Organized Networks

In his book Nice Work If You Can Get It, Andrew Ross opens the final chapter on ‘The Rise of the Global University’ with the following assessment: ‘Higher education has not been immune to the impact of economic globalization. Indeed, its institutions are now on the brink of channeling some of the most dynamic, and therefore destabilizing, tendencies of neoliberal marketization’.¹ Arguably, one of the central reasons higher education embodies the intensity of transformations wrought by neoliberalism has to do with ways in which post-Fordist labour is ‘multiplied and divided’.²

The political-economic technologies of measure are key to the division of labour in and across university settings. A quick listing of examples is sufficient to get an idea of what I am talking about here: systems of ranking institutions of higher education within a global frame serve to distinguish universities and the labour within them along national and geocultural lines of division; this in turn shapes the global mobility of students and thus the logic of economic accumulation, again dividing universities, labour and disciplines in terms of market competition and geocultural segmentation. The construction of special economic zones for higher education, which is most notable across the Asian, Middle Eastern and African regions, functions to divide national markets internally and externally along the lines of domestic and global spatialities that have implications for income generation derived from teaching and research activities in terms of the scope of student catchment and institutional sources for research funding.

The political-economic architecture of intellectual property regimes is another state supported device through which lines of division are constructed between what McKenzie Wark has termed the ‘vectoral class’ (those who proprietise and thus enclose the productive efforts of biopolitical labour) and the ‘hacker class’ (those engaged in the collaborative work of co-production and creation of the common).³ Universities and corporations have sought to further establish systems of measure from such labour through the global rankings of journals and citation indices. Such rankings overwhelmingly favour journals that are part of Anglo-American publishing consortia that over the past 20 years have set out to aggressively takeover the few remaining independent journals that support research and intellectual debate in national and regional settings. The effect of this has been to consolidate the hegemony of global English and erode the connection between the production of knowledge and its frequently local social-political conditions of possibility. This, notwithstanding the fact that the very notion of the local has become enormously complicated with the consolidation of economic and cultural globalization coupled with the rise of the network society.

Additional lines of division operate in terms of what Andrew Ross calls the ‘new geography of work’, and what I’m wishing to frame in this essay as the uneven distribution of expertise. Incorporated into the uneven distribution of expertise is the racialization of labour, both of which connect back to the construction of special economic zones for global universities. It is on this basis that my essay concludes that the 21st century informational university in its global manifestations is in many ways disturbingly similar to programs of institution formation and the management of populations undertaken by 19th century colonial powers. I will develop these aspects of my argument shortly, but first I wish to say a few more things about the multiplication of labour and how this dynamic and condition relates to the rise of the informational university.

The Informational University and the Production of the Common

In his book How the University Works, Marc Bousquet’s crucial insight is that the flexibilization of labour is at the centre of the informatization of the university as it embraces the force of neoliberal regimes.⁴ This orientation of labour around processes of informatization draws on work undertaken by various researchers associated with Italian post-operaismo thought. One of the key analytical and political precepts developed out of such work, as summarised recently by Tiziana Terranova, makes the distinction between the social production of value and the model of classical political economy, which measures the time and cost of labour in determining the production of commodity value.⁵

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri note that traditional models of measure (e.g. intellectual property regimes, university and journal ranking systems, citation indicators, etc., all of which operate within the contemporary neoliberal, informational university), and thus of the law of value, are in crisis today due to profound contradictions within the force of economic globalization and the multiple antagonisms between the cooperative logic of biopolitical labour and capitalism’s mechanisms of expropriating the wealth of the common as it is produced by the creativity of biopolitical labour.⁶ In his dialogue with Negri, Cesare Casarino reiterates this point, noting how the common provides ‘the locus of surplus value’ for capital, whose apparatuses of capture – or regimes of measure – expropriate the wealth of the common.⁷

A distinction needs to be made here between the concept of the common and that of the commons. The latter is associated with processes of enclosure and proprietary control of that which was previously collectively owned and managed. In a neoliberal paradigm, such a process has been marked by the shift of public goods to private ownership. The key point here is that the commons – whether they are understood in terms of ecology, culture or relationships – are predicated on the dual logic of scarcity and ownership, and are thus assumed to be resources in need of protection. Within social democracies, the state is frequently bestowed with such a role. The commons is thus ascribed a representational quality.

The common, by contrast, cannot be owned or managed, most especially by statist formations that assume the identity of the people or the public. The common does not operate within the logic of representation, in other words, and instead is a force mobilized through non-representational relations and the multiplication of biopolitical labour. Nor is the common a resource underscored by the logic of scarcity. And while the common holds an economic potential – something that is made clear in the moment of expropriation – its ‘wealth’ is not inherently economic. As I have written elsewhere with Soenke Zehle, ‘If we understand the commons to refer both to the material context and the consequence of practices of peer-production, the common is the political potential immanent in such practices. Such an understanding of the common situates it conceptually as the latest iteration of the political; just as there exists an “excess of the political over politics”, the affirmation of the common is offered as a condition of possibility for collaborative constitution, for the sharing of affects of love, solidarity or wrath, and for the translation of such affects and experiences across the “irreducible idiomaticity” of ethico-political practices’.⁸

Casarino makes the ‘important qualification’ that there is always a remainder of the common that is not appropriated by capital. There is the suggestion that this ‘outside’ or ‘externality’ provides the point of separation between capital and the common, which otherwise risk becoming indistinguishable. The precise content of this common is left without elaboration by Casarino. My sense is that asymmetrical institutional-social temporalities between capital and the common are key here. Where the university is often accused of being ‘out of time’ or ‘too slow’ by those who heavily identify with the business sector and industry, perhaps one could also suggest that the time of the common and living labour holds a special complexity that refuses absorption into capital’s apparatuses of capture and regimes of measure, which are always circumscribed in a way that living labour is not. I can only note such speculations in passing – the empirical-conceptual content here is the stuff of future research.

When transferred to the setting of the university and its transformation under conditions of economic globalization, questions such as the following emerge: How does the social production of value (brand desire, affect, subjectivity, online social networking, etc.) shape the commodity value of the university degree? What relation does this have with the globalization of higher education? And how does the informational university – defined increasingly by privatization (as distinct from being a public good), labour flexibility and informational management – relate to the social production of value?

Let me outline in concrete fashion how the social production of value shapes the commodity value of the university degree. Anyone who is astute to the conditions of cognitive labour within universities will not have trouble making the connection between diminishing numbers of full-time faculty, increasing casualisation of teaching staff, the massive expansion in administrative labour and the viral-like proliferation of managerial personas, the structural reproduction of adolescent research subjectivities through short-time contracts for junior researchers on cross-university projects and what I would term the incapacity of the disciplines to invent new conceptual and methodological idioms of practice.

It is a well known if rarely articulated strategy of refusal for coordinators of course modules to reissue the same material for students year in and year out. Admittedly this is a practice that has gone on for years in universities, but it takes on substantially different hues with the shift from the public-state university to the pseudo-corporate and informational university. Whereas the academic of the public university who trotted out the same module outline every year was justifiably accused of intellectual and pedagogical laziness, these days it is more a matter of survival as academics struggle to manage an enormous increase in managerial and administrative workloads that accompany the ever-expanding mechanisms that define the madness of audit cultures (another feature that defines the informational university). Come the start of a new semester, it is not uncommon for academics who have spent whatever recess from teaching duties by writing grants, undertaking marking, fulfilling administrative duties, meeting with dissertation students and maybe, if lucky, engaging in some research, to then find themselves having no time to redevelop old course materials (forget about producing new materials), and thus resort out of desperation and self-survival to repeat whatever it was that they taught the previous year.

The result of such practice – which I would expect to be widespread across the sector – is that disciplines become impoverished. You might counter this charge by telling me it is the job of research to provide the material of innovation for the disciplines. To do so falls into the trap of privileging research and thus dividing the important and mutually informing relationship between research and teaching. Moreover, it assumes that research activity is actually doing the job of disciplinary reinvention. I would suggest that, to the contrary, the vast majority of national and supranational funded research – especially in the humanities – is funded on the grounds that it reproduces the orthodoxies of the disciplines, in which case very little is gained by way of disciplinary innovation.

This brings me to the social production of value. When academics no longer have the time and perhaps intellectual stamina let alone curiosity to test the borders of their disciplines, what do they do? Well, in similar fashion to capital – and indeed, precisely because they are subjects of the corporate, informational university – they look to appropriating the creativity of the common. In my own field of new media studies, it has become very clear over the past 10 years that academics have contributed very little by way of conceptual and methodological invention. Such work has been undertaken outside and on the margins of the academy by artists, activists, computer geeks and media theorists.

How is such work undertaken? It is undertaken through practices of collaborative constitution and the multiplication of labour made possible by the mode of information and the media of digital communication.⁹ The key social-technical features here of flexibility, adaptation, distributive co-production, informational recombination, open/free content and code, and modulating axes of organization (both horizontal and vertical) all define the culture and labour of networks. And as the generative content of the common is absorbed and more often enclosed by non-generative proprietary regimes that function to shore up the borders of the corporate university, there is also an informational dimension of open and generative network cultures that is carried over and interpenetrates the institutional dynamic of the university.

Actually, an increasing number of universities are recognizing the value of adopting open content practices – MIT’s OpenCourseWare being one of the more widely known examples.¹⁰ The reason for this has to do with the fact that there is very little ‘product differentiation’ across degree programs from one university to the next, and universities are slowly but surely understanding that economic leverage for higher education comes not from the sale of pre-packaged, static material (although this is still the dominant economic model). Rather, they see their business as that of awarding degrees (i.e. granting an institutional/symbolic legitimacy upon a learning experience, which is the basis of determining tuition fees) and service delivery. This is a model that effectively duplicates the business model of open source software providers who understand that users (including educational institutions, corporations, small businesses and organizations) expect to download content (operating systems and office software, for example) for free, but are then willing to pay for labour that customises the software to specific institutional needs, with follow-up service as required.

The Uneven Distribution of Expertise

What is the relation between the informational university and the uneven distribution of expertise across the higher-education landscape? Indeed, what is expertise and who is an expert? And what are the geocultural configurations upon which such relations might be mapped out? With the rise of Web 2.0 and its attendant self-publishing and promotion platforms such as blogs, wikis, Twitter and YouTube, everyone these days is an expert. In some respects this seeming democratization of knowledge production is a structural phenomenon brought about by the outsourcing of labour and content production in the media industries. These days, even the corporations want everything for free. And with the social production of value, which in the case of news media comes in the form of citizen-journalism that willingly supplies content for free, the cost of labour is effectively removed from the balance sheet.

How, though, does this Cult of the Amateur impact upon the distribution of expertise within the university? With the rise of mass education and user-pay systems, many academics nowadays complain of the ‘dumbing down’ of curricula. Academic departments have become in most cases almost entirely dependent on income derived from student fees, with international students making up a substantial portion of annual budgets. This is especially pronounced in universities in Australia where, after two decades of partial deregulation and massive cuts in government expenditure on education, it has become a routine practice for academics to slide students over the ever diminishing hurdles of assessment. If they didn’t, then the security of their own jobs would be at stake.

Similar practices are the norm in British and North American universities, no matter what the ‘quality assurance’ reports might say to the contrary. Such systems of measure long ago lost any relationship with their referent and function in a very similar way to the production of public opinion, which does not exist according to Bourdieu’s compelling thesis.¹¹ What does exist is the ever-increasing extension of self-referential reporting measures into the time of academic work. The tyranny of audit cultures inscribes academic subjects into discursive practices of accountability and conditions the over-production of administrative functionaries, whose job is to keep track of the bureaucratic madness that such systems guarantee.

Not only has the dependency relationship on student fees had substantive impacts on the design and content of curricula, it has also exacted a toll on the capacity for academics to keep abreast with – let alone make contributions to – advances in their field. Increasingly, the insistence by students and administration for entertainment-on-demand styles of not so much teaching but ‘course delivery’ has resulted in more academic time expended on maintaining online administration and content management systems such as the notorious WebCT and Blackboard. (Although for reasons I fail to understand, such systems are embraced with an obsessive degree of delight by some colleagues I’ve worked with over the years.)

Within conditions such as these, which again are typical of the informational university, it would seem the very notion of expertise is in crisis. And arguably it is. But there are also ways in which expertise is upheld, since once it can be quantified as measure a crucial symbolic value can then be accrued that can then be transferred as brand value for individual academics and their institutions. This in turn results in a capacity to charge higher student fees and attract the much vaunted external research funds, whose board of assessors place great emphasis on so-called ‘esteem indicators’ provided by journal ranking systems and citation indices which hold their own geocultural and political economic bias that reinforces what Harold Innis termed ‘monopolies of knowledge’.¹² Such measures supposedly confer upon the body of academic research a ‘quality assurance’ that effectively removes from the assessor the task of critical assessment, which is now designed to be as automated and therefore as time efficient as possible. Again, these are some of the key features that characterise an informational mode of knowledge management. Though it remains to be said, the calibration of such systems of automation are deeply ideological and underscored by cabals of self-interested academic groups and individuals.

This brief survey of teaching and research practices within the informational university comprise what Andrew Ross has termed the ‘new geography work’. A far-from-uniform informational geography of intellectual property regimes, content management systems, database economies, flexible labour and open content production becomes integrated with a geocultural system that valorises the reproduction of Western knowledge traditions and hegemony of global English.¹³ There are further implications here for disciplinary innovation and the production of subjectivity. With the rise of the global university, local knowledge traditions and expertise have very weak purchase within an educational-machine that demands modes of flexible, just-in-time delivery provided by staff in contract positions whose structural and ontological insecurity is offset by largely generic course modules whose uniformity ensures a familiar point of entry for the next short-term academic hired by the global university. 

The Racialization of Labour

In which cases might a racialization of labour underscore the informational university? In short, what are the labour inequalities that shape the market of higher education on a global scale and how are new (or, as the case may be, neo-colonial) class subjectivities being reproduced? There are multiple hues of labour differentiation across universities at a global level. To make the claim of differentiation along the lines of race is to suggest a reproduction of the 19th century biological category of race as the basis upon which division is operating. The official positioning of universities across the world would be most defiant in maintaining this is certainly not the case, and indeed may be inclined to issue legal writs against anyone making such a charge, if it was perceived that brand damage was a stake.

Nearly twenty years ago, Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein observed that ‘in traditional or new forms (the derivation of which is, however, recognizable), racism is not receding, but progressing in the contemporary world’.¹⁴ Arguably, this is no less the case today, and one of the sites upon which racism has become reproduced, albeit in new guises, is that of the informational university. The category of race, as Balibar and Wallerstein go on to analyse, is one of the key modalities enlisted in the construction of the ‘people’, or what Foucault analysed in terms of the biopolitical production of territory, populations, security and subjectivity.¹⁵ Other social-political devices through which populations are constituted include the nation, class, ethnicity, gender and broadcast media of communication. How the category of race intersects with these technologies of governance that define the rise of the nation-state and industrial modernity has been a matter of considerable research, which is in no way exhausted yet. It may seem a surprise to many that the seemingly archaic category of race should figure within the time and space of informational modernities. But, as I go to show, forms of institutional racism are central to the problem of labour within the global university.

Let me conclude by briefly documenting the operation of what Balibar terms ‘racism without races’ with reference to the division of labour and uneven distribution of expertise operating at global universities present in China. How to situate the differences between labour regimes in the global university and those of 19th century colonialism? In form they are similar. In both cases indigenous elites are enlisted as administrators to provide the linguistic and cultural interface between the imperial institution and local populations, which include government officials and industry representatives. But one key difference is that a relatively high ranking official such as myself in the 19th century could freely have lavished all the racial epithets on the lower ranking colonials. Today, however, someone such as myself has to be careful about how the discourse on race is handled since it could endanger my position, to say nothing of the offence it may provoke. There’s a difference here with the 21st century variants of differential racism that needs to be analysed. And the concept of ‘racism with race’ helps such analysis part of the way. Racism without race is predicated on modes of division that while not invoking the biological category of race are nonetheless reproducing the logic of racism – namely, to divide and exclude on the basis of race – through other means but which at their heart are racist in orientation, no matter how unconscious or unintentional that may be.¹⁶

A notable feature across global universities operating in China today is the substantial presence of domestic Chinese in the administrative ranks, with considerably fewer Chinese working as academic faculty. While smaller scale operations may combine academic and administrative roles and have those carried out by foreigners on casual contracts familiar with the ‘culture’ of the national system within which they are working, the larger universities employ local Chinese for administrative work on an almost exclusive basis. These staff often hold an undergraduate degree from a US, British or Australian university, and many will also have postgraduate qualifications from an overseas university. In many cases their degrees will have been awarded from their current employer, which again ensures familiarity with the culture and administration of their particular institution.

In principle, the Chinese administrators working within global universities in China are not there because they are Chinese but because they have met the job selection criteria – relevant degree or diploma, competency in English language, good interpersonal skills, relevant experience, etc. The official positioning is thus definitely not about race in its classic 19th century articulations. On the other hand, if these administrative staff were not Chinese, then they most likely would not be working in these universities. Why, then, are there so few and in enough cases no non-Chinese staff comprising the administrative ranks at these global universities?

If it was just a matter of holding the appropriate qualifications and skills, then there could be people from any number of racial and ethnic backgrounds working as administrators in these universities. As noted earlier, while the primary administrative and teaching language of these universities is English, there is a need for at least some administrative staff to have a high proficiency in Putonghua in order to interface at linguistic and cultural levels with local and national government departments and businesses. But there is no obvious reason or need for all administrative staff to be of Chinese origin. It would seem that there’s an important subjective desire at work for Chinese administrative staff with largely Anglophone qualifications to find work back home. What emerges from this phenomenon is a dual-language system where intra-institutional and transnational administration and engagement with academic staff is conducted in English, whereas the informal socialisation among administrative staff and their interaction, to some extent, with Chinese students is conducted in Putonghua or local dialects. 

To not be Chinese, in other words, means to not be participating in those institutional and social circuits conducted exclusively in Chinese. This enlisting of the (middle-class) elite ‘locals’ in administrative positions strikes me as very similar to the colonial strategy of engaging indigenous elites to administer colonial institutions (India being the classic example) and in so doing reproduce and reinforce (or in some cases produce) a local class system. My understanding of such operations is that racial distinctions determined the institutional positions and conditions of the labouring subject. Institutions of globalized higher education provide the institutional settings and organizational cultures through which the logic of differential racism is played out today.

Moving to the question of academic faculty and the international staff that compose its ranks, the opposite display of racialized labour becomes notable: namely, the tendency for Chinese to not be among those holding academic positions. Perhaps this is even more remarkable than the case of the Chinese majority within administrative positions. The opportunity for movement within administration from a US or British university to a global university operating in China, or some other country, for that matter, is less likely than in the case of academics, who tend to be much more mobile within both national and global settings. Why, then, do so few Chinese academics comprise the ranks of faculty within global universities in China? One reason has to do with remuneration. Local Chinese are paid substantially less than their international colleagues, and in this respect the economy of labour in global universities reproduces that of most other businesses in China. Unlike other business sectors, however, the global universities do not – at least not yet – fill their academic ranks with local Chinese in order save on labour costs. Key to the brand value of the global universities is the assurance these institutions make to students that they are receiving a product and experience that essentially reproduces what they could expect if they were enrolled at the ‘home’ institution. An important part of that assurance thus rests on a significant portion of academic staff who are either on secondment from or at least familiar with the workings of the home institution. There are also administrative practicalities for this practice associated with the running of equivalent programs, submission and moderation of grades, establishment of academic and administrative committees, and so on and so forth.

From the perspective of the Chinese academic who may give thought to shifting from a Chinese university to one of the increasing number of global universities setting up shop in China, a number of practicalities need to be considered. The linguistic barrier presented by the necessity to have a working command of English is just one of various factors to take into account. While the low pay may be equivalent between Chinese and global universities, the Chinese academic will have to forego the frequently informal ways in which income is supplemented within the Chinese system. The household items and food parcels supplied by the national teacher’s union, for example, would not be part of academic life in a global university. Moreover, they will have to suffer the knowledge that for effectively the same labour they are being paid a fraction of the amount received by their international colleagues. It must be said that such differentiation of remuneration levels is not based on whether one is Chinese or not. The same applies for those international teachers who have entered the global university from within China, and thus are structurally positioned as part of a domestic labour force. Nonetheless, the material effect of these multiple forces results in an academic body that is largely absent of Chinese staff.

While the differentiation of work across the spectrum of academic and administrative life points to standard divisions of labour in universities around the world, often enough both the individual worker and collective experience will embody these distinctions in singular ways and thus becomes a subject who multiplies rather than divides the borders of labour. This process whereby the borders of labour become multiplied is made clear in the relation cognitive labour holds with the social production of value, as sketched earlier in this essay. The racialization of labour, on the other hand, serves as a technology of division in the case of global universities currently operating in China.

Both the multiplication and division of labour are features of the informational university and its expropriation of the social production of value. Cognitive labour includes modes of peer-to-peer production that make available resources in the form of an informational commons. While more immediately understandable as a technology of division, the racialization of labour also feeds into the symbolic production of a commons in terms of the image repertoire and affective registers that are communicated about the global university as a site for international experience and certification. When situated within China, such an imaginary is reproduced in material ways in terms of the domination of mainland Chinese in administrative ranks coupled with the general absence of Chinese academics from faculty programs.

The relationship between the multiplication and division of cognitive and racialized labour, however, is substantially different in terms of how they connect with the social production of the common, which can be understood as the political potential that subsists within and conditions the possibility of the commons. The point of connection between such immediately distinct modes of labour lies precisely within the ways they shape the brand value and thus economy of the informational, global university. While there is unlikely to be political affiliation between transnational cognitive labour and Chinese administrators in global universities operating in China (the geocultural disparities being largely insurmountable), there is potential for relations to be forged between workers who experience the informatization of labour as it manifests in both global and national academies. It is at the point of shared experience borne out of struggle that the possibility arises for differential inclusion in the social invention of the common. Both the racialization of labour and the uneven distribution of expertise hold the capacity to be a part of such a process.

As the hegemony of the Chinese state unfolds and exerts its power across the geocultural terrain of global institutions, it should come as no surprise that the composition of labour within those institutions becomes increasingly comprised of mainland Chinese workers whose skills, expertise and symbolic value is no longer perceived as second tier. Such a transformation will occasion new lines of struggle in the globalization of higher education. The challenge for biopolitical labour will be to assert the autonomy of the common from emergent apparatuses of capture. A key part of this struggle will involve refusing the informational technologies of measure.

Notes
Thanks to Brett Neilson and Justin O’Connor for comments and suggestions and co-panellists Paolo Do and Jon Solomon for their dialogue on themes and conditions addressed in this essay. Thanks also to Wang Xiaoming for hosting the edu-factory presentation at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, Shanghai University, 7 December 2009.

Unique visitors to post: 10

[Forthcoming in Mark Deuze (ed.) Managing Media Work, Sage, 2010]

By Geert Lovink and Ned Rossiter (The OrgMen)

Four Stages of Web 2.0 Culture: Use. Modify. Distribute. Ignore. – Johan Sjerpstra

In between the blog posting and the tweet there is the aphorism, a centuries old literary form that should do well amongst creative media workers. Zipped knowledge of the 21st century.

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Already for 18th century German experimental physicist and man of letters, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, there was an impossibility for knowledge to capture the totality of things. ‘It is a question in arts and sciences whether a best is possible beyond which our understanding cannot go’ (Lichtenberg). The answer to Twittermania is not the thousand page magnum opus. Today, in a techno-culture where the link never ends, there is a need to give pause to thought. This is the work of the aphorism. Karl Kraus: ‘An aphorism doesn’t have to be true. The aphorism should outstrip the truth, surpassing it in one sentence’. This text is dedicated to the creative workers, migrants, vagabonds, activists, intellectuals of this world: Abandon the state, create multiple expressive forms, engage in transborder relations (affective, intellectual, social, political), invent new institutional forms!

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Where to situate the study of network cultures? It hovers between a public form of ‘mass informality’ and hardcore techno-determinism. The social noise we see scrolling down our screens is a waste product of techno-settings in which our sweet entries are situated. Interface is King, with the consequence that real techno-aesthetic intervention increasingly becomes a lost archive in the history of network cultures.

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In retrospect Friedrich Kittler’s techno-determinism remained an unfinished project. Kittler’s post-1968 German media theory has not gone through many alterations since the early 1990s. The once bold statement ‘media determine our situation’ doesn’t shock anyone these days and has become an empty phrase. The media a priori is so obvious that it seems to have drifted into the realm of the collective unconscious. Henceforth no Kittler school. The grownup Kittler-Jugend are dedicated to scattered projects on the margins of academia. People once again obsess over their small careers and seem to have forgotten the primal energy that collective imagination can unleash. New generations read German media theory with interest but simply no longer have the time to read the necessary libraries to fully enjoy the details. Kittler himself abandoned contemporary techno-analysis and retired in imaginary Old Greece. How can there be a critique when such a position itself is still obscure and on the brink of disappearing? You start to sympathize with the programmer geeks when techno-determinism is sublimated by the highly attractive commercial sheen of Web 2.0.

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Why network? We ought to ask this question. Why is the network, this empty signifier, the emerging-becoming-dominant paradigm of our age? Most of us will grow into network(ing) like children grow in and out of clothes. It takes some time to realize that we dedicate fixed periods of the day to the social-technical networks that are out there without factoring it in. Networking and communicating through email, chats, Twitter and social networking sites are technological forms of day dreaming, a sphere you enter into and then come out of. The dreamtime in the techno-cloud could be compared to the siesta at the village square or chats in the local bar. It is time dedicated to the social. What we get out of it is diffuse and impossible to quantify.

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Why organize(d) networks? Ever since we launched this concept in 2005 we have seen organized networks (or orgnets) as just one of many possibilities. But if the tendency that networks, over time, will simply have to become more structured, then why bother? Long live techno-social determinism. The org.net question should be precluded with: Why do we still talk about organization in an era that seems to celebrate looseness and non-commitment? The Organization Man (William H. Whyte, 1956) is alive and well to this day. He did not disappear with the so-called end of industrialism. In fact, his powers have multiplied even if his ‘mind and soul’ is no longer exclusively beholden to the demands of The Organization. Today, Organization Man has moved beyond that institutional terrain and penetrated the life of networks. Everyone is Organizing. Such was the great masterplan of the ‘organizational complex’ (Reinhold Martin). Cooked up as a Cold War dream to extend the military-industrial complex into the realms of aesthetics and technology, the organizational complex fused the modulation of patterns from the Bauhaus School with the cybernetic programming of control. ‘Media organize’. This McLuhan-inspired maxim by Reinhold Martin truncates even further Friedrich Kittler’s earlier synthesis, ‘media determine our situation’. The key difference being the organizing capacity of communications media, which carry with it the organization man updated. This leaves us with the question: are we The Org Men? Wouldn’t it be great to deconstruct the very .org concept to pieces in order to get rid of it, once and for all? Isn’t there behind any call to organize a desire to restore the über org-anism once called tribe, church, society, nation-state?

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Not all online group initiatives work. Many fail. So can orgnets. The failure of a network is, however, not entirely without some work. There is a labour involved with failure. So we are using the notion of work in a different sense. We wish to invoke the idea of sustainability as a core feature of the work of networks. Failure is all too often the common of fragile conditions and the fragments of demands placed upon those involved in building and guiding the network. Social dust is a necessary precondition of the will to scale.

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‘We are here to stay’. The sustainability issue is a highly political one. Once a network becomes sustainable it addresses the problem of time, which tends not to be the default of networks. More often networks are about the dimension of space – quite frequently, they are transnational in orientation. The material property of spatially distributed social-technical relations that are forever being remade through the logic of connection and speed provides sufficient grounds for distraction from the problem of time understood as the experiential condition of duration. This was the analysis of Canadian communications theorist and political economist Harold Innis, whose writings in the late 1940s and early fifties sought to address how it was that ancient civilizations rise and fall due to the spatial or temporal bias of their communications media and transport systems. The biases of our time are known to all, but ignored by even more.

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‘There ain’t no time, only over time’. The political aspect of networks is closely associated with the sustainability of time. The annoying network is the one that lasts the test of time and refuses to disappear. Networks as technoversity are connected to develop a diverse range of standards, practices, modes of governance, techno-social relations. They collectively produce their own idioms of knowledge, one platform or system distinct from the next, all predicated on the will to communicate. The technoversity of networks is not simply about distribution across space but about maintaining lines of differentiation over time.

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The realization of the social is no longer possible outside an understanding of the constitutive power of technologies. There is no pure social realm. The social is inseparable from the technology. We speak of healthy bodies and populations, but what is the healthy techno-social body? Why are fluidity and transformation such celebrated values these days? How can we design the care of the self for a social-technical network?

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With so much real concern around ecological futures, how come there is so little concern within networks of techno-social futures? The net-cultural preoccupation with immediacy works against both the histories of the present as well as present conditions of the future. Network cultures have their own distinct apparatus of capture: Respond, Now! To cleave out time from the work of networks requires a certain act of refusal through the practice of delay or, if you happen to be a member of the techno-economic elite, you simply log off. But these are not options for the networked masses. How, then, to reinvent a politics of autonomy in the time of networks? Such work requires new modalities of organization whose ambition is singular: conspire to invent new institutional forms.

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Networks are not renowned for their managerial efficiency. Indeed, the very term ‘management’ is one that makes many within networks actively hostile and they recoil with deep distaste. Networks are more inclined toward anti-authoritarian tendencies. They ‘unmanage’ their cultural formation with little interest in purpose-driven, performance indicators and procedural guidelines. And it’s no wonder they do this. Such practices are embedded in the highly dysfunctional audit cultures of dominant institutions. Networks are not goal driven. They are galvanized around shared issues and the production of passions and the cultivation of clouds. The network blurs all purpose. That’s why we wish to raise the question of management in terms of organization. There can be no successful managerial science for networks. Please listen, once and for all, you brothers and sisters in consultancy land. Shy away from top-down decisions and impulses driven by regulatory ressentiment. IT-administrators belong in that category – their burning ambition is to ensure that networks never work.

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Organized networks are best understood as new institutional forms whose social-technical dynamics are immanent to the culture of networks. Orgnets are partly conditioned by the crisis and, in many instances, failure of primary institutions of modernity (unions, firms, universities, the state) to address contemporary social, political and economic problems in a post-broadcast era of digital culture and society. In this sense, organized networks belong to the era and prevailing conditions associated with post-modernity. Organized networks emphasize horizontal, mobile, distributed and decentralized modes of relation. A culture of openness, sharing and project-based forms of activity are key characteristics of organized networks. In this respect, organized networks are informed by the rise of open source software movements. Relationships among the majority of participants in organized networks are frequently experienced as fragmented and ephemeral. Often without formal rules, membership fees, or stable sources of income, many participants have loose ties with a range of networks.

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The above characteristics inevitably lead to the challenge of governance and sustainability for networks. It’s at this point that networks start to become organized. With a focus on the strategic dimension of governance, organized networks signal a point of departure from the short-termism and temporary political interventions of tactical media. At first glance orgnets are a natural, almost inevitable development of the ‘network society’ as described by Manuel Castells. Yet nothing is ‘natural’ in virtual environments. Everything needs to be constructed. And if so, under whose guidance? Who sets the very terms under which networks will cultivate their roots into society? Will this process of institutionalization have a (built-in) financial component?

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As a political concept, organized networks provide what urban theorist Saskia Sassen calls an ‘analytical tool’ with which to describe ‘the political’ as it manifests within network societies and information economies. The social-technical antagonisms that underscore ‘the political’ of organized networks are instantiated in the conflicts network cultures have with vertical systems of control: intellectual property regimes, system administrators, alpha-males, a tendency toward non-transparency and a general lack of accountability.

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How to rebuild labour organizations in the network society? This was one of the many unrealized ambitions of the anti- and later alter-globalization movements. And, for the most part, the unions never quite realized that life and labour within a digital paradigm had become the norm. Let us sketch out some of the current conditions challenging political organization within network societies. First, we need to problematise labour as some kind of coherent, distinct entity. We know well that labour in fact is internally contradictory and holds multiple, differential registers that refuse easy connection (gender, class, ethnicity, age, mode of work, etc.). This is the problem of organization. How to ‘organize the unorganizables’?, to borrow from the title of Florian Schneider’s documentary film. Second, we need to question the border between labour and life – contemporary biopolitics has rendered this border indistinct. Techniques of governance now interpenetrate all aspects of life as it is put to work and made productive. The result? No longer can we separate public from private, and this has massive implications for how we consider political organization today. What, in other words, is the space of political organization? Paolo Virno, for instance, speaks of a ‘non-state public sphere’. But where, precisely is this sphere? All too often it seems networked, and nowhere. This is the trap of ‘virtuality’, understood in its general sense. Of course there can be fantastic instances of political organization that remain exclusively at the level of the virtual, which is the territory of today’s ‘info-wars’. Here, we find the continued fight over the society of the spectacle. Yet the problem of materiality nonetheless persists, and indeed becomes more urgent, as the ecological crisis makes all too clear (although this too is a contest of political agendas played out within the symbolic sphere).

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Slogans ‘R’ Us * T-shirt label: Made for Asia * Today Your Friend, Tomorrow the World * Book title: ‘Stimulus and Indifference’ * Praise Exodus – Blast Decay * Support My Exit * ‘Children of the Deconstruction’ * The Institution is the Message * Project: Deleting Europe * I Joined the barcamp on anticyclic resistance and all I got is this lousy USB stick * ethics is moral punk * Romantic Mobility * Sillicon Friends™ * The Art of Attack (3 days intensive) * Post-Exotic: The Boring Other as Kulturideal * Buy More Consume Less * ‘Networking is Great to Waste Time Before Dying’ * Rejected EU proposal: ‘Dialectics of Innovation – Creative Warfare in the Age of the Relaxed Crisis’ *

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There are benefits in adopting a combinatory analytical and methodological approach that brings the virtual dimension of organization together with a material situation. This may take the form of an event or meeting, workshops, publishing activities, field research, urban experiments, migrant support centres, media laboratories … there are many possibilities. In Italy, uninomade and the media-activist network and social centre ESC are good examples of what we are talking about here. Sarai media lab in Dehli would be another. In the instance of bringing many capacities together around a common problem or field of interest we begin to see the development of a new institutional form. These institutions are networked, certainly, and far from the static culture and normative regimes of the bricks and mortar institutions of the modern era – unions, firms, universities, state. Their mobile, ephemeral nature is both a strength and a weakness. The invention of new institutional forms that emerge within the process of organizing networks is absolutely central to the rebuilding of labour organizations within contemporary settings. Such developments should not be seen as a burden or something that closes down the spontaneity, freedom and culture of sharing and participation that we enjoy so much within social networks. As translation devices, these new institutions facilitate trans-institutional connections. In this connection we find multiple antagonisms, indeed such connections make visible new territories of ‘the political’.

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Reading Russell Jacoby’s The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe (1987) two decades later makes you wonder how such an independent study would look like, post-Cold War, post-9/11, in the age of the Internet and globalization. Jacoby’s description of the ‘impoverishment of public culture’ has not come to a halt. No dialectical turn here. As predicted, the figure of the ‘public intellectual’ has disappeared. ‘Intellectuals no longer need or want a larger audience; they are almost exclusively professors who situate themselves within fields and disciplines’. The nonacademic intellectuals, an endangered species in the 1980s, have vanished for good. The academics who replaced the general intellectuals created ‘insular societies’. There is a widespread fear here of the ‘single-minded men’. But are we really living in the Age of the Expert? It is not the expert knowledge that has become the dominant voice in the media age. Instead, we have witnessed the rise of the celebrity, and the ‘celebrification’ of all spheres of (mediated) life. The professional is hiding inside the walls of the office culture. Instead of a Triumph of the Professional we witness the Cult of the Amateur (Andrew Keen), neither of them claiming any of the virtues of the General Intellectual. Nothing in Jacoby’s study points at the appearance of ‘citizen journalism’, ‘participatory culture’ (Henry Jenkins) and the decline of professional work due to the rise of free content found in free newspapers and through the Internet. Yesterday’s public intellectuals of mass media were not exactly unpaid fellow travellers. What would Jacoby’s strategy be after the ‘de-monetarization’ of the media markets?

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Communication conditions the possibility of new political organizations. We could say that ‘the political’ of network societies is comprised of the tension between horizontal modes of communication and vertical regimes of control. Just think of the ongoing battles between Internet and intellectual property regulators such as WIPO (World Intellectual Property Organization) and pirate networks of software, music or film distribution. Collaborative constitution emerges precisely in the instance of confrontation. In this sense, the horizontal and vertical axes of communication are not separate or opposed but mutually constitutive. How to manage or deal with these two axes of communication is often a source of tension within networks. Here, we are talking about models of governance, without universal ideals to draw on. More often than not, networks adopt a trial-and-error approach to governance. It is better to recognize that governance is not a dirty word, but one that is internal to the logic and protocols of self-organization.

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The ‘participation economy’ of Web 2.0 is underscored by a great tension between the ‘free labour’ (Tiziana Terranova) of cooperation that defines social networks and its appropriation by firms and companies. How is the ‘wealth of networks’ (Yochai Benkler) to be protected from exploitation? Unions, in their industrial form, functioned to protect workers against exploitation and represent their right to fair and decent working conditions. But what happens when leisure activity becomes a form of profit generation for companies? Popular social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, del.icio.us and the data trails we leave with Google function as informational gold mines for the owners of these sites. Advertising space and, more importantly, the sale of aggregated data are the staples of the participation economy. No longer can the union appeal to the subjugated, oppressed experience of workers when users voluntarily submit information and make no demands for a share of profits. Nonetheless, we are starting to see some changes on this front as users become increasingly aware of their productive capacities and can quickly abandon a social networking site in the same manner in which they initially swarmed toward it. Companies, then, are vulnerable to the roaming tastes of the networked masses whose cooperative labour determines their wealth. This cooperative labour constitutes a form of power that has the potential to be mobilized in political ways, yet so rarely is. Perhaps that will change before too long. Certainly, the production of this type of political subjectivity is preferable to the pretty revolting culture of ‘shareholder democracy’ that has come to define political expression for the neoliberal citizen.

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The precarity debate was, correctly, about the material conditions of labour and life. Mistakenly, the precarity discourse remained fixated on the rear-view mirror of Fordist production and the welfare state. But there is more to precarity than this. Judith Butler wished to extend the term to include emotional states and affective relations. Yet somehow precarity doesn’t satisfactorily capture the intensity – and dullness – of the contemporary soul. What comes closer is the image of the nervous, electric body in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century as diagnosed in sociological accounts of urban transformation. Think Georg Simmel, Gabriel Tarde, Walter Benjamin. The image of digital disembodiment was perhaps a 1990s attempt to update the electric body, but nowadays such a notion just looks sadly comical and misplaced, which brings us back to the materiality of communication vis-à-vis Kittler. Today we have not so much digital disembodiment but the violence of code that penetrates the brain and the body. It is the normality of difference, sending out constant semiotic vibrations, that numbs us. What the precarity meme doesn’t catch is the cool frenzy. There is an aesthetics of uncertainty at work. An impulse to Just Do It! Extreme Sports. Risk Societies. Financial Derivatives. Creative Classes. Porn Stars. Game Cultures. Today, it seems impossible to escape the network paradigm that is always economically productive, even if it never returns the user a buck. The non-remunerated body remains a body in labour. And it’s increasingly exhausted. The brain encounters the limits of the day and everything that is left uncompleted. The endless task of chores ticked off slide over from one day to the next. One becomes tired by looking at the ‘to-do’ list, which reproduces like a nasty virus. Bring on the remix.

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The shift from Fordist modes of assembly production to post-Fordist modes of flexibilization cannot be accounted for by reference alone to capital’s demands for enhanced efficiency through restructuring and rescaling. The 1970s in Italy saw the rise of operaismo (autonomist workerism) who refused the erosion of life by the demands of wage labour. Importantly, their unique ‘refusal of labour’ demonstrates, in theory, a clear capacity of workers to change the practices of capital, for better and worse. The Italian collective strike is a one-off concept workshop, blending the radical with the general. It is in this power of transformation that ‘the common’ is created (unlike so many other struggles and forms of dissent in Europe). The ongoing challenge remains how to organize that potentiality in ways that produce subjectivities that can open a better life – in Italy, and beyond.

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Workfare, flexicurity or ‘commonfare’ – all of these options are variations on the theme of state intervention that is able to supply a relative security to the otherwise uncertainty of labour and life. Such calls are misguided. They presuppose that somehow the state resides outside of market fluctuations and the precarity of capital. The state is coextensive with capital. The 2008 credit crisis has shown the state has little command over the uncertainties of finance capital. How, then, can the state guarantee stability? Furthermore, to whom does the state offer security? Certainly not to undocumented migrants. The call for flexicurity is a regressive, nostalgic move that holds dangerous implications vis-à-vis the formation of zones of exclusion. There is no pleasure principle in being underpaid. The price of freedom is a high one and it is only a handful of lucky outsiders in the Rest of the West who can afford to work for free, enjoying unemployment while living off a small income. It is a secret lifestyle choice for a diminishing elite of cultural conceptualists and their outsourced army of semiotic producers. This is not what the dreams of the multitudes aspire to realize. There is much political value in targeting not the state but the companies – especially those engaged in the Web 2.0 economy – and insisting on a distribution of income commensurate with the collective labour that defines the participation economy. This may be a more effective strategy for broadening the constitutive range of labour organizations.

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If social movements are serious about addressing the economic conditions of workers and engaging the complexities of the political they would put an end to the mistaken faith in the state as the source of guarantees. Moreover, the logic of the state as a provider of welfare is special to Europe – it does not translate to the situations of workers in many Asian countries, for example. So what are the borders of connection among workers? Does the movement simply reproduce the borders of the EU? Or does it engage in the much harder but no less necessary work of transnational connection? If so, then targeting the state does not especially help facilitate a common territory of organization. The global circuits of capital are where radical politics should focus their attention. But global capital is in no way uniform in its effects, techniques of management or accumulative regimes. Political intervention, in other words, must always be situated while traversing a range of scales: social-subjective, institutional, geocultural. The movement of relations (social, political, economic) across and within this complex field of forces comprises the practical work of translation. Translation is the art of differential connection and constitutes the common from which new institutional forms may arise.

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Practices of collaborative constitution are defined by struggle. There is no escape from struggle and the tensions that accompany collaborative relations. This is the territory of the political – a space of antagonism that in our view is much more complicated than the Schmittian friend/enemy distinction. Again, it is the work of translation that reveals the multiplicity of tensions. As Naoki Sakai and Jon Solomon have written, translation is not about linguistic equivalence or co-figuration, but rather about the production of singularities through relational encounters. But let’s get more concrete here. What is a relational encounter? It occurs through the instance of working or being with others. Of sharing, producing, creating, listening. Sustaining a range of idioms of experience is a struggle in itself – one that is rarely continuous, but rather continually remade and reassembled. This in turn is the recombinatory space and time of new institutions.

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Let’s unpack the idea of new institutions and their relation to precarity. If we say that precarity and flexibility is the common condition – one that traverses class and geocultural scales – then we can ask: what is the situation within which precarity expresses itself? The situation (concept + problem) will define the emergence of a new institution. Situation, here, consists of virtual/networked, material, affective, linguistic and social registers. We are of course always in a situation, but how to connect with others? The point of connection brings about tensions – the space of the political – and the ensemble of relations furnishes expression with its contours. Real power lies not in the spectacle of the event, but rather subsists within the resonance of experience and the minor connections and practices that occur before and after the event. That is the time and space of institution formation. The rest is a public declaration of existence.

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The question of organization persists: Who does it? How is organization organized? For Keller Easterling, this is the role of the orgmen: ‘Different from the deliberately authored building envelope, spatial products substitute spin, logistics, and management styles for considerations of location, geometry, or enclosure. The architect and salesman of such things as golf resorts or container ports is a new orgman. He designs the software for new games of spatial production to be played the same way whether in Texas or Taiwan. The coordinates of this software are measured not in latitude and longitude but in the orgman argot of acronyms and stats – in annual days of sunshine, ocean temperatures, flight distances, runway noise restrictions, the time needed for a round of golf, time needed for a shopping spree, TEUs, layovers, number of passengers, bandwidth, time zones, and labor costs. Data streams are the levers of spatial manipulation, and the orgman has a frontier enthusiasm for this abstract territory. He derives a pioneering sense of creation from matching a labor cost, a time zone, and a desire to generate distinct forms of urban space, even distinct species of global city’.

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The OrgMen of networks, then, share something with the alpha-males and sysops (system operators). Both administer behaviours in symbolic or technical ways, shaping patterns of relation. Indeed, the software architecture used by any network is its own orgman. Organized networks would do well to diversify their platforms of communication, adopting a range of software options to enable the multiplication of expression and distribute as much as possible the delegation of network governance. If one platform starts to fall flat – say a mailing list – then perhaps the collective blog is going to appeal to more. Whenever the collective labour of a network can be galvanized around forms of coproduction (making an online journal, organizing an event, setting up a file-distribution system, producing a documentary, identifying future directions, staging a hack, designing slogans) then the life of the network finds that it has a life. Such techniques of collaborative constitution keep in check the proto-fascistic tendencies of the orgman that lurks within every network. The tension between these two registers of network sociality is a necessary dynamic. The challenge is to keep the game in play, gradually shifting the limits of the network disposition.

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If we were to reinvent cybernetics (as an organizing logic of recombination, feedback, noise, etc.), outside the military-industrial context of the Cold War, what would it be? First of all, it would no longer be obsessed with biology and bio metaphors. The aim of computer networks is not to mimic the human by copying or improving human features such as the brain, memory, senses and extensions. The question of agency and the relation between humans and non-humans, as thematized by for example Bruno Latour and the actor-network theory crowd, is a typical remainder of the cybernetics 1.0 era. In the past cybernetics tried to figure out how to connect the individual (human) body to the machine. It presumes we still have an issue with ‘intelligent machines’. The cybernetic 1.0 age was both worried and drawn to the idea that the human can(not) be replaced by thinking machines. The result of this was an irrelevant debate for decades over artificial intelligence (AI). These days no one is concerned if and when the machines take over. Have you ever been scared by the idea that a computer can and will beat you at chess? Sure it can, but so what? We know Big Brother is storing all the information in the world. AI is here to stay but is no longer a key project in technology research. Whereas cybernetics 1.0 tried to schematize human behaviour in order to simulate it through models, cybernetics 2.0 is concerned with the truly messy, all too human, social complexity. We are not ants. We are more and behave as less. Our understanding has to go beyond the boring mirror dynamic of man and machine. Computer science will have to make the leap into inter-human relations in the same way as humans are adapting to the limits set by computer interfaces and architectures. Stop the mimicry procedures, and restart computer science itself.

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Reinhold Martin: ‘Norbert Wiener argues that what counts is not the size of the basic components (such as neurons, which are similar in humans and ants) but their organization, which determines the “absolute size” of the organization’s nervous system – its upper limit of growth and index of social advancement. An organism’s social potential, conceived in terms of its ability to organize into complex communication networks, is thus measured as a function of the size of its internal circulatory and communications system, which is a function, in turn, of their own organizational complexity. The original analogy between the social and biological organism is thus collapsed, as the two become directly linked as part of the same network…. A relational logic of flexible connection replaces a mechanical logic of rigid compartmentalization, and the decisive organizational factor is no longer the vertical subordination of parts to the whole but rather the degree to which the connections permit, regulate, and respond to the informational flows in all directions’.

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What are the limits of potentiality for the organized network? While impossible to answer in terms of content (every network has its own special attributes), we can say something here about form. Form furnishes the contours of expression as it subsists within the social-technical dynamics of digital media. How these relations coalesce as distinct networks situated within and against broader geopolitical forces becomes a primary challenge for networks desiring scalar transformation – a movement that also consists of trans-institutional, disciplinary, subjective and corporeal relations whose antagonisms define the multiple registers of ‘the political’. The question of limits takes us to the transcalar practice of transversality – the production of multiple connections that move across a range of social, geocultural and institutional settings. There are also strategic questions: Who do you collaborate with? How local are you? Are you willing to deal with the cynical professionals of traditional media? Do you believe in Meme Power, viral marketing and subliminal dissemination with the chance of hitting the Zeitgeist lottery, or in the hard work of political campaigning?

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Collaboration is always accompanied by conflict and struggle. This is a matter of degree. And there’ll be plenty of exhilaration that keeps the momentum going. But tensions will always be present. Better to work out an approach to deal with this, otherwise you’ll find your projects go kaptuz!

References

Anderson, Chris. Free: The Future of a Radical Price, New York: Hyperion, 2009.

Benkler, Yochai. The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom, Yale: Yale University Press, 2006.

Castells, Manuel. The Rise of the Network Society, Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1996.

Easterling, Keller. Enduring Innocence: Global Architecture and its Political Masquerades, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005.

Innis, Harold A. The Bias of Communication, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1951.

Innis, Harold A. Empire and Communications, Victoria and Toronto: Press Porcépic, 1986.

Jacoby, Russell. The Last Intellectual: American Culture in the Age of Academe, New York: Basic Books, 1987.

Keen, Andrew. The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing our Culture, New York: Doubleday, 2007.

Kittler, Friedrich. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. & intro. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz, Stanford, Cal.: Stanford University Press, 1999.

Kraus, Karl. Aphorismen. Sprüche und Widersprüche, Pro domo et mundo, Nachts: Suhrkamp, 1986.

Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph. The Waste Books, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, New York: New York Review of Books, 2000.

Lovink, Geert. Zero Comments: Blogging and Critical Internet Culture, London and New York: Routledge, 2007.

Lovink, Geert and Rossiter, Ned. ‘Dawn of the Organised Networks’, Fibreculture Journal 5 (2005), http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue5/lovink_rossiter.html

Martin, Rheinhold. The Organizational Complex: Architecture, Media and Corporate Space, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003.

Neilson, Brett and Rossiter, Ned. ‘Precarity as a Political Concept, or, Fordism as Exception’, Theory, Culture & Society 25.7/8 (2008): 51-72.

Rossiter, Ned. Organized Networks: Media Theory, Creative Labour, New Institutions, Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2006.

Sakai, Naoki. Translation and Subjectivity: On ‘Japan’ and Cultural Nationalism, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997.

Sakai, Naoki (2006) ‘Translation’, Theory, Culture & Society 23.2/3: 71-86.

Sassen, Saskia (2006) Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Schneider, Florian. Organizing the Unorganizables (2002), http://wastun.org/v2v/Organizing_the_Unorganizable

Solomon, Jon (2007) ‘Translation, Violence and the Heterolingual Intimacy’, translate, http://translate.eipcp.net/transversal/1107/solomon/en

Terranova, Tiziana. Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age, London: Pluto Press, 2004.

Virno, Paolo. A Grammar of the Multitude, trans. James Cascaito Isabella Bertoletti and Andrea Casson, New York: Semiotext(e), 2004.

Whyte, William H. The Organization Man, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1956.

Unique visitors to post: 47

By Gabriella Coleman, Geert Lovink, Ned Rossiter and Soenke Zehle

Winter Camp 09 Visions
Wherever we look, there is a Will to Network. In most areas of the (post-)industrial world, networks are becoming a ubiquitous feature – of life, work and play. If they can – and are allowed to – teenagers spend hours texting, blogging, dating, chatting, twittering and social networking. In fact, the network addiction transcends age and cultural barriers, with business men and women hooked to their CrackBerries (Presidents too!) and older folks texting away on buses. Garbage men in the Chinese city of Ningbo check out commodity prices of waste copper from their mobiles each morning. Activists organize transnational campaigns online. Web 2.0 companies profit from the free labor and attention provided by the networks of users.

If we take these network technologies seriously, we have to ask ourselves: what’s next? What happens after the initial excitement, after we have linked up, found old classmates, become ‘friends’ and have even met up? Will networking produce a dispersed, weak level of sociality or will the ties become more substantial? What long term cultural transformations might emerge from networked interactions? Will we constantly move from one platform to the next initiative, following the global swarm? Do we really wish to carry our social network with us, wherever we go? How do we cope with the hype surrounding the ’social web’? Do the constant requests to be linked turn into a plague? Do these sites function more like a modern version of the White Pages rather than a ‘revolutionary’ platform that fosters new forms of cooperation? Will we return to our busy everyday life after the hype recedes or strive for a deep commitment to the Techno-Social? As artists, researchers, activists, educators, and cultural workers are drawn into the network paradigm, it is urgent to collectively analyze what happens when networks become driving forces. How can networks maintain their critical edge while aiming for professional status? Does anyone want to get paid for their ‘free labor’?

These and other questions inspired the organization of Winter Camp 09, which took place between the 3rd and 7th of March 2009, in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Hosted and organized by the Institute of Network Cultures, the meeting brought together twelve networks that worked on their own projects during the day (although some continued deep into the night) and collectively engaged in analyzing questions regarding the past, present and future of organizing networks during plenary sessions in the evening.

In their early stages, most networks are loose and unstructured, but over time, as they settle and grow, new challenges always emerge. Perhaps the most pressing question is whether informal networks should transform into a so-called ‘organized network’. Organizing a network does not necessarily mean the end of spontaneity and the rise of rigid rules and hierarchies. An organized network can provide an environment for sustainable knowledge sharing, production, and perhaps most importantly, reproduction. As we all know, face to face meetings are crucial for a network to maintain momentum, revitalize energy, consolidate old friendships and discover new ones, recast ideas, and plan further activities.

There is no single organizational or political model for (online) networks to become sustainable. Winter Camp was an opportunity for members of a range of networks and (potential) networks to gather in person to conspire, discuss and make the necessary steps forward to pose questions of sustainability, informality and growth. And even though Winter Camp did not have an (academic) educational or training component, there is a lot to be learned from the interactions, discussions and debates occurring during the event, which inspired these reflections.

The primary focus of Winter Camp 09 was not on established organizations, such as universities and newspapers, but on the sustenance of emerging networks. Crucial to the concept of the Winter Camp was the intention of ‘antagonistic encounters’, not simply for the sake of critique but to generate knowledge that can aid a group’s survival and dynamism. It was not an in-crowd event. The hosts were not previously acquainted with half of the networks and participants. Existing and emerging networks need to be challenged and interrupted by their own members and by contributions from outsiders. Self-referential ghettoization is a danger to the vitality and political potential of organized networks.

The political importance and urgency of organized networks is clear in that we aim for the invention of new institutional forms immanent to the logic of networks. Sustainability is key, and should not be quarantined within ecological, bio-evolutionary, economic and developmental discourses. It was intended for Winter Camp to be an exploration of how to do that, of what such institutions might look like, of what they might do, of how they might operate in different geopolitical contexts, of how they are financed, relate to other institutions and each other. This is the scalar dimension of organizing networks: How can we scale and keep-up, not become insulated and not only invent and innovate but, in the end, use the network form in the implementation of changes we envision on a society-wide level? Conceived primarily as a catalyst, the event aimed to produce an overview of network strategies that hold a combinatory potential for trans-network collaborations.

At the same time, and particularly with the advent of the neoliberal state over the past decades, space has been created for new institutional players. Witness the renewed role of religious organizations in the management and provision of social services, or the continued rise of NGOs and community organizations. Civil society has not so much ‘withered’, as Michael Hardt once put it, but rather has proliferated due, in part, to a logic of outsourcing that has spread from the economy proper across the social spheres.

Where then, does all of this leave the culture of networks? This is in many aspects one of the guiding questions that has shaped the organization of Winter Camp 09. It seems both sensible and strategic that organizing networks is a process of instituting new social-technical relations, that have unique and special capacities to do things in the world – to engender change and ultimately to transform subjectivities. How might networks take advantage of this new institutional condition – retaining their strengths, which include the culture of free distribution and sharing – while securing or, more likely, inventing the possibility of real sustainability in social and economic life?

Logistics, Format, Early Assumptions
By organizing Winter Camp, the Institute of Network Cultures intended to create a space for rethinking the role of institutions in networks and for networks to work on their own self-directed projects. Winter Camp 09 provided resources – space, food, a place to sleep, travel, lots of strangers to talk to and recruit into your network – to support encounters within and across networks. The hosts thought this kind of interdisciplinary exchange is still rare but worth the effort, even if cross-network interactions are demanding and may, if only at first sight, seem to divert precious time and energy from the core agenda of each network.

The 150 participants within the twelve networks included programmers, activists, academics, writers, designers, cultural workers and artists. A few of the twelve participating networks emerged from the context of the Institute of Network Cultures, such as the MyCreativity/ Creative Labour network. Others were already established (Dyne.org, Upgrade!) or on the verge of becoming a network (Bricolabs). The networks attending ranged from the highly informal (Goto10) to the more formal (blender.org, FreeDimensional) with participants mainly from Western Europe, North America and a smattering of participants from other parts of the world (e.g. Mexico, El Salvador, Cameroon, India) and a small core from New Zealand and Australia. With a few exceptions (notably within the FLOSS Manuals network), the groups were not all that inter-generational in so far as participants were fairly young (20 to 35 years old).The gender balance was mostly evenly distributed across the networks. Though the majority was male in some networks, one was entirely composed of women (Genderchangers).

The Winter Camp format was a mix of largely improvised, conference-like presentations and working sessions, with an emphasis on getting things done. The intention was to find a balance between the intensive sessions of groups, plenary sessions and mid-size meetings while leaving ample opportunity for informal interaction. Winter Camp featured parallel workshops. Once a day the people in these workshops convened for (public) lectures and debates. The outcomes varied from code and interfaces to research proposals. Plenary sessions were held during this working conference in order for the participants to discuss and contextualize the limits and possibilities of the attending networks. The program ended with a public session on Saturday afternoon in which the networks presented the results of their working groups.

The Winter Camp Meta-Group was responsible for the programming and production details of the event. This group of researchers reported and reflected on the network dynamics that unfolded during the event. The research of the Meta-Group revolved around the two objectives of Winter Camp: to give existing (online) networks the possibility to unite and work on their own issues, and to collectively develop sustainable network models. The group facilitated the plenary debates and theorized – collectively in the context of Winter Camp, individually as an ongoing concern – the pitfalls and possibilities of the ‘networked condition’. Members of the Meta-Group were tasked with holding on to the floating ideas and reflecting on the insights, challenges and debates that emerged at Winter Camp.

The Winter Camp Meta-Group also conducted interviews – all now online – with almost thirty members of all networks, focusing on issues such as conditions of emergence, tension between informality and formality, financial and material resources, and business and political relationships to other networks and groups. The interviews were produced for educational and archival purposes. They provide a historical resource for the Winter Camp networks as well as for anyone who wishes to think comparatively and analytically about these networks.

Before the start of the event, the Meta-Group compiled a list of questions and framing issues that helped guide in-depth interviews, plenary sessions and informal observations. Rephrased here, the list has become a mix of presumptions, questions, reflections and outcomes.

• Scaling up or down
To stay active and vibrant, should a network scale up? What does growth mean to the core of dedicated contributors? Sometimes, for no obvious reason, networks remain too small. Research has shown that a network with 50-150 active members can go on for many years. So, is expansion always the answer to a stagnated network? What procedures and policies should groups institute, if at all, to integrate new participants? What role do conferences and face to face gatherings play in allowing networks to scale? Sometimes networks just need time, often years, to find their productive synergy. However, the massive involvement in Web 2.0 platforms and social networks indicates that the critical mass is reached much sooner now than five or ten years ago. Internet culture is now mainstream culture. Social mobilization is carried out so much easier these days. Networks can be fooled by the erratic ruptures of today’s online engagement. Are large networked conversations, with sometimes over five hundred participants, doomed to fall apart? Would ’small is beautiful’ be the correct response to the Facebook masses?

• Dealing with conflict
Networks can get caught up in recurring instances of social conflict between participants (e.g. flamewars, territoriality), which can lead to the collapse of the larger network. How do we overcome such obstacles? Is it enough to let some time pass? Is it a good idea to bring in new people, hoping they will overrule the ongoing differences? What role might codes of conduct or other procedures play in mitigating these types of interpersonal conflicts? In the era of ‘trust’ conditioned by information overload it has become extremely easy to unsubscribe, filter out people you do not like, ignore e-mails and leave networks. What is the consequence of this for the potential of online environments to not only resolve but also raise and work through conflicts? Moreover, there is enormous research to be done on the geo-cultural variations of how conflict manifests itself in networks. Sure, networks are often international, but with this comes vast cultural differences in how to negotiate in the event of conflict. Indeed, a topology of conflict prevails across the culture of networks. In other words, conflict is often mutable in form and affect. People have different ideas about what it is and when it has happened. So how is a network going to deal with this on its own terms, let alone when it enters in relation with other organizational forms?

• Collaborations
How do organizations form alliances and collaborations with other like-minded groups? What coalitions are possible? How to relate to the brick and mortar institutions? Is membership an option? How does this relate back to the question of finance and legal structures, but also to the modes of relation that define the network? Collaboration has become one of those terms ubiquitous to the age of networks and, it must be said, the ideology of neoliberalism. Across the spectrum of institutional forms, budgets are cut and organizations find themselves forced to pool resources, engage in ‘knowledge-transfer’, multiply the outputs or productivity of labor force through syndication (in the worst cases) and grapple with the reality of international cultural and communicational flows. It is no wonder that for many, collaboration is a dirty word. There is no doubt that it takes time and energy and is prone to failure. So why would networks bother to go anywhere near this sort of engagement with the unexpected? Well, for a start, collaboration has been a default condition of networks ever since they emerged within online settings. While the horizontality and distributive structure of networks tends to invoke excessive celebration and to lead to frequent analytical error, however, it can be said that it has facilitated modes of relation that engender collaboration. What, after all, is a network without a relation? As we see it, the power of collaboration lies in the capacity to renew networks and feeds into processes of scalar transformation. At the level of organizing networks as emergent institutional forms, the practice of collaboration forces networks to address related questions of governance and the constitution of protocols, whether formal, informal or both.

• Financial matters and legal structures
Suppose you hope your network will survive more than a few years. It is fun and you all develop the right vibe. There are tons of plans. Would writing a grant proposal be the way to go? Most networks do not have a legal structure. However, you need to become a legal body in order to enter the money economy or funding systems. Online networks also have to deal with money, even if it is just site hosting and the cost of a domain name. It is a farce to believe everything can and will be free of charge. What then, are the most suitable legal forms for distributed collaboration? What if you do not want to have a board, or a director? Or on the contrary, what if you are tired of the ‘terror of the casual’? Is the legal road a way out, or the perfect recipe for disaster? Can we escape such predicaments? Would it be possible to operate as a parasite institute? Piggyback on an existing NGO? Or even snatch a (dead) legal body? Perhaps there are unexpected opportunities in the society of fakes.

• The politics of culture
What role might culture – interpreted loosely – play in the constitution of networks? Free and open source software emerges from and helps consolidate geek culture, whose history precedes this mode of production and which may account for the strength of these particular networks. Are similar dynamics at play with other networks, or is this not the case? Moreover, there is a political side to these networks, which ranges from anarchist/left to liberal/reformist. How do these political philosophies shape the constitution of these networks? What sort of political and institutional prehistory might register the continuum of political culture in networks?

• Ownership and copyright
While there are current alternatives to copyright (such as copyleft licenses and those of Creative Commons), what are the limits, pitfalls, and problems in implementing these or any other legal solution for creative and knowledge production? The core lies at the level of the individual participant, and the ownership over his or her ideas. If the network accepts the idiom of intellectual property, what are the models that allow personal attribution as well as award recognition for the group effort? Is it is a major issue for the network to have legal discourses pressed upon their mode of production? How might the genre of creation (e.g. software versus photography) change the efficacy of current alternatives?

• Software and the technology fix
What tools are suitable for collaboration? What are the limits of current communication protocols (i.e. e-mail, mailing lists, web pages, social networking sites)? What new tools are being created to address the needs? How can we keep the network together without getting caught up in difficult or differentiated channels of communication? How does a network of non-experts learn a new language of programming? Is this an opportunity to expand the network, invite the experts in, or is this an occasion of getting to work and acquire new skills? Perhaps both are necessary. Either way, it seems the software question has to be addressed for those networks wishing to enter the world of open source cultural production and political invention.

• Dissemination
What type of publications and series can be developed? Without too much trouble, networks jump into the grey zone between print and online publications – what are the opportunities here? The question of labor, again, has to be central in any strategy of dissemination. Who will do the work? For a publication you need designers, writers, coders, editors, copy-editors, readers, and so on. Many publications in the field of network cultures are available free of charge, and regarding sustainability and finance issues, this becomes a problem that somehow has to be addressed. Piggybacking off other institutional forms – whether they be universities or cultural organizations – is a common practice that helps relieve some of the problems around resources and expenditure. The process of dissemination, like that of open source programmers, is something done outside office hours. But this does not really help advance the development of networks. Sooner or later this position is going to wear thin. One of the main reasons to keep up the practice of dissemination is that it often serves as a binding force for networks and their participants. A collective memory is important to all institutional forms and social pleasures.

• Definitions and typologies
Winter Camp’s overall aim has been to strengthen the network(ed) form of organization. It might also be important in this context to go back to basics and to ask how an (organized) network defines itself. What could a network institution look like? What are its dynamics and how might it become a source of power vis-à-vis the production of new standards and social relations? What forms of reflexivity and translation are part of these modes of relation? How does the network learn to institute sharing, democratize its own production of expertise, establish collaborative forms of decision-making and address the question of borders?

Ongoing Observations, Random Ruminations
We opened Winter Camp with a plenary session in which participants of each network introduced themselves. One hundred and fifty people presenting themselves: it was clearly program overload – and very diverse. But it also gave people a sense of how difficult it may be for networks not only to scale up but to create meaningful communication channels across networks. And while the question of translation of network-specific jargon was raised more than once both as a practical concern and a possible model for collaboration, the English language continues to be the lingua franca.

The venue for this opening night, a 70s-style movie theatre, shaped the plenary session naturally, for better and worse. It was a reminder of how networking, even if done online, is a spatial practice and requires the creation of spaces (tools, user interfaces, services) that are supportive of the networked condition, and of new forms of collaboration.

Indeed, sometimes it is merely the architecture that encourages us to maintain traditional forms of sociality and debate. Clearly meeting face to face is a key condition for networks to thrive, and one of the reasons for hosting this kind of event. However, an important consideration are the costs to accommodate such meetings. Urban space is a commodity of which the value is rising as the information economy shifts to creativity as the next big thing. Gentrification accompanies the transformation of creativity from an experimental practice into the economic paradigm of policy frameworks. There is a number of concrete implications here: It is now more expensive than ever to rent spaces to gather, to talk, to organize. It is a curious detail that most of the Winter Camp budget was spent on rent. The event was organized in the first week of March because this proved to be the cheapest week of the year for plane tickets, hotel rooms and conference accommodation in Amsterdam.

The plenary sessions were our main feedback channel during this event. Instead of thematic emphasis, we drew on the concepts, terms and idioms of the texts submitted by each network – these are some of the terms groups use to describe their work, to situate themselves in the world of networks. We grouped the terms around three main phases each network goes through – the conditions of its emergence, the trials and challenges of being (and staying) active, and possible futures that may (or may not) call for collaborations beyond network boundaries.

‘If I can’t dance to it, it’s not my revolution’.
The Winter Camp mix – artists, activists, academics, programmers – is one that has a certain history in local net cultural events (at least since the Next Five Minutes conference series, held in Amsterdam in September 2003). There are clearly points of overlap and synergy between the political activists and the coders, or the artists and academics. And yet, the points of contact are certainly partial and often contentious as well. Different networks organize around different political cultures – anarchist, liberal humanist, hybrids and so on. Moreover, affective logics have a strong shaping power in the sociality of networks, and more broadly, groups. As people from various backgrounds and professions are placed in one (composite) space, distinctions between art and activism, academics and the work of software development appear to become more entrenched. Borders are not completely permeable, and the very possibility of translation between and among the many idioms – jargons – particular to each effort seem to constitute yet another limit to the very idea of a network of networks.

For a brief moment, the diversity of Winter Camp 09 participants seemed to be reduced to primarily one distinction: you are a techie or not, with the implications that people who work on seemingly non-technological issues of social justice, human rights, and other forms of more directly political engagement are somehow closer to a real and authentic world of emergencies than those who sit in front of the blue screen and churn out code. Time and again we have seen that programmers, designers, activists and theorists need each other. Take one of them out of the equation and you will immediately notice the missing element – yet the need for such multidiscipline has to be affirmed time and again as it can never be taken for granted.

We were surprised at the strong – and almost group-like – desire in and across some of the networks for a common, universal vocabulary, a desire reminiscent of liberal fantasies of universal communication and subjectivity. This came through in the numerous calls for ‘jargon-free’ talk. But if such commonality merely means a world of perpetual self-affirmation where everything is a predictable, reiteration of the same (we think of dull jobs, canned sitcoms, and consumer products), dynamic networks certainly beg to differ. So we wondered: How do they deal with difference, both internal and external? If it is not quips against ‘high academic theory’ (whatever that means, since you would be hard-pressed to find much high theory in universities these days) that is supposedly ‘disengaged’ from ‘doing things’, then there’s the charge against the impenetrability of geek-speak. But what is this will-to-total knowledge all about? Who wants to know everything? Let’s remember, less can also be more. These issues concerning difference and unity provide an important reminder of the fallacy behind the possibility of a grand ‘we-are-in-this-together’ situation. In fact, the opposite seems to be the case, and serves as an important reminder of why the questions of borders, differences and translation continue to matter.

Yet, such distinctions behold their own dangers and limits – fragmentation is probably the single most evident shortcoming in the contemporary landscape of networked politics. Politics, even radical politics, are well and alive online but their topography is one of pods, ponds and silos. While there is a certain degree of strength in autonomous nodes and decentralized networks, there are serious limits to this current geo-spatial arrangement. Without contact zones, without some degree of collaboration, without federation, groups are left to compete for attention, for members, and for resources. Certain political efforts require numbers and thus require groups to conjoin forces, at least momentarily. The 21st century has born a vibrant sphere of organized networks and as these mature and travel forward, it is imperative to alter the topography to allow loose federations and stable contact zones to grow and take root.

However, we can still remain skeptical regarding the desire for a return to a seemingly simple language of self-evidence or universality. The challenge is to create spaces for cross-border pollination and labor without the illusion that they will be total and frictionless. They require sustained work and energy, perhaps even more than the creation of any single network.

The Limits of Collaborative Reflection
Let’s discuss the plenary session in which we convened after the first day of work. At first resisted by a number of participants who wanted more time to work, the idea of one event that everyone checks into did take on a life of its own, as questions and comments and counter-comments both illustrate the tremendous diversity of efforts, including commonalities, as much as tensions and mutual misunderstandings.

Terminology is something that quickly emerged as important to understanding the social metabolism of these groups. Some groups do not refer to themselves as networks, others describe their collaborative efforts with terms drawn from a broad, overwhelming array of conceptual and political practices: community, autonomous collective, network. These idioms – languages, vocabularies, ways of speaking and doing – by which to reflect on network activity vary widely, including friendship and the desire to create spaces of comfort to act and learn in common as well as the attempt to elaborate translation as a new mode of relation.

Interviews with participants were held through the entire event and yielded some surprises. Perhaps one of the most contentious but also not so surprising issues was representation: who gets to be spokesperson for the group? Some groups welcomed the opportunity to broadcast their agenda through the video interview and blogging, which can contribute another resource to sustain and perhaps stabilize their efforts. Others were uncomfortable to speak on behalf of others at all, suggesting that the very idea of representation may in fact weaken the very effort to relate and sustain their common effort.

At the same time, the permanent state of emergency around is creating an urgency that almost threatens to overburden us, making us impatient with discussions that do not seem to relate to the world of social change directly yet are necessary to identify and chart future paths of collaboration. There is so much to do, to be engaged in, we can only pick and choose and then hope that others will join. And while all of the networks at Winter Camp have social and political agendas, it seemed that a disproportionate number of them were ‘technological’ networks dedicated to the creation of new infrastructures.

Another way to look at this, however, is to recognize that many networks have adopted and appropriated technological tools and idioms because they are useful in describing and sustaining what they do. In other words, there are affinities between a sociological network and technological network. But the relationship is not deterministic. The techie/non-techie divide is not only misleading, it also threatens to obscure the extent to which many of these efforts have already developed, subverted, and recreated mainstream technological idioms that have little to do with social justice, and put the question of justice back into them. This is the task at hand of many free software projects, for example, they reject the neutrality of proprietary solutions and make visible the extent to which intellectual property frames the kinds of politics we can engage in.

Unsurprisingly, one of the various linguistic or terminological debates was around the term ‘network’. Ton Roosendaal of Blender memorably proclaimed ‘So what is a network!?’ Others referred to the term community, suggesting it connected much more closely with the people they work with. Others insisted that their network was too large, too decentralized, too far flung to use the term community. There can be no consensus over what terms mean or do not mean, but it did become clear that ‘community’ corresponded to an issue of scale. In a community, you know folks personally, but at Winter Camp, many participants met for the first time, They suggested the networks had ‘abstracted’ into the online, virtual realm, and quite likely done so in the first instance.

There was no debate concerning the constrictive nature of ‘community’ as a term that corresponds with the reproduction of repressive traditions. Perhaps this is just a (critical) European response to community as distinct from other regions in the world that do not associate ‘community’ with this type of baggage. Perhaps it also has something to do with the relatively new entry of the term ‘network’ into our social-technological vocabularies. Community is a (Christian) term that has circulated within society for considerably longer, and thus holds a familiarity that the term network perhaps still does not. This could be one explanation for the layperson, who is not especially invested in the formation of techno-socialities, but it does not make so much sense for participants of Winter Camp 09 who, generally speaking, have a pretty strong familiarity with the ‘update and upgrade’ world of high-tech.

Future Questions
Whether we like it or not, institutions are part of our daily life – a fact that ‘nomadic’ thinkers who celebrate ‘difference’, ‘multitude ‘ and ‘globalization’ often tend to ignore. It is necessary but not enough to dream up new concepts. The trick is to translate them, together, into new institutional forms. Networks become part of the problem if we do not present them as forms of organization and if we let them become seamless with capitalist imperatives. Just as economic globalization has massively transformed the world on a seemingly ongoing basis, so too have institutions as we usually understand them – those whose foundations are built from concrete and steel, bricks and mortar – been subject to considerable change in the age of electronic networks. While many primary institutions of social and political life (the state, firms, unions, universities) have struggled to adapt to changing circumstances, they have nonetheless made recognizable and frequently substantial changes. Indeed, many have reinvented themselves as ‘networked organizations’. While it could be said that many of those established institutions are in a crisis – in terms of legitimacy, sustainability and ontology – it would be a mistake to suggest their hegemony and power has in any way diminished. Network surveillance through data-mining and user-profiling is only becoming more sophisticated as a bio-political technology of control. That dominant institutions have increasingly become networked does not mean they operate in a more soft, benign manner; to provide effective alternatives to such entities, we still need to create counter-sites of power. And yet we must not be complacent about existing alternative networks and simply celebrate the mere existence of the latter.

As sociality – the ways we communicate, relate, work – is becoming more technological, it is now more important than ever to address the uneasiness network technologies appear to trigger. Does this become a question of reclaiming ‘the social’ that is always already technological? Can the technological somehow be withdrawn, detached or kept at some kind of manageable (and knowable) distance? Probably not. So it would seem crucial to find ways of knowing the technological in order to negotiate the social.

Organized networks move between informality and structure, and it is this unexplored terrain that Winter Camp sought to investigate. It could have been a totally ‘structure’- free event, but for us that would defeat a central purpose of this meeting, namely the cross-pollination of ideas and practices across the various networks, most of whom do not know each other, and with whom the organizers are also not acquainted.

The study of network cultures is the core concern of the Amsterdam-based Institute of Network Cultures, the initiator and organizer of Winter Camp 09. It is in this light that we aimed to gather both practical and conceptual knowledge from networks themselves, document these ideas and make them accessible to an ever-growing range of groups and individuals that have started to work under the ‘network condition’.

Networking academies, camps, or schools of various kinds have always existed, but it seems to us that in the post-Seattle moment, their role and integration with a broader agenda of social transformation has to be redefined. This is even more urgent as Web 2.0 social media, produced by well-funded Silicon Valley start-ups, colonize the everyday technological landscape and define the ideological/ political maps used to comprehend the significance of these technologies. Along with a great curiosity about how networks currently function, one of our key motivations in putting this event together has been to reflect further on the possible and current relationships between (a few) institutions and networks. Winter Camp was too short, too small to yield results that can simply be generalized across the terrains of net.culture, but it confirmed the need to couple face-to-face meetings with a research agenda that both takes key signals from what’s happening at the grassroots and prompts critical reflection on issues across network boundaries.

* Published in Geert Lovink (ed.) From Weak Ties to Organized Networks: Ideas, Reports, Critiques, Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2009, pp. 6-23.

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Abstract
The return of political ontology and its critique of representation contribute to a retrieval of the antagonistic registers of “the political.” A corresponding interest in processes of collaborative constitution has explored alternative modalities of the (conflictual) production of (political) subjectivity. Because such efforts necessarily attend to the status of a principle of the actionable, this essay suggests that the question of a “beyond” as it relates to a politics of the actionable calls for a conceptual elaboration of “organized networks.” The essay argues that a broader analytical perspective is opened by reengaging the practice of translation.

Keywords: organization, networks, non-representational politics, collaboration, translation

Zehle, Soenke and Rossiter, Ned. ‘Organizing Networks: Notes on Collaborative Constitution, Translation, and the Work of Organization’, Cultural Politics 5.2 (2009): 237-264.

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By Ippolita, Geert Lovink & Ned Rossiter

0. The internet turns out to be neither the problem nor the solution for the global recession. As an indifferent bystander it doesn’t lend itself easily as a revolutionary tool. The virtual has become the everyday. The New Deal is presented as green, not digital. The digital is a given. This low-key position presents an opportunity to rethink the Web 2.0 hype. How might we understand our political, emotional and social involvement in internet culture over the next few years?

1. News media is awash with ‘economic crisis’, indulging in its self-generated spectacle of financial meltdown. Experts are mobilised, but only to produce the drama of dissensus. Programmed disagreement is the consensus of daily news. Crisis, after all, is the condition of possibility for capitalism. Unlike the dotcom crash in 2000-2001, when the collapse of high-tech stocks fueled the global recession, the internet has so far managed to stay out of the blame game. Web 2.0 only suffers mild side effects from the odd collection of platforms and services, from Google to Wikipedia, Photobucket, Craigslist, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Habbo and so-called regional players such as Baidu and 51.com. Despite its benign existence, there still is hyper-growth wherever you look. Web 2.0 applications and platforms remain ‘new’ but show a tendency to get lost inside the boring, stressful and uncertain working life of the connected billions.

2. Social networks are technologies of entertainment and diffusion. The social reality they create is real, but as a technology of immediacy you can’t get no satisfaction. We initially love them for their distraction from the torture of now-time. Networking sites are social drugs for those in need of the Human that is located elsewhere in time or space. It is the pseudo Other that we are connecting to. Not the radical Other or some real Other. We systematically explore weakness and vagueness and are pressed to further enhance the exhibition of the Self. ‘I might know you (but I don’t). Do you mind knowing me?’. The pleasure principle of entertainment thus diffuses social antagonisms – how does conflict manifest within the comfort zones of social networks and their tapestries of auto-customisation? The business-minded ‘trust doctrine’ has all but eliminated the open, dirty internet forums. Most Web 2.0 are echo chambers of the same old opinions and cultural patterns. As we can all witness, they are not exactly hotbeds of alternative sub-culture. What’s new are their ’social’ qualities: the network is the message. What is created here is a sense or approximation of the social. Social networks register a ‘refusal of work’. But our net-time, after all, is another kind of labour. Herein lies the perversity of social networks: however radical they may be, they will always be data-mined. They are designed to be exploited. Refusal of work becomes just another form of making a buck that you never see.

3. Social networking sites are as much fashion victims as everything else. They come and go. Their migration across space signals the enculturisation of software. While Orkut disappeared in G8 countries, it is still Big in Brazil. Is anyone still seriously investing in real estate in Second Life? What the online world needs is sustainable social relations. The moving herds that go from one server to the next merely demonstrate an impulsive grazing mentality: once the latest widgets are installed, it is time to move on. Sustainability is connected to scaleability. Here, we see lessons from the major social movements over the last 50 years. The force of accumulated social-political desires manifest, eventually, in national and global forums that permeate back into policy discourse and social practice: think March on Washington, 1963 (Black Civil Rights), Rio, 1992 (Earth Summit), Porto Alegre, 2001 (World Social Forum), Geneva and Tunis, 2003-2005 (World Summit on the Info-Society). None of these examples are exempt from critique. We note them here to signal the relationship between sustainability and scalar transformation. We are familiar with formats such as barcamps, unconferencing and have participated in DIY techno-workshops at those seasonal media arts festivals. But these are hardly instances of sustainability. Their temporality of tinkering is governed by the duration of the event. True, there is occasionally resonance back in the local hack-lab, but such practices are exclusive to techno-secret societies, not the networked masses. Social networking sites are remarkable for their capacity to scale. Their weakness is their seeming incapacity to effect political change in any substantive way. The valorisation of citizen-journalism is not the same as radical intervention, and is better understood as symptomatic of the structural logic of outsourcing media production and election campaign management.

4. From social to socialism is a small step for humankind – but a big step for the Western subject. What makes the social attractive, and socialism so old school and boring? What is the social anyway? We have to be aware that such postmodern academic language games do not deepen our understanding of the issues, nor widen our political fantasies. We need imagination, but only if it illuminates concepts that transform concrete conditions. The resurrection of the social after its disappearance is not an appealing slogan. Some ideas have an almost direct access to our body. Others remain dead. This in particular counts for insider jargon such as rent, multitude, common, commons and communism. There’s a compulsion to self-referentiality here that’s not so different from the narcissistic default of so many blogs. What, then, are the collective concepts of the social networked masses? For now, they are engineered from the top-down by the corporate programmers, or they are outsourced to the world of widgets. Tag, Connect, Friend, Link, Share, Tweet. These are not terms that signal any form of collective intelligence, creativity or networked socialism. They are directives from the Central Software Committee. «Participation» in «social networks» will no longer work, if it ever did, as the magic recipe to transform tired and boring individuals into cool members of the mythological Collective Intelligence. If you’re not an interesting individual, your participation is not really interesting. Data clouds, after all, are clouds: they fade away. Better social networks are organized networks involving better individuals – it’s your responsibility, it’s your time. What is needed is an invention of social network software where everybody is a concept designer. Let’s kill the click and unleash a thousand million tiny tinkerers!

5. We are addicted to ghettoes, and in so doing refuse the antagonism of ‘the political’. Where is the enemy? Not on Facebook, where you can only have ‘friends’. What Web 2.0 lacks is the technique of antagonistic linkage. Instead, we are confronted with the Tyranny of Positive Energy. Life only consists of uplifting experiences. Depression is not a design principle. Wikipedia’s reliance on ‘good faith’ and its policing of protocols quite frequently make for a depressing experience in the face of an absence of singular style. There ain’t no ‘neutral point of view’. This software design principle merely reproduces the One Belief System. Formats need to be transformed if they are going to accommodate the plurality of expression of networked life. Templates function as zones of exclusion. But strangely, they also exclude the conflict of the border. The virus is the closest thing to conflict online. But viruses work in invisible ways and function as a generator of service labour for the computer nerd who comes in and cleans your computer.

6. The critique of simulation falls short here. There is nothing ‘false’ about the virtuality of social networking sites. They are about as real it gets these days. Stability accumulates for those hooked to networks. Things just keep expanding. More requests. More friends. More time for social-time. With the closure of factories comes the opening of data-mines. Privacy is so empty of curiosity that we are compelled to slap it on our Wall for all to see. If we are lucky, a Friend refurbishes it with a comment. And if you are feeling cheeky, then Throw A Sheep! You would be hard-pressed to notice any substantive change. But you will be required to do never-ending maintenance work to manage all your data feeds and updates. That’ll subtract a bit of time from your daily routine.

7. The Network will not be Revolutionized. What does this mean for Indymedia 2.0? The question of why indymedia.org failed and did not further develop into an active and open social networking site or clearly take up a position in the Web 2.0 debate is something that needs to be addressed (see nettime debate of May 2009). Have media activists already learnt enough of the Brechtian Indymedia Lehrstueck that started in the late nineties? Is global branding and branching, as in the case of Indymedia (one name, often similar design, sharing of servers, some syndication of content, etc.), still as important as it used to be? Indymedia met the challenge of scaleability in amazing ways only to discover its limits. Contamination seems key for transnational social-political networks. As do regular face-to-face meetings. Let your network connect with the concrete and adaptation and transformation will undoubtedly kick in. Then try reconnecting across networks (and other institutional and organizational forms) on the global scale. Conflict will already have multiplied and the primary condition of sustainability will be underway.

8. Web 2.0 is not for free. ‘Free as in free beer’ is not like ‘free as in freedom’. Open does not equal free. These days ‘free’ is just another word for service economies. The linux fiefdom know that all too well. We need to question naive campaigns that merely promote ‘free culture’ without questioning the underlying parasitic economy and the ‘deprofessionalization’ of cultural work. Pervasive profiling is the cost of this opening to ‘free market values’. As users and prosumers we are limited by our capacity as data producers. Our tastes and preferences, our opinions and movements are the market price to pay. At present, Facebook’s voluntary and enthusiastic auto-filing system on a mass scale represents the high point of this strategy. But we cannot succumb to the control paranoia and to the logic of fear. Let’s inject more kaos in it! So what if you have your anti-whatever Facebook group? What does it change other than expanding your number of friends? Is deleting the radical gesture of 2009? Why not come up a more subversive and funny, anti-cyclical act? Are you also looking for rebel tactical tools?

9. Soon the Web 2.0 business model will be obsolete. It is based on the endless growth principle, pushed by the endless growth of consumerism. The business model still echoes the silly 90s dotcom model: if growth stagnates, it means the venture has failed and needs to be closed down. Seamless growth of customised advertising is the fuel of this form of capitalism, decentralized by the user-prosumer. Mental environment pollution is parallel to natural environment pollution. But our world is finished (limited). We have to start elaborating appropriate technologies for a finite world. There is no exteriority, no other worlds (second, third, fourth worlds) where we can dump the collateral effects of insane development. We know that Progress is a bloodthirsty god that extracts a heavy human sacrifice. A good end cannot justify a bad means. On the contrary, technologies are means that have to justify the end of collective freedom. No sacrifice will be tolerated: martyrs are not welcome. Neither are heroes.

10. ‘Better a complex identity than an identity complex’. We need to promote peer-education that shifts the default culture of auto-formation to the nihilist pleasure of hacking the system. Personal exhibition on web 2.0 social networks resembles the discovery of sexuality. Anxiety over masturbation meets digital narcissism (obsessive touching up of personal profiles) and digital voyeurism (compulsive viewing of other’s profiles, their list of friends, secrets, etc.). To avoid the double trap of blind technophilia and luddite technophobia, we have to develop complex digital identities. They have to answer to individual desires and satisfy multiple needs. Open-ID are a good starting point. ‘Steal my profile’. It’s time to remix identity. Anonymity is a good alternative to the pressures of the control society, but there must be alternatives on offer. One strategy could be to make the one (’real’) identity more complex and, where possible, contradictory. But whatever your identify might be, it will always be harvested. If you must participate in the accumulation economy for those in control of the data mines, then the least you can do is Fake Your Persona.

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Special Issue: Mónica Carriço, Bert de Muynck, Ned Rossiter (eds) ‘Creative China: Counter-Mapping the Creative Industries’, Urban China 33 (November, 2008).

Designed by Hendrik-Jan Grievink

This issue of Urban China sets out to critique and redefine the idea and practice of ‘mapping’ the creative industries. Foregrounding the experimental process of collaborative constitution, we are interested in the multiple idioms of expression that make creative industries intelligible beyond the blandness of policy discourse. Activist researchers, artists and writers in Europe, Brazil and India have been particularly inventive in combining collaborative techniques of production with social-political critique via media of communication. We see this work as part of the prehistory and global dialogue around how to create new spaces and transdisciplinary knowledges able to negotiate the complexities and politics that attend the economization of culture.

Screen shots of section introductions.

Chinese with select texts published in English

Full and downloadable issue here.

It may be possible to order copies from here, though the issue has sold rapidly and is in limited supply.

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Earlier this year the edu-factory organizers invited me to comment on the passage from hierarchisation to autonomous institutions. Indeed, I think it appropriate to maintain the connection between hierarchy and autonomy. This constitutive tension is apparent in the political economy and social-technical dimensions of both open source and proprietary software that provides the architecture for communicative relations. And it manifests on multiple fronts in the modalities of organization that attend the creation of autonomous spaces and times of radical or alternative research and education projects, experiments and agendas. There is no absolute autonomy, but rather a complex field of forces and relations that hold the potential for partial autonomy, or ‘the difference which makes a difference’ (Bateson). How to move and direct such complexities in such a way that make possible autonomous education is what I understand to be the program of edu-factory.

And in such guidance – a combination of collective investigation and top-down decision-making – one finds the movement between hierarchy and autonomy. This is a matter of governance for networks. Protocols come in to play, and dispute, disagreement and alliance shape the culture of networks in singular ways. At the technical level there are some near universal features of networks: TCP/IP, location of root-servers according to the geo-politics of information, adoption of open source and/or proprietary software, allocation of domain names, etc. But as the debates around the UN’s World Summit on the Information Society (2003-2005) amply demonstrated, it quickly becomes analytically and politically implausible to separate the technical aspects of information from social and cultural conditions. Autonomous education that makes use of ICTs will always be situated within a geography of uneven information. Hierarchies will always prevail.

The possibility of transnational collaboration that aspires to autonomous education thus becomes a problem of translation, as Jon Solomon and others have discussed in rich ways on this list. There will be no ‘construction of an autonomous global university’. How, then, might autonomous education initiatives engage in scalar transformation in such a way that makes transnational relations possible? This seems to be the ambition of the edu-factory. But what is the desire for transnational connection? Why not keep things local, rooted in the geographies of the city, neighborhood or village? Who is the subject of, let us say, not a global but transnational education project that resides sufficiently outside the corporate university?

Part of the brilliance of the edu-Summit held in Berlin last May was to finally break with the anti- or alter-globalization cycle of staging protests according to the diary of the WTO, G8, etc.[1] Autonomy begins with invention that is co-emergent with conflict, crisis, frustration, curiosity, depression, wild utopian desires, boredom, etc. The sites of conflict are multiple: individual, institutional, social/collective, corporeal, affective, ecological, cultural, disciplinary, geopolitical, governmental, etc. Underscored by heterolingual tensions and incommensurabilities, the edu-factory organizers’ call for and presupposition of ‘the realization of our collective project’ is nothing short of complex (a problematic acknowledged by edu-factory organizers and participants). But one needs to take care not to allow complexity to displace the conflict that takes place in occupying a line or position. This is the space of the political.

What is the situation of autonomous institutions? Paolo Do: ‘Talking about an autonomous university is to find a starting-point to attack and to occupy the spaces belonging to the enemy’.[2] Such an approach is a reactionary one if it is to be reduced to a takeover, say, of the institutional spaces of the university. The conservatism in such a move lies in a responsive mechanism determined by the space and time of ‘the enemy’, or hegemonic institution (the university as we know it). To simply occupy the spaces of the enemy is to repeat the failure Foucault saw of revolution: the end-result is a reproduction of the same. This amounts to a reformist agenda and, in the case of the transformation of universities over the past 20 or so years, succeeds in the production and proliferation of managerial subjectivities.

There are, however, different registers of occupation, and I will assume this to be the interest of Paolo. A good example can be found in the case of domestic workers in Hong Kong and their invention of new institutional forms that arise through the practice of occupation. The potential for commonalities across labouring bodies is undoubtedly a complex and often fraught subjective and institutional process or formation. The fractured nature of working times, places and practices makes political organization highly difficult. Where this does happen, there are often ethnic affinities coalesced around specific sectors – here, we are thinking of examples such as the ‘Justice for Janitors’ movement in the U.S., a largely Latino immigrant experience of self-organization.[3]

In Hong Kong, domestic workers gather on Sundays within non-spaces such as road fly-overs, under pedestrian bridges and in public parks. The domestics are female workers for the most part, initially from the Philippines with a new wave of workers in recent years from Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand.[4] And as cultural critic Helen Grace notes, ‘there are also mainland migrant workers with limited rights, working in all sorts of low-paid jobs, moving backwards and forwards and living with great precarity’.[5]

The domestic workers transform the status of social-ethnic borders by occupying spaces from which they are usually excluded due to the spatial and temporal constraints of labour. Sunday is the day off for domestic workers, and they don’t want to stay at home, nor do their employers wish to have them about the house. The Norman Foster designed headquarters for HSBC bank located in Central district nicely encapsulates the relation between domestic workers and capital and the disconnection between state and citizen. This bank is just one of many instances found globally where the corporate sector makes available public spaces in the constitution of an ‘entrepreneurial city’.[6]

Yet the actions of undocumented workers mark a distinction from the entrepreneurial city and its inter-scalar strategies of capital accumulation in the form of property development and business, financial, IT and tourist services. With a first floor of public space, workers engage in praying and study groups reading the Koran, singing songs, labour organization, cutting hair and dancing while finance capital is transferred in floors above the floating ceiling of the HSBC bank. Used in innovative ways that conflict with or at least depart from how these spaces usually function, there is a correspondence here with what Grace calls a ‘horizontal monumentality’, ‘making highly visible – and public – a particular aspect of otherwise privatized labour and domestic space’.[7]

Not described in tourist guides and absent from policy and corporate narratives of entrepreneurial innovation and development, the domestic worker is a public without a discourse. For many Hong Kong residents their visibility is undesirable, yet these workers make a significant contribution to the city’s imaginary: their visibility on Sundays signals that the lustre of entrepreneurialism is underpinned by highly insecure and low-paid forms of work performed by non-citizens. The domestic worker also instantiates less glamorous but nonetheless innovative forms of entrepreneurialism. An obvious example here consists of the small business initiatives such as restaurants, deli’s and small-scale repairs and manufacturing that some migrant workers go on to develop, making way for new intakes of domestic workers in the process and redefining the ethnic composition of the city. Such industriousness provides an important service to local residents and contributes in key ways to the social-cultural fabric of the city.

The competition of urban space – particularly the use of urban space – by the domestic worker also comprises an especially innovative act: the invention of a new institutional form, one that we call the ‘organized network’. The transnational dimension of the domestic workers is both external and internal. External, in their return home every year or two for a week or so – a passage determined by the time of labour and festivity (there is little need for domestics during the Chinese New Year). External, in their return home every year or two for a week or so – a passage determined by the time of labour and festivity (there is little need for domestics during the Chinese New Year). Internal, with respect to the composition of the group itself. In this case, there exists ‘a multiplicity of overlapping sites that are themselves internally heterogeneous’, as noted by Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson in their posting to the list.[8] Here, I am thinking of the borders of sociality that compose the gathering of domestics in one urban setting or another – as mentioned above, some choose to sing, engage in labour organization, hold study groups, etc. Ethnic and linguistic differences also underscore the internal borders of the group.

Can the example of domestic workers in Hong Kong be understood in terms of a transnational organized network? I suspect not. The domestics only meet in particular times and spaces (Sunday in urban non-spaces). Such a form of localization obviously does not lend itself to transnational connection. Perhaps NGOs and social movements that rally around the conditions of domestic workers communicate within a transnational network of organizations engaged in similar advocacy work. But if this is the case, then we are speaking of a different register of subjectivity and labour – one defined by the option of expanded choice and self-determination.

In this sense, we can identify a hierarchy of networks whose incommensurabilities are of a scalar nature: local as distinct from transnational. For domestic workers, much of this has to do with external conditions over which they have little control: Sunday is the day off work, exile from their country of origin is shaped by lack of economic options and the forces of global capital, their status as undocumented or temporary workers prevents equivalent freedom of movement and political rights afforded by Hong Kong citizens, etc. But within these constraints, invention is possible.

Part one of this second round of discussions on the edu-factory mailing list identified many of the conditions at work that shape the differential experience of labour and practices of education. How to make the transition to institution strikes me as the task now at hand.

Notes
Parts of this text are drawn from a forthcoming article: Brett Neilson and Ned Rossiter, ‘Precarity as a Political Concept, or, Fordism as Exception’, Theory, Culture & Society 25.7 (2008).

1. Summit: Non-Aligned Initiatives in Education Culture, Berlin, 24-28 May, 2007, http://summit.kein.org

2. Paolo Do, ‘Open University’, posting to edu-factory mailing list, 14 January, 2008, http://listcultures.org/pipermail/edufactory_listcultures.org/2008-January/000113.html

3. See Florian Schneider, ‘Organizing the Unorganizables’, 2002, http://wastun.org/v2v/Organizing_the_Unorganizable

4. See Nicole Constable, ‘At Home but Not at Home: Filipina Narratives of Ambivalent Returns’, Cultural Anthropology 14.2 (1999): 203-228 and Lisa Law, ‘Defying Disappearance: Cosmopolitan Public Spaces in Hong Kong’, Urban Studies 39.9 (2002): 1625-1646. [both articles available online - do a search]

5. Helen Grace, personal email, 15 January, 2008.

6. See Bob Jessop and Ngai-Ling Sum, ‘An Entrepreneurial City in Action: Hong Kong’s Emerging Strategies in and for (Inter-)Urban Competition’, (no date), http://www2.cddc.vt.edu/digitalfordism/fordism_materials/jessop.htm

7. Helen Grace, ‘Monuments and the Face of Time: Distortions of Scale and Asynchrony in Postcolonial Hong Kong’, Postcolonial Studies 10.4 (2007): 469.

8. Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson, ‘Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor’, transversal (2008), http://eipcp.net/transversal/0608/mezzadraneilson/en.

English version of: ‘Una gerarchia di reti? ovvero, reti geo-culturalmente differenziate e i limiti della collaborazione’, in edu-factory collective (eds) L’università globale: Il nuovo mercato del sapere, Roma: Manifestolibri, 2008.

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