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. 3 1 T H E N E T W O R K A S M E T H O D F O R O R G A N I Z I N G T H E W O R L D t h i s b o ok i n v e s t ig at e s how the digital network forms part of a capitalist order that reproduces inequality through participation and how this participation exhibits a hegemonic and consensual nature. It describes the emergence of a network episteme that organizes knowledge according to reductionist logic and exposes the limits of trying to counter this logic on its own terms. Additionally, it explores the motivations and strategies for “unmapping the network,” a process of generating difference and disidentification.While these themes are considered in detail in subsequent chapters, here I will attempt to establish a general framework for their discussion. Thedigitalnetworkisaparticularlydelusivetechnologicaldeterminant because it is a mechanism for disenfranchisement through involvement and for increasing voluntary social participation while simultaneously maintaining or deepening inequalities. In other words, while the digital network increases the means of participation in society—as celebrated in much of the current literature—it also increases socioeconomic inequality in ways that we have not yet fully begun to understand. Networks are designed to attract participation, but the more we participate in them, the more inequality and disparity they produce. The way in which they do so—the way in which they create inequality while increasing participation —is through strategies that include the commodification of social labor (bringing activities we used to perform outside the market into the market), the privatization of social spaces (eradicating public spaces and replacing them with “enhanced” private spaces), and the surveillance of dissenters (through new methods of data mining and monitoring). Various examples of these dynamics will be discussed throughout the book. 4 . T H E N E T W O R K A S M E T H O D This is not to say that participation in digital networks fails to yield any benefits, for it does produce many gains for participants. For instance, participation may increase social capital, such as rank within a community , or attention capital,1 such as the number of times one’s profile in a social networking site is viewed—all of which explains why some nodes have managed to “make it big” with very few resources in what appears to be a level playing field. But my point is that these methods of capturing and measuring new kinds of social wealth are means of concealing the fact that participation in the network promotes, overall, a kind of inequality that can eventually nullify most of its benefits. Inequality is, in fact, part of the natural order of networks, particularly those exhibiting a preferential attachment process. The outcome of this process—whether we are talking about networks of proteins, citations, or web links—is that the rich nodes in those networks tend to get richer. This is not something that should strike us as illogical or irrational, since we know that even (or especially) in the midst of great disparity, those with resources manage to increase their wealth at the expense of those with fewer resources (which explains why it was recently reported that the world’s rich got richer amid the worst recession in decades2 ). What I am interested in, therefore, is looking at the natural and artificial properties of digital networks that generate inequality and exploring their social, political, and economic impact both within the network and beyond it. In other words, I am interested in a political economy of participation in digital networks: looking at how the act of participation in digital networks increases the wealth of the corporations that own the networks and fails to generate any substantial long-term gains for the participants, even though it might seem to generate some short-term gains. The starting premise, as many authors who have written about the information society have argued, is that the network has become the dominant operating logic of late capitalism. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, for instance, write that “[i]n the passage to the informational economy, the assembly line has been replaced by the network as the organizational model of production, transforming the forms of cooperation and communication within each productive site and among productive sites.”3 But the network has become much more than a capitalist organizational paradigm . It has become...

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