For a long-term reader of the New York Review of Books like me it came as a surprise to read about the decline of book review culture in America. Of course, in the Land of the Superficial, under the rule of G.W. Bush, everything critical, cultural or intellectually demanding must have gone down the drain. But that wasn’t exactly my impression. The New York Reviews of Books is one of the best review magazine in the world. Gail Pool doesn’t see it that way. For her NYRB is not best practice but an exception to the rule. In her book on review culture in America Pool presents intellectually prestigious publications as niche products that do not cover the “general interest.” What Gail Pool qualifies as a risk, namely to produce controversies beyond the book under review, I would see as the ultimate aim. Reviewers become boring the minute they start morally judging and take the seat of the author or publisher. It is such a downer to read that the reviewer found a spelling mistake. So what’s today’s state of the art in book review culture and how it is responding to the rise of Internet?

I expect reviews to provide a critical context of the work. The review is a mature literary genre in itself that does not merely have the obligation to inform. Rather, reviews should unsettle and question. Reviews make connections and provide us with the bigger picture. It is up to the PR machines of the publishers to deliver the blurbs to potential readers. If this division of labour properly works book reviews can really spark debates, widen our horizons and put new ideas and concepts into world. Gail Pool would agree with this. Reviews create an intellectual culture that the readers is invited to participate in. Despite all talk in post-modern times of the dead of criticism, I strongly believe in the art, and necessity of such a public venture. What reviewers do is not merely multiply commercial memes but comment on the context they observe in the cultural objects that are under review—and the better ones give ‘cultural guidance’ how to position ideas and cultural currents. Reviews are the glue between our cultural expressions and make it possible for ideas to move from music to novels, towards fashion—and back into a text.

I doubt if the main reason to read reviews, as Gail Pool states, is “to help us decide what to read.” I wonder if it is strategic to reduce reviews to ‘consumer advice’ and if the recommendations through friends and colleagues isn’t much stronger. The fun part of visiting a bookstore or Amazon is exactly that you stumble upon titles you haven’t heard about. One is never free of peer pressure and cultural/class preferences in what we read but it is certainly part of the art of book reading to make your own unique choice. Let’s at least further cultivate this illusion. Why spend time in a bookshop if you already know what you’ll purchase? See if you can walk out a store without having bought a single title. The ideal reviewer is a cultural agent with a much broader task than to put the thumb up or down. It is all about remixing found concepts and stories with one’s own mind flow.

The perfect reviewer is a self-appointed theorist who opens up the borders between the review and essay form, thereby constantly blurring the origins of ideas. We don’t need more information. We can find the PR texts anywhere else. Books that once raised curiosity will stay will soon or later pop up. The object has called upon you and this is stored somewhere. That’s my belief. A review doesn’t have to summarize—unless the work is transient in nature and in the process of disappearing. Interesting happenings such as installations and performance, conferences, actions and even web-based works can be described in detail, but this activity should be seen as a passionate affair of the storyteller. If a culture is strong enough it will be able to forget events and nonetheless pass over collective experiences through deeper layers. A strong review culture first of all debates and is dialogic, which according to Bhaktin carries on a continual dialogue with other works. With this I do not only mean intertextual. New media are often self-referential enough and rather need unlikely linkage.

I came to Gail Pool’s book with a specific question. How could a high quality review culture be established in the new media field? This question has preoccupied me ever since the founding in 1995 of the nettime group of mailinglists together with Pit Schultz. It is one to have a (speculative) theory that can function as resource of general concepts. In order to build a rich and diverse Internet culture it is necessary, but not sufficient, to build and maintain exchange nodes such as announcement lists, newsletters, portals and (electronic) magazines. Again, information exchange as such does not translate into an interesting (sub)culture. In my understanding, and this is what was reinstated in Pool, reviews are pivotal nodes between works and their audiences. Through reviews we do not only announce the existence of a blog, software, installation or festival. Through a practice of critical judgement we establish a set of Temporary Common Values (which then can be criticized and modified), necessary to form a quality judgement and position the works in the culture at large. If we forget the latter, new media turns into a boring expert culture. Without contested common values there cannot be (sub)culture. These are expressed in reviews, which, in the end, is nothing more than a sophisticated version of gossip. Reviews then play a critical part in the archipelago strategy: how do we build interrelated islands of practices that are neither centralized nor completely insulated from each other?

To me all reviewers are critics, a term that should not only be reserved for academics. It is obvious that writing reviews is hardly a profession that will earn you a living. With Pool I demand higher wages for the reviewers of the future, but don’t think that separate general interest review sections are the way to go. What should be raised is the general intellectual level of all media, period. In such an effort critical review culture should distance itself from rating system and not incorporate the consumer test rage. We’re not testing the quality of products. Let’s distinguish between the purchase of a fridge and a book that might upset you. Let’s hope the fridge doesn’t. What Gail Pool points at is that mainstream media have downplayed negative criticism altogether. In a climate of anti-elitism, one is quickly accused of being a difficult, messed-up person, lacking even the basic skills to communicate, resulting in “dumbing down the tone of reviews to make them accessible.”

Obviously Gail Pool had to ask herself the question how to judge the current Web 2.0 recommendation craze. “The book on Amazon with 600 high ratings may indeed be good. But to be useful to readers, these unknown reader-reviewers, like professional reviewers have to make their case, which is what the well-written, well-argued review does.” Pool’s problem with Web 2.0 is that it does not encourage quality. “Does anyone really want to read through 600 reviews of a single book? The scrolling alone would be wearing, and by the time I’d read a few dozen reviews, I’d no longer either need or want to read the book.” The problem here is one of search. What search tools could be developed—not owned by Google—to tackle the problem that Gail Pool presents us with here? It is not enough to <tag> or have contextual bots to do the automatic tagging for us. It should be part of our media literacy not to panic in such a case. The problem deep down the Long Tail is not of getting 600 reviews but organizing one or two good ones to start with. One of the ways out could be to force corporations such as Amazon, Yahoo, Newscorp, Microsoft and so on to invest more in quality content support. Identify and reward quality recommendations, invest in critical magazines, install fellowship programs for net criticism, and last but not least: raise technical awareness.

‘User generated content’ is nothing more than priceless noise: trash for the readers, gold for the shareholders. I recently had a debate with a Web 2.0 start-up owner who admitted for him user content would become irrelevant the moment he’d sell his company. We are working for his profit. He saw himself as a ‘multi-preneur’ (so-called entrepreneur who walks away from the job way too early, letting others deal with the ‘creative’ mess). What will happen with the content and the community after the deal was done, he couldn’t tell. I would say: he couldn’t care less. Profiles, recommendations, ratings, they are all data that contribute to the value of the company. Reading Pool lead me again to the question how to overcome Andrew Keen’s criticism in his Cult of the Amateur? We need system solutions here. It’s too easy, as Karin Spaink and others have recently done, to stigmatize Keen as a reactionary who is merely defending the values and interests of the ancient media regime. Karin is right, but we can’t stop there. We should stop working for tomorrow’s bosses. It’s time to get a better understanding how to redistribute wealth and income in this ‘free’ and ‘open’ world. The uncritical praise of social networks, placed in opposition to the print and broadcast media, is merely replicating 1990s schemes and leaves no space for the critique of techno-libertarism. Soon the Web 2.0 boom will be over. Merely celebrating citizen content takes us away from the hard task to design the building blocks of a new digital utopianism that does provide fair living wages from cultural workers—and their reviewers.

Here are some of the things I had to say in the email exchange with Susan E. Ryan:

SR: What are some of your thoughts on wearable technology?

GL: It is time for radical prototyping and some very explicit stuff. The danger of wearable computing at the moment is increased invisibility. After decades of carrying around heavy loads of gear, the pendulum now shifts to the opposite side, which is a shame. RFID in textiles is not a good thing. Fashion implies visibility, seduction, and play. It’s nice if you weave chips and LEDs into fabric, but this should be done in order to increase freedom of form, not for some good intention or practical reason.”

SR: You mention designers elaborating wearables (”weaving chips”) but say this should be done “not for some good intention etc.” Do you mean a good intention that is in fact not good, i.e., commercial? Or, good intention meaning just functional and not expressive?

GL: Aesthetics should put us off, disturb us. Beauty does. It is shocking. The integration of technology into clothing has the danger of becoming invisible and merely expanding corporate functionality, which is not beneficial for the user.

SR: Is there a good example of wearable technology used expressively that you have noticed? In the early 1990s Adilkno speculated about data dandyism, written before the spread of the internet in society. The question is, how do we re-introduce the outrageous into the wearable technology discourse?

GL: Who is the Oscar Wilde of our age? Momus, perhaps? How can we imagine walking and talking, dancing, peer-to-peer stations that give [things] away?

SR: What are the implications for society-now regimented into notions of logo-fashion and icon uniforms-to (instead) technologically enhance the inherent quality of clothing to convey messages of all kinds, including personal or counter-cultural ones? Do we need to learn (or relearn) how to have things to say, as well as how to feel free to say them?

GL: Unlearning is a good start. Undressing street wear is another.

“Internet has revealed the worst in humans. There are plenty of images and text that make people feel good about the fact that they feel bad. A society where all children are this nihilistic, will cease to exist. High culture will not help in this case. It is most important that we leave open a safe haven for cultural asylum seekers. Without these asylum seekers everything is lost. We have to keep the light of civilization burning.”

Scruton then goes on to explain why Western civilization has been open towards others whereas culture from India and China have remained closed and unchanged. What a messy collection of resentful ideas. It is interesting to see that the internet has moved on from a rather obscure academic network and funky business toy to the Bundesliga of Evil. I still do not associate the net with pop culture, but anyway. Maybe I am not enough on MySpace and GeenStijl (Dutch schockblog) to dismiss the entire internet as trash. The call to disconnect High Culture from the internet is unnecessary because the elite has its own info servants. The open computer networks were never build for the Western ruling class to start with. In essence the internet is a (military) engineering work turned social media tool.

We should see the internet as global communication platform that is transformed from its original crude machine logic to a smooth surface that helps to increase productivity. It is there for the mobile always-on work force, as Scruton says, aimed at rapid change, quick satisfaction, adverse of complexity. The elite has its secretaries to pick up the phone–and always had. What we, slaves of the networks, do is dream of an offline country life (that Roger Scruton lives on our behalf, see his website).
P.S. The irony of it all: Roger Cruton’s homepage is not bad at all. Chapeau, Roger! (or should we thank your web manager?)

Review by Geert Lovink

US Internet critic Nicholas Carr managed to write a second bestseller. Similar to Does IT Matter? in which Carr posed that IT investments have lost their (competitive) strategic value because everybody is using the same systems, The Big Switch can be summarized in one sentence: the shift from in-house computer systems to ‘cloud computing’. Instead of storing applications on each individual PC, will we soon have everything store in central data warehouses. Such data centres are not entire new. What’s emerging is the enormous scale in which companies like Google are actively anticipating the future migration of (corporate) IT systems to a few global hubs, making most of the in-house infrastructure obsolete. Already in the 1990s so-called ‘server farms’ could be found in the vicinity of international hubs, profiting from cheap and fast connectivity—a scarce commodity at the time. The existence, and location, of such computer warehouses was often unknown, even to insiders. If you were in need of a virtual server, what counted was speed and reliability, the exact details of what and where didn’t matter. This all changed with the opening of Google’s data centre in The Dalles, Oregon. The location was chosen because of a new, potential scarce resources: cheap electricity. As Wikipedians remark, “the performance of server farm is limited by the performance of the data centre’s cooling systems and the total electricity cost rather than by the performance of the processors.” Since Oregon server clusters are no longer unknown entities run by anonymous telecom firms but have entered centrestage in the ICT news reporting.

Virtual hosting of files has always happened, and it could be said that file transfer (through ftp, the file transfer protocol) has been the core of the Internet project from its inception. Around 1993 geeks explained me the workings of the then nouveau World Wide Web as a giant ftp machine: a great number of files were requested, and then put together on the screen by the browser. What has changed since then is not this principle, but the collective desire to keep the Internet infrastructure decentralized. The ownership of data centres in a few hands will undermine the very nature of the Internet and give data centre owners an unprecedented power to control their users.

Part 1 of The Big Switch is a brilliantly written allegory about Edison, General Electric and Samuel Insull, one of Edison’s clerks. Carr describes the development around 1900 to move away from the decentralized electrical power supply in which each factory or building block would have its own engine, towards the building of large electric plants—a development kicked off by Insull—to build one large plant that could serve the greater Chicago area. “Manufacturers came to find that the benefits of buying electricity from a utility went far beyond cheaper kilowatts. By avoiding the purchase of pricey equipment, they reduced their own fixed costs and freed up capital for more productive purposes.” Along the lines what Carr had already predicted in Does IT Matter? “Thanks to Samuel Insull, the age of the private power plant was over. The utility had triumphed.”

The Big Switch poses all sorts of interesting questions for those activists, researchers and artists who prefer to work independently. Ever since the public got access to the Internet, in 1993, it has been an issue whether or not to build autonomous infrastructures, or to virtual hosting from somewhere, usually in the USA. We see this dilemma repeated these days concerning gmail and other Google hosting services. It’s estimated that universities will one day give up their own mail servers and let staff decide which email provider they prefer to use. Or worse: make a deal with Google. Will the surrender to (corporate) utilities cause a backlash and spark off a renaissance of distributed computing? How will the heritage of fear and paranoia for the 20th century totalitarian states respond to this twist in Internet history? On the one hand it could be reassuring for those FLOSS advocates who fought against Microsoft’s monopoly position that MS Office-type application will be accessed via the Web. It is Microsoft that will suffer most from utilitarian computing. But which corporations would honestly all their sensitive data, from emails to sales spread sheets and strategic planning documents, on a central server of Google? One can only be amazed seeing the millions of gmail users are already doing just that.

The move towards a utility status could also spark a call for the founding of public utilities. Carr doesn’t mention this possibility—and maybe it is not something we can expect from a US-American critic with a business background. Calls for wireless (communal) public infrastructures are heard, not only in Europe. There are already numerous non-profit initiatives that install wireless community networks. They have sprung up exactly because the initial investments for WiFi are low. This is not the case with data centres, and the possible search engines, public data storage and other facilities that one could imagine necessary for the 21st century public library. The fact that our imagination stops here has got more to do with the neo-liberal hegemony, and the current poor state of existing public infrastructures in most countries than with investments or a deficiency of knowledge. What is necessary here is a re-invention of the ‘public’ in general, beyond inefficient state bureaucracies and hyped-up, non-committal corporations that are ready to close down or sell social networks and community services if it no longer fits into the portfolio. Internet culture could be catalyst in the re-imagination of what publicly-owned utilities could look like, but so far the rare political projects that exist do not go beyond the best-practice do-it-yourself status. Would the utility cooperative be a model here?

Part 2, Living in the Cloud, deals with the possible consequences of the World Wide Computer. It struck me here how Nicolas Carr the book author, really is a different author compared to Carr the blogger. Whereas the ‘electricity’ essay in the first part has the perfect form of an extended argument, with a balanced use of historical material, the second part is remarkably weaker in comparison to his often brilliant, witty and sharp blog postings. For me, a dedicated Carr fan, he is a role-model ‘net critic’ that is well-informed, engaged and courageous enough to not only take on large corporations but who is also not afraid to dismantle the world of good intentions. This is the hardest task. It’s a big research task to take on monopolists (in the making). But, on a social level, it’s much harder to deconstruct politically correct undertakings from FLOSS and Wikipedia to Google’s corporate ethics (“Don’t Be Evil”). A critic runs the risk of becoming an intellectual outcast, being accused of cynicism, misplaced irony and conservatism. What also struck me in the last chapters is the lack of a larger intellectual framework for Carr’s justified criticisms. It’s interesting to see Carr referring to Lewis Mumford, Joseph Weizenbaum, Neil Postman and James Beniger. There is an impressive tradition in the USA of critical technology thinkers, and Carr is on the way of becoming one. We should encourage him to follow this road and abandon the Harvard Business Review style, that, in the end, is not much more than intelligent trend watching as preformed in think tank newsletters. The step from a critical consultant to a true philosopher should be doable for someone as smart as Nicolas Carr. The larger issue is how a critical IT research agenda will establish itself outside of academia. Carr is one of the few IT writers with a considerable insider knowledge who makes a living as an independent investigative journalist. Carr is not required to quote the latest European fashions in the humanities such as Simondon, Badiou or Agamben. This gives him the freedom to dig deeper into underlying trends in the US-American computer business. But this position can also become a shortcoming once the writer is in need of critical concepts necessary to describe developments in society-at-large. Maybe we shouldn’t make more of Carr than an enlightened East Coast liberal. But I am not happy with such political reductionism. For the stakes are too high, and there are simply not enough informed IT critics to make such easy (mis)judgements.

What Carr does develop is a ‘theory of unbundling’. In economics unbundling means the separate pricing of goods and services. In the Internet context this means that we no longer buy a newspaper or magazine but only read and download the exact article we’re looking for. Unbundling is a consequence of the hegemony of search. In the society of the query we filter out the unwanted and classify as it as noise. This to the benefit of Google, and to the disadvantage of ‘bundle’ businesses where editors select content for their respective audiences. The outcome Carr sees is social segregation. “It is clear that the two hopes most dear to the Internet optimists—that the Web will create a more bountiful culture and that it will promote great harmony and understanding—should be treated with skepticism. Cultural impoverishment and social fragmentation seem equally likely outcomes.”

The Big Switch doesn’t offer a comprehensive theory of control, but for those in search of elements of a general network critique there traces we can take us further, elsewhere, like Carr’s reflections on Richard Foreman’s notion of the ‘pancake people’. We’re unlearning how to access our human memory in our brains, replacing it through access the databases of the Internet. “The Net provides no incentive to stop and think deeply about anything.” This is where Carr, potentially, takes a conservative turn and could end up in the complaint camp of Andrew Keen and others. This is the risk of criticism as a genre when it disconnects from progressive movements and locks itself up in an elitist hide-out. However messy the situation, we have to promote the Internet as a tool for global mass education, in combination with ambitious public education programs. For that we have to reverse the disinvestment in education that has happened across the board. Sinking prices for storage, traffic and data processing result in data centres and new monopolies, but these developments are only a result of much broader policies—and it is time a new generation of net critics to situate the medium into the techno-social context it now operates in.

–

Website of the book: http://www.nicholasgcarr.com/bigswitch/
Nicholas Carr’s blog: http://www.roughtype.com/
Carr’s unbundling thesis, a fragment of The Big Switch:
http://www.britannica.com/blogs/2008/04/the-great-unbundling-newspapers-the-net/
Andrew Orlowski’s review of The Big Switch
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/01/17/nick_carr_big_switch_review/

“I prefer to think of multiple intermediate models, and free software is one of them. In Brasil, it is better than the alternative - 100% mainstream-industry-copyright and no space for independent creative people anyway. The thing is, in Brasil there is not a significant creative ‘market’. Either you live in precarity or you sell out to corporate media or government. The only people who earn money with music sales are the intermediaries and few big-shots such as the minister of culture. Free licensing brings some fresh air into that. Have you watched “good copy bad copy”? Musicians in Belém giving away ‘content’ for free in the form of CDs with their music, earning a living from gigs.”

I understand the argument, but only see this as a short-term solution. It is up to the new media culture that we shape and represent, to come up with long-term sustainable models so that content providers will be able to live from their content, if they wish so. Amateurism should be a choice, not the default option. Bands can’t always be on the road, and even less so can writers or designers. It is time to unravel the good intentions of FLOSS from the bad consequences the ‘free’ has for independent content producers and to start imagining, in a collective fashion, how alternative flows of money could be facilitated. A way back to the mainstream record companies and media industries is not a option– but neither is the floss model.

SBJ: When it comes to politics the parties seem to loose members but people haven’t lost interest in politics. In stead of showing up for political meetings they gather on the internet in big or small groups or communities. They blog and they arrange activities, they discuss. What is this form of political communication? Does it contribute to democracy and the political debate or does it undermine serious politics with endless gibberish in niche groups that will never be heard anyway?

GL: With the millions of users we can’t really look down on the Internet anymore. I just read that Denmark got the most dense and effective network economy. It is indeed true that we are living in the Age of the Long Tail. Business begins to see this as opportunity and translates this in to economic models, but the political class is nowhere near ready to engage with the idea that we have left behind representative democracy and its inherent push to create majorities. When it comes to politics we have to think big and better vote for a hand full of parties. In many Western countries there is still only a choice between two or three parties. In terms of prosperity that would be comparable with the consumer goods on offer in a Cuban state supermarket. In fact, as you indicate, the ‘popular’ parties of the past struggle with a steady decline of membership. They have compensated their lack of proper representation with an increase of PR means. Politics has become a business opportunity for spin doctors. We do not need to repeat the Situationist critique of the society of the spectacle here. It would be much further build on Jean Baudrillard’s notion of the simulacrum and how this disembodied archipelago of signs called mutates when it enters the Web 2.0 age.

SBJ: What can citizens get out of this form of communication when it comes to democracy in political influence?

GL: Let’s start with the observation that the Internet itself has become less and less democratic. This may be unavoidable as millions of ordinary users do not want to get involved in complex issues around (global) internet governance. The very idea that the Internet itself could be new digital public domain, like squares in the past, or the fourth estate in the age of the industrial revolution, does only exist on the level of tiny content particles. Increasingly users delegate power and responsibility over the network architecture into the hand of large firms such a Google where they trade their privacy against the free use of incredible web services such as Google Earth and YouTube. Let’s face it: there is less and less autonomous infrastructure, in a time when it is so cheap and easy to run a web or email server from your own bedroom. This lack of self-organization has an impact on the structure of the online political interventions that you asked about. We can hardly speak anymore of ‘tactical media’ in this respect. Even do-it-yourself is no longer an appropriate image. What we see happening is extremely fluid and instable ’smart mobs’ (Howard Rheingold) that gather, connect, act, and then disappear and dissolve the built-up structure. I would not say that politics have become immune yet against the speedy activism. Quite the opposite. As long as the medium or platform is new, like Hyves, MySpace, Studie-VZ or Bebo, one can generate a lot of media attention, but these windows of opportunities close down soon so one has to be constantly on the move.

SBJ: How can/should politicians use this development?

GL: Really, as an autonomous anarchist I should be the last to consult politicians what they should, or should not do. The political class figured out quickly how to create a presence at the social networking sites. Look at how US presidential candidate Barack Obama is using YouTube. It’s all pretty obvious. Is this innovative or even subversive? I doubt. Will it reach a few more young voters? Perhaps. This is not the political change that many hope for. We should not mix up PR strategies with a genuine form of dialogue and debate. Politicians still have so much to lose, publicity-wise, that they cannot simply effort to join debates online. They will be slaughtered. Without the constant protection of their PR-people, spin doctors, policy advisors and lawyers they cannot go anywhere, say anything. This harnessing of the political class is going in a completely opposite direction as Web 2.0–and that’s what makes their appearance in this networked environment so predictable and hypocritical.

SBJ: Have social medias taken over the political debate and activism or do real life debates and organisation still serve a purpose–and if so which?

GL: Taken over? No, there isn’t any statistical evidence for that. Television, assisted by newspapers and radio, are still dominating the political agenda. The Web is playing a strange, new role in all this. For many, Internet is the perfect place to hang out and escape the boring, pre-programmed world of the ‘old media’. Simultaneously, society is moving into the Internet at the same time, just think of the re-invention of advertisement out there. What we see happening is not an easy convergence of media. Real and virtual mix but in unexpected manners. That’s the fun of it. However, the current crises are not properly addressed either in cyberspace. It’s really questionable to think that the paperless Internet is contributing in a positive way to the global warning and environmental pollution that we have in China as the place of production and Africa as the waste basket. But I remain positive. Remember that all these hyped-up self-important dotcom people in the late nineties had no idea about their own upcoming crash, let alone about the social aspects of Web 2.0. This makes me optimistic about Web 3.0, 4.0 and so on. Why won’t some Afro-Brazilian consortium draw up the principles for the Internet architecture in 20 years time?

After a trip on the high-speed train I visited Seville where I was amazed to see the temporary media lab that the Zemos98 festival set up for five days in order to celebrate their tenth anniversary. Instead of doing an ordinary video/new media festival, the Zemos98 collective decided to select ten topics, invite ten ‘professors’ (workshop leaders) and then opened up the workshop to up to ten participants each. Twice a day there were plenary lecture sessions for all hundred participants. The festival was organized in an 18th century monastery that had been converted into an arts centre. The recent history of this centre wasn’t very fortunate but the Zemos98 was a blast. Please look around the Flickr pages and see what the architect did with card boxes in order to transform the large, high spaces into creative workspaces. The unique character of this format is the five days parallel programming of the ten workshops, combined with collective sessions. Usually the workshop either run one after the other (as we have done in Kassel during Documenta X with Hybrid Workspace and the Temp Lab in Kiasma), or the workshops are additional to a conference or festival.