, that seems to be characterized by an unprecedented abundance of informational output and by an acceleration of informational dynamics.
In this sense, this is a book about information overload in network societies and about how we might start to think our way through it. Because of this abundance and acceleration, the sheer overload that constitutes contemporary global culture, it was necessary to assemble and reinvent a method that was able to take in this bewildering variation without being overwhelmed by it. This method has privileged processes over structure and nonlinear processes over linear ones – and in doing so it has widely borrowed from physics and biology, computing and cybernetics but also from philosophy, and cultural and sociological thinking (from Baudrillard to Lucretius, from Deleuze and Guattari to Stuart Hall and Manuel Castells, from Michel Serres to Henri Bergson and Antonio Negri). Above all, however, this book is an attempt to give a name to, and further our understanding of, a global culture as it unfolds across a multiplicity of communication channels but within a single informational milieu.
To think of something like a ‘network culture’ at all, to dare to give one name to the heterogeneous assemblage that is contemporary global culture, is to try to think simultaneously the singular and the multiple, the common and the unique. When seen close up and in detail, contemporary culture (at all scales from the local to the global) appears as a kaleidoscope of differences and bewildering heterogeneity – each one of which would deserve individual and specific reflection. However, rather than presenting themselves to us as distinct fragments, each with its own identity and structure, they appear to us as a meshwork of overlapping cultural formations, of hybrid reinventions, cross-pollinations and singular variations. It is increasingly difficult to think of cultural formations as distinct entities because of our awareness of the increasing interconnectedness of our communication systems. It is not a matter of speculating about a future where ‘our fridge will talk to our car and remind it to buy the milk on its way’. It is about an interconnection that is not necessarily technological. It is a tendency of informational flows to spill over from whatever network they are circulating in and hence to escape the narrowness of the channel and to open up to a larger milieu. What we used to call ‘media messages’ no longer flow from a sender to a receiver but spread and interact, mix and mutate within a singular (and yet differentiated) informational plane. Information bounces from channel to channel and from medium to medium; it changes form as it is decoded and recoded by local dynamics; it disappears or it propagates; it amplifies or inhibits the emergence of commonalities and antagonisms. Every cultural production or formation, any production of meaning, that is, is increasingly inseparable from the wider informational processes that determine the spread of images and words, sounds and affects across a hyperconnected planet.
Does that mean, as Paul Virilio has recently suggested following a prediction by Albert Einstein, that an unbearable catastrophe has struck the planet – that we are the victims, today, as we speak, of an informational explosion, a bomb as destructive as the atomic bomb? 1 Information is often described as a corrosive, even destructive and malicious entity threatening us with the final annihilation of space-time and the materiality of embodiment. Echoing a widespread feeling, Virilio suggests that we see information as a force able to subordinate all the different local durations to the over-determination of a single time and a single space that is also emptied of all real human interactions. From this perspective, contemporary culture is the site of a devastation wreaked by the deafening white noise of information, with its ‘pollution of the distances and time stretches that hitherto allowed one to live in one place and to have a relationship with other people via face-to-face contact, and not through mediation in the form of teleconferencing or on-line shopping.’ 2 As will become clear in the book, I do not believe that such informational dynamics simply expresses the coming hegemony of the ‘immaterial’ over the material. On the contrary, I believe that if there is an acceleration of history and an annihilation of dis