Gap Capitalism: Commodifying Zeno's Paradox

By Own screenshot, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=26632754

I watch people on the Seoul subway playing 쿠키런 (Cookie Run) while we barrel towards Chongno. It's the successful colonization of the two minutes between stations--just one among many in regimented lives that have become moments to produce and consume.  Will capitalism ever run out of space to subsume into its extractivist logic?

Zeno's paradox of motion describes the impossibility of ever arriving; there is always infinitely divisible space remaining: first 1/2, then 1/4, then 1/8. Mathematically, this isn't a paradox at all, but, really, capitalism depends on Zeno's chicanery. There's always a fraction left to exploit. And this goes in both directions. We're used to thinking about capitalism as an expansive system, constantly locating new sources of profit, but it also goes down, to the molecular level and beyond. Finally, capitalism turns to the between.

 

For Bandak and Janeja (2020: 2), this "gap" is fundamental to the social and cultural processes of waiting they document in their edited collection, "Ethnographies of Waiting": "In a modern conception of time, human beings are situated in a gap, in an interval where there is an engagement with different forces." While undoubtedly universal, and taking its place among other temporalities (anticipation, duration, etc.), this "gap" becomes politicized under modernity, where people and ideas are oftentimes forcibly rendered between. But modern tragedy is a also a source of profit.

Driven by imperialism and colonialism, capitalism is constantly looking for new markets, new resources, new possibilities for profit. In the process transforming all that it touches in the style of Marx, "all that is solid melts into air." But it is also true that capitalism is an uneven process, one that develops, but also under-develops, that produces workers, but also impoverishes populations.

If capitalism is predicated on spatio-temporal changes, then those shifts are hardly uniform. The distance between the the periphery and the metropole describes one, but time and space are produced irregularly throughout human lives, like a stamping die that cuts sheet metal into parts and patterns, but that always produces leftover scrap. You can re-use some of that scrap, certainly, but there will always be scrap in the end. This is what I'm calling the ideology of "gap" capitalism. Pace Zeno, there will never be complete exploitation - there's always something left over.

Many of these "gaps" are already familiar. Think arbitrage as the exploitation of a momentary pricing difference. Or interstitial spaces where brownlands or other in-between zones await urban re-development. The exploitation of leftover space and time (Phelps and Silva 2018). 

The popularity of mobile games is an example of the proliferation of technologies of waiting. We can pick them up for moment or a minute, play in a line, in a doctor's office, on a subway platform. They are designed for the emptiness created by a regimented, spatio-temporal system that simultaneously generates action and inaction, vitality and passivity, attention and inattention.

Digital music is another triumph of gap capitalism, with half of people in the US wearing headphones/ earbuds for their entire day, streaming music that vacillates across layers of consciousness, filling moments between events and social encounters. Not the soundtrack of your life (i.e., music keyed to pivotal memories of events), but what exists in-between: semi-conscious musicality in the intervals.

Social media exploit the gap between stranger and acquaintance, acquaintance and friendship. That gap is simultaneously temporal. If we think of something like triadic closure, the tendency over time is for relationships to close gaps within clusters, social media are anticipatory across a relationship gap (Huang 2015). The genius of social media is in the commodification of these in-between relationships and statuses--both as something to be pursued as pleasurable by users and as a source of fungible value in their own right.

This is a brief sketch of a larger study, certainly. And one that has engaged a number of critics. Ultimately, it begs the question of limits. Where can the exploitation of the gap take us? What can be commodified? And where does commodification cease? Gaps between perception and cognition? Synaptic gaps? The space between cardiac arrest and brain death? 

Outside of undergraduates in introductory logic courses, it would be hard to find someone flummoxed by Zeno's paradoxes. That sleight-of-hand reasoning no longer works; it only does if there's an interlocutor that accepts the (false) correspondences between dissimilar units. This is the same with capitalism: only if we accept time or space in this way - as an infinitely divisible unit to be be developed - spent - then it becomes fuel for capitalist exploitation. If the factory's clock-time is revealed as a capitalist ideology, if people no longer accept land as a source of exchange value, then the artifice of "gaps" must also disappear.

References

Castree, Noel (2009). The Spatio-temporality of Capitalism. Time & Society, 18(1), 26-61.

Huang, H., J. Tang, L. Liu, J. Luo and X. Fu (2015). "Triadic Closure Pattern Analysis and Prediction in Social Networks," IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering 27(12): 3374-3389. 

Janeja, Margaret and Andreas Bandak (2020). "Introduction." In Ethnographies of Waiting, ed. by Janeja and Bandak, pp. 1- 40. NY: Taylor and Francis. 

Keogh, B., & Richardson, I. (2018). Waiting to play: The labour of background games. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 21(1), 13-25.

Phelps, N. A., & Silva, C. (2018). Mind the gaps! A research agenda for urban interstices. Urban Studies, 55(6), 1203-1222.

Qiao, Mina (2019). "Consumption on the Orient Express." Journal of Urban Cultural Studies 6(1): 79-94. 

Mind the Gap—Technology and the Multiplication of Space/Time

Sitting on my desk is a book that I page through when I have a moment:Quantum City.  It’s not something I’m going to assign in classes—it’s really a manifesto, with quantum  looking a bit like a brand-name than a serious application of quantum mechanics to urban planning.  But it reminds me how important anthropology has been to thinking about space and time as an indivisible whole embedded in everyday life.

Frame from the film Man with a Movie Camera (1929) by Dziga Vertov. Photo courtesy wikicommons

If we think of 19th century anthropology as the effort to produce time and space as a classificatory grid into which we might slot cultural alterity, then the twentieth century suggested a fairly successful effort to challenge that orthodoxy through a cultural relativism that also occasionally included space/time relativity, the idea, in other words, that space and time form a folded topology in social and cultural life rather than distinct variables in a linear equation.  These are not new insights for ethnographers who are steeped in what Bergson called “duration.”  On the other hand, as Fabian pointed out long ago in his Time and the Other (1982), these insights into temporal relativism often came at a cost, imprisoning “the Other” in bubbles of time/space that made anthropology’s interlocutors even more vulnerable to power and manipulation.

But when applied to the city’s spaces, anthropology anticipates many of the insights and critiques of Henri Lefebvre and others, namely that capitalism seeks to impose ideologies of homogeneity on the city’s diverse rhythms, practices of space and time which, paradoxically, capitalism generates through highly differentiated productions of commodified spaces, work schedules and mobilities.  For Lefebvre, recovering the “rhythms” of our actual lives is antidote to this ideological reduction.

Within these interstices of space/time lie new possibilities for challenging hegemony.  On the other hand, each juncture suggests new possibilities for commodification and profit, with differences in the production of time and space exploited through arbitrage strategies that commodity them.

Nowhere has this been truer than in the development of mobile computing and social media.  On the one hand, our mobile handsets promise homogenous instantaneity, where physical presence is just a phase embedded in a spectrum of virtual presences, and every corner and relationship is reduced to a node in a web of commodified information.   On the other, these ubiquitous technologies generate countless fractures and interstices in space/time, with each technology generating absences and lacunae right alongside transparency and surveillance.  Far from complete homogeneity, social media makes our urban perambulations more like a lattice of Wi-Fi coverage—with people moving in, out and between charged fields in ways that multiply connection, continuity and ubiquity, but that simultaneously construct their opposite: disconnection, discontinuity and schism.

There are numerous, well-known examples.  In 2012, Facebook forced all of its accounts into its “timeline”—a chronology of your posts that scrolls down your screen.  At the same time, it introduced gaps in that chronology: the time before your Facebook account, or the times when you’ve been less active on the social network.  Foursquare users “check in” at different intervals with their status and location, but the social media simultaneously introduces gaps and inconsistencies before or after “check-ins”.

Some of these discontinuities may tease out the ghosts of alternative possibilities.  After having been accused and harassed for months by the FBI, the artist and University of Maryland professor Hasan Elahi began his own “sousveillance,” calling the FBI before his trips abroad and updating his whereabouts constantly on his website/art installation, “Tracking Transience.”   There are (reportedly) more than 20,000 photos on his site—an eloquent protest against a government obsessed with the surveillance of ordinary people.  But there is also an element of “intransigence” here as well, for each photograph is simultaneously the creation of an infinite number of movements and practices that are off-frame—the spaces and times between the photographs that proliferate despite the Orwellian state.

Of course, these rifts in time/space are more often ambiguous in their ultimate significance.  I think of driving around last week in Baltimore in a friend’s car with GPS.  We follow its deadpan directions through West Baltimore and then suddenly balk when it prompts us to drive through the parking lot of a strip-mall.  Did this lead me to critique of the commercialization of public space?  Does the GPS help me to question the legitimacy of the strip mall to interrupt the maximum efficiency of our route?  I remember feeling annoyed, but also wondering if I shouldn’t stop and buy something.

But that isn’t atypical.  Space/time discontinuities are routinely exploited by an advanced capitalism forever expanding into new frontiers of accumulation.  A few months ago, a big box store in Seoul (HomePlus), installed  virtual shopping along the walls of the subway station at Seonreung Station, allowing commuters to use their smartphone to click onto pictures of groceries that get delivered to their homes that evening.  The success of the virtual store depends not on the homogenization of different temporalities, but on their exploitation.  By moving into the space of competing urban rhythms: work, commuting, shopping, delivery, HomePlus seeks to colonize the temporal fragments that mark the borders of one type of mobility and another.

Undoubtedly, we will see more of this.  While the promise of ubiquitous, mobile computing is the perfect synchronization of our digital and material lives, the exact opposite is also true, with each mobile technology delivering disconnection and rupture right alongside promises of transparency and connection.  There are also reasons to hope that an anthropology sensitive to time and space practices as generative of difference and heterogeneity will continue to use these gaps in order to evoke critical topologies, but it must do so nimbly.  By the time we step in, disruptive time/space may have been already (re)colonized as productive time/space.

[published previously in Anthropology News]

Robert Fletcher on Cory Doctorow

There's a nice piece on Cory Doctorow by Robert Fletcher in the current issue of Science Fiction Studies (SFS).  It surprised me a little to find it there, since Doctorow is not exactly the sf canon, yet, as I have blogged about here, there is really no better example of the current "structure of feeling" than Doctorow--he's right there, blogging constantly, writing for any magazine that will have him, putting a creative commons license on everything but insisting on the profitability of the whole enterprise.  In short, it would be hard to find a literary figure who does a better job exploring the tensions and contradictions of the neo-liberal, especially when it comes down to the fluidity of information, the role of the state, the constitution of the individual and, in general, the contradictions of a monolithic yet simultaneously superannuated capitalist system.  It's that aspect of his fiction that I find interesting, even when it doesn't quite hold together: the accelerated heteroglossia of a networked era. As Fletcher (81) writes, "Like Dickens's competing roles as artist, advocate, and entrepreneur tell us something about his novels' relations to changing modes of cultural production and to the social organization they entail."  And as Doctorow continues to write past the dot.com crash into the depths of our information-saturated, Orwellian state, we'll see more in his work that chronicles the contradictions of our times.  One of the best parts about what Fletcher identifies as Doctorow's "networked" identity is the perspective it gives us onto the messiness of figuring things out in the global present.  Drawing on the diverse discourses around him to form occasionally refractory assemblages of ideas, and then working those ideas back and forth over the course of several essays, novels and short stories is not only symptom but also synecdoche of the neoliberal present.

Book review: Cory Doctorow's Makers

Cory Doctorow should have been an anthropologist; or, rather, he is--a nonce anthropologist of his corner of information society. Doctorow is a veteran activist, best known for his work in electronic media and civil liberties. His technical background, together with his considerable experience in policy and political activism, makes him the ultimate anthropological insider--few writers are as dead-on in their descriptions of geek-dom in general, and his policy writings give his work a level of accessibility that would otherwise be missing.

Makers is in many ways the synthesis of his work in science fiction, activism and what might best be described as self-entrepreneurship. As such it is a profoundly reflexive work: Doctorow blogs on boingboing.net about people who re-combine the dross of consumer society into new forms, clever hacks, ironic parodies. Makers extrapolates on these smaller-scale inventions into a description of a new economic system (the 'new work'), as seen through the eyes of the blogger who loves it (the journalist-cum-blogger Suzanne Church). At the same time, Doctorow is re-cycling and re-using his own materials in Makers, returning to Disney once again (pace Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom), and to 3-D volumetric printing (which appears in at least one of his stories, "After the Siege"). And finally, he's opening his work to re-use and re-mixing through his creative commons licensing, itself an intellectual property hack on par with the inventions of his two protagonists, Lester and Perry.

The "New Work" that Makers introduces expounds on the ethics of re-using and re-mixing, combining technologies, trash, abandoned buildings, polluted factories and everything else in a post-industrial "future" America (that exists in many places right now in the present) and using that to create something else.

It starts with Lester and Perry in their junk-yard laboratory on the borders of an abandoned Wal-Mart in Florida, but then blossoms into rapidly brachiating micro-enterprising fuelling the creative urges of an underemployed and de-skilled lumpenproletariat.

As Lester and Perry later eulogize in a "new work" theme park,

THERE WAS A TIME WHEN AMERICA HELD OUT THE PROMISE OF A NEW WAY OF LIVING AND WORKING. THE NEW WORK BOOM OF THE TEENS WAS A PERIOD OF UNPARALLELED INVENTION, A CAMBRIAN EXPLOSION OF CREATIVITY NOT SEEN SINCE THE TIME OF EDISON—AND UNLIKE EDISON, THE PEOPLE WHO INVENTED THE NEW WORK REVOLUTION WEREN’T RIP-OFF ARTISTS AND FRAUDS.

THEIR MARVELOUS INVENTIONS EMERGED AT THE RATE OF FIVE OR SIX PER WEEK. SOME DANCED, SOME SANG, SOME WERE HELPMEETS AND SOME WERE MERE JESTERS.

TODAY, NEARLY ALL OF THESE WONDERFUL THINGS HAVE VANISHED WITH THE COLLAPSE OF NEW WORK. THEY’VE ENDED UP BACK IN THE TRASH HEAPS THAT INSPIRED THEM

In the end, the company that was bankrolling most of the new work start-ups ("Kodacell") goes bankrupt, throwing everyone out of work again in another paroxysm of “creative destruction,” but the boys trudge on, re-using the wrack of new work in their project. The "new work" may have been beaten by specters of shareholder value, but the entrepreneurial spirit lives on!

Some of the early reviews of this work have applauded the way the entrepreneurial spirit remains unconquered--indeed, the final paragraphs of Makers find Lester and Perry, now at the end of their lives, toiling over their next mash-up invention:

The scene inside the workshop was eerie. Perry and Lester stood next to each other, cheek by jowl, hunched over something on the workbench. Perry had a computer open in front of him, and he was typing, Lester holding something out of sight.

How many times had she seen this tableau? How many afternoons had she spent in the workshop in Florida, watching them hack a robot, build a sculpture, turn out the latest toy for Tjan’s amusement, Kettlewell’s enrichment? The postures were identical—though their bodies had changed, the hair thinner and grayer. Like someone had frozen one of those innocent moments in time for a decade, then retouched it with wizening makeup and hair-dye.

Is this a celebration? Sure, there's something to the idea that human creativity perseveres despite age and economic collapse. But I don't believe Doctorow is so optimistic. The novel, after all, is not just about the "entrepreneurial spirit"--it's about the imagination trammeled under the profit imperatives of a ravenous corporate capitalism that ruins everything it touches, turning the revolutionary hack into the bland recapitulations of the same.

After all, it's the vagaries of the market that sinks the "New Work," Disney lawsuits that ravage the participatory, recombinant "cabinet of wonders", and, finally, the dictees of the market that turn 3D volumetric printing from a tool for hackers and reuse into the catalyst for a renewed era of Disney dominance. It is even the market that turns the "fatkins" treatment--a biological hack applying genetic therapy and pharmaceuticals to speed the metabolism of fat Americans--into a death sentence of organ failure and osteoporosis. At every turn, what begins as potentially liberating--or at least cheeky--techno-tinkering turns into a source of corporate profit, after which Lester and Perry move on.

This is, finally, what drives Perry out of the whole game altogether. Washing his hands of his partnerships, he becomes a bricoleur-drifter, unwilling to stay put long enough to build more tech for the commodity machine.

Lester is less of a cynic, and ends up at what appears to be a kind of Disney think tank. But there, his experiences are little better, and he ends up with the same kind of sad realizations.

“They said that they wanted me to come in and help them turn the place around, help them reinvent themselves. Be nimble. Shake things up. But it’s like wrestling a tar-baby. You push, you get stuck. You argue for something better and they tell you to write a report, then no one reads the report. You try to get an experimental service running and no one will reconfigure the firewall. Turn the place around?” He snorted. “It’s like turning around a battleship by tapping it on the nose with a toothpick.”

That is, rather than the "entrepreneurial spirit," there another spirit altogether haunting this novel: the spirit of money.

As Christopher Bracken writes (only partly in irony) of this omnipotent spirit,

It is the pure potential for appropriation. Hence it is the most powerful kind of spirit there is [ . . .] Although money is a "mere thing," still in some ways it is more human than I am. I possess only some human potentialities. Money possesses them "all." How did it come to have more "human abilities" than humans do? And how did we trade places with a thing?

More than the straw man villains who harry our protagonists (a vengeful journalist and a Disney executive), it is this money spirit that swallows up everything the inventors produce. It is the "third man" in Doctorow's novel--the genius loci that hastens the entropy of ideas. Kettlewell, the venture capitalist, opines in the opening paragraphs of the novel,

“Capitalism is eating itself. The market works, and when it works, it commodifies or obsoletes everything. That’s not to say that there’s no money out there to be had, but the money won’t come from a single, monolithic product line. The days of companies with names like ’General Electric’ and ’General Mills’ and ’General Motors’ are over. The money on the table is like krill: a billion little entrepreneurial opportunities that can be discovered and exploited by smart, creative people.

But, in the end, capitalism is still eating itself. And Lester and Perry manage to hold out longer than most (416 pages in the printed edition!), but they succumb to death and the bottom-line in the end, just like everyone else.

So, in a way, this is Doctorow's most bleak novel yet (and he has drawn on the dystopian muse before)--not the triumph of ideas, but the triumph of capitalism and commodification over ideas. And while we’re meant to feel empathy for the two inventors, there’s some finger-pointing here as well. Why can’t Lester and Perry see that their nerdy coke-can computer ultimately strengthens the system it was supposed to poke fun at? Why don’t they ever come up with a really new work, one that doesn’t end up on a balance sheet? And what would that mean? Can we even conceive of intellectual creativity outside of the market?

References
Bracken, Christopher (2007). Magical Criticism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

"Circle" and the Spirit of Capitalism

There's a really interesting (or at least suggestive) story in May's issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction: "Circle," by George Tucker. Oh, it's got plenty of standard SF devices: Billy Black is a Seminole shaman who never seems to get hurt at the cursed construction site he's working on in Miami (a la the "Miami circle"). Eventually, he's hired on to "exorcise" the spirits from the site and, after a couple of complications, everyone profits: the condo complex goes up, complete with the cultural "value-added" of a seminole shaman and Billy can finally buy the plot to his grandfather's grave in order to stop developers from dis-interring his body . . .Kind of a Heinlein-esque-free-market-conquers-all story.

But, there's other things afoot here as well . . .The resolution of the story rests on Billy's realization that the "spirit of place" must be given recognition in order to be palliated. But what kind of recognition? Commodified recognition, occupying advertising and gallery space in the commodified topologiies of the new condo complex. This is certainly a prominent theme in contemporary anthropology: tracing the encroachment of commodities into ritual spaces, such as Laurel Kendall's 2008 article in american ethnologist examining the influx of global commodities in a Korean shaman's "kut".

But the question I had reading the story was: which spirit is being mollified? The spirit of space (genius loci) or the spirit of capitalism? In other words, the spirits that demand recognition are ultimately subsumed within another spirit: the spirit of perpetual, autochthonous growth, the ability of monster-developers like George Perez to develop Miami into a perpetual growth machine. Not the spirit of place, but the spirit of money.

But this is not just a case of commodification, wherein all forms of pre-capitalist culture become commodities to be bought and sold. Instead, the story gestures to more ghostly dialectics . . .one spirit in concert with another spirit. In the process, Tucker alludes to the what we can construe (not ironically) as the mystical trappings of the real estate boom, the sense that these commodities, animated by the spirits of capitalism, can generate endless, logarithmic growth. In another words, Tucker takes us to into the animism of the West.