Democracy and other neoliberal fantasies

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Dean, J. (2009) Democracy and other neoliberal fantasies. Durham: Duke University Press.

Contents

1. Technology: The promises of communicative capitalism

Communicative capitalism

  • Communicative capitalism, "Democracy that talks without responding" (22)
  • Public discourse circulates separately from the activities of political institutions (21)
    • Content
  • Challenging the "neoliberal" conflation of marketplace and democracy
    • Blurring commercial choices and political choices (22)
  • Networked communications "bring together" capitalism and democracy (22-23)
"The values heralded as central to democracy take material form in networked communications technologies. Ideals of access, inclusion, discussion, and participation come to be realized in and through expansions, intensifications, and interconnections of global telecommunications." (23)

Networked comm tech

  • Does not "enliven radical democractic practices" (23)
    • Left is fragmented
    • Extreme voices are amplified
    • Advertising is omnipresent
  • It has not lead to "more equitable distributions of wealth and influence" (23)
    • But "extreme corporitization, financialization, and privatization" (23)
  • Rhetoric of democracy "work ideologically to secure the technological infrastructure of neoliberalism"
    • And thus the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of "the very, very rich" (23)

Radio B92, Serbia

  • Used internet to circumvent govt censorship
  • Enabled mobilization against Milosevic regime

Marketplace dominance

  • Neoliberalism shifts everything into the discourse of the market
    • Politics operates like consumer choice, seeking efficiency, "value" (23)
  • To effect change in politics requires participating in, and supporting
    • Via advertising, building websites, etc. (24)

Lost messages

  • When everyone is assumed to be a producer, "messages get lost" (24)
  • The "intense circulation ... occludes the antagonism necessary for politics" (24)
    • Antagonism is dispersed to 1000s of minor sites

Fantasy 1: Abundance

  • Fantasy of abundance : messages as contributions
  • Premise: "more people than ever before can make their opinions known" (25)
  • Dean: messages circulate in an undifferntiated stream (26)
    • "Morphing of message into contribution is a contitutive feature of communicative capitalism." (26)
  • Messages are circulated in a stream of content, "not actions to elicit responses" (26)
    • (But why else would anyone post anything? Clearly people are literally responding ... but not what she means?)
    • The content, sender, response are "irrelevant" (26)
    • "The only thing that is relevant is circulation" (26)
    • (Relevant to whom? And under what conditions? Why are some types of response irrelevant?)
    • The more volumninous the stream, the less of an impact that one can make
    • (But why focus on the unit of 1? Why not see the stream as a phenomenon worthy unto itself?)

Abundance and Habermas

  • Habermas: use value of message is "action oriented toward reaching understanding" (27)
  • In Comm Cap, understanding is not required. Use-value replaced by exchange-value, circulation, repetition

Abundance and equality

  • Abundance fantasy assumes all contributions are equal (28)
    • (In what sense? They are equally accessible if they are on open URLs, e.g. not in FB...)
    • "Prevents us from recognizing the underlying inequalities" (28)

Abundance and networks

  • re: Barabási, Albert-László observing a power-law in network composition
  • re: Pareto, Vilfredo and the "80/20 rule"
  • There are "hubs" on the web with more links than others (28)
    • (Who assumes otherwise?)
    • "Four 'continents'" with their own navigational requirements (161-178)
  • re: Galloway and discussion of rhizome (de Deleuze and Guattari), "distributed network"
    • Dean suggests that Barabási's observation contracts the rhizome (30)
    • (But this seems a mischaracterisation. The rhizome doesn't assert equality. She is confusing hierarchies. Non-hierarchical NETWORK ARCHITECTURE is not the same as non-hierarchical emergent link structures.)
"The Internet is not a wide-open space with nodes and links to nodes distributed in random fashion such that any one site is equally likely to get hits as any other site." (43)
  • (WHO ever said that it was? And WHERE did they say it??)

Fantasy 2: Participation

  • Fantasy of participation : Technology fetishishm
  • People who post online "believe their thoughts and ideas are registering" (31)
  • "A subjective registration effect detached from any actual impact or efficacy" (31)
    • (What is "actual" impact or efficacy? Is the act of posting effective on its face? Does the intent of the poster matter?)
  • Žižek: interpassivity, "you think you're active" but you're "true position ... is passive" (31)
  • "Linking or citing stands in for reading ... stands in for engaging ... there is a gap" (31)

Doing is reduced to talking

  • Communication as an end (32)
  • People have information (watchdog.net) but no infrastructure to effectively act (32)

Personal computing as "revolution"

  • Nelson, Brand, People's Computer Company 70s/80s
  • Apple sloganeering in the 80s
  • Gore and mid-90s call for participatory democracy thru networked telecom
  • "Deep underlying fantasy wherein tech covers our impotence" (36)

case: P2P

  • Dyer-Witheford, Nick on Napster, an "attack on private property itself" (36-7)
  • Dean: "Lost in the celebratory rhetoric is the fact that capitalism has never depended on one industry" (37)
    • (This feels almost like academic dishonesty. The quotes here do not indicate capitalism will fall.)
    • She writes that Napster users felt like revolutionaries but no citation or quote? (37)
  • Also, Joshua Gamson, on "Internet-philia" and an emphasis of "newness" that ignores structures of power (37)

Fantasy 3: Wholeness (Global)

  • Fantasy of wholeness is a belief that the internet is actually global (42)
  • Zero institution', empty signifier, no determinate meaning but signifies the presence of meaning (42)
    • Lévi-Strauss, Claude
    • Žižek, nation and sexual difference "function" as zero institutions
  • "This global is nothing like the 'world'" (43)

Wholess and debates over internet regulation

  • Regulation of internet tends to fall across lines of social and anti- or non-social (44)
    • Porn, antisocial
    • Amazon, social
  • Dean cites the "echo chamber" critique of Sunstein, applies to imaginaries of the "global" (45)
    • Things that I don't visit, don't encounter are not excluded from the global but "foreclosed" (45)
    • (But don't we imagine that "everything is out there", meaning -- there are things we have yet to encounter?)

Three ways the left collapsed, resulting in trauma

  • Techno fetishism + comm cap are responses to this trauma (35)

Abandoning workers, poor

  • Left sought social justice via individual liberty; difficult cobmo (32-33)
    • Identity politics a "boon" to the right, coalition building between social conserv + neoliberal (33)

Retreat from the state and repudiation of collective action

  • Corporate actors consolidated power; esp via privatization and campaign finance laws (33)
  • Left rejected the state as oppressive
  • Turn toward libertarianism

Acceptance of the neoliberal economy

  • Left supported deregulation, eliminated welfare (34)
  • With no support for the state, the Left turned to market logic (35)
  • Loss of political agency

Three primary modes of operation for technological fetish

Condensation

  • Reduction of complex politics to one problem and one (tech) solution (38)
  • (But who supports this? And who is duped by it?)
  • Example is food companies seeking labeling requirements instead of regulation (39)
    • (How does this example map to internet/tech fetishism????)

Displacement

  • "Displacing" politics onto "ordinary people" and "everyday activities"
  • Everyday activities seen "teeming" with political significance (40)
  • E.g. Shirky, "Is social software bad for the Dean campaign?"
    • Participating online "feels good" but has no real-world Political effect
    • "It's hard to find time to go door-to-door when one blogs 20 hours a day" (41)

Denial

  • Presumption of immediacy: building "a website is political" (41)
  • Denial of structural context to online participation
    • Also a denial that democracy is failing to meet the needs of its constituents (42)

No Response

  • People are drawn to "spectacular events that raise awareness ... but do little in the way of building [sustainable] institutions" (47)
  • New media tech "strengthens the hold of neoliberalism and the privilege" of the "top 1 percent"
  • But "globally networked communications remain the very tools and terrains of struggle" (48)

MoveOn.org as exemplar

  • No one has to remain committed, it is "opt-in"
  • Participation can happen from home (46)
  • Busy people can feel active, "alleviating their guilt while assuring them that nothing will change too much" (47)
    • Leaving behind the "time-consuming, incremental, risky efforts of politics" (47)

Jump offs

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