Re: <nettime> More Crisis in the Information Society

["t byfield" <tbyfield@panix.com>]

One curious thing about this discussion is that most of the people 
involved are speaking from their experiences on faculties involved, 
broadly, speaking, in 'digital culture.' This field sits in an odd 
conceptual space between design, art, 'technology' (e.g., computer 
science), and critical fields grounded in somewhat politicized 
humanities (as opposed to, say, political science). Certainly, many of 
the main ideas proposed are shaped by different disciplinary 
inflections, which are mainly institutional in their orientation: they 
seem to look outward, but they remain tacitly inward-looking in that 
constant reference is made to the experiences and prospects of 
graduates, new classes to taught, and so on.
They're also shaped by different regional inflections: you can hear 
echoes of, on the one hand, different national policies regarding 
educational funding and employment policies, and, on the other, the 
emergence of transnationally legible fields of practice -- enabled 
partly by the standardization of 'technologies' (ranging from TCP/IP to 
Adobe products), and partly by seismic shifts in governance (e.g., the 
EU's impact on our own biographical options). If we had contributors 
writing from China, Korea, Japan, Israel/Palestine, Turkey, Australia, 
Brazil, India or Pakistan or even for that matter different parts of the 
US we'd hear some perspectives with key differences. For example, in NYC 
there are immense amounts of money sloshing around in 'digital design,' 
but in very contingent ways. I think they're mainly a byproduct of 
megacorps' distinctions between their 'core' capacities (where they make 
direct investments in employees) versus peripheral needs (which they can 
outsource at lavish rates to agencies and boutiques, which can easily be 
jettisoned ). It doesn't take much effort to see how this will end in 
tears for many.
Felix is absolutely right that this is all at root political -- and not 
just politicized, in the way noted above, but political in the sharply 
defined sense of people's will and ability to recognize where they stand 
in structural terms and to act effectively on that understanding. This 
is where the roll (I would say the *plight*) of faculty expresses itself 
most poignantly, because faculties these days are at a fork in the road, 
or, as I think, sitting on the edge of a knife. Their status n veery 
sense is directly grounded in their employment in a particular kind of 
institution -- one whose function is, basically, to mediate change in a 
sort of Goldilocks way, i.e., not too much and not too little. That 
mediation takes many forms, some 'synchronic' (e.g., sectoral), some 
'diachronic' (e.g., generational). But, internally as it were, a central 
part of this process is the practice of standing 'outside' the forces it 
mediates -- in ways that are both imaginary and real. What does 
education do, after all, but transform the imaginary into the real, yes?
In 'digital' fields, this ambiguity or ambivalence is completely 
concrete in ways that were exemplified by the recent ruckus over the 
Facebook 'manipulation' study. From a certain, very idealized 
standpoint, the FB study shocks the conscience, violates important 
ethical norms and probably many laws as well, and so on. At the same 
time, I think many people working in these fields are utterly befuddled 
by the ruckus, because that woolly combination of study and intervention 
is the *point* of design; and from that parochial perspective, the 
academics who are upset by it seem like the village green preservation 
society, hopelessly naive nostalgists. Worse, that nostalgia prevents 
them from seeing as clearly as they should the ways in which the FB 
study exemplifies a profound shift in universities, where declining 
public funding and prestige is forcing them to seek out alternative 
sources of funding and prestige.
That shift from public to private sources of funding is another area 
where regional differences will express themselves *very* clearly. The 
political, economic, and cultural traditions that have shaped higher 
education -- again, in part, as a mediator -- as a *national* 
phenomenon. Historical experiences in the US, the UK, the Netherlands, 
Germany have varied dramatically in the postwar period, to say nothing 
of the countries I mentioned above that we haven't heard from. So I 
think it doesn't make much sense to spend time on particular national 
studies about the economic prospects of any given 'creative' practice -- 
in particular, *photography*, as though it were a useful historical 
constant or reference on any level.
But if every single thing about photography has changed since, say, WW2, 
we can at least note that it *existed* before that war. The same cannot 
be said of 'digital' fields, can it? So presumably they've changed even 
more than photography in that same period -- not least, by absorbing it. 
Given these abysmal depths of change, I don't think (_pace_ David) we 
can make any generalizations about cyclicality of any kind, least of all 
economic cyclicality.
We could settle for that lazy refutation of a certain way of thinking 
about history, but the specificist context -- the rise of 
computationalism -- changes things on a much deeper level. The 
difference is roughly akin to, say, the shift from Braudel and Piketty: 
on the one hand, a ponderous model of a world history that emphasizes 
the longue duree and continuities, on the other, a more dynamic and 
pessimistic model of a historical word that emphasizes pathological 
trajectories. It doesn't matter what you think about either of these 
thinkers (let alone whether you 'like' them), whether you think they're 
right or wrong: each exemplifies a kind of mentalità or zeitgeist. And 
universities are a key site where we're trying to figure out how to 
bridge that chasm.
But the problem is that the university as we now know it, despite its 
masonicky  pretensions to being ancient by dint of concerning itself 
with the truth, is a pretty recent affair. In particular, the norms that 
define what it 'means' to be a faculty member -- your pay packet, as 
David put it -- is very, very recent, just a few generations old. Those 
generations happen to coincide heavily with a period of postwar economic 
expansion and prosperity (and its imaginary afterimage). And, as people 
tend to do in good times, they think they'll last forever -- or at least 
hope they will. That hope, as much as anything else, is what shapes the 
standpoint of the contributors to this discussion -- basically, the 
assumption that the university is a safe place from which to observe the 
world. It is not. So we can talk about what 'other' sectors will be made 
redundant by computationalism or about the experiences of people in our 
fields and our graduates, but of course the elephant (or gorilla or 
whatever) in the room is when and how computationalism will, in effect, 
make faculties redundant.
Lots of faculty are consciously wary of explicit forms -- for example, 
how OMG!!! BOO!! MOOCs!!! will displace their rituals -- but are blind 
to the greater danger: the financialization of education. Of course, 
since the universal 'stability' they've generalized from the experience 
of a few generations relies precisely on that financial cushion, so 
they've had very little incentive to see this threat. In any event, as 
most of us know, financialization is just one dimension of a much deeper 
change afoot, which Felix, citing Snowden, described as the emergence of 
a kind of 'deep state' defined more by administrative bureaucracies and 
proceduralism than democracy. And let's not forget that manufacturing 
competent subjects for democracies was one of the main reasons for being 
of the modern academy; so as democracy becomes ever-more optional, so 
does that function of the university. And that, more than MOOCs etc, is 
why faculties aren't just as a fork in the road but really on the edge 
of a knife. Many knives, actually.
I'd like to stay and awaken the dead as they say, but this is long 
enough already. One thing worth noting, in conclusion, was something 
astonishing that Snowden said to the assembled crowd at HOPE X in NYC a 
few days ago -- something that only a handful of faculty in the US are 
willing to admit (and I'm one of them): that student debt student debt 
is creating a 'new class of indentured servants.' If that immense 
juridical step backward isn't political, I don't know what is.
Cheers,
T


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