Directive Number One

Many thanks to comrade Mayfield for his excel­lent present­a­tion to the col­lected officers of the Social Media Commissariat … sorry Club, this evening.

To cut his talk short, he’d been thinking about the par­al­lels between the birth of social media and the birth of print itself, as described in Elizabeth Eisenstein’s The printing press as an agent of change: com­mu­nic­a­tions and cultural trans­form­a­tions in early modern Europe. The printing press caused a social upheaval and changes in the patterns of people’s thought that would last forever. Revolutions are often thought to be sudden and violent, but as well as that, if they are really revolu­tionary, they are about long-​​term, irre­vers­ible change.

The printing press, like the explo­sion of social media, changed access to the means of pro­duc­tion and dis­tri­bu­tion of media forever. It smashed feud­alism and church control. It also changed the ways in which people think — new modes of beha­viour and activity like silent reading appeared. The emer­gence of con­tinual partial atten­tion through the likes of Twitter might be a modern analogy.

In a revi­sionist aber­ra­tion, Mayfield sug­gested that mar­keting had always had a place in print, from its very origins, since early books were very often part advertorial for the author’s goods and services. He sug­gested in Gutenberg’s time, there were numerous helpful volumes that actually were about pro­moting the writer — think books along the lines of Tenne Most Efficacious Waies to Dryve Traffick to Ye Blogge. He also cited the division and combined hatred and approval created by this new media, a very familiar theme today when it comes to the media created by you and I and reac­tions to that from the press and the establishment.

Dialectical mater­i­alism and Web 2.0, then. The sub­sequent con­ver­sa­tion revealed a few ways into such an analysis, most of which seem bleak in the short term:

(a) this apparent trans­feral of the means of pro­duc­tion into the hands of the people (e.g. ‘push-​​button pub­lishing’ for everyone) seems like a revolu­tion. But that apparent lib­er­a­tion is con­tained within the illusion of freedom granted by a very few cor­por­a­tions. Fox, Google, Microsoft, Facebook. At the next level, our ISPs are owned by even fewer, larger players. Our sense of freedom and own­er­ship in this space is a delusion. The recent Usmanov outage proved how fragile this freedom is. If cor­por­a­tions are the new states, then much of social media might be clas­si­fied as Ideological State Apparatus to obscure the real rela­tion­ships between those states and the peasantry.

(b) this is even more the case outside the bour­geois social media intel­li­gentsia (viz. anyone likely to attend SMC). Most people are joining in, if at all, through portals con­trolled by media giants. Unwitting col­lab­or­ators, my comrades, not revolu­tion­aries. Maybe not the same media giants as ten years ago. But the same forces, same money behind them. Don’t mistake with­drawal from one account and invest­ment into another for a sea change in how cap­it­alism works.

© the myth of trans­par­ency. Transparency used as a way to bully lesser powers. Corporations remain psychotic: under US law, they are incap­able of acting altru­ist­ic­ally. If they do anything about the social media revolu­tion, then it will be because they think it will be the best way to drive profits. Watch them, catch them out, be suspicious.

(d) so what/​where is the revolu­tion? Regrettably,there was reac­tionary talk based upon non-​​scientific doctrine during the evening that ‘life will out’ and that cen­sor­ship and control will ulti­mately be bypassed because that it is the destiny of any new com­mu­nic­a­tions medium. Applying the sci­entific method of Marx and Lenin instead, we might conclude that the ongoing struggle between the pro­let­ariat and the bour­geoisie will continue and that the inev­it­able victory of the working classes will ensue to similar effect. Even the benighted might hit upon the truth some­times. Print led to edu­ca­tion, sec­u­larity and the spread of sci­entific thought, even­tu­ally, even though its first thrust came from the opposite direction.

Be watchful comrades. The day is near, but not yet at hand.

Update: somewhat more sensible posts on the event from Alan and Jenny.

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