User Be Used: Leveraging the Play in the System

An “Open” Network

In the era of networks, what room for maneuver remains in a system from which there has appeared to be no way out? In a post-2008 global financial crisis moment marked by a waning sense of political agency, scholars and artists alike have looked to theories of new media—and indeed to cybernetics, information systems, and nonhuman ecologies—in search of serviceable models for conceiving renewed modes of intervention and resistance. That new media theory would be taken up as a means for working through the double bind of political action today is unsurprising. The “revolutionary” promise of Facebook and Twitter widely hyped in the wake of the Arab Spring and Occupy movements, new media have in recent years signified at once the euphoric potential of Internet activism and the corporate co-option of radical politics in an international climate that has proven largely hostile to frontal modes of organizing.¹ Binding corporate exploitation with the implied consent of participation, new media have thus manifested the complicit entanglements of technological buy-in with the protocols of state and corporate power, be it the appropriation of personal data by proprietary social media websites or the high-cost labor of the latest “must-have” mobile gadgetry. It is in this context that scholars and artists have thus sought means of resistance—often makeshift and stopgap in character—able to accommodate a sense of feeling implicated within, and even dependent on, a neoliberal system whose survival they may nevertheless seek to work against. They have sought a means for using the very system of use in which they find themselves embedded.

Materializing the privatized economy of transnational telecommunications that makes online participation possible, “the network” has thus consolidated and emblematized the very tangles of complicit action in contemporary life as it has represented both the theoretical abstraction and physical substrate of the immanent ecology of global capitalism.² Heralding a brave new world of viral circulation and exchange, characterized by the boundless reach of digital technologies and the hyperconnected character of social life, networks have nonetheless overstated the equalizing effects of circulation and the reciprocal capacities of exchange. So while they have been embraced as the answer to the problem of mapping complex systems, in fetishizing connectivity and exchange they have proven an impoverished model for registering gross inequity.³

Sold as an open system of exchange, networks have in fact promoted the lie of reciprocity in a neoliberal system⁴ constituted by accelerating processes of uneven precarization.⁵ New media’s much-touted virtue of “openness,” by which the digital has been defined from its inception—its collapsing of hierarchy, its exploding of secrecy, its democratization of knowledge—has also contributed to blurring the picture of the political economy of networks. Yet as Andrew L. Russell has shown, the constitutive “openness” of the network is deeply ideological insofar as it appropriates the perception that generosity is an absolute good for commercial ends: “For individuals, ‘open’ is shorthand for transparent, welcoming, participatory, and entrepreneurial; for society at large, ‘open’ signifies a vast increase in the flow of goods and information through a global, market-oriented system of exchange. In the most general sense, it conveys independence from the threats of arbitrary power and centralized control.”⁶

Ubiquitous and seemingly innocuous, the term “user” perhaps best illustrates the seductive fiction that the network is a hospitable platform. In it are inscribed the agential capacities vested in participation; however, this empowerment also traffics a concealed form of disempowerment, as companies such as Facebook and Google, by selling themselves as free services, falsely position online subjects as their equals, counterparts able to use and be used equally, while the companies transform the content of this participation into data sold for enormous profit. Facebook boasts “It’s free and always will be,” and meanwhile Google, as Siva Vaidhyanathan points out, accepts no money for the algorithmic labor of making the messy work of sorting and ranking search results appear clean and simple.⁷ Disavowing their monetization of site-based advertising, such corporations insist on...