[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 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 ‘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 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 over 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 grow 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, 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 * Silicon 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 the new political organization. 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. Although 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 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 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 a decades long irrelevant debate 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 human 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!
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