First of all, I’ll admit that I was pretty spoiled during the first few months of fieldwork because I had WIRELESS INTERNET access anytime I wanted.  That’s right, a wireless connection right in my room.  Madness, I know.  This was definitely not the case when I was here in 2009 and 2010 doing prelim work for my dissertation.  I had no problems with my fantastic and luxurious internet situation…until it evaporated like spilled gasoline.

Gone.

For the last month the internet has once again become a rare, fleeting occurrence that is only attainable (it seems) when the wind blows in the right direction.  You can’t always get what you want.  The funny thing is that once something like the internet comes into a place, certain technologically-skilled folks (like the local satellite internet tech) become high demand individuals–and almost impossible to find.  The internet is wonderful, amazing, and very useful…until it breaks and there’s nobody to fix it.  So anyway, my extended vacation from Savage Minds has a little something to do with the sudden loss of signal syndrome (SLSS)…but the truth is that this might not be a bad thing considering the fact that I am in the middle of fieldwork.

Still, having internet for fieldwork can be really beneficial, especially in my case.  Why?  Because many of the residents of this area use the internet to communicate with one another instead of telephones (and sometimes instead of walking over and tapping on a neighbor’s door)*.  So it helps to be connected into this network in order to keep a certain level of communication going.  It also helps to have internet when I need to try to set up meetings in places that are 1-2 hour drives away, since there’ nothing worse than making a long, dusty drive to find out that the official you wanted to talk with is away for two weeks on vacation.

At the same time, internet access in the middle of fieldwork can be a time-sucking curse (I’m sure many of you know what I mean).  In the old days I think a lot of cultural anthropologists used to wile away the hours and fieldwork anxieties by reading massive books.  This is still pretty common.  But what about now?  Are future generations of anthropologists going to deal with culture and fieldwork shock by playing solitaire or Angry Birds?

There are lots of conversations out there about how the internet is going to affect fieldwork.  In my case, it’s both a positive and a very negative thing all at once.  It’s useful to have, just like anywhere, but it’s also not really a good idea to depend upon the internet.  Why?  Because when it isn’t there, and your research methods are counting on it to make connections, then what?  Well, that’s where flexibility comes into the picture.  If there’s one thing that we all need in fieldwork, it’s the ability to adjust what we’re doing to the situation at hand.

I’ll go ahead and admit that I may have been counting a little too much on having internet access to get in touch with certain people in the communities where I am working.  I planned on using it as one of my recruitment tool, mostly after I learned how important it was for many community members down here and how often they use it.  And when the net is on and accessible, it works great for getting in touch with people, setting up meetings, and even arranging times to meet for interviews.  But when it goes out, it’s like getting stuck on top of some massive roller coaster…the whole system got you this far, but now you’re stuck.  Now what?  Well, this isn’t exactly a new problem in anthropology.  Veronica, my wife, who is also a cultural anthropology grad student, always reminds me about the fact that old Bronislaw Malinowski used a pretty simple yet effective anthropological method when he needed to learn what was going on: he went for walks.

He went for lots of walks.

So there you have it.  If your research design counts upon having access to high-speed (or even excruciatingly slow speed) internet, here’s my advice: don’t count on it.  This is not just advice for field sites in places where the internet is a relatively new luxury.  This applies everywhere: haven’t you ever experienced a day or two when the net goes down at your university of office and the whole world seems to freeze and nobody knows what do to?  Ya, it’s the same thing…kinda like when the power goes out and then everyone realizes that maybe having candles, water, and flashlights would be a good idea.  So, the lesson of the story (and I am learning this myself) is to find the fieldwork version of candles and flashlights for when the communicative power known as the internet flickers into nothingness.  Two feet, motivation, and a decent little notebook can still go a long way in the 21st century.**

So, there you have it: keep on walking, people.

Over and out.  I’ll write when I can.

*In fact, where I am working, there are many people who PREFER to be contacted via email, since that’s what they use for all kinds of social planning.  So, another issue here is that we might have to face the fact that our preferred methods of meeting and recruiting interview participants might not always be available, so we have to adjust accordingly.

** Repeat this mantra as necessary if you are an intractable online junkie/fieldworker.

A similar issue has arisen in anthropological research on Muslims in North America. In the conclusion to Katherine Pratt Ewing’s edited volume, Being and Belonging (2008), Andrew Shryock called for greater attention to “the immediate and mediated worlds…articulated in everyday life” (206). So, how should one strike a balance between studying media and the everyday? One could study the everyday dimensions of production practices, or how the reception of media is incorporated into people’s everyday lives, or how and why media producers construct the everyday in certain ways.

This issue is especially relevant to many members of the Muslim community in North America and those who conduct research on/with them. Last year I attended two large conferences: The American Academy of Religion (San Francisco, November 2011) and the Islamic Society of North America (Chicago, July 2011). Religious adherents, spokespersons and academics all converged on the notion that engaging with media (news, entertainment, and social media) was the most vital means to influence public opinion about Muslims. I heard numerous panels where professors, journalists, filmmakers, writers, students, etc. discussed the benefits and pitfalls of media activism. Such a large degree of interest solidified my focus on the anthropology of media and Islam by generating more questions than answers. But what about the everyday?

I share Shryock’s view that ethnographies of the everyday lives of Muslims in North America could add texture to our understanding of post-9/11 Muslim identity formations, while also humanizing the Muslim ‘Other’. Yet, television shows about everyday Muslim lives have reached more Muslim and non-Muslim American homes than any ethnography could dream of. Even though an ethnography of actual lives could provide a much needed point of comparison with televisual representations, it seems just as pressing to ethnographically research the construction and reception of the everyday in tv programs.

An ideal approach would analyze the relationship between the everyday in televisual media and lived realities. But, there is no guarantee that such moments would arise during fieldwork and would probably have to be one dimension of a larger study. For this reason, internet sites could prove useful for analyzing how Muslims discuss such shows and apply them to life situations (more on this in the next post), as well as understanding how non-Muslims make sense of them. Another possibility would be to approach the relationship between the everyday and media in a sideways manner (see my last post). This would entail interpreting one in light of the other without positing an underlying unity.

How do you perceive the relationship between media and the everyday? What are some other fruitful directions to pursue?

I stumbled upon the sideways issue in some of the readings I will discuss below. Initially, I read laterality and sideways discussions to be the equivalent of the keystone anthropological activity of cutting across social spheres. It is only after hearing about the Sideways conference this past Fall at UC-Irvine that I decided to take a second look and try to think it through a bit more. And, this is a wonderful venue to hopefully hear back from many of you who have been thinking about this issue in more depth and at greater length than I have at this point.

Last year Julian discussed projects of studying up or sideways as hinging on how “ethnographers relate to their interlocutors, as well as different degrees of “identity overlap” between ethnographer and subject.” In another post, Dorien Zandbergen took issue with such “identity overlap,” by claiming that the sideways concept “suggests that there is some kind of plane that is shared by particular kinds of people, who can move ‘sideways’ to have a peek into each other’s affairs.” It is thus by paying careful attention to similarities that Dorien was able to identify issues where “such similarities appeared only superficial,” as differences emerged. However, Julian addressed the issue, as well, by looking at how such research is “differentiated on several axes: of political sympathy, of shared knowledge, of power relations, of informants’ reflexivity, and of socio-cultural belonging, to name a few.” Within these posts the matter of studying sideways, or up, involved drawing a connection between self/other (i.e. who) and similarity/difference (i.e. what).

On a different note, Kerim analyzed Tim Ingold’s articulation of the “sideways glance” as an “anthropological attitude.” This attitude consisted of the “constant awareness of alternative ways of being, and of the ever-present possibility of ‘flipping’ from one to another.” This formulation shares a concern with the axes of self/other and similarity/difference, but intimates the “how” by conceiving of “flipping” as shifting subject positions within anthropological “participatory dialog.” It is for this reason that Kerim contended that Ingold’s title “should have read: Anthropological reasoning is not inductive, but dialectical.” This approach served to “challenge the dichotomy which places ethnographic description on the one side and anthropological theorizing on the other.” What we will encounter below continues along this trajectory.

While there are many insightful sources for thinking about how to conduct sideways research, I have found the work of Tom Boellstorff (2003), Bill Maurer (2005), and Diane Nelson (2009) to be particularly instructive. There are some differences of emphasis in their projects, but for my purposes here (and for the sake of brevity) I will focus on the commonalities between them. Tom Boellstorff was concerned with how a “space for subjectivity appears” through the “holding together of two ostensibly incompatible cultural logics without conflating them” (2003:237). He argued that thinking about culture in terms of dubbing, “sets two elements side by side, blurred yet distinct” (237). The reason they are distinct is that “[t]he authoritative voice is at odds with the visual representation” (237). A “disjuncture” is therefore crucial to the “performative act” of subject formation based on “collage,” in that “there is no “real” version underneath, where everything fits” (237).

Bill Maurer explained this conception of setting “side by side,” or “alongside” in his terminology, as opposing “any synthetic or absorptive metatheoretical rubric to bring them under one sign of law” (2005:19). Instead of attempting to fix meaning, information, money, subjectivity, translation, etc. into a stable set of relations, Maurer is concerned with the “oscillation (alternare) between adequation and other modes of praxis” (17). By adequation, he meant the conjoining of representation and reality. So, he sought to understand how alternative banking and currency practices utilized various “analogies…homologies…analytical moves” that both critiqued and utilized adequation as modes of “conjunction” that are “impossibly linked” (19-20). It is helpful here to think of Maurer’s conjunction as an exmaple of Boellstorff’s “performative act” in which each link is always incomplete, capable of change, as well as maintaining simultaneous differences.

In the work of Diane Nelson (2009) we find an attempt to trace a genealogy of a sideways approach. She noted Russian constructivists (Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov), Surrealists,  Situationists, as well as Walter Benjamin and Michael Taussig as contributing predecessors to sideways work (73). While Boellstorff (2003:237) and Maurer (2005:17) cited Gilles Deleuze in connection with their lateral and sideways approaches, Nelson drew more from Slavoj Zizek’s reading of Levi-Strauss (2009:xxxi). Nonetheless, they all share inspiration from Marcel Mauss’ (1924) usage of similar phrasing and methodological positioning (Maurer, personal communication). Nelson depicted her “methodology of dialectical montage” as “[l]aying two unlikely things like two faces beside each other” (73). Again, note the beside, alongside, and side by side correspondences between these three works. Like Boellstorff, Nelson identified a gap, what she called a “cut” taken from film theory, as the space in which the subject constitutes herself (73). Much like Ingold’s “flipping,” Nelson attempted to “play them against each other” by interpreting “one with the help of the other” (xxxi).

It is this interplay between disjunctive/conjunctive practices and processes that seems to be one of the most crucial dimensions of sideways projects. As such, it enables us to identify and track the spaces and crossings where the maintenance and construction of much of that stuff called culture occurs. Boellstorff summed the approach up well in the following passage: “the more-than-juxtaposition and less-than-unification of pasts, presents, and futures” (2003:239).

Perhaps in my next post or two I will outline some examples from these works, and/or attempt to identify some of the stakes involved in sideways projects. In the meantime, what aspects of lateral/sideways projects have resonated with you? Are there some worthwhile distinctions awaiting articulation since I have merely sketched some similarities? Do you perceive other modalities at work? I look forward to reading about your considerations of the topic.

(I want to thank Adam Fish for the invite to guest blog here on SM. I am also very appreciative of the engaging conversations with Bill Maurer and my fellow students at UCI on this subject.)

Works Cited
Boellstorff, Tom
2003 Dubbing Culture: Indonesian Gay and Lesbi Subjectivities and Ethnography in
an Already Globalized World. American Ethnologist 30(2):225–242.
Maurer, Bill
2005 Mutual Life, Limited. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Mauss, Marcel
1967 [1924] The Gift. New York: W.W. Norton.
Nelson, Diane
2009 Reckoning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

The human consequences of the bitification of atoms go far beyond my bourgeois consumption. This shift, or what is could simply be called digitalization, when paired with their very material transportation systems or networked communication technologies, combines to form a powerful force that impacts local and global democracies and economies.

What are the local and political economics of granularity in the space shared between the fiduciary and the communicative? To understand the emergent political economy of the practices and discourses unifying around mobile media and digital money we need a shared language around the issue of granularity.

Granularity

Granularity is the reduction of symbols to binary-type simplicity such as lines of computer code or small economic integers. Granularity means to break down money or media into symbolic and quantitative units for digital delivery and reconstitution. Granularity and networks are what gives bit-based media and money its mobile advantage over its cousins–film stock that needs to be “bicycled” to theaters and precious metals that need to be stored in fortified treasuries. Granularity is the physical principle that allows the discourses of money and media to meet. With granularity come two conflicting social worlds –the financialization as well as the democratization of media and money.

More philosophically, the media/money verisimilitude reveals the already tenuous analytical separation of thought and action, discourse and practice, and rationalities and tactics.

Financialization and Democratization of Money/Media

Digital money and mobile media, in a state of fine granularity, are symbolically opened for innovative as well as manipulative financialization and potentially wide democratization. Granularity, by refining things into ever-smaller units, increases the opportunities for access to previously closed systems. On the one hand, this can be empowering as peer-to-peer media and financial transactions can increase and, for a time, transpire under the radar of regulators and speculators. On the other hand, media/money granularity can also result in “flexible accumulation,” the post-nation manufacturing of information/financial/mathematical tools such as seen in the derivatives market that is increasingly difficult to regulate, litigate, or access if you are a citizen.

Digital Money as Democratizing

The granularity of digital money can create opportunities for access by materially poor people to small investment-able capital. This form of capital democratization is dependent upon new technologies and networks. Digital money, largely a numerical system within ornate cultural contexts, is easily made granular and digitally shared via phone or internet from person to person, micro-lender to person, and employer to person. Such transactions on unregulated communication networks has democratized new forms of money sharing, saving, and transfer.

While it isn’t popular in the United States, mobile granular financing has exploded in Kenya. For instance, Vodaphone affiliate Safaricom started m-Pesa, a mobile money transfer in Kenya in 2003. M-Pesa has 12 million users out of 17 million mobile phone users representing 70% of the mobile market in Kenya and 21% of the Kenyan GDP flows through the system, wrote mPay Connect founder Menekse Gencer in 2011. It works and it’s profitable for Vodaphone shareholders. And yet its commercialization balances any breathless optimism about m-Pesa’s democratizing impact.

This democratization of capital provides an opportunity to re-acquaint ourselves with the overbearing symbology that is money. It also invites us to reconsider basic issues of financial autonomy and agency. How will mobile money challenge, magnify, or articulate with local customs? As digital currencies evolve will they be pegged to national or international banks? How will they be regulated and by whom? How are they insured and what backs their legitimacy? As these pragmatic questions are answered and applied digital money will likely move further from democratization and nearer to financialization.

Financialization of Digital Money

Few have bank accounts but the 1.7 billion materially poor people will have a cell phone in 2012. This phone can be used to make calls, many can take photos and videos, upload them to the internet, and, increasingly, receive and give money. Even before this form of digital money there were banks micro-lending. Following CK Prahalad’s claim that the collective material wealth at the bottom of pyramid can make development profitable, a number of microfinance organizations went into non-profit “business.” Kiva, who started in 2005, the same year as YouTube, is the most recognizable microlender for Westerners. Kiva founders were inspired by a talk by Muhammad Yunus at Stanford. Yunus, of course, started Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, the first microfinance organization. Kiva, Grameen, Yunus and the following, Banco Compartamos, are all vigorously successful and have all claimed to alleviate poverty. Such philanthrocapitalism is rich with contradictions. The World Bank, for instance, is the largest micro-lender in the world. The problematic financialization of granular money is evident in Banco Compartamos that started as a non-profit micro-lending bank to materially poor Oaxacans, took a shot at becoming private in an IPO, raised a billion dollars, and made its shareholders wealthy. Yunus was outraged by the high interest rates and simple bald privatization of the now profitable banco.

While the granularity of digital money can create capital access and capital democratization, it can also create access for corporate financialization. By financialization I refer basically to commercial or market tactics and discourses; of tacking profit generating financial instruments onto each grain of digital money and a charge onto each node it its circuitous pathway through the technological and social network. This is an important facet of “flexible accumulation” which refers both to the global mobility of capital as well as the instrumentalization of social life.

Mobile Media Democratization

The democratization of digital money is spiritually linked to the tactical and discursive interventions of local entrepreneurs who “hacked” into public systems –satellite television, electricity, water– that had been privatized. My research into the history of cable and satellite “guerrilla television” producers reveals how techniques and rationalities are mobilized by marginalized producers to gain access to systems of media power closed by economic or political power. The process goes something like this. A disruptive network communication technology evolves out of tinkerer communities (radio, cable television) or large-scale federal investment (satellite, internet). The indigenous or local innovators are either responsible for the technology, as in the case of radio and cable television, or adapt to exploit it like early internet hackers, public access television producers, and phone phreaks. Examples include TVTV, a psychedelic television producer community who created an opening on cable television in the 1970s and Deep Dish TV, a progressive producer collective who exploited inexpensive satellite rents to distribute their anti-war message. They used their policy discourse and interventionary practices to exploit an opening in an otherwise closed system. These opening can provide the context for the democratization of (capital) production. These examples of media democratization are from the pre-digital phase, how does granularity impact media democracy as well as the financialization of media?

Mobile Media Financialization

Granularity impacts two forms of media financialization: personalization and fragmentation. The obsession the Google founders Page and Brin have with artificial intelligence is dutifully documented by Nick Carr in The Big Switch. They hope to know enough about each of us through recording our search records to be able to recommend consumer solutions to life. This they call personalization, the individualization of search. This ‘give-them-what-they-appear-to-like’ mentality includes searches we do on politics as Eli Pariser explains, keeping us in homogenous “filter bubbles.” Just yesterday it was reported that Google’s personalization ambition has been branded as “Search,  Plus Your World” to honor how they merge their search data with the person data we freely give them on their fledgling social network Google+. The point is that every granular piece of personal data has a price. It is on these grains of identity that Google and Facebook hang their future business plans.

Google is financializing another stream of granular data, the video clip. Beginning back in 2007, I began documenting the transformation of amateur to professional YouTubers. By the end of 2011, this transformation is now complete and YouTube is fully prepared for the convergence of broadband home entertainment by creating the Partner program, buying Next New Networks, and recently enshrining 100 top video producers. Many of the professionalized channels are vloggers whose work is not granular in the traditional sense of the term (micro-payments or lines of code) but it is granular in reference to the lengthy documentaries, over-cooked television talk shows, and studio call in shows of the past. They are short and often include ever more granular clips. Ray William Johnson, the most subscribed and viewed YouTube celebrity built his business around making fun of little clips. Kind of like America’s Funniest Home Videos for tweens. Taken as a whole, from the semi-famous vloggers making almost a million dollars a year from revenue sharing with Google to the one-hit wonder who uploads an addictively watchable cat video and who make a few thousand dollars for Google and herself, granularity is part of the financialization as well as democratization of visual media.

Possible Social Consequences

What are the possible global and local impacts of the theory that granularity is turning money and media into objects easily interchangeable, financialized, and democratized? In essence I am concerned with the manufacturing and exploitation of desire, the commercialization of bio-politics, and the death of democracy. I worry about the emergence of a corporation capable of exploiting the verisimilitude of money/media and developing financial/media instruments that can control and monetized the smallest units of both symbolic systems. I worry about the capacities of these money/media corporations to manufacture ubiquitous entertainment environments that can extract financial rewards based on phenomenologically inconsequential but altogether quantifiable granular units of sensual attention. I worry about the media, which includes journalism, being colonized by financial interests to such a degree that there is no media (and no journalism) without a financial product immediately inscribed in its metadata. That would negate any democratization granularity would produce.

And yet, I have faith in the rationalities and techniques of the indigenous innovators, phone phreakers, “guerrilla television” producers, and hacktivists to intervene in this worrisome future.

This post is largely inspired by Anke Schwittay’s excellent 2011 article, “The financial inclusion assemblages: Subjects, technics, rationalities” in Critique of Anthropology 31[4]:381-401.

]]> http://savageminds.org/2012/01/11/digital-money-mobile-media-and-the-consequences-of-granularity/feed/ 1 http://savageminds.org/2011/12/20/hackers-hippies-and-the-techno-spiritualities-of-silicon-valley/ http://savageminds.org/2011/12/20/hackers-hippies-and-the-techno-spiritualities-of-silicon-valley/#comments Tue, 20 Dec 2011 20:05:53 +0000 Adam Fish http://savageminds.org/?p=6568 I had the pleasure of hanging out with Dutch anthropologist Dorien Zandbergen (PhD, Anthropology, Leiden University) in Sweden in October at an ESF Research Conference and learning about her fascinating research into the convergence of new age spirituality and new media discourses in and around Silicon Valley. I loved the idea of a Dutch anthropologist studying me and my friends in the eco-chic Burning Man hipster scene so I asked her to riff off of a few questions for this blog. Zandbergen talked about liminality, technoscience, the California ideology, ‘multiplicit style,’ secularization, studying sideways, liberalism, internet culture, ‘pronoia’, open-endedness, emergence, the neoliberal ideal of the autonomous self, the confluence of hackers and hippies in San Francisco, the usual…

(AF) What is New Edge and how did you conduct your fieldwork?

(DZ) The term New Edge fuses the notions ‘New Age’ and ‘edgy’, as in ‘edgy technologies’. In the late 1980s, founder of the ‘cyberpunk’ magazine Mondo 2000, Ken Goffman, used the term to refer both to the overlaps and the incompatibilities between the spiritual worldview of ‘New Agers’ and the ‘geeky’ worldview of the scientists and hackers of the San Francisco Bay Area. Such interactions were articulated in the overlapping scenes of Virtual Reality development, electronic dance, computer hacking and cyberpunk fiction. I borrowed the term New Edge to study the genealogy of cultural cross-overs between – simply put – the ‘hippies’ and the ‘hackers’ of the Bay Area, beginning with the 1960s and tracing it to the current (2008) moment.

The overlaps that I traced are related to one general idea popular within New Age as well as within hacker circles and relating to current transhumanist notions. This is the idea that humanity is involved in a process of ‘self-evolution’, leading to a future moment when all ‘intelligence’ in the world fuses into one holistic entity. Among others, this notion translates into practices whereby people seek to sensitize their bodies, making it ‘all-sensing’ and ‘all-knowing’ by means of high-tech and/or by practices such as meditation or ecstatic-dance. This idea is also married to a neoliberal image of the autonomous, individual self, who needs to ‘realize’ its true natural self by escaping social conditioning.

There are quite a few moments and places constituted both by hippies and hackers, where they celebrate a kind of common adherence to these ideas and practices. Examples are Virtual Worlds conferences, the Mondo 2000 magazine, the electronic dance scene of the late 1980s/early 1990s, psychedelic events such as the Mindstates conferences and the contemporary Burning Man festival. These ‘New Edge environments’ are perfect places where it can be studied how secular thinking is both a modern ideology as well as a social fact: here we can see how the secularist idea that technology and science are inherently incompatible with spirituality, mysticism or magic is contested. At the same time we can witness here how notions of secularization are still informing modes of distinction-making: the very ways in which hippies and hackers identify themselves to be different from each other, occurs in large part in reference to the alleged incompatibility between the spheres of ‘religion’ and ‘technoscience’. While enchanted by the open-ended ways of thinking of New Age, geeks here are just as much distancing themselves from the “wishy-washyness”, the alleged vagueness of New Age. Similarly, those identifying with the New Age discourse, distance themselves from the images of disembodiment, celebration of technological superiority and over-rationality attached to geek-hood.

In my dissertation, I explore such kinds of compatibilities and tensions at various levels. My research for this comprised a period of 12 months, spent in between 2005 and 2008, in the San Francisco Bay Area, while going from scene to scene, place to place and tracing overlaps in people, metaphors, ideas, practices, objects and styles in between the ‘hippie’ and the ‘hacker’ spheres that I here identified.

So, why is New Edge so prevalent in California?

This is a kind of question that has bugged me for a long time and I am open to all kinds of suggestions into the answer. What I am finding the most plausible answer at the moment – and this turns your question a bit on its head – is that New Edge may in fact be a celebration of California.

I can only say this granting that what makes New Edge unique is not necessarily the fact that it allies the ‘rational’ world of science and technology development with the mystical spheres of spirituality and religion. Such alliances can be found all over the globe. Instead, what is characteristic about New Edge, I believe, is the way that it manifests this alliance through its radical performative style and this may be what makes New Edge characteristically Californian. If you have been to Burning Man, and if we take Burning Man as one of the homelands of New Edge, you probably understand what I mean. The clothes, the art-cars, the music, the buildings, the rituals at Burning Man are all aspects of a performance of a way of being that is ‘authentic’, ‘flexible’, deliberately confusing and unconcerned with hegemonic cultural norms. In a larger sense, we can here see the performance of a radical notion of ‘open-endedness’ in terms of what we can do with our bodies, with our minds, with other people, with our material environment and with technology. In my dissertation there are some examples of this celebration of ‘multiplicit style’. Ironic language; the deliberate contrasting of colors, ideas and ways of being; and the celebration of confusion and chaos are all part of it.

In terms of ideas, this performance associates with neoliberalism, which is prevalent in many other places of the world. Yet, in terms of style, it self-consciously identifies, I believe, with (the image of) California. This observation is partially informed by the fact that my New Edge interviewees were manifesting a strong self-consciousness about being Californian, or being located in California, and particularly about knowing what this means in terms of lifestyle, aesthetics and ‘ways of being’ – cacophonous, optimistic, stylistically ‘loose’ – which was often juxtaposed against ways of being in other parts of the world and of the USA in particular. For instance, Jane Metcalfe, co-founder of Wired Magazine, when she arrived in California in the early 1990s, read the alleged open-mindedness of Californians into the colorful, bright, and crazy style of the buildings and the clothes of the people. And so did Mitch Kapor – developer of Lotus 1-2-3 and associated with many other organizations such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Mozilla Foundation – explain to me the difference between the corporate worlds on the East and the West Coast by pointing to people in Californian offices wearing Hawaiian shirts. I believe that New Edge culture is firmly rooting itself in, and celebrating as such, California by exploiting this association between California and stylistic cacophony to its extremes. Just as the 1960s hippies of California used a particular style of being, of building, of dressing and talking to distinguish themselves from their notion of mainstream America, so are New Edge Californians embracing this style still to distinguish themselves from the ‘conditioned rest of the world’. Of course, this style is also strongly global in its aspirations and has gone global in many ways, which complicates your question yet again.

Your anthropological project is about the confluence of technological and spiritual imaginations. There is little discussion of political and economic power as part of the equation. Why is that and what would your theory look like if you had included power?

I see New Edge as a discourse that travels through and across different kinds of socio-economic and political niches. And being a discourse, New Edge is not something that defines, in any fixed sense, someone’s identity. Just bringing this back to Burning Man, for instance, people go there from different kinds of backgrounds. This is so in economic sense: some participants are millionaires and are funding for entire camps while others save up all year to be able to “come home”. For one camp leader that I met, going to Burning Man was a tremendous financial sacrifice – that she was more than happy to make – since she was in such debt that she had started living in a shed in her backyard while renting out her own house. Within the larger New Edge sphere, there is also relative diversity in terms of political philosophy. Some of my interviewees were quite outspokenly libertarians, others were very much opposed to libertarianism and celebrating social democratic values. The New Edge discourse has the capacity to unite such differences. It does so in its explicit rejection of political debate and its outward refusal to validate formal status roles and in its emphasis on the body, on style and on human consciousness. As such – just as the 1960s hippies did – New Edge quite deliberately manifests itself in non-political terms.

Perhaps because the core of my dissertation is concerned with a discussion of New Edge contested understandings of consciousness, nature, evolution, style, and the body, it may seem not to involve a discussion of politics and socio-economics. It would be good to make this more explicit in further work, but there is quite a lot of implicit attention in my work for the power-politics underneath this New Edge negation of politics. For instance, I give the a-historical self-imaginary of New Edge a history; I root the transcendental aspirations of New Edge in actual physical bodies; I show the material conditions that enable a place like Burning Man to be experienced in non-political, naturalistic ways and I am critical of self-narratives that are explicitly dismissing discussions of socio-economics. For instance, in a newspaper article published after Burning Man 2005, when Hurricane Katrina had hit and some burners had set off to the East Coast to help clear up the mess, the writer was arguing that burners were specifically predisposed to being able to do this work, where official government failed. This was so, he wrote, because burners had understood the “bedrock value of water, diesel, and serviceable tools.” He argued that Burning Man was all about learning such values and becoming self-reliant beings, making burners predisposed to “lead” when the larger socio-economic system collapses. Of course, “water, diesel and serviceable tools” are not values but material goods. Along with the free time that these burners had at their disposal to go to the disaster area, and with the technologies and kinds of jobs that allowed them to work from a distance, these material goods are quite characteristic of the privileged position that these burners are having within the socio-economic system they seek to replace. I have been similarly critical towards the New Edge ideology of radical open-endedness, its celebration of fluidity and of boundary-crossing, arguing how these notions of flexibility are quite gendered and exclusive of people who are socio-economically ‘stuck’ in the bodies and in their material circumstances.

So, in these ways I did bring in discussions of power into the equation, yet, I didn’t feel the need to extend this into a critique of New Edge. This is so in the first place because I have been mainly concerned with understanding New Edge living, and secondly because there is much of this type of self-criticism within New Edge circles as well. To draw a parallel, there is much critique, both from the political right and the left, regarding the alleged ‘hypocrisy’ of Occupy protesters since the system they are trying to transcend is simultaneously giving them the resources to protest. Occupiers are often aware of this paradox themselves, yet it is not stopping them to try and change the system. Similarly, there is a lot of such ‘double-consciousness’ going on within New Edge circles and rather than critique it, I see it as something that is so characteristic of reflexive societies today that it is extremely worth-while to study it ethnographically – in non-normative ways.

Some of your key interviewees are cultural writers just like you. Some anthropologists have discussed the lateral, horizontal, or interface ethnography when the anthropologist and informant share an equal power-field, discursive community, and skill set. What do your methods or research tell us about the ethnographic project not studying up or down but sideways?

Yes, all my interviewees were in fact habitually thinking with me, interested in meta-perspectives, in connections between different kinds of ideas, and some of them – Erik Davis and Ken Goffman most notably – are, indeed professional writers. Furthermore, most of my interviewees had also formally studied, read or been implicitly informed by anthropological literature and anthropological concepts. This was testified by the off-hand way in which the notion of ‘liminality’, or the concept of the ‘homo ludens’ was used to describe the nature of the Burning Man festival and of how people were here behaving. Also, documentaries and books were constantly produced within this cultural environment that dealt with the exact same convergences that I was seeking to study. At one point, I began to take photographs of the many impressively filled bookshelves of my interviewees as a way of visualizing this self-reflexivity.

One of the ways that I dealt with my ‘schizophrenic position’ being a researcher in a highly self-reflexive field, was by becoming alert to the differences in the ways that we handled theoretic, reflexive concepts. I saw it as one of my tasks to make these distinctions explicit. For instance, I noticed that when using the idea of liminality when talking about a place like Burning Man, my interviewees did not so much use it in the Turnerian sense of going through a period of chaos to become part of the structures of society afterwards. Instead, they were striving for a sense of permanent liminality, for a permanent detachment from structure. Anthropology, in this way, in fact became a kind of ‘New Age science’ (Hanegraaff 1996) – i.e. a scientific legitimation for quite mystical ideas.

In general, what my research tells me about the ethnographic project of ‘studying sideways’, first, is that the types of questions one asks as an ethnographer, as well as the types of relationships one builds and the type of insights one gains are quite different from what ‘classical anthropology’ is generally considered to be. Secondly, I believe that there is by far not enough attention to this in the larger academic anthropological sphere, nor for the ethnographic phenomenon of self-reflexivity in general. Most anthropological studies still take for granted that it is the anthropologist who is reflective and that the ‘respondents’ are not at all aware of what they do. This implicit notion, for instance, has led some ethnographers to conceptualize Burning Man as a religious space, where people experience true authenticity – through dance for instance – and where they are genuinely free from the consumer-oriented, artificial, rationalistic larger western society. Yet, what is not accounted for in such studies is not only that there is much consumption, artificiality and rationalistic ideology going on in and around Burning Man, but also that many burners are quite self-conscious about this. For instance, burners generally realize quite well that Burning Man is an artificial environment that may quite well enable the experience of extraordinary things that have a mystical, natural feel to it. This ‘double consciousness’, I believe, requires not so much a “willing suspense of disbelief”, but as Michael Saler (2004) recently wrote about the ironic imagination, a habit of mind that allows people to “willingly believe with the double-minded awareness that they are engaging in pretence.” When, as a researcher, you take into account also such kinds of reflexivity, and the ironic imagination in particular, you ask different – and in my opinion more interesting – questions about the cultural complexity of today’s post-industrial societies – about how people negotiate different kinds of frameworks and perspectives that are logically and knowingly incompatible.

A final comment I would like to make about ‘studying sideways’ is that this notion runs the risk of covering up the cultural complexity of today’s world. The notion suggests that there is some kind of plane that is shared by particular kinds of people, who can move ‘sideways’ to have a peek into each other’s affairs. Yet, much of my research in reflexive communities – both in California as well as in the hacker scenes of the Netherlands – still felt like treading on unfamiliar territory. At times it was clear that I shared much socio-economic and intellectual background with my interviewees. At other moments such similarities appeared only superficial and much interpretative and translative work needed to be done to bridge the many subtle ways in which we experienced and conceptualized the world differently.

A number of anthropologists studying digital culture, Biella Coleman and Chris Kelty among them, argue that many manifestations of computer culture can be traced back to classical liberal theory and an emphasis on individuality, freedom of expression, etc. Can you square your research with this ontogenesis?

Yes certainly. In fact, I believe it is this liberal aspect through which computer culture and New Age are related. The emphasis on ‘freedom’ and particularly on ‘liberation’, as well as on the expressive self and the self-evolving and self-realizing human individual, are themes that account in large part for the sympathies between the ‘hippies’ and ‘hackers’ of the Bay Area. These notions translate, for instance, into the celebration of technology as art, of technology creators as artists and into rituals that seek to ‘decondition’ human beings (as well as technology).

Yet, this understanding that New Edge has liberal grounding is only anthropologically meaningful if we understand liberalism here in a broad sense, as similarly understood also by Coleman (and no doubt also by Kelty). Whereas Steven Levy’s notion of the Hacker Ethic, as defined in his 1984 book Hackers, suggests for instance that hacker culture is liberal, this ethic rarely translates into one uniform mode of behavior or political attitude among hackers. As I learned from my research, and as Peter Samson, one of the hackers that Levy wrote about, told me, some hackers translate the notion of freedom into a radical libertarian ideology, whereas for others their engagement with computer technology ties in with their sense of social responsibility. This may be related to the experience of being the creator of a system that users don’t understand the technicalities of. Or it may come from having to agree, socially, on a set of ethics and rules of conduct within computer systems. I think ‘computer culture’, if there is such a thing, is characterized by an interesting tension between these two aspects – a sense of individual freedom and expression and of social responsibility. Such tensions most certainly characterize debates within this New Edge cultural sphere.

One of my observations, for instance, regarded the implementation of the ideal of Doing It Yourself at Burning Man. In self-reflective narratives, Burning Man seems to be all about Doing It Yourself, about creating your own reality ‘from scratch’, quite independent from the cultural notions and social constraints of the larger society. Yet, alongside this fantasy of individual autonomy, both in hacker culture and in New Age scenes, there is also a kind of opposite longing – a longing to fuse, to become one with some kind of larger environment. To put it bluntly, for hackers this is the intelligence of computer networks and for New Agers this is the wisdom of the universe. Yet, this longing for self-transcendence and fusion is often frustrated in the context of everyday life: the people I studied don’t generally find themselves living in systems that they trust. This may be due to the understanding that computer networks are controlled by (opaque) corporations and government agencies and that corporate and ideological hegemonic interests conspire with contemporary media technologies to ‘distort’ people’s ideas about reality and about who is to be trusted. This is why and how an environment such as Burning Man is important for my interviewees. It offers an environment of trust. Here one can give oneself over to a larger environment – to the hallucinogenic substances, the artworks, the food offered, the dances, the light-shows – that is created by people that are known or that can be known potentially. A sense of paranoia, experienced in the context of everyday life, is here transformed into a sense of ‘pronoia’. This term was first coined in the context of raves and refers to the notion that the universe conspires to give you exactly that what you need. Both paranoia and pronoia are rooted in the awareness of being part of and controlled by a larger system, yet, paranoia comes from having to depend on a system that cannot be trusted and pronoia comes from giving oneself over to a system that is trusted. This divide informs much of the social embeddedness of the liberal belief in individual autonomy. This is the case at least in the context of New Edge but I think also in the context of hacker culture more generally.

Your work is mainly about a period of time between 2005-2008. This culture moves fast. If you were to continue this specific project where would you go and what would you do?

While you are right in the sense that technocultural development moves fast, I am quite interested in studying certain continuities within the technocultural landscape of post-industrial societies since the 1960s. What I’d love to continue doing, for instance, is to focus on the historically developed cultural tensions that I observed in this New Edge environment, and to see how these tensions intersect with the kind of technocultural negotiations that are taking place in the Netherlands today – and probably in other places as well.

For instance, one tension that I find characteristic of the New Edge environment is what I just discussed: on the one hand, there is a lot of commentary and experiential testimony of the notion that people today are becoming more and more part of opaque, complex, incomprehensible corporate and technological networks. At the same time, what remains firmly standing in this environment is the ideal of the autonomous self-possessed human individual – expressed in the ideologies of Doing It Yourself, Creating Your Own Reality and the notion that it is possible to use these otherwise complex technologies to have some kind of transparent access to Reality. I think you could say that two different notions of what technology is, are here converging: on the one hand technology is conceived of as an enveloping system. On the other hand it is seen as a tool that one can use to realize one’s individual desires.

This is one tension that I am now seeking to study in the context of technocultural negotiations in the Netherlands today: within New Edge, as well as in the larger context of technology innovation in the Netherlands, the artistic sphere has played a large role in fostering the notion of technology being inherently and ultimately flexible, complex and unexpected in its outcomes. Various tech-art institutions in the Netherlands have been wedded to this notion, and have co-operated with hackers and artists to study the flexibility of technology, to push it to its limits and to solicit unexpected results – the ideals of multiplicity, open-endedness and emergence, are quite important here, and wedded also to the idea that, ultimately, what it means to be human is open-ended. Some of these artistic institutions have received government subsidies for their explorations, sometimes in combination with corporate or private investment. Yet, recently in the Netherlands, a cultural atmosphere has emerged that is extremely hostile towards art, and towards any kind of practice that does not straightforwardly produce a tangible profit-making product. This negative atmosphere is intensified by parties now in parliament that have successfully pushed for extreme budget-cuts, targeting specifically art institutions. So, currently, only institutions that are capable of producing concrete, profit-making products as part of their technological explorations, paradoxically, remain eligible for subsidy.

In this context, the institutions that I am seeking to study are having to intensify their negotiation of two technological frameworks that are different and conflicting in the ontological sense: on the one hand, the notion that technology is open-ended, and on the other hand, the notion that technology is a tool, used to solve identifiable problems, catering to the demands of the markets and able, in this way, to generate profit and to justify its own existence. An overarching question that I have, while seeking to study these ontological and institutional negotiations between different understandings of technology, is regarding the political, material and socio-economic bases for the neoliberal ideal of the autonomous, DIY individual – since I believe it is this ideal that is present in both ontological frameworks and that may reveal their common basis – and that may reveal what both accounts leave out of the equation.

And yes, this research does not involve a study of Virtual Reality software but addresses any kind of technology that is now attracting the attention of artists, hackers and corporations – most significantly being new forms of energy-generation tools, new kinds of sensor-based mobile technologies, and bio-nanotechnologies.

In December 2010 Zandbergen finished her PhD dissertation, “New Edge: Technology and Spirituality in the San Francisco Bay Area,” on the dynamic relationship between new forms of spirituality and politics on the one hand, and digital technologies on the other, as shaped in the past 30 years in Silicon Valley, California. A book chapter was recently published, “Silicon Valley New Age: the co-constitution of the digital and the sacred” in Religions of Modernity: Relocating the Sacred to the Self and the Digital. She elaborated on her dissertation in a recent post, “Combining Extreme Distrust and Spastic Bursts of Blind Faith… What New Edge Culture has to say about Today’s Schizophrenic Information Society.” Previously she has taught the course “Anthropology of the Information Society” at the University of Leiden. She is presently a Postdoctoral scholar at the University of Leiden in “The Future is Elsewhere” program. 

Non-fiction information, knowledge, and “the news” are essential for citizens to make wise decisions regarding the future of a democratic state. The right to media is a human right and a public resource for democratic communication. But the media is a finite resource, limited in radio, television, and the internet and limited by the amount of subjective mental bandwidth we can personally process. In the United States this media resource was allocated by the state to corporations. These America corporations were given the right and responsibility to use the “airwaves.” Part of the bargain the government struck with these companies was that they could make massive profits if they worked in the public interest by informing and educating the citizens. This responsibility they have slowly neglected and we are today left with fiction parading as fact on television news. Citizen involvement in this corporately consolidated public sphere was promised but subtly ignored. The abused or misused power of corporate media is a significant reason why democracy is failing.

Deep Democracy or Digital Democracy? Dr. West arrested on October 21, 2011.

Many hopeful individuals cite internet-based social media as a networked communications system capable of improving democracy by routing around the corporate “noise” and towards a vibrant non-market public sphere. The internet has produced new conditions for peer-to-peer and disintermediated communication, it is true. But what the cynical scholars and activists are saying might be true as well. Democracies require explicitly engaged citizens that demand civically minded, accessible, and participatory media systems to thrive. Are these pre-conditions for democracy being met in America?

To answer this question it is necessary to empirically describe some of the major socio-cultural attributes of the contemporary American public sphere. Scholars estimating the public sphere in the age of information opulence, telecommunications convergence, and interactive media must discuss these issues:

1) Media Ecology: observe interactive social media, static consolidated television networks, and grassroots activists as working within the socio-technical boundaries of a media ecology (Srinivasan and Fish 2011)

2) Political Diversity: examine the relative balance of political ideological diversity of constituents, activists, and voices on American television news networks and social media networks within the media ecology (Hindman 2005)

3) Cultural Silos: acknowledge that grassroots activism networks, as well as social media and television news consumption and production communities tend towards ‘silos,’ ‘filter bubbles,’ or personalized spaces of homogeneity; recognize that digital democracy is likely a myth (Pariser 2011, Boczkowski 2010, Hindman 2009)

4) Neoliberal Governmentality: see both social media and cable television news companies as impacted by neoliberal governmentality–state regulation and market ideology (Foucault 1978-1979)

5) Media Reform Movements: acknowledge the impact of neoliberal resistance, ideological diversity, and non-market actors (Klinenberg 2009, McChesney and Pickard 2011).

This model of the public sphere is for today. Habermas addressed 18th century bourgeois society and the emergence of free market mercantilism. Foucault, when designing his theory of a strong state at the center of governmentality late in his life, had seen the emergence of the 1970s welfare states across North American and Europe just before the dawn of Reagan, Thatcher, and neoliberalism. The criteria for a public sphere I outline above are specific to the age of technological convergence and a period of heightened neoliberal and counter-neoliberal activity. The criterion includes the actions of grassroots movements, demographical considerations, consumption practices, network theories, and globalized political economy. Few theoretical orientations address such human, technological, practical, and economic diversity. Like Bourdieu’s field theory, these research criteria identify competitive realms of production. Like Latour’s actor network theory, this approach articulates non-human actors as influential elements. Like Castells’s theory of networked communication power, filters and nodes control media flow through the public sphere. Like Ortner’s practice theory, agency and structuration exist at the level of the individual, the institution, the state, and the corporation.

It may seem unanthropological to argue for monolithic “America,” “democracy,” “public sphere”, and “media ecology.” These notions are all problematic for cultural anthropologists who focus on the relativity and plurality of publics and counter-publics (Warner 2002), deconstruct the singular state, and observe diversity everywhere. However, this is an American problem. It is American policy regarding spectrum allocation to specific American corporations that is influencing the development of American audiences. It is Silicon Valley and Wall Street that are creating the conditions for techno-neoliberalism. Media justice resistance movements justify these seemingly totalizing statements by addressing these state-based issues. In this conceptualization, and for specific groups of media moguls and activists there is an America, imagined in some instances, and legally defined in others, but real nonetheless.

It is important to note that this theory of the public sphere is primarily focused on the public-market relationship ala Dewey, Habermas, and Weber as opposed to the private-market relationship ala Marx and Smith in political theory. Thus, the telephone, a socio-technical tool of private-market relationships is an important element of the public sphere but as a private and personnel tool is not considered in this theory. Here I am more concerned with sociality than subjectivity. I focus on the public-market socio-technical conditions for the public sphere.

Another clarification is important. The public sphere is distinct from a media ecology. The primary distinction is that the public sphere is constituted by voices while the media ecology designates the relationship of technologies. When I discuss the public sphere I am referring to the contested space of discursivity shared by various actors and voices. A media ecology, on the other hand, designates the relationships of technologies that deliver the voices that constitute the public sphere. Sharing the same relational dynamics amongst various parts as does a public sphere, the media ecology is one amongst other criteria for a public sphere.

The five research criteria reveal that despite the media ecology including both democratized social media citizens and hierarchical television news producers, the tendency is towards neoliberal consolidation of media companies, leading to a weakening of diversity and a siloing of audiences, which is threatening American democracy. However, media justice movements and independent television news networks do exist and despite their absence of hard political and economic power they struggle to contribute their voices to the public sphere that exists as a result of the interactions of elements of the media ecology which includes the internet, television, and grassroots orations and performances. In the instances where movements and independent broadcasters do not have access to power or the best technology–culture, imagination, and hacker practices become key assets to the success of improving the diversity, access, and voice in the American public sphere.

It is widely acknowledged that Habermas idealizes the era of 18^th century bourgeois Europeans inhabiting markets and coffee houses deliberatively dialoguing on the future of the nation, markets, religion, and the species. Those halcyonic days quickly gave way to our present situation where the public sphere is colonized by corporate media, where our dynamic and eventful two-way chatter about the fate of the planet is replaced by the one-way monologue from the culture industries. This is our present day inheritance, and, according to Habermas, all networked communication technologies are tools of capital propaganda. Yes, the notion of the public sphere is monolithic and universalizing; ignores counter-publics of gender, ethnic, and class minorities; and has little to say about the specific affordances of contemporary networked communication technologies. The ‘political sphere’ should certainly be a plurality of spheres and publics.

One thing Habermas did get absolutely right was that in the context formed at the confluence of culture, power, technology, and the public sphere there is a historical transformation from open to closed systems, to borrow a perhaps reductive idea from internet scholar Tim Wu. I want to discuss three cases in regards to the two stages of the public sphere. I will conclude by attempting to show how future theorization of the public sphere and of social movements need to consider the media ecologies that consist of social media, cable television, hacktivism, and grassroots activists sleeping in solidarity in city parks.

Habermas uses the unfortunate term bourgeois to describe the class of the people in his ideal public sphere.  Occupy and Anonymous both would likely detest this term to describe the methods of their political action, but Habermas saw the bourgeois against the specter of feudalism and monarchism. To him, the bourgeois were a uniquely liberated people, who braved ostracism to speak freely. If we must discuss Occupy and Anonymous in Habermas’s terms we might do well to think of these “bourgeois” activists resisting corporate feudalism. In a fascinating interview ending with him walking off stage right, Occupy activist and journalist Chris Hedges describes the financial “criminal class” as involved in “neofeudalism.” His is such an excellent example of cable television functioning, against Habermas’s dystopic views, as a public sphere that I typed it out for you:

Those who are protesting the rise of the corporate state are in fact on the political spectrum the true conservatives because they are calling for the restoration of the rule of law. The radicals have seized power and they have trashed all regulations and legal impediments to a reconfiguration of American society into a form of neofeudalism.

Habermas use the term “refeudalization” to describe how the public sphere was colonized by corporate propaganda. The point is that Occupy is an attempt to defeudalize what remains of the middle and working classes through modeling a laterally-organized direct democracy in their General Assembly. Here is an excellent video of the General Assembly using its structure to discuss the role of hierarchy in the Occupy Wall Street movement.

An article describes anthropologist David Graeber’s work at Occupy establishing the horizontal General Assembly as opposed to the vertically organized leader-based organization:

A ‘general assembly’ means something specific and special to an anarchist. In a way, it’s the central concept of contemporary anarchist activism, which is premised on the idea that revolutionary movements relying on coercion of any kind only result in repressive societies.

A “GA” is a carefully facilitated group discussion through which decisions are made — not by a few leaders, or even by majority rule, but by consensus. Unresolved questions are referred to working groups within the assembly, but eventually everyone has to agree, even in assemblies that swell into the thousands.

Occupy’s General Assembly is not unlike how Anonymous and LulzSec make their decisions on Internet Relay Chat (IRC) systems. The IRC process is a bit more chaotic but similar to the GA in that both are laterally organized, allowing for leaderless deliberation and action. Direct democracy is a messy practice; one that has confounded mainstream consolidated news media looking for a dominant agenda. But as we shout in the streets: “This is what democracy looks like!” (I am one who believes there is a single issue perfectly described in the included photo above I took at Occupy LA.)

The question on many media pundits’ lips as well as those keyed in to Habermas’s revelation regarding the historical transformation of the public sphere is: when will this open, deliberative public sphere of Occupy’s General Assembly or Anonymous’s IRC space of praxis give in to formalization and consolidation? Perhaps the techno-structure of the GA or the IRC prohibits such integration and institutionalization, or perhaps the power of persuasive culture assists participants in resisting leadership and agenda aggregation. I don’t know but I will provide an example of an open, laterally organized corporate public sphere giving way to a non-participatory, top-down corporate public sphere. Yet, despite this, and in counter-distinction to Habermas, I argue, a public sphere perseveres in this example from Current.

The progressive and independent television news network Current originally was founded on the idea of media democratization which they attempted to achieve through creating a lateral network of documentary video producers (Viewer-created content producers or VC2) working through the central hub of Current as a television network that showcased the work, a social media destination current.com used to discuss the documentaries, and a corporation incentivizing participation through payment. While enmeshed within a for-profit media system, Current saw itself as a formal critique of consolidation and the “refeudalization” of the public sphere. Indeed, the network’s chairman, Al Gore was apt to quote Habermas in his book Assault on Reason.

But by 2011, this specific media democratization project was over at Current, replaced by pundit-based, ratings driven news programming led by the return of Keith Olbermann to cable television news. Now it might be convenient to criticize this transformation of the deliberative bourgeois public sphere of the VC2 model to the for-profit refeudalization of what was once a vibrant public sphere. But a wider look at the role played by Olbermann and progressive media punditry exhibits how various elements work in consort to produce the educative conditions for the public sphere. What remains under-theorized and documented in both Habermas and in regards to the social movements of the present, are the ecological dynamics between various constituencies that produce the conditions for a progressive public sphere. I call upon the General Assembly of Occupy Research to empirically document the Occupy movement within its cultural context that includes hacktivists, television newscasters, as well as boots-on-the-ground Occupiers.

For most of us too busy (in our non-market activities) to be sleeping at the various liberation parks around the nation and globe, we know the Occupy Movement as #occupywallstreet, or #occupyla. It is something we know less through the experience of inhabiting a space in protest but more as something known through sitting at home and engaging with social media. For others, we know the Occupy Movement through cable television news–Fox, MSNBC, CNN, or Current. Cable television is a networked communication technology with specific cultures of consumption. Unlike those reading about Occupy through Twitter and its hashtag #occupywallstreet, cable news viewers have few options of engaging with the material through the media itself. Habermas, who correctly prioritizes two-way, dialogic engagement over top-down listening, thinks this form of political mediation expressed by cable news is part of the problem of democracy—passivity and propaganda.

Again, Habermas misses the point of active cultures of consumption and how information can lead to action. For instance, Cenk Uygar of the Young Turks, and formerly of MSNBC, announced in Zuccotti Park the political action committee (PAC) he is forming, Wolf-PAC, with a sole focus of getting a 28th US Constitutional Amendment limiting personhood to people not corporations. Via YouTube and soon via his up-and-coming cable TV program on Current he will continue to encourage political action. While scholars have wondered if the rich dialogue that occurs in the public sphere ever actually leads to democratic action, mainstream cable television, despite lacking two-way engagement, exhibits the conditions of an attenuated public sphere by encouraging political action.

What is the cause for these emergent horizontal organizations? Yochai Benkler, in his new book, claims that humans are essentially selfless and collaborative; the open architecture of the internet is just helping that gene to express itself. It’s a provocative argument he makes with quite a bit of social, psychological, and biological anthropological data. Perhaps, but the point is that horizontal organizations exist as temporal and transitional boundary objects impacted by technology, power, and culture from all directions. Likewise, power, culture, and technology are mediated by forces within the media ecology, some of these forces are laterally while others are vertically ordered—this is the mediated context for the present social movements.

What attention it has gotten has largely been positive, such as this glowing review in CounterPunch, or this blog post by Louis Proyect. A review in VAR was slightly more critical, but not by much. Still, the following comment from Stephen Broomer’s review gets to the heart of the matter:

Padilha’s contribution to this debate is confined within the limits of documentary form. Secrets of the Tribe is a narrative-driven documentary, and as such it privileges dramatic contrast over the reinforcement of facts or proof.

Indeed, I would go much further. The film struck me as little more than tabloid journalism, reveling in salacious scandals, academic cat fights, and conspiracy theories in the name of discussing research ethics and scientific methodology. It reminded me of one of those local news stories where a reporter exclaims how shocked he is to discover that there is prostitution in his city while the camera indulges in digitally blurred closeups of exposed female flesh.

In comparing this film to tabloid journalism I don’t mean to impute Padilha’s motives. Padilha is clearly someone who cares deeply about Brazil’s indigenous population. He also deserves credit for actually interviewing Yanomami for the film. But Padilha is not an anthropologist. As one review put it: “A student of math and physics, Padilha turned to filmmaking after a brief, unsatisfying career in banking.” (He is most famous for “Bus 174″ about a hijacked bus in Rio.) For this reason he seems unable to meaningfully engage with contemporary debates about fieldwork practices or the nature of anthropological research.

I don’t really know which bothered me more: the lumping together of pedophilia accusations against Jacques Lizot and Kenneth Good with Patrick Tierney’s accusations against James Neel and Napoleon Chagnon, the fact that the film completely ignored Tim Asch even as it relies extensively on his footage, or the way it presented anthropological epistemology as a simplistic choice between the hard-science of sociobiology on the one hand and mushy-headed cultural relativism on the other.

What really upsets me is that these are serious issues, which warrant serious discussion. By simplifying the scientific debates and lumping them together with pedophilia accusations, the film missed a unique opportunity to make an important contribution to the popular understanding of anthropology. Too bad.

Eco-chic, like many other socio-cultural manifestations of neoliberalism is rife with contradiction. The fundamental contradiction being that it is a social justice movement within consumer capitalism. The producers of eco-chic goods and experiences are structured by capitalism’s profit motive. Likewise consumers of eco-chic goods and experiences are motivated by ideals that try to transcend or correct the ecological or deleterious human impacts of capitalism. Thus both producer and consumer of eco-chic are caught in a contradiction between their social justice drives and their suspension in the logic of neoliberalism. Eco chic events such as Burning Man and television networks such as Al Gore’s Current TV also express the fundamental contradiction between the social and the entrepreneurial in social entrepreneurialism. How do the contradictions within eco-chic represent themselves in American West Coast’s cultural expressions such as Burning Man and Current TV?

I don’t study eco-chic but it is a reoccurring motif. The specific location for my ethnographic encounter with eco-chic is the annual Burning Man festival that I have been attending since 2001. Combining countercultural ideals and Web 2.0 notions of sharing with ecological mindfulness and new primalism, Burning Man is the quintessential event in North America for the eco-chic radical. Following Fred Turner—and I’ve stated this before–that Burning Man is a ‘sociotechnical commons’—the cultural infrastructure for the digital media industries of California. Burning Man is expensive, catering to the Silicon Valley intelligencia who are eco-chic and have the finances to explore themselves along with 50,000 people at Black Rock City, a temporary metropole we construct for a delirious week of personal expression and community celebration on the barren alkaline plains of a Nevada desert a half-days drive from San Francisco. Thus, like most iterations of cultural and community identity in neoliberalism, Burning Man is rich with contradictions. The economic costs and carbon footprint required to freely express oneself and live briefly in alliance with nature and community and supposedly outside of capitalism, being only the most obvious contradiction.

Ethnographic research requires specificity so I have focused on one manifestation of the eco-chic culture of San Francisco, Silicon Valley, and Burning Man. Since 2006 I have been producing television documentaries and conducting participant observation with the global television network Current TV who has been exclusively covering Burning Man since 2005. Current TV, founded by famed eco-chic Vice President Al Gore, is based on the mission to democratize television production through broadcasting citizen journalism on television screens around the world. Current TV employees, of whom I have interviewed many, express eco-chic values of sustainable coolness as well as a technoutopian idealism about how new media is going to improve democracy and heal cultural and ecological fractions. Thus, like Burning Man, Current TV is full of contradictions, namely the attempt to instigate democratic processes within the most capitalized and hierarchical cultural industry–global television.

How are the contradictions of neoliberalism mediated by an eco-chic culture of media producers, digital designers, and artists spatio-temporally situated between the radically expressive neo-primitive festival Burning Man and Al Gore’s media democratizing global television network Current TV? Both of these sites of cultural production reflect the contradictions that befall the high tech cultural industrial centers of Silicon Valley in the shadow of the countercultural epicenters of San Francisco and the Bay Area. These contradictions can be summed up in the contradiction between doing good and doing well, being ecologically sensitive while being hedonistic, being trendy while being independent, and being a creative producer while also being a conscious consumer. These contradictions don’t fly. As an anthropologist I seek to critically assess these contradictions while exploring the social, historical, economic, and technological affordances that rationalize and valorize eco-chic as a valid cultural identity as well as an impacting consumer movement.

Whether eco-chic, Burning Man, and Current TV are developments of social justice within corporate culture or merely new incarnations of neoliberalism’s sophisticated production of surplus from the social justice energies of people is not an empirical question. Capitalism is fraught with contradictions, the primary one being the drive to enhance life for many while retaining a surplus for the few. The point of this research is to document how these contradictions are mediated at specific times and spaces, namely, early 21st century Silicon Valley and its proxy locations like Hollywood and Burning Man, in accordance with the institutional value sets and technological assemblages of these specific spaces.

On a more meta-level what does it mean for a larger anthropological project when it recognizes these trends in values? Chris Kelty recently talked about how “transhumanism”–that utopian value for immortality through science and technology–continues to appear throughout his research with computer scientists, hackers, and other geeks. He isn’t doing research on “transhumanists” but their values crop up consistently in the course of doing his other work. Eco-chic is like this I assume for many scholars investigating Western liberal elites. It isn’t the focus but the wider socio-cultural context for the research. When I recognize these larger patterns that appear to unify subjects across a field of seemingly disparate scenes I get that rush that I’ve finally found “culture.” Is it, or merely a typification?

It is corny to admit it but what I discovered was a worldview and mode of political action that aligned with my own belief system as a person and an anthropologist. The core concept of progressivism is progress–that culture changes through time because of the actions of vision-driven groups and individuals. Now, how much agency individuals actually have to enact cultural change is a hotly debated topic in both political and academic circles but few disagree that “a small group of thoughtful people could change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has” as it was that activist anthropologist, Margaret Mead, who said that most famous of hummus container quotes.

Progressive philosophy is aligned with the base theory of cultural anthropology, that is: culture is not a static or conservative thing that we need to stabilize at some nostalgic and unrealistic moment but rather a dynamic process. Progressives want to direct that process towards a more inclusive future. Progressives are not hung-up on retaining or reverting to an antique sense of ethnic, gendered, or national purity. They don’t romanticize some false sense of the securities of 1950s Americana. However, as I will describe below, The American Dream as a concept was a focal point for progressives at Netroots Nation this year.

Although in the preceding years Netroots Nation events have attracted Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Al Gore, and other stalwarts of the Democratic Party, the perspective one gets from Free Speech TV’s makeshift studio in the lobby of the conference is one in which the Democratic Party is centrist, more aligned with the corporate and Republican agenda, more beholden to Washington lobbyists, more entrenched in political melodrama than progressives who though technologically savvy, informed, and vocal are true outsiders. True there is the Congressional Progressive Caucus, with but one Senator, Bernie Sanders (VT), and 70 or so representatives, the impression of progressives from Netroots is something closer to the ground and grass than the overpasses of the Beltway. Here, real issues are addressed: economic justice, the expiration of the Bush tax cuts and the Patriot Act, resistance to corporate consolidation of the media, the elimination of all types of discrimination, the end of troop deployments to the Middle East, and healing the relationship between energy independence and ecology security. Progressives believe in labor unions and environmental justice over corporate profits; equality in free speech and education; and valuing the dignity of all human beings over corporations as human beings.

As progressives are rarely represented in Congress they are a grassroots movement, hence the “roots” of Netroots Nation. But what about the “Net”? The progressive brand “Netroots,” a conflation of internet and grassroots, describes a politically coordinated and technology-enabled public. It can be considered synonymous with the progressive blogosphere, the internet-activated public sphere. Netroots express the value of technoprogressivism—an idealization of the positive role of technology in achieving progressive political objectives that has its historic roots in 1960s computer and countercultural notions of techno-cultural change. Netroots activists believe in the power of networked technologies to bring together people in a space of reasoned, passionate public discourse that can lead to coordinated social change. Because of the element of disenfranchisement experienced by progressives, the internet and cable television outlets like Free Speech TV constitute the technological grounds for community and cultural change.

Despite progressive’s resistance to the neverlands of Americana and Manifest Destiny they were openly engaging in a rebranding exercise of that most debatable of notions from our history–the American Dream. In probably the most thrilling talk of the conference, Van Jones, Obama’s onetime green jobs czar who was hunted down by the right wing noise machine until he was forced to resign, re-introduced the slogan “Rebuild the Dream,” that is, the American Dream:

“I’m not talking about killing the American Fantasy, okay? The American Fantasy: everybody’s gonna be rich, you buy a lot of things, you’ll be happy? No, that’s an American Fantasy, which means it’s the American nightmare. That needs to go. We don’t believe in that at all. … I’m talking about something much, much deeper than that. Something that we had in this country until the commercializers turned it into something else.”

Bolding railing against the false happiness of consumer capitalism–a cornerstone of economic liberalism–otherwise known as the US global economy, Jones goes onto a working class definition of the American Dream he wants to rebuild, that you should be able to:

“walk out your front door, go to a dignified job, put in a good day’s work and come back home with a paycheck that you can feed your family with and give your children a better life.”

Jones finished his speech by accusing the “Dream killers…who have a wrecking ball agenda for our country. A wrecking ball for America. But they painted that wrecking ball red, white and blue.” The wrecking ball must certainly refer to the Tea Party ideology of rampant deregulation that is attempting to dismantle the governmental safety nets for poor, undereducated, unemployed, and uninsured citizens. On the grounds of the razed governmental buildings, “cheap patriots’” third and forth townhouses are being built.

He concludes by defining the “deep patriots” versus the “cheap patriots” which he aligns with the Dream Killers and their American Fantasy:

“It’s time for the deep patriots who love this country and who love everybody in this country, no matter what color you are or who you want to marry or what kind of piercing you got in your nose, we love everybody, we are the deep patriots.”

This big nondiscriminatory platform, furnished with the rhetorical weapons of progressive patriotism, and wielding the decentralized networking capacities of the internet gives me pause still coming down for the firework parties of Independence Day 2011. We could do worse, as anthropologists or activists, than thinking about what tools–both rhetorical and technical—are needed to activate agency in future world-building.

—

Following Rex’s and ckelty’s trend I present this light ethnographic account of progressive patriotism and liberty from a recent bit of fieldwork with freedom loving digital activists. This post will also appear in Free Speech TV’s monthly email to subscribers.

Thoughts on Fieldwork From Three Research Sites

Cultural Anthropology is a social science that explores how people understand – and act in – the world. But what, exactly, is it that Cultural Anthropologists do? How do they approach their research? In this short film, three members of MIT’s Anthropology Department, Stefan Helmreich, Erica James, and Heather Paxson, talk about their current work and the process of doing fieldwork.

Free Speech TV at the National Conference on Media Reform

From its inception in 1995, Free Speech TV’s goal has been to infiltrate and subvert the vapid, shrill and corporately controlled American television newscape with challenging and unheard voices. Fast forward to 2011, and in the age of viral videos, social media and ubiquitous computing, the same issues persist.

An excellent young pro-freedom-of-speech organization, Free Press, called all media activists to Boston for the National Conference on Media Reform (NCMR), April 8-10, to celebrate independent media and incubate strategies to fight the tide of corporate personhood, monopolization in communication industries, and the denial of access to the public airwaves.

These are issues FSTV has long fought, first with VHS tapes of radical documentaries shipped to community access stations throughout the nation, then through satellite carriage in 30 million homes, and now via live internet video and direct dialogues with the audience through social media.

FSTV was at NCMR in full force, covering live panels on everything from the role of social media in North African revolutions to media’s sexualization of women; developing strategic relationships with print, radio, internet and television collaborators; interviewing luminaries like FCC Commissioner Copps; and inspiring the delegates by opening up the otherwise closed and corporatized satellite television world to the voices of media activists fighting for access and diversity during a frankly terrifying period in American media freedom.

One question haunted the many stages, daises and dialogues at the NCMR: Is the open, decentralized, accessible and diverse internet – by which media production, citizen journalism and community collaboration have been recently democratized – becoming closed, centralized and homogenous as it begins to look and feel more like the elite-controlled cable television system?

For example, while we were in the conference, the House voted to block the FCC from protecting our right to access an open Internet. The mergers of Comcast and NBC-Universal and AT&T/T-Mobile loomed behind every passionate oration. And yet FSTV was there to document when FCC Commissioner Copps took the stage stating he would resist the denial of network neutrality and such monopolizing mergers.

Internationally, examples of the power and problems of the internet exist. The Egypt-based Facebook group “We are all Khaled Said” had 80,000 members, many who amassed at Tahrir Square on January 26, instigating a wave of democratization that began in Tunisia – also fueled by social media – and hopefully continuing to Libya. Two days later, however, the Mubarak regime was able effectively to hit a “kill switch” on the internet and target activists using Facebook for arrest, an activity that worked against the desires of the repressive regime. At the NCMR, Democracy Now! reporter Sharif Abdel Kouddous said,  “Facebook was down … so they hit the streets. It had the reverse desire and effect that the government wanted to happen.”

In 2010, Reporters Without Borders compiled a list of 13 internet enemies – countries that suppress free speech online. The U.S. wasn’t on the list, but U.S. companies Amazon, Paypal, Mastercard, Visa and Apple were pressured to cut digital and financial support for whistleblowing WikiLeaks. The point is obvious: A vigilant press aided by an open, uncensored and unprivatized internet are necessary yet threatened and are the focus of FSTV’s coverage at NCMR.

FSTV embodies that ancient movement of ordinary people taking back power from entrenched elites. Today, every issue, from class inequality to ecological justice – is a media issue. However, our media sources, from journalists to internet and television delivery systems, are being co-opted by monopolizing corporations and lobbyists. As an independent, open and interactive television network, FSTV is an antidote to the problems facing free speech and democracy as more media power is centralized in fewer hands. Thankfully, as we found out in Boston, FSTV is not alone in this dangerous and difficult operation of media liberation.

—
Jenkins hyperbolically describes “critical pessimists” as people who “opt out of media altogether and live in the woods, eating acorns and lizards and reading only books published on recycled paper by small alternative presses”. This is a false exaggeration of a movement that is providing a necessary check on corporate power and mindfully working for greater civic, community, and citizen involvement in media production.

The last morning of a national conference on progressive media one of my friendly informants invited me to a power breakfast at 8 AM at a 4 star hotel. An HD camera rested on a high tripod above two semi-private tables overlooking the harbor via tall glass windows that shed morning light on flutes of parfait and silver pitchers of coffee. Having a rather late night at the cash bar at the local whiskey establishment we hungrily consumed our breakfast, caffeine, and juice as we awaited our invitation to introduce ourselves. Magazine editors, television producers, community media activists, major funders, radio DJs, progressive television personalities, and one out-of-place anthropologist quickly gave their name in an audible wave around the tables.

The editor emeritus of a major progressive magazine presented two timely issues that were cause for celebration and alarm. He wanted to celebrate a success that needed repeating. For that we needed to generate an institutional history of the practices that worked. A small committee was formed through a show of hands. As the house social scientist it sounded like that fit my skill set so I volunteered. I was encouraged to visit the archive of programmatic and pragmatic emails that went quickly and passionately between the groups and individuals hustling to organize leading up to the days of the successful operation. Next, there was not as much agreement, as can be expected, about what to do about the alarming new situation but engaged debated ensued about fundraising, the upcoming 2012 election, and ever increasing media consolidation around corporate mergers. We agreed to collaborate. But what did collaboration mean?

Thinking through this question and about Part.Public.Part.Lab‘s work in the article Birds, I began to typologize social interaction into three types: participation, collaboration, and mergers. First is participation, which was the focus of Birds, and can originate from an organized public or be provoked by a formal social organization. When participation emerges, it can come from three different categories descending in the amount of time and resource commitment, as media scholar Mirko Tobias Schäfer explains in his excellent 2011 book, Bastard Culture! How Participation Transforms Cultural Production. The first, according to Schäfer is modification—the hacking of physical devices such as Xboxs or software. The second is a form of explicit participation, where subject exert agency and act on an ambition for professional or personal growth. Examples of explicit participation include the now classic forms of user-generated content production: making YouTube videos, Facebook profiles, and Tweets. And, thirdly, is implicit participation, the subjectively lackadaisical or algorithmically automated forms of participation such as “liking” this or that, or simply conducting Google searches that implicitly participate with Google’s capacity to fine tune and target its search and advertising machinery. Each of these three forms of participation—modification, and explicit and implicit participation, are vertically organized between an organized public and a formal enterprise. For example, my co-diners this morning—magazine editors, television audience experts, social justice social media gurus—each incorporate the network and economic effects of at least two of these forms of participation into their annual planning and budgeting. The vertical power relation of this participation distinguishes it from what I define as collaboration—which is horizontally ordered. Modifiers and hackers take professional objects and manipulate them for more idiosyncratic and local uses; explicit UGC contributors upload content to billionaire companies; and implicit participants do the same, but often out of ignorance or lack of concern.

Second in my typology is collaboration, which my little story above demonstrates, and is usually the tool for the under-funded and those organized to work for social justice. Collaboration is a middle-range theory, between unincorporated or uninterested participation, and fully incorporated and economically motivated mergers. Collaboration is a powerful tactic to resist hegemonic power, and thus codes an antagonistic relationship to vertically arranged power structures–while at the same time resisting the temporal transformation into hierarchy–but it is structurally a horizontally ordered strategy for internal practical formation. The lateral pooling of resources—sometimes with potential competitors as I saw at the power breakfast–proves that, in the social justice realm, the efficacy of the mission trumps the funding operation (sometimes to the point of compromising the efficacy). Despite the fact that many of these organizations compete for a decreasing share of philanthropic dollars, what was agreed upon was a commitment to collaborate, pool resources, and attack the problem vigorously from the skills sets dispersed throughout the group. New media firms also exhibit collaborative strategies as anthropologist Thomas Malaby showed in his study of collective problem solving and virtual world coding in Second Life. But while the visionaries of Second Life devise such pro-corporate tools such as the Love Machine, which enables collaboration and appreciate to flow laterally peer-to-peer across the company, collaboration is not dependent upon digital technology and is a tactic innovated by the dependencies of social justice activism.

The lateral collaboration I viewed at the power breakfast was not an example of what we wrote about in Birds. This was not internet enabled participation, but rather collaboration between people over eggs and hearty dialogue. Email is the most sophisticated ‘new’ media system. These collaborators are all technically literate and use very sophisticated technologies in their broadcast and start-up professional lives. But they are not dependent upon digital peer-to-peer networks for the sharing of Perl code, complex video uploading systems, or sophisticated medical record aggregation databases for their collaboration. Rather, embodied meetings and simple text-based communications suffice. They set ad hoc goals and tasks and produce tools, data, and methods that are generative as opposed to being tethered to protocols within the collaborative community.

The third type of social interaction I have only remotely observed but it permeates the community. While embedded in a hardware, software, and enterprise television and internet research and development laboratory, I witnessed the excitement of employees as their company purchased a world leading internet video database. That is another story, but even without this experience I and several others at this breakfast were literally holding in our hands a physical and symbolic technology at the center of this third type of social interaction (our smart phones): the corporate merger. Throughout the media reform conference, whose final day we were beginning with a working brunch, loomed the historical reality and threat of media consolidation, vertical integration, and mass media industrial mergers of US internet, cable, and wifi industries. The mergers of T-Mobile and AT&T and NBC-Universal and Comcast were the reasons for the alarms of the magazine editor who initiated the debate of our key problem.

I begin to wonder: what is the cultural industrial logic of the corporate merger? Larger firms consume smaller ones to be able to fold their resources into the mission of the behemoth. Complementary firms consolidate their resources to achieve a larger market control. Distinct firms merge to expand their sway over new social, geographical, or technological horizons. Though stated in official press releases as benevolently balanced to those firms merging, the generous laterality I observed in the collaborating social justice media organizations, is unlikely the reality in the case of the corporate merger.

This expansive community in progressive media culture engages with all three of these forms of social interaction–participation, collaboration, and mergers. Modification, implicit, and explicit participation within organized publics, while never without aspirations or connections to formal social enterprises, is essentially on the level of the person. Social media, with ever user-interface simplicity—as well as algorithmic capitalization–is the technological kit for participation. Collaboration, on the other hand, is a tactic for under-resourced and mission driven organizations to share capacities horizontally across their field. In-person meetings, phone calls, and emails are enough of the socio-technical modalities necessary for these collaborations. Finally, is the merger, the hostile or peaceful economic takeover of complementary, heterogeneous, or homogenous firms. Financial and journalistic manipulations fill out the technological app-base for this type of social interaction.