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This type of "ethical" argument is possibly the most absurd of all -- a strong statement, I realise, given the stiffness of its competition -- because of the enormity of what it overlooks within its own scope. To stand back and (by one's inaction) cause someone to die sooner, when one could act to let them live a lot longer at no (or even at some modest) cost to oneself or anyone else, is arguably the second most unnatural thing a human can do, second only (and then by a very small margin) to causing someone's death by an explicit action. (Of course, there is plenty of departure from these ethics in the world, but that's not the point -- abandonment of the law of the jungle is what most fundamentally defines humanity, and also what defines civilisation.) Thus, to ask humanity to accept the "naturalness" argument against life extension, and on that basis to delay the development of a cure for aging, is thus to ask it to transform itself into something as un-human as can be imagined. Even if such concerns were to turn out to be valid, it is for those who experience this diminution of their existence to act to restore it (e.g., by rejecting rejuvenation therapies that are on offer), not for us to make their choice for them.

One can also put this in terms of technology, rather than civilisation. It's clearly unnatural for us to accept the world as we find it: ever since we invented fire and the wheel, we've been demonstrating both our natural ability and our equally natural inherent desire to fix things that we don't like about ourselves and our environment. We would be going against that most fundamental aspect of what it is to be human if we decided that something so horrible as everyone getting frail and decrepit and dependent was something we should live with forever. And if you believe God put us here, presumably you also believe that God made us the way we are on purpose. Thus, if changing our world is playing God, it's just one more way in which God made us in His image.

Over the next few weeks, I'll be posting an outline and, perhaps, discussion questions about Hardt/Negri's Multitude. Here are my notes on the Preface.

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (N.Y.: Penguin Press, 2004).

Preface: Life in Common

I. The possibility of democracy on the global scale is emerging for the first time;
A. the project of the multitude both expresses the desire for this democracy and provides the means for achieving it.
B. But the primary obstacle to democracy is war, so there we must begin. (xi).
II. This book is a sequel to Empire.
A. Empire addressed the new global form of sovereignty.
B. It identified “network power” as this new form, including as its primary elements, or nodes, dominant nation-state plus major capitalist institutions, supranational institution, and other powers. This power is “imperial,” but not imperialist. (xii).
C. Our analysis cuts across “diagonally” current debates about:
1. Multilateralism/unilateralism
2. Pro-/anti-Americanism
3. Because not even America can “go it alone” (xii-xiii).
D. Empire rules over a global order:
1. Fractured by internal divisions and hierarchies
2. Plagued by perpetual war, which is:
a. Both inevitable in Empire,
b. Functions as a system of rule (xiii).
III. This book focuses on the Multitude:
A. Two faces to globalization:
1. New mechanisms of control and conflict that maintain order.
2. New circuits of cooperation and collaboration that stretch across nations and continents (xiii).
B. The Multitude itself might be conceived as a network in which all differences can be expressed freely and equally.
1. It is thus different from “the People,” which is “one.”
2. And from the “Masses,” which is indifference, the merging of differences into grey,
3. The Multitude is multi-colored, like Joseph’s magical coat.
4. The challenge posed by the concept of the multitude is:
a. For a social multiplicity to manage to communicate and act in common
b. While remaining internally different (xiv).
5. It also is different from the working class, because:
a. The working class no longer plays a hegemonic role in the world economy,
b. Production today has to be conceived in social terms rather than the merely economic: the production of communications, relationships, and forms of life.
c. The Multitude is composed potentially of all the diverse figures of social production. (xv)
C. Labor as social production:
1. Tends through transformations of the economy to create and be embedded in cooperative and communicative networks
2. Especially true for labor that creates immaterial projects such as ideas, images, affects, relationships.
3. This new model of production we call “biopolitical production” to highlight that it not only involves the production of material goods but also produces all facets of social life, economic, cultural, and political.
D. The Multitude also, in contrast to earlier revolutionary organizations, has increasingly democratic organization—network organizations that displace authority in collaborative relationships (xvi).

IV. But don’t expect that this book will answer the question, “What Is to Be Done?”
A. Our goal is to rethink our most basic political concepts: power, resistance, multitude, democracy (xvi).
B. And to do so in language as clear as possible (xvii).
C. Empire/Multitude are related as Hobbes’ de Cive/Leviathan are, except that while Hobbes moved from the nascent social class to the new form of sovereignty, our focus is the inverse—from the new form of sovereignty to the new global class.

Posted by jim at 11:30 PM | Comments (1)

The next few extended entries on the Blogora are my outline of Hardt and Negri's Empire (2000); I hope we can have some discussion of their new book Multitude over the next few weeks. I realized that it might be helpful to have some notes on the earlier, more difficult work.

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000).

Preface:

1. “Our basic hypothesis is that sovereignty has taken a new form, composed of a series of national and supranational organisms united under a single logic of rule. This new global form of sovereignty is what we call Empire” (xii).
a. But Empire is NOT imperialism. The sovereignty of the nation-state was the cornerstone of imperialism. Empire has no territorial center of power; it is a decentered and deterritorializing apparatus of rule. “Empire manages hybrid identities, flexible hierarchies, and plural exchanges through modulating networks of command” (xii).
b. Empire not a metaphor, but a “concept”:
i. A regime that effectively encompasses the whole civilized world.
ii. It is not a historical regime originating in conquest, but an order that effectively suspends history and fixes the existing state of affairs for eternity (xiv).
iii. The object of its rule is social life in its entirety: biopower.
iv. Although continually bathed blood, the concept is always dedicated to the notion of a perpetual and universal peace outside history (xv).

2. The dominant productive processes have changed:
a. Role of industrial factory labor has been reduced and priority given instead to “communicative, cooperative, and affective labor” (xiii).
b. Creation of wealth tends ever more toward biopolitical production, “the production of social life itself, in which the economic, the political, and the cultural increasingly overlap and invest one another” (xiii)

3. Rather than merely resist global flows and exchanges the “multitude” needs to invent new democratic forms and a new “constituent power” that will “one day take us through and beyond Empire” (xv). An alternative global society is being written today through the “resistances, struggles, and desires of the multitude” (xvi).

4. This book is an interdisciplinary toolbox of concepts for theorizing and acting in and against Empire. Narrow disciplinary boundaries are breaking down: an economist needs to understand cultural production to make sense of the economy, and a cultural critic needs a basic knowledge of economic processes to understand culture (xvi). In note 4, Hardt and Negri cites Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus and Karl Marx’s Capital as models for their interdisciplinary work.

5. Overview of the book’s structure:
a. Part 1: general problematic of Empire.
b. Part 2: passage from the early modern period to the present from the standpoint of the history of ideas—especially the concept of sovereignty.
c. Intermezzo: hinge that articulates the movement from the realm of ideas to production.
d. Part 3: narrates the same passage from the standpoint of production (production includes both economic production AND the production of subjectivity). Both parts 2 and 3 are structured by:
i. Account of the modern, imperialist phase
ii. Mechanisms of passage
iii. Our postmodern imperial world
e. Part 4: alternatives beyond Empire.

Empire 1.3: Alternatives Within Empire

I. Introduction:
A. Construction of Empire is a response to class struggle by the "multitude."
B. Still, the construction of Empire is a step forward--NO nostalgia for power structures such as the nation-state to protect against global capital.
C. Like Marx, for whom capitalism, was "progressive," despite its horrors. [Capitalism as simultaneously the best thing and worst thing that happened to people.]
D. Left has committed itself to local struggles and nationalism against global capital, but we believe this to be "false and damaging" (44). Can easily devolve into a "kind of primordialism that fixes and romanticizes social relations and identities" (45)
E. We need instead to address "the production of locality, that is, the social machines that create and recreate the identities and differences that are understood as the local" (45). "We should be done once and for all with the search for an outside, a standpoint that imagines a purity for our politics." Let us confront the homogenizing and heterogenizing flows of Empire in all their complexity, "grounding our analysis in the power of the global multitude" (46).

II. The Ontological Drama of the Res Gestae:
[A. res gestae=means literally "things done" in Latin. In the law, the "res gestae" rule is that a spontaneous remark made by a person immediately after an event (Oh, no! I ran over your cat!) is likely to be true, and thus an exception to the hearsay rule. Term seems to come from Althusser (p. 63) to refer to self-constituting, unmediated collective action . . .]
B. 2 methodological approaches:
1. Critical and deconstructive: subverting the hegemonic languages and social structures, thus revealing an alternative ontological basis that resides in the creative and productive practices of the multitude.
2. Constitutive and ethico-political: "seeking to lead the processes of the production of subjectivity toward the constitution of an effective social, political alternative, a new constituent power" (47). Refuses any deterministic conception of historical development and any "rational" celebration of the result (48).
III. Refrains of the "Internationale":
A. Proletarian internationalism was a protest against the nation-state and its warmaking capacity; but its time is over (49-50). These were the real motor that drove the development of the institutions of capital and drove it in a process of reform and restructuring (51). [The point is valid: without threat of revolution, we would never have gotten the 40-hour week, occupational safety and health legislation, labor laws, etc. The CLOSER a country was to the Soviet Union the more likely it was to have a generous welfare state.]
1. First wave after 1848
2. After 1917 Soviet Revolution
3. After the Chinese and Cuban revolutions
B. Living labor always tries to liberate itself from rigid, territorializing regimes. "When one adopts the perspective of the activity of the multitude, its production of subjectivity and desire, one can recognize how globalization, insofar as it operates a real deterritorialization of the previous structures of exploitation and control, is really a condition of the liberation of the multitude" (52). [Why do I hear "mob" when they say "multitude"?]

IV. The Mole and the Snake:
A. We must broaden the term proletariat to include all whose labor is directly or indirectly exploited by and subjected to capitalist norms of production and reproduction (52).
B. Immaterial labor power, involved in communication, cooperation, and reproduction of affects, occupies an increasingly central position both in capitalist production and the composition of the proletariat.
C. New struggles, though, are incommunicable; Chiapas, Intifada, etc. don't immediately translate across borders the labor struggles once did (54).
D. But:
1. Each struggle leaps immediately to the global level and attacks the imperial constitution
2. All destroy the distinction between economic and political: they are at once economic, political, and cultural--thus biopolitical struggles over a form of life, creating new public spaces and new forms of community (56).
E. An obstacle is lack of a common enemy; clarifying the nature of the common enemy is an essential political task. How can we create a new common language that facilitates communication, like the languages of anti-imperialism and proletarian internationalist did for an earlier era. Perhaps we need to learn how to communicate singularities? No clear, mole-like tunnels any more, but the undulating motions of the snake (57).
F. Leninism: target the weakest link (i.e., the weakest capitalist state, Russia). Now there is no weakest link. But, Empire can be attacked now from any point (59).

V. Two-Headed Eagle:
A. First head of the imperial eagle: juridical structure and constituted power, constructed by the machine of biopolitical command.
B. Second head is the plural multitude of productive, creative subjectivities of globalization who have learned to sail on this enormous sea (60). Universal nomadism.

VI. Political Manifesto:
A. [Initial reference to Louis Althusser, the French Communist philosopher's "period of seclusion" refers to being institutionalized after strangling his wife during a manic-depressive episode. . . .] The genre of the "manifesto" as text.
1. Similarity between Machiavelli's Prince and the Communist Manifesto: form of the argument consists of a specific apparatus (dispositif) that establishes particular relationships between the discourse and its object and between the discourse and its subject.
2. Difference: subject (proletariat) and object (the Party) are co-present, while in Machiavelli there is a distance between the subject (the multitude) and the object (the Prince and the free, republican state) (63).
B. What would a new manifesto look like? What subjects and objects would it create? "how can the endeavor to bridge the distance between the formation of the multitude as subject and the constitution of a democratic political apparatus find its prince?" (65). A new manifesto must aspire to fulfill a prophetic function, the function of an immanent desire that organizes the multitude (66).

Empire, Part 2: Passages of Sovereignty

[Remember that Parts 2 and 3 are the story of the passage from modernity to postmodernity, from imperialism to Empire; Part 2 specifically narrates the passage primarily in terms of the history of ideas, especially the genealogy of the concept of sovereignty, while part 3 will look at the same passage from the standpoint of production (not only economic, but also production of subjectivity itself). Each part's general structure will move from 1: modern, imperialist phase to 2: mechanisms of passage, to 3: our postmodern imperial world (xvii).]

2.1: Two Europes, Two Modernities

We identify 3 moments in the constitution of European modernity related to concept of sovereignty:
A. Revolutionary discovery of the plane of immanence: discoveries in philosophy and science that made attention turn to "this world"
B. reaction against these immanent forces and crisis in the form of authority:
1. Renaissance and Reformation culminate in War
2. Modernity itself as defined by crisis:
a. between immanent, constructive, creative forces (like Spinoza's placing of humanity and nature in the position of God) and the
b. transcendent power aimed at restoring order (e.g. the modern, absolutist state)
C. Partial and temporary resolution of this crisis in the formation of a modern state as locus of sovereignty that transcends and mediates the plane of immanent forces. Sovereignty developed in coordination with modernity itself, Eurocentrism (70).
1. Descartes and Kant as part of this strategy, by emphasizing reason and Enlightenment, contributing to a "story" Europe told about itself;
2. Hobbes by creating a transcendent political apparatus as God; sovereignty thus defined both by transcendence and representation (84);
3. Rousseau does the same with the General Will (85);
4, Smith does the same by reducing everything to the Market (86), thus sovereignty and capital are synthesized; also Weber, with bureaucratic rationality (89-90).
D. A new humanism? Refusal of transcendence, acceptance of creative power of our posthuman, simian, cyborg bodies (92).

2.2: Sovereignty of the Nation-State

I. Birth of the Nation:
A. Patrimonial state as body of the monarch; cuju regio, ejus religio--religion as subordinated to the territorial control of the sovereign, who himself is part of the body of God (94).
B. Yielded to the spiritual identity of the nation (rather than the divine body of the king). Reinvented the patrimonial body of the monarchic state in a new form. This new totality of power was structured partly by new capitalist productive processes on one hand and old networks of absolutist administration on the other. This was an uneasy relationship, so it was stabilized by cultural, integrating entity of national identity, based on blood relations, spatial continuity of history, and linguistic commonality (95). From subject to citizen. But this quickly became an ideological nightmare. Herder: every human perfection is, in a certain respect, "national" (101). the next step is construction of absolute racial difference (103). [Importance for the history of rhetoric: the shift from the classical texts to modern "literature" is deeply involved with this discovery of the spirit of the "People" in its national language/literature, which comes to replace Greek and Latin] But this was also the consolidation of the victory of the bourgeoisie (105).
C. Paradox: the concept of nation promotes stasis and restoration in the hands of the dominant, while it is a weapon for change and revolution in the hands of the subordinated (106). Malcolm X, for example (107). But Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia as examples of use by the dominant (110). Nationalist socialism (Stalin) and national socialism (Hitler) met because the abstract machine of national sovereignty is at the heart of both. [This is one of the most interesting political claims in the book. Counter-arguments?]

2.3: The Dialectics of Colonial Sovereignty

I. Introduction: "The crisis of modernity has from the beginning had an intimate relation to racial subordination and colonization"; the "dark Other of European Enlightenment" has been a necessary component for the negative foundation of European identity and modern sovereignty as such. "Colonial sovereignty is another insufficient attempt to resolve the crisis of modernity" (115).

II. Humankind Is One and Many
A. Don't forget the utopian element of global colonization: love of differences and the belief in universal freedom and equality. Examples of this utopianism:
1. Bartolome de Las Casas--who protested against Spanish treatment of the natives of the New World.
2. Toussaint L'Ouverture--leader of the successful slave revolt in Haiti (in the name of the same Universal Rights of Man used during the French Revolution).
3. Karl Marx--advice to India: refuse both submission to British capital AND return to traditional Indian social structures. But the only alternative path Marx can imagine is the same path traveled by European society already (120). Marx's "Eurocentrism."
B. The Crisis of Colonial Slavery:
1. Perhaps the extension of slavery in the New World was a kind of imposed apprenticeship to capitalism (122). [Interesting argument; this is a much-contested issue among historians.]
2. "The deterritorializing desire of the multitude is the motor that drives the entire process of capitalist development, and capital must constantly attempt to contain it" (124).
C. The Production of Alterity:
1. "The negative construction of non-European others is finally what founds and sustains European identity itself" (124).
2. Anthropology as key academic discipline for "producing" the native other (125).
3. British had to write a whole new Indian history to legitimate colonial rule (126).
D. The Dialectic of Colonialism:
1. "Colonialism homogenizes real social differences by creating one overriding opposition that pushes differences to the absolute and then subsumes the opposition under the identity of European civilization. Reality is not dialectical, colonialism is" (128).
2. "Colonialism is an abstract machine that produces alterity and identity" (129). Another version of Hegel's Master-Slave dialectic, in which the Master can only achieve a hollow form of recognition; it is the Slave, through life-and-death struggle, who has the potential to gain full consciousness (129)** see appended note on Hegel.
E. The Boomerang of Alterity:
1. Sartrean solutions: unite all oppressed peoples in the same struggle; practice of negritude (black is beautiful, in the US version); but only as a first step toward the ultimate goal of a raceless society (130-1).
2. Fanon: reciprocal counterviolence (The Wretched of the Earth). Like Malcolm X.
F. The Poisoned Gift of National Liberation
1. National liberation becomes a project of modernization that hands the revolution over to a new power group, from India to Algeria and Cuba to Vietnam (134).
2. But the new global order of capital is quite different from the colonialist and imperialist circuits of international domination.
G. Contagion:
1. Image of the colonized as disease-ridden (in Celine's Journey to the End of the Night).
2. If one looks back, Europe appears reassuringly sterile.
3. "The horror released by European conquest and colonialism is a horror of unlimited contact, flow, and exchange--or really the horror of contagion, miscegenation, and unbounded life" (136).
4. Now we see Africa and Haiti's AIDS epidemic in terms reminiscent of the colonialist imaginary: unrestrained sexuality, moral corruption, and lack of hygiene .
5. "Nothing can bring back the hygienic shields of colonial boundaries. The age of globalization is the age of universal contagion" (136).

Posted by jim at 11:35 AM | Comments (2)

Here's an outline of the Preface and Part One of Hardt and Negri's 2004 book Multitude. Anyone interested in discussing? They put "communication" at the heart of their diagnosis of contemporary capitalism and at the heart of their notion of resistance, so the book is of theoretical interest to rhetoricians.

Discussion Questions:

1. Any specific “clarification” or “literacy” questions?
2. Are the diagnoses of contemporary war accurate—particularly the “homology” between post-Fordist production and new forms of war and revolutionaryorganization?
3. We should probably exercise the principle of hermeneutic charity here: read the whole book before we start trashing the lack of a practicalprogram—BUT,
a. Is there a dangerous flirtation with “radical chic” in this book?
b. The argument from jeopardy (see Hirschman, The Rhetoric of Reaction): why should we jeopardize the hard-won civil liberties and benefits of the social-democratic welfare state in the name of a revolutionary leap into the void?
c. Why is it that every time they use the word “multitude” I hear the word“mob”? My general theory that all systems of political thought are based on one of two different types of anxiety:
i. Fear of the Mob and the demagogues who might incite them
ii. Fear of the Elite and their monopoly of knowledge through expert discourses
4. Virtually every major political theorist before the 18th century also reflected systematically on “rhetoric”—a theory of political
prudence/practical wisdom involving the design of messages to persuade the target audience(s) of the political theory. What “rhetoric” is the counterpart of Hardt/Negri’s “dialectic”?

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (N.Y.: Penguin Press, 2004).

Preface: Life in Common

I. The possibility of democracy on the global scale is emerging for the first time;
A. the project of the multitude both expresses the desire for this democracy and provides the means for achieving it.
B. But the primary obstacle to democracy is war, so there we must begin. (xi).
II. This book is a sequel to Empire.
A. Empire addressed the new global form of sovereignty.
B. It identified “network power” as this new form, including as its primary elements, or nodes, dominant nation-state plus major capitalist institutions, supranational institution, and other powers. This power is “imperial,” but not imperialist. (xii).
C. Our analysis cuts across “diagonally” current debates about:
1. Multilateralism/unilateralism
2. Pro-/anti-Americanism
3. Because not even America can “go it alone” (xii-xiii).
D. Empire rules over a global order:
1. Fractured by internal divisions and hierarchies
2. Plagued by perpetual war, which is:
a. Both inevitable in Empire,
b. Functions as a system of rule (xiii).
III. This book focuses on the Multitude:
A. Two faces to globalization:
1. New mechanisms of control and conflict that maintain order.
2. New circuits of cooperation and collaboration that stretch across nations and continents (xiii).
B. The Multitude itself might be conceived as a network in which all differences can be expressed freely and equally.
1. It is thus different from “the People,” which is “one.”
2. And from the “Masses,” which is indifference, the merging of differences into grey,
3. The Multitude is multi-colored, like Joseph’s magical coat.
4. The challenge posed by the concept of the multitude is:
a. For a social multiplicity to manage to communicate and act in common
b. While remaining internally different (xiv).
5. It also is different from the working class, because:
a. The working class no longer plays a hegemonic role in the world economy,
b. Production today has to be conceived in social terms rather than the merely economic: the production of communications, relationships, and forms of life.
c. The Multitude is composed potentially of all the diverse figures of social production. (xv)
C. Labor as social production:
1. Tends through transformations of the economy to create and be embedded in cooperative and communicative networks
2. Especially true for labor that creates immaterial projects such as ideas, images, affects, relationships.
3. This new model of production we call “biopolitical production” to highlight that it not only involves the production of material goods but also produces all facets of social life, economic, cultural, and political.
D. The Multitude also, in contrast to earlier revolutionary organizations, has increasingly democratic organization—network organizations that displace authority in collaborative relationships (xvi).

IV. But don’t expect that this book will answer the question, “What Is to Be Done?”
A. Our goal is to rethink our most basic political concepts: power, resistance, multitude, democracy (xvi).
B. And to do so in language as clear as possible (xvii).
C. Empire/Multitude are related as Hobbes’ de Cive/Leviathan are, except that while Hobbes moved from the nascent social class to the new form of sovereignty, our focus is the inverse—from the new form of sovereignty to the new global class.

1: War

1.1 Simplicissimus

Exceptions

I. War is becoming a general, global, interminable phenomenon.
A. War used to be armed conflict between sovereign political entities.
B. Now it is more like civil war: armed conflict between sovereign or semisovereign combatants WITHIN a single sovereign territory (3).
C. Like the beginning of the Thirty Years’ War, 9/11/2001 opened a new era of war: the passage from modernity to postmodernity (4).
D. How to understand this phenomenon of brutal global state of war?
1. The notion of EXCEPTION [from the creepy pro-Nazi German legal theorist Carl Schmitt: “sovereign is he who can declare a state of exception,” i.e. the suspension of “normal” constitutional liberties; Schmitt also proposed—with considerable influenced on right-wing political strategists—that “the friend/enemy distinction” is fundamental to politics—hence our current US politics of constant war against the other party, conceived as the polarized “enemy”].
2. The goal of modern, liberal political thought and practice was the separation of war from politics (6).
3. But now the exception, the state of war, has become permanent and general.
4. It is connected with “American exceptionalism”:
i. That we are an exception from European corruption
ii. New thing: we can claim an exception from the law (8).
iii. But the classical republicanism on which the US was founded claimed that no one is above the law; the new state of affairs erodes the republican tradition that runs through the nation’s history (9).

II. Golem [as in Empire, these italicized sections seem to serve the rhetorical purpose of providing an imaginative/poetic interlude in the more expository main argument]: “Perhaps what monsters like the Golem are trying to teach us, whispering to us secretly under the din of our global battlefield, is a lesson about the monstrosity of war and our possible redemption through love” (12).

III. The Global State of War
A. War is becoming a permanent social relation; politics is increasingly war conducted by other means
B. Foucault on biopower: force is reinscribed in all social institutions, economic inequality, even personal and sexual relations: “a form of rule aimed not only at controlling the population but producing and reproducing all aspects of social life” (13).
C. War on drugs as an example of trend of treating enemies as set of concepts or practices (14)
1. The limits of war are rendered indeterminate, both spatially and temporally
2. The conceptual merging of war and policing.
3. The concept of justice moves war beyond the battle of interests to the cause of humanity as a whole (14-15).
4. As a result, tolerance—a central conception of modern thought—is being undermined.
D. Terrorism is used as justification for this expansion of war, but the term is unstable, potentially meaning:
1. Revolt against a legitimate government
2. Exercise of violence by a legitimate government in violation of human rights
3. Practice of warfare in violation of rules of engagement (targeting civilians)
E. Diminishing civil liberties and increasing rates of incarceration are manifestation of a constant social war. The new forms of power and control operate in contradiction with the new social composition of the population and blocks its new forms of productivity and expression—a similar obstruction of freedom and productive expression led to the implosion of the Soviet Union (17).

IV. Biopower and Security
A. War is becoming ontological, but moving in 2 directions:
1. Localized police actions, but
2. Raised up to an ontological, global level by technologies of global destruction.
B. Ever increasing use of torture—a generalized, yet banalized technique of control. [From Nat Hentoff’s Village Voice column this week: --I'm perfectly comfortable in telling you [that] our country is one that safeguards human rights and human dignity. George W. Bush to a Russian reporter in Slovakia, February 24. --Mehboob Ahmad, a 35-year-old Afghan, was left hanging upside down by a chain, sexually assaulted, probed anally, threatened with a snarling dog at close range. Los Angeles Times, March 2, on Ali et al. v. Rumsfeld, a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union and Human Rights First detailing Rumsfeld's responsibility for the torture and other abuses of U.S. detainees.--Then [the guard] brought a box of food and he made me stand on it, and he started punishing me. Then a tall black soldier came and put electrical wires on my fingers and toes and on my penis, and I had a bag over my head. Then he was saying, "which switch is on for electricity?" "United States of America: Human Dignity Denied: Torture and Accountability in the 'War on Terror,' " Amnesty International, 200-page report]
C. Shift from defense to security—the use of preemptive strikes to undermine sovereignty (20).
D. War now has a constituent, regulative function: it creates and maintains social hierarchies, a form of biopower aimed at the promotion and regulation of social life (21). While it was earlier regulated by legal structures, now war becomes regulating by imposing its own legal framework (22).
E. Nationbuilding a good example of postmodern/essentialist thought: the nation can be destroyed or invented as part of a political program (23).

V. Legitimate Violence
A. Declining ability of states to legitimate violence may explain increase in intensity of accusations of terrorism (27).
B. Rise of international courts aimed at the destruction of rights and sovereignty of peoples through supranational jurisdictional practices (e.g. trial of Milosevic)—decline of international law and rise of a global or imperial form of law (29).
C. The individualizing of the enemy: Noriega, bin Laden, Milosevic, Hussein, Qadafi—pedagogical tool for presenting this new view of war—not what power is, but what power saves us from (31).

VI. Samuel Huntington, Geheimrat: Trilateral Commission report of democracy in the 1970’s became blueprint for destruction of the welfare state; Clash of Civilizations became blueprint for current war.

1.2: Counterinsurgencies

I. Birth of the new war
A. Postmodern warfare much like post-Fordist production:
1. Based on mobility and flexibility
2. Integrates intelligence, information, and immaterial labor
3. Extends militarization to outer space, the ends of the earth, depths of the ocean (40).
B. RMA: Revolution in Military Affairs
1. New technologies provide new form of combat
2. US now has overwhelming dominance of military power
3. With the end of the cold war, paradigm of war as predictable mass conflict has ended, too (41).
C. But:
1. Doesn’t really correspond to reality,
2. E.g. suicide bombings
3. Lacks consideration of the social subject that makes war (45-46).
D. Machiavelli’s republican ideal: armed, free men defending the republic; the postmodern dream of war without bodies, armies without soldiers, contradicts this ideal (48).
E. The choice:
1. All armies become mercenary armies
2. How love of country could again become love of humanity (49-51).

II. Asymmetrical conflict:
A. The enemy has a new form: threats to imperial order now appear as distributed networks rather than centralized and sovereign subjects—all wars today are netwars
1. No center to the network
2. No stable boundaries between inside and outside
3. Makes it hard to find an “enemy target” to attack (54-55).
4. The old army was like a wolf-pack; today’s enemy is a swarm, and it is very difficult to attack a swarm (57).
5. So it takes a network to attack a network. Network forces of imperial enemies face network enemies on all sides (62).

1.3: Resistance

I. The Primacy of Resistance
A. We need to research the genealogy of social and political movements of resistance, leading us to:
1. A new vision of our world
2. An understanding of the subjectivities capable of creating a new world
B. Need to understand:
1. How people are integrated into the systems of economic production and reproduction
2. What jobs they perform
3. What they produce
C. Thesis: The contemporary scene of labor and production is being transformed under the hegemony of IMMATERIAL LABOR: labor that produces immaterial products such as:
1. Information
2. Knowledges
3. Images
4. Relationships
5. Affects (65).
D. Not that the old industrial worker is irrelevant, but the contractual and material conditions of immaterial labor spread to the entire labor market:
1. Blurring of distinction between work time and nonwork time, making the working day fill all of life
2. Lack of long-term contracts puts labor in the precarious position of constant flexibility (performing many different tasks) and mobility (moving continually among locations)
E. Positive aspects:
1. Immaterial labor moves out from the economic realm to include the production and reproduction of society as a whole
2. The production of ideas, knowledges, and affects directly produces social relationships—it is biopolitical
3. New subjectivities are produced
4. Immaterial labor takes the forms of networks based on communication, collaboration, and affective relationships—invents new independent networks of cooperation through which it produces (66)
F. 3 principles from the genealogy of resistance:
1. Find the form of resistance most effective in combating a specific form of power
2. The most effective model of resistance turns out to have the same form as the dominant models of economic and social production
3. Each new form of resistance is aimed at addressing the undemocratic qualities of previous movements, creating a chain of ever more democratic movements
G. Resistance, exodus, the emptying out of the enemy’s power, the multitude’s construction of a new society are one and the same process (69).

II. From the People’s Army to Guerrilla Warfare
A. Fundamental passage of modern civil war: formation of dispersed and irregular rebel forces into an army (70).
B. Downside:
1. Revolutionary civil wars became motors of modernization
2. Centralization of the people’s army made the rebellion undemocratic (73).
C. 1960’s guerrillas had a greater desire for freedom and democracy: rejection of the centralized model of the popular army (74-75) (increasing participation of women in leadership and combat in these movements, 76).
D. Unlike Arendt, we cannot separate the political from the social (77).

III. Inventing Network Struggles
A. “The People”: a middle term between consent given by the population and the command exercised by sovereign power
B. But even in resistance and rebellion, this popular will is always grounded in a charismatic, transcendent authority (tendency to privilege authority) .
C. So, can we imagine a new process of legitimation based not on popular sovereignty but on the biopolitical productivity of the multitude (79)?
D. Need to focus on the relationship between the organization of the movements and the organization of social and economic production.
1. The networks of information, communication, and cooperation—the main dynamics of post-Fordist production—begin to define the new guerilla networks;
2. use of the Internet not only as organizing tool, but as model for organizational structure (82).
3. No center, only an irreducible plurality of nodes in communication with each other (83).
4. Examples: 2nd Intifada, Zapatistas (make communication, horizontal network organizations central to their notion of revolution, irony itself as a political strategy) (85), identity politics, resurgence of anarchism, the distributed network approach of the WTO and World Social Forum protests (86), creating a “movement of movements” (87).
E. Resisting war—thus resisting the legitimation of this global order—becomes a common ethical task (90).
F. Swarm intelligence:
1. AI/Computers: swarm intelligence refers to collective and distributed techniques of problem solving without central control or provision of a global model
2. Intelligence based primarily on communication (91).
3. Need to read Rimbaud’s hymns to the Paris Commune (comparison to insects) (92-3).
G. Need to remember that there is no natural, evolutionary path that forms of resistance take; history develops in contradictory and random ways (93).

Posted by jim at 02:49 PM | Comments (0)

My reading group just finished discussing Hardt and Negri's Multitude last night. I disliked Empire a great deal, but I was really very impressed with this book--the last chapter, on learning from both Lenin AND James Madison is particularly inspiring. Of the five of us, 2 analytic philosophers, one continental philosopher, and 2 small-r republican rhetoricians, I was probably the most enthusiastic. Here's an outline of Part III (final) for those of you following along at home.

Part III: Multitude

3.1 The Long March of Democracy

I. Crisis of Democracy in the Era of Armed Globalization: What does democracy mean in a globalized world?
A. The social-democratic answer:
1. Globalization defined in economic terms.
2. Nation-states should withdraw from globalization, to assert their sovereignty
3. But 9/11 changed all that, leading to 2 different strategies:
a. Schroeder’s Germany: pursue multilateral cosmopolitan alliances
b. Blair’s Britain: accept US hegemony (231-233).
B. Liberal cosmopolitan answer:
1. Globalization fosters democracy, esp. in human rights
2. War has made this seemingly the only viable alternative to US global control.
3. Subset: the US cannot “go it alone” (234).
C. U.S. hegemony answer (neoconservatism)
1. US global control plus expansion of capitalism necessarily breeds democracy, because the rule of capital is inherently democratic
2. US hegemony=democracy
3. Some British writers encourage the US to accept imperialism, because the US is heir to benevolent European imperialism.
4. US authors believe US hegemony is new and exceptional (234-5).
D. Traditional-values conservative answer:
1. Globalization threatens traditional conservative values.
2. US global involvement does
3. Unregulated capital does as well (235).
E. What these answers miss:
1. Democracy today faces a leap of scale beyond the nation-state.
2. They insist on liberty first and democracy later, leading to the absolute rule of private property, undermining the will of everyone.
3. In the era of biopolitical production, liberalism and liberty based on the virtue of the few or even the many is becoming impossible, precisely because the social nature of biopolitical production threatens private property.
4. Democracy in fact can ONLY arise from below (236-7).

II. The Unfinished Democratic Project of Modernity
A. We are back to early modern political theory now; global war parallels the role of “civil war” that concerned Hobbes, Descartes, and other founders of modern European thought (239).
B. 18th-century innovations:
1. Democracy as rule of many over the few (Pericles) was transformed into the democracy of everyone.
2. Notion of representation: fulfilled the 2 contradictory functions of:
a. linking the multitude to government
b. but also separates it, as a “disjunctive synthesis” that simultaneously cuts and connects ( 241).
3. The term “republicanism” was used by 18th-c. authors to mark their distance from democracy (242).
C. The American founding:
1. Madison, for example: the US Constitution’s representative schema is an effective guarantee against oppression by the majority (243).
2. Anti-federalists favored small sovereign states in which delegates actually represented people
3. What we got in the Constitution as an “elective aristocracy”
4. All these discussions are refreshing to read now because they show how democracy and representation stand at odds with each other (244).
D. Types of Representation (from Weber):
1. Appropriated or patriarchal representation:
a. How black slaves, women, and children were represented in the US Const.
b. How the IMF and World Bank work today (245).
2. Free representation (parliaments between elections)
3. Instructed representation (more frequent elections, recall) (246-7).

III. Debtors’ Rebellion as example of:
A. Contradiction inherent in the US system: a society divided along class lines.
B. Same contradiction today with global debt
C. But Shays’ Rebellion wasn’t productive, nor would a similar global one today; we need to address inequality in the global system before such a rebellion arises (247-9).

IV. The Unrealized Democracy of Socialism:
A. Promising elements in the early socialist tradition:
1. Critique of the “autonomy of politics”
2. Rejection of separation between political representation and economic administration (249).
B. Alternatives to traditional representation:
1. The Party
2. The Commune: destruction of sovereign power as separate from society
3. Self-management/council Communism (tended to be strongest when skilled workers controlled industrial production, but assembly line production caused this model to yield to a “planning” model).
C. Degradation of the socialist model into bureaucracy, and eventually the implosion of E. European socialist regimes in the late 1980’s (249-252).
D. Weber: the problem is that socialism was still the administration of capital—the same relentless dynamic of the instrumental rationalization of life.
E. Right-wing populisms thus emerged perversely out of the socialist tradition (254-5).

V. Revolt, Berlin 1953: rejection of representation and affirmation of the Communist expression of desire through the multitude (255-258).

VI. From Democratic Representation to Global Public Opinion:
A. Public opinion as 18th c. invention: fulfill role for modern democracy that the assembly filled for ancient democracy (259).
B. Opposing views:
1. Utopian view of perfect representation of the will of the people through public opinion (James Bryce’s American Commonwealth (1895)
2. Apocalyptic vision of manipulated mob rule (Le Bon’s The Crowd).
C. Hegel’s vision of civil society (social, political, economic institutions that are not part of the state, e.g. families, civic groups, trade unions, political parties, interest groups, etc.) as a mediation between individual or group expressions and the social unity (260).
D. The new role of the media in transforming public opinion.
E. Habermas responds, a la Hegel, by defending public opinion as communicative action aimed at reaching understanding and forming a world of values: free expression plus free communicative exchanges—an alternative to instrumental reason and to capitalist control of communication, a protest against capitalist colonization of the lifeworld.
F. H/N disagree with JH because we are “all already inside, contaminated,” requiring “ethical redemption” constructed outside the system (261).
G. Luhmann’s functionalist emphasis on equilibrium (261-2).
H. Birmingham School’s (cultural studies) emphasis on communication as productive; we are not just passive receivers or consumers.
I. C ommunication is productive, not only of economic values but also of subjectivity, and thus communication is central to biopolitical production; we can create alternative subcultures and new collective networks of expression within the dominant culture (263).

VII. White Overalls: a form of expression for new forms of labor: network organization, spatial mobility, temporal flexibility—a coherent political force against the new global system of power (Genoa G-8 protests in 2001) (265-267).

3.2 Global Demands for Democracy

I. Cahiers de Doleances [list of grievances]
A. Grievances of representation: World Bank, IMF, UN
B. Grievances of rights and justice: human rights NGO’s; truth commissions; international tribunals (Nuremburg Trials); International Court of Justice, International Criminal Court (US refuses to ratify)
C. Economic Grievances: Debt, privatization, Jubilee Movement
D. Biopolitical Grievances: construction projects (World Bank dam in India protests), control of knowledges (pharmeceutical company control over AIDS drugs) (268-285).

II. Convergence in Seattle: the first “global” protest (286), including environmentalists, union members and other of the Estates General presenting their grievances (286-288).

III. Experiments in Global Reform: Reform and Revolution today cannot be separated (289).
A. Reforms of representation
1. Making IMF and World bank “accountable” and “transparent” (290).
2. Eliminating the UN Security Council (291-2).
3. World Social Forum as possible model for a global body, not relying on one-man one-vote but on representing existing organizations or communities (294-5).
4. European multilevel federal model (EU) (295-296).
5. All oddly imitate the US constitution, while the US blocks extension of the US model (296).
B. Reforms of rights and justice:
1. Extend International Criminal Court
2. Establish a permanent international or global truth commission
3. Unclear what reparations to victims of economic corruption would look like (296-299).
C. Economic reforms:
1. New world debt-arbitration agency, al la domestic bankruptcy laws (299).
2. Strategy of giving states MORE regulatory power, e.g. via the Tobin tax, a currency transaction tax:
a. Controlling volatility of exchange rates
b. More control over their currencies and thus over their economies as a whole, allowing more redistributive policies (300)—puts too much faith in nation-states (300-1).
4. Strategy of freeing up information by limiting copyright, promoting open-source software—the idea of a creation of the Common not of a Public (301-302).
D. Biopolitical reforms:
1. Alternative to the war system
2. Kyoto Accord
3. Global FCC (303-306).

IV. Back to the Eighteenth Century!
A. The concept of democracy was not as corrupted then as now: challenge of reinventing the concept of democracy and creating new institutions adequate to modern society and the national space. If they did, we can too! (306-7).
B. We need not an archaeology to unearth models of the past but something Foucault’s notion of genealogy: the subject creates new institutional and social models based on its own productive capacities (308-9). A New Science (or anti-science) of global democracy.
C. TJ: ideas are enhanced by their communication: when I light my candle from yours both seem to burn brighter—immaterial property today is a main difference from the 18th c (311).

V. Excursus 3: Strategy: Geopolitics and New Alliances:
A. Crisis of geopolitics: must adopt the US ideology of rejecting the European notion of fixed borders
B. Unilateral command and the Axis of Evil: but Europe, Russia, and China aren’t so easily fit into the US model.
C. Contradictions: the US unilateral model is not working.
D. A new Magna Charta? Like King John’s nobles the global aristocracies might be encouraged to revolt against US imperial control (322). Proposing alliances with the aristocracies for a program of counter-Empire?
E. Iconoclasts: [a very odd digression on the iconoclasm controversy in the Eastern Church) (324-327).

3.3 Democracy of the Multitude

I. Sovereignty and Democracy:
A. Sovereignty is a dual system: the ruler and consent (or revolt) of the ruled—it is a constant struggle
B. Biopolitical production makes imperial sovereignty completely dependent on the productive social agents over which it rules (the Matrix needs us to survive).
C. The choice is no longer between sovereignty and anarchy (328-336).

II. Ingenium Multitudinis: role of networks in the individual body, economic innovation in networks, organization of the multitude as something like a language—it produces real meanings (339). Its decision-making in common much like open-source production of software (34).

III. May the force be with you.
A. Today democracy takes the form of subtraction, flight, exodus from sovereignty (but Pharaoh does not let the Israelites leave, we must remember) (341).
B. Violence:
1. must follow the Zapatista insistence of subordinating military violence to the political, not v.v. as in Cuban model (342);
2. must always be defensive (343). Republican meaning of the 2nd amendment (oh, dear god. . ) (343).;
3. use of violence must be organized democratically (345).
4. critique of arms: reflection on which weapons today are effective and appropriate (345-6). Martyrdom as testimony (from Plutarch to Luther in the republican tradition) (346). Need for new weapons (biopolitical strike) (347).

IV. The New Science of Democracy: Madison and Lenin
A. Ontological standpoint: biopolitical nature of the multitude, creating a new social being, a new human nature (348-9).
B. Sociological standpoint: new affective, cooperative, and communicative relationships of social production (349-50).
C. Political standpoint: need to grasp love as a political concept, in understanding the constituent power of the multitude
D. The New Science:
1. Challenge all existing forms of sovereignty as a precondition for establishing democracy, as in Lenin’s project of smashing the State
2. But also need the institutional methods of the Federalist, which, after all, reflected Madison’s republican utopianism [WHOOP!]
3. Need a new realism, a sense of timing (351-358).

Posted by jim at 03:57 PM | Comments (1)

WHOOP

But also need the institutional methods of the Federalist, which, after all, reflected Madison’s republican utopianism [WHOOP!]

how parecon institutions could fit as an alternative to that?

Vinge makes two opening assumptions: no grand physical disaster occurs,
and today's computing and communications trends continue.

He added a third trend: "The great conspiracy against human freedom." As
novelist Doris Lessing has observed, barons on opposite sides of the
river don't need to be in cahoots if their interests coincide. In our
case, defence, homeland security, financial crime enforcement, police,
tax collectors and intellectual property rights holders offer reasons to
want to control the hardware we use. Then there are geeks, who can be
tempted to forget the consequences if the technology is cool enough.
Vinge quotes the most famous line from the comic strip Pogo: "We have
met the enemy, and he is us."

Vinge's technology to satisfy these groups' dreams is the Secure
Hardware Environment (She), which dedicates some bandwidth and a small
portion of every semiconductor for regulatory use. Deployment is
progressive, as standards are implemented. Built into new chips, She
will spread inevitably through its predecessors' obsolescence.

This part is terribly plausible. It sounds much like the Trusted
Computing Platform, implemented in Intel chips and built into machines
from Dell, Fujitsu-Siemens and others. Most people don't realise their
new computer contains a chip designed to block the operation of any
software not certified by the group. Now enhance that and build it into
RFID chips, networked embedded systems, shrink and distribute as "smart
dust". All are current trends or works in progress.

Geeks are willing to fight Trusted Computing on the grounds that it
could be used to block open-source software or to enforce draconian
digital rights management. But what if accepting it meant less visible
security, less bureaucracy, even slight profit? She automatically sends
taxes, enables much less noticeable surveillance and gets you through
security checkpoints with no waiting. There's less crime, because
legislative reality can be enforced on physical reality. Fewer false
convictions. Make regulation automatic, and it seems to go away. New
laws can be downloaded as a regulatory upgrade.

"She," Vinge concluded at the conference, "fits the trajectory that
economics and technical progress are following. The infrastructure for
such control will probably arrive in any case." He also calls his
scenario optimistic.

"The illusion of freedom becomes a strange thing when a government is
dealing with ... thousands of people who are as bright as the smartest
people running the government. Together, they outclass the people
running the show. The turning point is the notion that to provide this
illusion of freedom for such a group would wind up being more like real
freedom than anything in human history." Or, as he thinks Pogo might say
for the 21st century, "We have met what's going to save our ass and it
is us."

Since the online version of the book is available at author Yochai
Benkler's site under a Creative Commons Attribution - NonCommercial -
ShareAlike license, I've remixed several of my favorite parts of the
book into an essay, which hopefully conveys some of the essence of
Benkler's subtle and insightful work.***

The text:

For all of us, there comes a time on any given day, week, and month,
every year and in different degrees over our lifetimes, when we choose
to act in some way that is oriented toward fulfilling our social and
psychological needs, not our market-exchangeable needs. It is that
part of our lives and our motivational structure that social
production taps, and on which it thrives.

There is nothing mysterious about this. It is evident to any of us who
rush home to our family or to a restaurant or bar with friends at the
end of a workday, rather than staying on for another hour of overtime
or to increase our billable hours; or at least regret it when we
cannot. It is evident to any of us who has ever brought a cup of tea
to a sick friend or relative, or received one; to anyone who has lent
a hand moving a friend’s belongings; played a game; told a joke, or
enjoyed one told by a friend.

What needs to be understood now, however, is under what conditions
these many and diverse social actions can turn into an important
modality of economic production. When can all these acts, distinct
from our desire for money and motivated by social and psychological
needs, be mobilized, directed, and made effective in ways that we
recognize as economically valuable?

Human beings are, and always have been, diversely motivated beings. We
act for material gain, but also for psychological well-being and
gratification, and for social connectedness. There is nothing new or
earth-shattering about this, except perhaps to some economists.

In the industrial economy in general, and the industrial information
economy as well, most opportunities to make things that were valuable
and important to many people were constrained by the physical capital
requirements of making them. From the steam engine to the assembly
line, from the double-rotary printing press to the communications
satellite, the capital constraints on action were such that simply
wanting to do something was rarely a sufficient condition to enable
one to do it. Financing the necessary physical capital, in turn,
oriented the necessarily capital-intensive projects toward a
production and organizational strategy that could justify the
investments. In market economies, that meant orienting toward market
production. In state-run economies, that meant orienting production
toward the goals of the state bureaucracy. In either case, the
practical individual freedom to cooperate with others in making things
of value was limited by the extent of the capital requirements of
production.

In the networked information economy, the physical capital required
for production is broadly distributed throughout society. Personal
computers and network connections are ubiquitous. This does not mean
that they cannot be used for markets, or that individuals cease to
seek market opportunities. It does mean, however, that whenever
someone, somewhere, among the billion connected human beings, and
ultimately among all those who will be connected, wants to make
something that requires human creativity, a computer, and a network
connection, he or she can do so â€" alone, or in cooperation with
others. He or she already has the capital capacity necessary to do so;
if not alone, then at least in cooperation with other individuals
acting for complementary reasons.

The result is that a good deal more that human beings value can now be
done by individuals, who interact with each other socially, as human
beings and as social beings, rather than as market actors through the
price system. Sometimes, under conditions I specify in some detail,
these nonmarket collaborations can be better at motivating effort and
can allow creative people to work on information projects more
efficiently than would traditional market mechanisms and corporations.
The result is a flourishing nonmarket sector of information,
knowledge, and cultural production, based in the networked
environment, and applied to anything that the many individuals
connected to it can imagine. Its outputs, in turn, are not treated as
exclusive property. They are instead subject to an increasingly robust
ethic of open sharing, open for all others to build on, extend, and
make their own.

If there is one lesson we can learn from globalization and the
ever-increasing reach of the market, it is that the logic of the
market exerts enormous pressure on existing social structures. If we
are indeed seeing the emergence of a substantial component of
nonmarket production at the very core of our economic engine - the
production and exchange of information, and through it of
information-based goods, tools, services, and capabilities - then this
change suggests a genuine limit on the extent of the market. Such a
limit, growing from within the very market that it limits, in its most
advanced loci, would represent a genuine shift in direction for what
appeared to be the ever-increasing global reach of the market economy
and society in the past half-century.

I treat property and markets as just one domain of human action, with
affordances and limitations. Their presence enhances freedom along
some dimensions, but their institutional requirements can become
sources of constraint when they squelch freedom of action in nonmarket
contexts. Calibrating the reach of the market, then, becomes central
not only to the shape of justice or welfare in a society, but also to
freedom.

What we are seeing now is the emergence of more effective collective
action practices that are decentralized but do not rely on either the
price system or a managerial structure for coordination. This kind of
information production by agents operating on a decentralized,
nonproprietary model is not completely new. Science is built by many
people contributing incrementally â€" not operating on market signals,
not being handed their research marching orders by a boss â€"
independently deciding what to research, bringing their collaboration
together, and creating science. What we see in the networked
information economy is a dramatic increase in the importance and the
centrality of information produced in this way.

No benevolent historical force will inexorably lead this
technological-economic moment to develop toward an open, diverse,
liberal equilibrium. If the transformation I describe as possible
occurs, it will lead to substantial redistribution of power and money
from the twentieth-century industrial producers of information,
culture, and communications â€" like Hollywood, the recording industry,
and perhaps the broadcasters and some of the telecommunications
services giants â€" to a combination of widely diffuse populations
around the globe, and the market actors that will build the tools that
make this population better able to produce its own information
environment rather than buying it ready-made.

None of the industrial giants of yore are taking this reallocation
lying down. The technology will not overcome their resistance through
an insurmountable progressive impulse. The reorganization of
production and the advances it can bring in freedom and justice will
emerge, therefore, only as a result of social and political action
aimed at protecting the new social patterns from the incumbents’
assaults. It is precisely to develop an understanding of what is at
stake and why it is worth fighting for that I write this book.

Imagine three storytelling societies: the Reds, the Blues, and the
Greens. Each society follows a set of customs as to how they live and
how they tell stories. Among the Reds and the Blues, everyone is busy
all day, and no one tells stories except in the evening. In the
evening, in both of these societies, everyone gathers in a big tent,
and there is one designated storyteller who sits in front of the
audience and tells stories. It is not that no one is allowed to tell
stories elsewhere. However, in these societies, given the time
constraints people face, if anyone were to sit down in the shade in
the middle of the day and start to tell a story, no one else would
stop to listen.

Among the Reds, the storyteller is a hereditary position, and he or
she alone decides which stories to tell. Among the Blues, the
storyteller is elected every night by simple majority vote. Every
member of the community is eligible to offer him- or herself as that
night’s storyteller, and every member is eligible to vote.

Among the Greens, people tell stories all day, and everywhere.
Everyone tells stories. People stop and listen if they wish, sometimes
in small groups of two or three, sometimes in very large groups.
Stories in each of these societies play a very important role in
understanding and evaluating the world. They are the way people
describe the world as they know it. They serve as testing grounds to
imagine how the world might be, and as a way to work out what is good
and desirable and what is bad and undesirable.

Now consider Ron, Bob, and Gertrude, individual members of the Reds,
Blues, and Greens, respectively. Ron’s perception of the options open
to him and his evaluation of these options are largely controlled by
the hereditary storyteller. He can try to contact the storyteller to
persuade him to tell different stories, but the storyteller is the
figure who determines what stories are told. To the extent that these
stories describe the universe of options Ron knows about, the
storyteller defines the options Ron has.

Bob’s autonomy is constrained not by the storyteller, but by the
majority of voters among the Blues. These voters select the
storyteller, and the way they choose will affect Bob’s access to
stories profoundly. If the majority selects only a small group of
entertaining, popular, pleasing, or powerful (in some other dimension,
like wealth or political power) storytellers, then Bob’s perception of
the range of options will be only slightly wider than Ron’s, if at
all. The locus of power to control Bob’s sense of what he can and
cannot do has shifted. It is not the hereditary storyteller, but
rather the majority.

Gertrude is in a very different position. First, she can decide to
tell a story whenever she wants to, subject only to whether there is
any other Green who wants to listen. She is free to become an active
producer except as constrained by the autonomy of other individual
Greens. Second, she can select from the stories that any other Green
wishes to tell, because she and all those surrounding her can sit in
the shade and tell a story. No one person, and no majority, determines
for her whether she can or cannot tell a story. No one can
unilaterally control whose stories Gertrude can listen to. And no one
can determine for her the range and diversity of stories that will be
available to her from any other member of the Greens who wishes to
tell a story.

How, one might worry, can a system of information production enhance
the ability of an individual to author his or her life, if it is
impossible to tell whether this or that particular story or piece of
information is credible, or whether it is relevant to the individual’s
particular experience? Will individuals spend all their time sifting
through mounds of inane stories and fairy tales, instead of evaluating
which life is best for them based on a small and manageable set of
credible and relevant stories?

Having too much information with no real way of separating the wheat
from the chaff forms what we might call the Babel objection.
Individuals must have access to some mechanism that sifts through the
universe of information, knowledge, and cultural mores in order to
whittle them down to a manageable and usable scope. The question then
becomes whether the networked information economy, given the human
need for filtration, actually improves the information environment of
individuals relative to the industrial information economy.

There are three elements to the answer: First, as a baseline, it is
important to recognize the power that inheres in the editorial
function. The extent to which information overload inhibits autonomy
relative to the autonomy of an individual exposed to a well-edited
information flow depends on how much the editor who whittles down the
information flow thereby gains power over the life of the user of the
editorial function, and how he or she uses that power. Second, there
is the question of whether users can select and change their editor
freely, or whether the editorial function is bundled with other
communicative functions and sold by service providers among which
users have little choice.

Finally, there is the understanding that filtration and accreditation
are themselves information goods, like any other, and that they too
can be produced on a commons-based, nonmarket model, and therefore
without incurring the autonomy deficit that a reintroduction of
property to solve the Babel objection would impose. From the
discussions of Wikipedia to the moderation and metamoderation scheme
of Slashdot, and from the sixty thousand volunteers that make up the
Open Directory Project to the PageRank system used by Google, the
means of filtering data are being produced within the networked
information economy using peer production and the coordinate patterns
of nonproprietary production more generally.

Developments in network topology theory and its relationship to the
structure of the empirically mapped real Internet offer a map of the
networked information environment that is quite different from the
naive model of "everyone a pamphleteer." To the limited extent that
these findings have been interpreted for political meaning, they have
been seen as a disappointment â€" the real world, as it turns out, does
not measure up to anything like that utopia. However, that is the
wrong baseline. There never has been a complex, large modern democracy
in which everyone could speak and be heard by everyone else. The
correct baseline is the one-way structure of the commercial mass media.

The networked information economy makes individuals better able to do
things for and by themselves, and makes them less susceptible to
manipulation by others than they were in the mass-media culture. In
this sense, the emergence of this new set of technical, economic,
social, and institutional relations can increase the relative role
that each individual is able to play in authoring his or her own life.

The networked information economy also promises to provide a much more
robust platform for public debate. It enables citizens to participate
in public conversation continuously and pervasively, not as passive
recipients of “received wisdom� from professional talking heads, but
as active participants in conversations carried out at many levels of
political and social structure. Individuals can find out more about
what goes on in the world, and share it more effectively with others.
They can check the claims of others and produce their own, and they
can be heard by others, both those who are like-minded and opponents.

Whether their actions are in the domain of political organization
(like the organizers of MoveOn.org), or of education and professional
attainment (as with the case of Jim Cornish, who decided to create a
worldwide center of information on the Vikings from his fifth-grade
schoolroom in Gander, Newfoundland), the networked information
environment opens new domains for productive life that simply were not
there before. In doing so, it has provided us with new ways to imagine
our lives as productive human beings.

Writing a free operating system or publishing a free encyclopedia may
have seemed quixotic a mere few years ago, but these are now far from
delusional. Human beings who live in a material and social context
that lets them aspire to such things as possible for them to do, in
their own lives, by themselves and in loose affiliation with others,
are human beings who have a greater realm for their agency. We can
live a life more authored by our own will and imagination than by the
material and social conditions in which we find ourselves.

How will the emergence of a substantial sector of nonmarket,
commons-based production in the information economy affect questions
of distribution and human well-being? The pessimistic answer is, very
little. Hunger, disease, and deeply rooted racial, ethnic, or class
stratification will not be solved by a more decentralized,
nonproprietary information production system. Without clean water,
basic literacy, moderately well-functioning governments, and universal
practical adoption of the commitment to treat all human beings as
fundamentally deserving of equal regard, the fancy Internet-based
society will have little effect on the billions living in poverty or
deprivation, either in the rich world, or, more urgently and deeply,
in poor and middle-income economies.

Despite the caution required in overstating the role that the
networked information economy can play in solving issues of justice,
it is important to recognize that information, knowledge, and culture
are core inputs into human welfare. Agricultural knowledge and
biological innovation are central to food security. Medical innovation
and access to its fruits are central to living a long and healthy
life. Literacy and education are central to individual growth, to
democratic self-governance, and to economic capabilities. Economic
growth itself is critically dependent on innovation and information.

For all these reasons, information policy has become a critical
element of development policy and the question of how societies attain
and distribute human welfare and well-being. Access to knowledge has
become central to human development.

Proprietary rights are designed to elicit signals of people’s
willingness and ability to pay. In the presence of extreme
distribution differences like those that characterize the global
economy, the market is a poor measure of comparative welfare. A system
that signals what innovations are most desirable and rations access to
these innovations based on ability, as well as willingness, to pay,
over-represents welfare gains of the wealthy and under-represents
welfare gains of the poor. Twenty thousand American teenagers can
simply afford, and will be willing to pay, much more for acne
medication than the more than a million Africans who die of malaria
every year can afford to pay for a vaccine.

The emergence of commons-based techniques â€" particularly, of an open
innovation platform that can incorporate farmers and local agronomists
from around the world into the development and feedback process
through networked collaboration platforms â€" promises the most likely
avenue to achieve research oriented toward increased food security in
the developing world.

It promises a mechanism of development that will not increase the
relative weight and control of a small number of commercial firms that
specialize in agricultural production. It will instead release the
products of innovation into a self-binding commons â€" one that is
institutionally designed to defend itself against appropriation. It
promises an iterative collaboration platform that would be able to
collect environmental and local feedback in the way that a free
software development project collects bug reports â€" through a
continuous process of networked conversation among the user-innovators
themselves.

Laboratories have two immensely valuable resources that may be capable
of being harnessed to peer production. Most important by far are
postdoctoral fellows. These are the same characters who populate so
many free software projects, only geeks of a different feather. They
are at a similar life stage. They have the same hectic, overworked
lives, and yet the same capacity to work one more hour on something
else, something interesting, exciting, or career enhancing, like a
special grant announced by the government.

The other resources that have overcapacity might be thought of as
petri dishes, or if that sounds too quaint and old-fashioned,
polymerase chain reaction (PCR) machines or electrophoresis equipment.
The point is simple. Laboratory funding currently is silo-based. Each
lab is usually funded to have all the equipment it needs for
run-of-the-mill work, except for very large machines operated on
time-share principles. Those machines that are redundantly provisioned
in laboratories have downtime. That downtime coupled with a
postdoctoral fellow in the lab is an experiment waiting to happen. If
a group that is seeking to start a project defines discrete modules of
a common experiment, and provides a communications platform to allow
people to download project modules, perform them, and upload results,
it would be possible to harness the overcapacity that exists in
laboratories.

In principle, although this is a harder empirical question, the same
could be done for other widely available laboratory materials and even
animals for preclinical trials on the model of, “brother, can you
spare a mouse?� One fascinating proposal and early experiment at the
University of Indiana - Purdue University Indianapolis was suggested
by William Scott, a chemistry professor. Scott proposed developing
simple, low-cost kits for training undergraduate students in chemical
synthesis, but which would use targets and molecules identified by
computational biology as potential treatments for developing-world
diseases as their output. With enough redundancy across different
classrooms and institutions around the world, the results could be
verified while screening and synthesizing a significant number of
potential drugs. The undergraduate educational experience could
actually contribute to new experiments, as opposed simply to
synthesizing outputs that are not really needed by anyone.

In February 2001, the humanitarian organization Doctors Without
Borders (also known as Medecins Sans Frontieres, or MSF) asked Yale
University, which held the key South African patent on stavudine â€" one
of the drugs then most commonly used in combination therapies â€"for
permission to use generic versions in a pilot AIDS treatment program.
At the time, the licensed version of the drug, sold by
Bristol-Myers-Squibb (BMS), cost $1,600 per patient per year. A
generic version, manufactured in India, was available for $47 per
patient per year.

At that point in history, thirty-nine drug manufacturers were suing
the South African government to strike down a law permitting
importation of generics in a health crisis, and no drug company had
yet made concessions on pricing in developing nations. Within weeks of
receiving MSF’s request, Yale negotiated with BMS to secure the sale
of stavudine for fifty-five dollars a year in South Africa. Yale, the
University of California at Berkeley, and other universities have, in
the years since, entered into similar adhoc agreements with regard to
developing-world applications or distribution of drugs that depend on
their patented technologies. These successes provide a template for a
much broader realignment of how universities use their patent
portfolios to alleviate the problems of access to medicines in
developing nations.

A technology transfer officer who has successfully provided a
royalty-free license to a nonprofit concerned with developing nations
has no obvious metric in which to record and report the magnitude of
her success (saving X millions of lives or displacing Y misery),
unlike her colleague who can readily report X millions of dollars from
a market-oriented license, or even merely Y dozens of patents filed.
Universities must consider more explicitly their special role in the
global information and knowledge production system. If they recommit
to a role focused on serving the improvement of the lot of humanity,
rather than maximization of their revenue stream, they should adapt
their patenting and licensing practices appropriately.

The rise of commons-based information production, of individuals and
loose associations producing information in nonproprietary forms,
presents a genuine discontinuity from the industrial information
economy of the twentieth century. It brings with it great promise, and
great uncertainty. We have early intimations as to how market-based
enterprises can adjust to make room for this newly emerging phenomenon
â€" IBM’s adoption of open source, Second Life’s adoption of
user-created immersive entertainment, or Open Source Technology
Group’s development of a platform for Slashdot.

We also have very clear examples of businesses that have decided to
fight the new changes by using every trick in the book, and some, like
injecting corrupt files into peer-to-peer networks, that are decidedly
not in the book. Law and regulation form one important domain in which
these battles over the shape of our emerging information production
system are fought. As we observe these battles; as we participate in
them as individuals choosing how to behave and what to believe, as
citizens, lobbyists, lawyers, or activists; as we act out these legal
battles as legislators, judges, or treaty negotiators, it is important
that we understand the normative stakes of what we are doing.

We have an opportunity to change the way we create and exchange
information, knowledge, and culture. By doing so, we can make the
twenty-first century one that offers individuals greater autonomy,
political communities greater democracy, and societies greater
opportunities for cultural self-reflection and human connection.

We can remove some of the transactional barriers to material
opportunity, and improve the state of human development everywhere.
Perhaps these changes will be the foundation of a true transformation
toward more liberal and egalitarian societies. Perhaps they will
merely improve, in well-defined but smaller ways, human life along
each of these dimensions. That alone is more than enough to justify an
embrace of the networked information economy by anyone who values
human welfare, development, and freedom.

The term is both descriptive and prescriptive. Typically, the kinds of enhancements sought by proponents of e-democracy are framed in terms of making processes more accessible; making citizen participation in public policy decision-making more expansive and direct so as to enable broader influence in policy outcomes as more individuals involved could yield smarter policies; increasing transparency and accountability; and keeping the government closer to the consent of the governed, increasing its political legitimacy. E-democracy includes within its scope electronic voting, but has a much wider span than this single aspect of the democratic process.

E-democracy is also sometimes referred to as cyberdemocracy or digital democracy. Prior to 1994, when the term e-democracy was coined in the midst of online civic efforts in Minnesota, the term teledemocracy was prevalent.

Category: Cool | 3870 Views

One thing this is showing that is interesting is how Cyc is going forward to
use google in processing and learning new information by using Google, and
using it to verify facts and knowledge.

We've heard plenty about the tragedy of the commons --in fact, it pops up in several other chapters of this book. In the 1968 essay that popularized the concept, "The Tragedy of the Commons," Garrett Hardin wrote:

Therein is the tragedy. Each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd without limit -- in a world that is limited. Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons. Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.

In the case of certain ingeniously planned services, we find a contrasting cornucopia of the commons: use brings overflowing abundance. Peer-to-peer architectures and technologies may have their benefits, but I think the historical lesson is clear: concentrate on what you can get from users, and use whatever protocol can maximize their voluntary contributions. That seems to be where the greatest promise lies for the new kinds of collaborative environments. [Dan Bricklin: Cornucopia of the Commons, Peer-to-Peer, Chapter 4]

So for example, as I process my daily RSS inflow in Bloglines, it's very much in my own interest to put the few items of most value in a place where I can find them later. That I'm also putting them someplace where you can find them, that you may be doing the same thing for me, that we may collectively move toward standardized use of shared topics as we iterate this process, that reputation-based filtering may then begin to operate on the emergent set of topics -- all this is goodness, and may ultimately matter, but my participation (and yours) does not depend on these outcomes. Pure self-interest is a sufficient driver.

"One cannot hope to prosper in such a world (art world) as a "conservative", and this may be why arts bureaucrats seem to have such a relentlessly progressive taste. They look first to the art that trumpets its own radical, non-commercial credentials when they are making funding decisions. The system is closed and clubbish, perpetuated by the terrorism of fashion - the dread of falling out with the
in-crowd."

Even so, he longs for something bigger, like the cultural noise made by the Beats in the 1950’s or Andy Warhol’s Factory in the 1960’s or the bands and fans who clustered around CBGB’s in the 1970’s. He wants to “make history” and join “the time line” of New York. He is not an artist, an author, a designer, musician, filmmaker or even a famous skateboarder or graffiti writer. So in another era, Bondaroff might have had to settle for his cameos in some of the acclaimed images of youthful outsider debauchery captured by his photographer friend Ryan McGinley. He could be, in other words, a counterculture muse, like Neal Cassady or Edie Sedgwick.

In our present era, however, he may not have to settle. There’s a new alternative, one that’s neatly summed up in a question that A-Ron has been asking himself lately: “How do I turn my lifestyle into a business?”

The answer he came up with is worth paying attention to because it speaks to a significant but little-noted development in contemporary culture. Young people have always found fresh ways to rebel, express individuality or form subculture communities through cultural expression: new art, new music, new literature, new films, new forms of leisure or even whole new media forms. A-Ron’s preferred form of expression, however, is none of those things. When he talks about his chosen medium, which he calls aNYthing, it sounds as if he’s talking about an artists’ collective, indie film production company, a zine or a punk band. But in fact, aNYthing is a brand. A-Ron puts his brand on T-shirts and hats and other items, which he sells in his own store, among other places. He sees it as fundamentally of a piece with the projects and creations of his anti-mainstream heroes.

This might seem strange, since most of us think of branding as a thoroughly mainstream practice: huge companies buying advertising time during the Super Bowl to shout their trademarked names at us is pretty much the opposite of authentic or edgy expression. But branding is more complicated than that. It is really a process of attaching an idea to a product. Decades ago that idea might have been strictly utilitarian: trustworthy, effective, a bargain. Over time, the ideas attached to products have become more elaborate, ambitious and even emotional. This is why, for example, current branding campaigns for beer or fast food often seem to be making some sort of statement about the nature of contemporary manhood. If a product is successfully tied to an idea, branding persuades people — consciously or not — to consume the idea by consuming the product. Even companies like Apple and Nike, while celebrated for the tangible attributes of their products, work hard to associate themselves with abstract notions of nonconformity or achievement. A potent brand becomes a form of identity in shorthand.

Of course, companies don’t go into business in order to express a particular worldview and then gin up a product to make their point. Corporate branding is a function of the profit motive: companies have stuff to sell and hire experts to create the most compelling set of meanings to achieve that goal. A keen awareness of and cynicism toward this core fact of commercial persuasion — and the absurd lengths that corporations will go to in the effort to infuse their goods with, say, rebelliousness or youthful cool — is precisely the thing that is supposed to define the modern consumer. We all know that corporate branding is fundamentally a hustle. And guys like A-Ron are supposed to know that better than anybody.

Which is why the supposed counterculture nature of his brand might arouse some suspicion. Manufactured commodities are an artistic medium? Branding is a form of personal expression? Indie businesses are a means of dropping out? Turning your lifestyle into a business is rebellious?

And yet thousands and thousands of young people who are turned off by the world of shopping malls and Wal-Marts and who can’t bear the thought of a 9-to-5 job are pursuing a path similar to A-Ron’s. Some design furniture and housewares or leverage do-it-yourself-craft skills into businesses or simply convert their consumer taste into blog-enabled trend-spotting careers. Some make toys, paint sneakers or open gallerylike boutiques that specialize in the offerings of product-artists. Many of them clearly see what they are doing as not only noncorporate but also somehow anticorporate: making statements against the materialistic mainstream — but doing it with different forms of materialism. In other words, they see products and brands as viable forms of creative expression.

Through aNYthing, A-Ron sees himself as part of a “movement,” a brand underground. And maybe there is something going on here that can’t simply be dismissed just because of the apparent disconnect between the idea of a “brand” and the idea of an “underground.” After all, subcultures aren’t defined by outsiders passing judgment; they are defined by participants.

To try to understand this phenomenon and how it might play out, I sought a test-case category in which I could compare the experiences of several upstarts over time. The T-shirt, a simple commodity, seemed an ideal vessel. While some indie products are handmade, many more are, like T-shirts, manufactured goods that attract consumers largely through branding. Even with this single product as a framework, the variety is dizzying. Some T-shirt branders target high-end consumers, some are attached to the curious world of sneaker collecting and some are harder to categorize. Like A-Ron’s brand.

Bondaroff dropped out of high school at age 15 to spend more time partying, getting into trouble and hanging out with the people who were worth hanging out with. He ended up getting a job in Lower Manhattan at the Supreme store. Theoretically a skateboard brand, Supreme was really an attitude brand, and the store had a reputation as a place where clerks would insult you to your face if you weren’t cool enough. A-Ron was not only cool enough, he was photographed for Supreme ads and became its “unofficial face.” He offered his opinions about what would make the photo shoot work better or which underground artists the brand should work with. Supreme caught on in Japan, and by the time Bondaroff was 21, he was visiting Tokyo and getting asked for autographs by kids who had seen his picture in magazines. “I was always bugged out by that — people are like, ‘Oh, you’re that guy,”’ he told me not long ago. “You get famous for nothing.”

While still basically working a retail job, he was also becoming the cool guy who is flown to Australia to sit on a trend-setter panel or whose elaborate birthday party is underwritten by Nike. He was figuring out that he had the option of becoming, in effect, a corporate muse. But he concluded that there was no reason to rent his coolness and knowingness to other companies. The point of aNYthing was to turn his lifestyle into his own business.

He devised his brand not long after Sept. 11, 2001, and it is deeply tied to his love for New York City and his own status on the current downtown scene. The “NY” in the logo resembles that of the New York Giants football team, and aNYthing designs often blend familiar New York iconography (from The New York Post nameplate to Lotto signs) with the brand’s name. His boutique opened last year on Hester Street on the lower Lower East Side.

One reason an underground brand sounds nonsensical is that countercultures are supposed to oppose the mainstream, and nothing is more mainstream than consumerism. But we no longer live in a world of the Mainstream and the Counterculture. We live in a world of multiple mainstreams and countless counter-, sub- and counter-sub-cultures. Bondaroff’s brand is built on both the sort of microfame that such a finely cut cultural landscape enables and on his absolutely exquisite ability to analyze that landscape. He knows that he is seen by the various trend-hunters or Japanese magazine editors or marketing types who hit him up for the latest news as a professional Cool Guy. He recognizes that taste is his skill.

He and his friends have even turned downtown demographics into a kind of parlor game: there are Cool Guys and the Art-Damaged crowd, the Parent Haters, the Dropouts and so on. “I like to label all the different scenes,” he says. “I coin the phrase, and people use it, and it goes back to me.” In fact, he has a related set of T-shirts coming out in the fall. He called up his friend Futura, the veteran graffiti artist, and asked him to write “Cool Guys”; that will be one of the shirts. “I’m exposing everybody,” Bondaroff says, and includes himself in the critique. (“I’m definitely a Cool Guy — the top Cool Guy on the scene,” he said. “I’ll say it loud and proud.”) This is the quintessence of the postmodern brand rebel, hopscotching the minefield of creativity and commerce, recognizing the categorization, satirizing it, embracing it and commoditizing it all at once.

If A-Ron and his crew are the ideological descendants of the scenesters who clustered around Warhol in the Factory period or hung out at CB’s in its heyday, then perhaps they’re trying a new tactic in the eternal war against the corporate suits who co-opt the rebellion, style and taste of every youth culture and sell it right back to the generation that created it. Perhaps the first lesson of the brand underground is not that savvy young people will stop buying symbols of rebellion. It is that they have figured out that they can sell those symbols, too.

Daniel Casarella represents a second iteration of the brand underground. At 28, he is a young man who has something to say. Several years ago, he became fascinated with the gritty, turn-of-the-century New York underworld described in Luc Sante’s book on the era, “Low Life.” His brother, Michael, who is 23, was writing his college thesis about 19th-century New York literature, and the Casarellas came to believe that the depths of the forgotten past offered an intellectual antidote to the superficial, surface-driven present. The first time we met, in early 2005, Casarella told me the story of the Collect Pond in lower Manhattan: drained because of pollution in the early 1800’s, it was filled in and became the brutal Five Points slum. “My brother and I have this theory of the Collect being the original sin of Manhattan,” he said, launching into a riff on man’s betrayal of nature and its consequences.

He wanted to get these ideas across to others, but instead of writing a novel or making a series of paintings, he started making T-shirts. He learned screen printing at the Fashion Institute of Technology, but never considered actually joining the industry to work long hours for somebody else. Instead, in 2003, he founded Barking Irons — the name is 19th-century slang for pistols — a line of T-shirts with stark but intricate graphics that looked like old woodcuts, paired with mysterious phrases that refer back to the secret history of New York. One was inspired by the Collect Pond and another by a Washington Irving story. After he had printed some of his first designs, Casarella dropped off samples at Barneys in a paper bag.

A pricey department store doesn’t seem a likely place for expressing ideas, but the store’s buyer called him the next day. It turns out “new ideas” are exactly what the company was hungry for, according to Wanda Colon, a Barneys vice president. Its “young minded” Co-op spinoff stores cater to consumers who seek self-expression specifically through nonmainstream brands, like Gilded Age or Imitation of Christ, she said. Barking Irons got attention in the fashion trade press and on blogs like Coolhunting.com — and from an apparel distributor called Triluxe. A Triluxe executive told me that what the Barking Irons brand had going for it was “point of view.” Adam Beltzman, the owner of a Chicago store called Haberdash — one of many boutiques serving the same shoppers Colon describes — liked Barking Irons’ aesthetic, but what sold him on the brand were the background narratives. “There’s something meaningful behind it,” he says. “There’s something to talk about.” Soon Casarella was thinking way beyond T-shirts, and he projected confidence. From that first batch of a few hundred shirts in 2003, Barking Irons had seen its orders climb to 12,000 a season.

It is often said that this generation of teenagers and 20-somethings is the most savvy one ever in its ability to critique and understand commercial persuasion, and it is probably true — just as it was true when the same thing was said of Generation X and of the baby boomers before that. (And it will no doubt be true when it is said, again, of those now in middle school.) But understanding or “seeing through” the branded world is not the same thing as rejecting it. What bothers Casarella about mainstream branding are big, blatant logos that turn the wearer into a walking advertisement and are supposed to function as simplistic “badges.” That approach, he suggests, is what makes big brands as shallow as most Top 40 music or Hollywood movies. It is not that these forms are inherently bad; it is that they always seem built for the lowest common denominator, and the contemporary consumer demands more — more originality, more sincerity, more not-in-the-mainstream, a greater goal than just making money. That is what he sees Barking Irons as doing in the realm of the brand.

Barking Irons does have a logo, but it appears inside his T-shirts, where only the consumer sees it. That’s the way, Dan Casarella maintains, to make a deep connection. If it seems a little incongruous to combat superficiality by way of T-shirts that retail for $60 or more at Barneys or A-list boutiques, well, in his view, that’s the best place to find an audience that “gets it.” When Casarella declares that his project is part of a “revolution against branding,” what he really means is not the snuffing out of commercial expression but an elevation of it.

My third example of a grass-roots brand maker is the Hundreds. Its co-founder, Bobby Kim, is 26, one of three children of Korean parents who came to America and made good; his father is a physician. Growing up in multicultural Los Angeles, Kim was into hip-hop, punk and skateboarding. He is the kind of person that the marketing industry chases relentlessly, and he knows it. But of course he scorns mainstream efforts to speak to his generation. In an essay on his Web site, for example, he blasted the “commercialized” version of skateboarding culture that he sees in the X-Games or on MTV as a “big-industry ruse.”

Four years ago, he met Ben Shenassafar, another child of successful immigrants (his father is an accountant from Iran), not while skateboarding but at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, where they had some first-year classes together. They bonded over their mutual interests in art, music and design — and their mutual horror of becoming the respectable suit-wearing drones their parents wanted them to be. Seeking a more fulfilling alternative, they came up with the Hundreds (as in “selling by the hundreds”).

Now known as Bobby and Ben Hundreds, they started with T-shirts and a Web site. TheHundreds.com featured Bobby’s essays and interviews with people he admired: “The culture’s finest brands, artists, designers, photographers, retailers and media,” the site says. Department-store chains were too mainstream for the Hundreds; instead, they wanted to get their T-shirts into certain skateboard shops or independent “streetwear” stores. Their bête noir was Urban Outfitters, which they saw as the ultimate corporate vulture.

The first store they set their sights on was Fred Segal, the trendsetting boutique in Santa Monica. They showed up one day in 2003 and “ambushed” the buyer. “There are 50 new T-shirt lines that come out every day,” Bobby explained to me, so they knew that theirs would rise or fall on the strength of the Hundreds as a brand. “We really emphasized that we weren’t just a T-shirt line — we were more of lifestyle” that aimed to “bring this subculture out,” he says.

The Hundreds lifestyle and its components — Los Angeles, skateboarding, music, art — sound a little vague and may be most apparent by analyzing a recent Hundreds T-shirt graphic. The shirt has a title: Jerky Boy. The design takes the logo of Tommy Boy, the pioneering hip-hop label, and reimagines its three silhouette figures in the style of the moshing cartoon teenager used as an emblem of the legendary Southern California punk band the Circle Jerks. Looming over the Circle Jerks mascot, who is repeated in three Tommy Boy poses with props including skateboards and handguns, is “The Hundreds” and the phrase “California Culture.”

Streetwear designers often refer to graphics that riff off some other logo or icon or brand name as “parodies.” Kind of like the Ramones logo, which took the presidential seal but substituted a baseball bat for the arrows the eagle clutches in its talons. But the word “parody” can be misleading: often the visual references are more like a sampled bass line — recognizable to some but not to others — that makes a remix add up to more than the sum of its parts. It can be tribute or mockery or something in between, but the new cultural value that results accrues to the minibrand that did the remixing.

It is impossible to overstate the number of tiny streetwear brands with names like Crooks & Castles or Married to the Mob that are working variations on this territory. And it is easy to see the attraction for the new upstart branders that seem to jump into this realm every day. You don’t have to worry about the credentialing procedures that now define the traditional high arts, like getting a master’s degree from a well-connected art school or hobnobbing on the writer-retreat circuit. For people like Ben and Bobby Hundreds (or the Casarellas or A-Ron), you don’t even need to study marketing. Their apprenticeship was the act of growing up in a thoroughly commercialized world.

The symbols and references and logos these minibrands create are usually said to “represent” a culture or lifestyle. But I found myself asking, What, exactly, did that culture or lifestyle consist of — aside from buying products that represent it?

Bobby did his best to clue me in. “It’s just the idea of trying to be rebellious,” he said. “Or trying to be a little bit anti, questioning government or your parents. Trying to do something different.” Those are familiar answers, and this is hardly the first time that vague rebelliousness has been translated into an aesthetic. The style and iconography of punk, like that of other “spectacular subcultures” (to use the phrase Dick Hebdige coined in “Subculture: The Meaning of Style”), arguably did more than music — let alone ideas — to fulfill one of the crucial functions of any underground: group identity. It just happens that in this instance the symbols, products and brands aren’t an adjunct to the subculture — they are the subculture.

Many of the success stories that these minibrands aspire to replicate — like A Bathing Ape, Supreme and Stussy — have been around since the early 90’s or longer. Countless others have come and gone. Among the survivors are Lenny McGurr and Josh Franklin, better known as the graffiti writers Futura and Stash.

McGurr, who recently turned 50, has seen many iterations of the dance between subculture and mainstream. He made the transition from painting on subway cars to selling paintings in East Village galleries back in the 1980’s. The Futura-Stash creative partnership began around 1990. Separately and together, they made T-shirts, and they struggled to get by. Today, the brands and products they create or oversee — from clothes to vinyl toys to rugs and pillows — are sold in boutiques around the world. Franklin has his own stores, Recon and Nort, in New York, San Francisco, Tokyo and Berlin; Futura has stores in Fukuoka, Japan, and Bangkok. Futura and Stash’s Williamsburg headquarters is a rambling series of rooms filled with boxes of merchandise, 10 or so employees and a skate ramp.

One thing that has changed since the days when they scrambled to make a living is that Japanese consumers have embraced certain small New York brands as something culturally significant and worth a price premium. Nigo, a Japanese designer, built a fanatical following for his A Bathing Ape brand partly because he collaborated with so many graffiti writers and others who had an aura of authenticity that impressed young, hip Japanese consumers. “The legacy of our history from New York gave us a lot more credibility over there than it did here,” McGurr says. He compares it with the black jazz musicians who had to go to Paris to be appreciated.

The second change is technology, which has allowed production to become more accessible. (It is easier than you think for a two-person brand to work with factories overseas, using computer files and the occasional package.) The technology of the Internet has also acted as an amplifier. Ten years ago, a new T-shirt design could not be flashed around the planet minutes after completion. Now there are blogs like Hypebeast and Slam X Hype dedicated to this practice, reporting dozens of new products or design collaborations from the brand underground every day.

There is a third factor: manufactured commodities have in fact become accepted as quasi art objects, and there is no more stark example than the sneaker. Hunting for unusual sneakers and modifying them with markers or different laces has been cool for decades, a phenomenon defined in Harlem and the Bronx. (“We were the first generation, and only one, to enjoy sneaker consumption on our own terms,” Bobbito Garcia declares in his book about sneaker-hunting in the 1970’s and 80’s, “Where’d You Get Those?”) Eventually the sneaker companies began to cater to this market, manufacturing rarity through “limited editions,” commissioning small runs of sneakers made for specific stores or designed with the help of people like Mister Cartoon or Neckface. (If you don’t know who they are, these shoes aren’t for you.) Instead of stealing ideas from the underground, the big sneaker makers positioned themselves as supporting it. The strategy seems to work. Both Stash and Futura have designed co-branded products with Nike.

If sneakerheads were willing to treat athletic shoes made by multinational corporations as cultural objects, then new boutiques would treat them that way, too. Today, there are such boutiques all over the country; people sleep on sidewalks outside some of them because they have heard about some new limited-run product and want to be first in line for it. Occasionally things get out of hand and the police are called. There are magazines about sneakers, and there is a sneaker show on ESPN, and a sneaker Podcast called “Weekly Drop,” and a sneaker documentary, “Just for Kicks.” NikeTalk, a community and gossip Web site created by and for sneakerheads, claims to have more than 50,000 registered users.

Several years ago, some sneaker fans in Australia decided to mount a show of their collections, and this became Sneaker Pimps, which has been on a permanent world tour ever since. When it last hit New York several months ago, the line outside the club Avalon, where the sneakers were on display, stretched well down the block. Inside was a cross between a trade show, a museum exhibition and a night club. Walls were lined with notable sneakers, famous customizers were on hand and an artist named Dave White, who paints impressionistic portraits of sneakers on canvas, was on a platform, working under a spotlight while D.J.’s spun. Later, Public Enemy performed. Warhol’s Factory laid the foundation for giving consumer objects fine-art scrutiny, and Keith Haring’s Pop Shop built on that foundation, but it is hard to imagine that either artist could have predicted such a thorough product-as-medium spectacle. A line of Sneaker Pimps clothing is in the offing.

The effect of the Internet on sneaker hunting has been to make the scene more accessible — and more visible. With the Web, a relative handful of fanatics scattered around the world can look like a scene, and if enough people buy into that idea, then eventually it becomes a scene. This has created a new layer — half-consumer, half-entrepreneur — who snap up hot commodities with the sole intention of reselling at a profit. A T-shirt that Futura or Stash designed 10 years ago, made in small numbers because that was all the market would support, might now trade hands on eBay for $100; today some of the most successful minibrands keep production runs well below demand to maintain an image of specialness and rarity (just as the sneaker giants do). You can say the Internet made the market or that it simply made the market visible, but these are the same thing. Nothing draws people like a crowd, virtual or otherwise.

TheHundreds.com is not fancy, but it makes clever use of technology. The site is regularly updated with gossip from the scene and pictures of the Hundreds’ friends (and of parties and girls). There might be a clip from YouTube, the video-sharing Web site, of an evening news report on the crowd lining up to get the latest Stash-Nike collaboration from a boutique in San Francisco or of local teenage skaters showing off in free Hundreds T’s. Bobby also has a MySpace page and more than 3,500 “friends” (in the MySpace sense of the word). “I don’t want us to be a faceless entity,” he says. “People can talk to us.”

People like Scott Litel, for instance. The Hundreds barely existed when he found their site and sent an enthusiastic e-mail message asking to be part of their promotional “street team.” He was 16 at the time, just another kid in Valencia, 40 miles north of Los Angeles. He listened to punk and hip-hop, preferring to seek out lesser-known acts. But skateboarding was basically the center of his social life. Through skate videos, magazines like Mass Appeal, which covers alternative culture, and then the Internet, he learned about Supreme and various Japanese apparel companies. He would make his mom drive him, or when she wouldn’t, he would take a bus to the Union store in Los Angeles, where the coolest stuff was sold.

Litel liked the Hundreds because of the Southern California connection and because it wasn’t a brand that everybody knew about. It was like hearing a great band before anybody else caught on, the familiar yet underrated pleasure of inside information. “When something’s not made for the masses,” Litel told me, “it’s more personal.”

Soon he was part of the Hundreds team, helping out however he could, spreading the word, just being around. By the time I met Scott earlier this year, Ben and Bobby had started to pay him and had given him a column on the Web site. Now 19, he loved talking to the people at the little stores that sold the Hundreds shirts, going to the events and being part of the community — being, in fact, as he is now known, Scotty Hundreds.

Even in a world where the mainstream is less than monolithic, every subculture sooner or later has to reconcile itself with the larger cultural forces around it. A movement has to move somewhere, and the scene makers have to figure out how to make a living. That is what the Retail Mafia was up to last year at Magic, an apparel trade show that filled the entire Las Vegas Convention Center, with an impressive booth arranged to resemble a Coney Island boardwalk. The Retail Mafia was an alliance of brands associated with the downtown New York scene, including Alife, SSUR — and aNYthing, A-Ron’s brand. Boost Mobile, the West Coast wireless company, had just produced a set of limited-edition phones, co-branded with the Retail Mafia members, as an elaborate strategy to impress “influencers,” which is what corporate America calls Cool Guys.

Stash and Futura had a booth across from the Retail Mafia, and the Hundreds were nearby as well. Instead of displaying their shirts, Ben and Bobby had them on a rack blocked by a table and covered by a sheet. Ben explained that the point wasn’t how many stores they could sell to but which stores. This sounds like a strategy borrowed from luxury goods, but the Hundreds framed it as a matter of integrity: the sheet was there to fend off retail buyers representing stores that stocked too many mainstream brands. The Hundreds brand was being sold in about 60 stores, from New York to Paris to Tokyo, and what mattered was that they were the right kind of stores, stocked with other independent, properly underground brands. They would only lift the sheet for people they could trust.

In his 1934 memoir, “Exile’s Return,” Malcolm Cowley asserted that by 1920 the bohemian “doctrine” of Greenwich Village could be broken down to eight key points. Several of these remain fairly timeless markers of counterculture: liberty, living for the moment, protecting one’s individuality from the common fate of being “crushed and destroyed by a standardized society.” Each person’s “purpose in life,” the codification states, “is to express himself.” Cowley wrote that the bohemians saw themselves standing in opposition to “the business-Christian ethic then represented by The Saturday Evening Post,” a mainstream valuing “industry, foresight, thrift and personal initiative.”

But that old-fashioned value system, Cowley argued, shifted to a consumption ethic of spending and leisure, and the bohemian doctrine, it turned out, “proved quite useful” to the new mainstream ethic. Cowley posited that bohemian ideas about the primacy of self-expression and living for the moment “encouraged a demand for all sorts of products — modern furniture, beach pajamas, cosmetics, colored bathrooms with toilet paper to match.” The shift, he wrote, happened shortly after World War I. So for 80 years or more, the central problem of consumer culture and counterculture has been the same: it is very easy to confuse the two. Which is why, actually, Cowley was not so much praising the bohemian idea as scorning it.

Every subsequent counterculture has wrestled with the same basic predicaments, although the terms of the debate have, gradually, evolved. Punk’s media moment passed by the early 80’s, but it helped inspire a new counterculture, sketched by the music critic Ann Powers in her pop-culture memoir, “Weird Like Us.” She described how under-the-radar fliers and fanzines, small record labels and other modes and tactics “coalesced into practices that went by names bluntly characterizing their hands-on approach: indie, for independent, or D.I.Y., or do-it yourself.” The hip-hop and skateboarding subcultures operated in much the same way. And while Powers has less to say about the visual arts, a generation of designers and graffiti artists in cities and suburbs across America — Barry McGee, Mark Gonzales, Kaws, Ryan McGinness and others — built reputations outside the gallery world and under these very influences.

In “Beautiful Losers,” a catalog for a traveling museum exhibition of those artists, Aaron Rose, a curator, points out that pretty much all the artists in the show “have at some point broken the law to express themselves.” On the other hand, Rose points out that many of these artists have dabbled in the commercial world, whether accepting projects for big companies or becoming de facto brands unto themselves. The 1980’s and early 90’s was a time when certain record shops, small record labels (Sub Pop, SST, etc.) and even logos (like the artist Raymond Pettibon’s for the L.A. punk band Black Flag) started to matter almost as much as the bands. And while some brand-underground participants cite the influence of hip-hop as evidence that their tastes transcend standard demographic categorization (it’s a “mash culture” or a “merge culture” and so on), the real significance of that influence may be that no other spectacular subculture has so exuberantly venerated the leveraging of nonmainstream authenticity into entrepreneurial and material success.

If the dance between subculture and mainstream has always been more compromised than it appears and if every iteration of the bohemian idea is steadily more entrepreneurial than the last, then maybe a product-based counterculture is inevitable. Maybe subcultures are always about turning lifestyles into business — or the very similar goal of never having to grow up. Maybe the familiar corporations-against-individuals dynamic (“They manufacture lifestyle; we live lives,” as The Baffler, the alt-opinion journal, declared in 1993) is simply outdated. In “Weird Like Us,” Powers wrote, “I believe that alternative America becomes stronger by willingly engaging with the mainstream.” Maybe that’s what this optimistic generation is up to and maybe its strategy of engagement is simply more pragmatic than the carefully crafted cynicism of past cliques of self-styled outsiders.

Actually, I’m not sure I completely buy that. Refusing to be the fodder for someone else’s lifestyle-making machine because you are building your own still strikes me as a hollow victory. But maybe I’m just too old to get it. And I have to admit, the more time I spent with the minibrand entrepreneurs, the more I had to concede that what they have been up to is more complicated than simply imitating the culture they claim to be rebelling against. They believe what they are doing has meaning beyond simple commercial success. For them, there is something fully legitimate about taking the traditional sense of branding and reversing it: instead of dreaming up ideas to attach to products, they are starting with ideas and then dreaming up the products to express them.

When I saw Ben and Bobby with their collection at Magic, the trade show in Las Vegas, they had just taken the bar exam. Their parents — who wanted their kids to take advantage of the American-dream opportunities offered by a good education — were disheartened that the Hundreds was looking less and less like a phase. Of course, to Ben and Bobby, the Hundreds is the American dream.

The thought of ending up a lawyer, stuck in the mainstream world in such a decisive way and forsaking the partying and hanging out with other people involved in the brand-underground scene, had been much on Bobby’s mind as he worked on new designs. He came up with a shirt that borrowed the silhouettes of the Lost Boys from a Peter Pan cartoon, included a quote from “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory” and tweaked the results into a starker, streety style by the inevitable inclusion of the Hundreds logo.

A few months later, they got the official word: they had both flunked the bar. Ben sent out the specs for the spring ’06 line; orders climbed to 4,500 shirts. “We never have to grow up,” Bobby said.

Barking Irons popped up in GQ, Elle Girl, Maxim and elsewhere. The main character (played by Adrian Grenier) on the HBO show “Entourage” wore a Barking Irons shirt, and this fact was reported in People magazine. Late last year, the brand went global: a friend of the brothers’ helped coordinate a miniature trade show in Tokyo, leading to their first sales to Japanese retailers and a full-page spread in a Japanese shopping magazine. The Casarellas included a few more point-of-view brands like No Mas, whose T-shirts and other products explore the deeper meanings of sports culture. And they traveled to Turkey, where they had found an apparel factory to manufacture “better garments,” like polo shirts, thermals, hoodies and belts.

The brothers felt they needed to expand quickly, they told me late last year, because imitators were already at their heels. Daniel showed me a magazine page featuring one of their T-shirts along with several other shirts that knocked off their visual style but paired the graphics with words and phrases like “Crap” or “This Sucks.” This was one of Casarella’s fears: competing against a dumbed-down, meaningless version of his own ideas. Meanwhile, the relationship with Triluxe, their distributor, collapsed. Such firms promote and distribute apparel brands, showing their wares at trade shows and in private showrooms, advising them on sourcing and pricing strategies and taking a cut of the money. The brothers had decided that based on some belated research, they were paying too big a cut. After months of bickering, the partnership melted down for good in April.

By then the brothers had signed a lease on a 3,000-square-foot space on the fourth floor of a building downtown on Bowery, below Delancey. When I visited in May, it seemed like an awful lot of room for a two-or-three-person company. A few antique pieces were lying around, some framed maps, a trunk, a barrel, a fitting dummy. The plan is to turn the back half of the space into a showroom, possibly pulling in some other brands. They were also plotting a Web site — part magazine, part online store for selling some of the antiques they have collected. But the better-garment orders were around half of the minimums that the Turkish factory required, and in late June they were still waiting for deliveries that they had hoped to have a month earlier. T-shirt orders had been around 10,000 — a slight decline from the previous year. The trend-spotting blogs that helped early on had moved on to spotting more upstart brands, with new points of view. Lately, Daniel was suffering from headaches that he couldn’t seem to shake.

One thing that makes these upstarts harder to write off than the familiar waves of M.B.A.’s declaring that Internet companies are rebellious or that being a middle-management “change agent” is the new rock ’n’ roll is that, for all the literal and figurative headaches, they are sticking to their ideas. It just happens that their ideas are tied up in products. The Casarellas are now making jewelry out of some vintage New York silverware pieces they have collected. And printed inside their branded garments is a Walt Whitman quote: “Whatever satisfies the soul is truth.”

In March, the Hundreds had a breakthrough. Their spring ’06 line, still dominated by T-shirts, included a hoodie with an all-over paisley print. The day these arrived, a number of their cool-guy friends dropped by the new office space they had rented in West Hollywood; Bobby took pictures and posted them on TheHundreds.com. One of these images ended up on the front page of Hype Beast, the streetwear blog. Bobby put the whole line up for sale on the Web site at 1:30 in the morning; then he turned off his cellphone and went to bed. A few hours later, his girlfriend was pounding on the door of his apartment. Ben, unable to reach Bobby, had called her with the news: the entire line had sold out. Bobby posted a new entry on the site: “Which one of you sickos is up at 4 a.m. buying T-shirts?”

Soon the paisley hoodies were going for $250 or more on eBay, two or three times the retail price. Of course, Ben and Bobby had only made about 500 of them and under the orthodoxy of the scene would look like sellouts if they manufactured more. (Ben’s accountant father has softened on the Hundreds as a potential business, but couldn’t understand why they didn’t make more of those “stupid paisley hoodies,” Ben says.) A few weeks later, the retail consulting firm Doneger, whose clients include major department-store chains, sent out a bulletin called “Streetwear — The Next Generation,” naming brands that trendsetting kids in New York City were wearing. The list included Nike and Stussy, but also upstarts like Artful Dodger, Triko. . .and the Hundreds. Their summer ’06 T-shirt orders were up to 10,000.

Not surprisingly, the Hundreds were optimistic; Bobby talked about the brand being around “for centuries.” On the site, he posted pictures of the latest line outside Supreme: “It’s a great sign for our industry/culture/scene/whatever-it-is. It shows how fast we’re all growing. . .another notch for the independents.” In a way, the primary goal that binds together all the disparate entities of the new brand underground is independence: the Next Big Thing will be a million small things.

Even so, sometimes Bobby felt as if something were missing. When he talked about it, he seemed to be grappling with the kinds of things that had bothered me earlier when I had been trying to figure out whether there was more to the Hundreds lifestyle than buying certain products and brands. “I kind of feel like these kids — all they know is sneaker collecting and buying T-shirts, and they don’t think about anything else. Every T-shirt brand is just something stupid — a rapper and some guns.” Bobby said he wanted to steer the Hundreds look in a more “socially conscious, activist-oriented” direction, maybe dealing with issues like the way efforts to defend freedom can curtail freedom. Now that the Hundreds has a voice and a following, he said, “I’d like to say something.”

Just like his subculture and bohemian heroes, A-Ron has an uneasy relationship with the commercial mainstream and its representatives. He sees his brand as something apart from the sneakerhead world, let alone fancy department stores. “I ran into the Boost guys recently,” Bondaroff told me some months after the phone-marketing stunt had ended, “and I told them I wasn’t really happy with the project. It didn’t change anybody’s lives; it didn’t make history.” Maybe it helped Boost, since the phones were written up in Rolling Stone and other magazines, but it hadn’t helped him. The Retail Mafia basically ceased to exist as a concept, and half the brands in what he called “the movement” were scrambling to work with the sneaker giants or other big brands, from Levi’s to New Era. “We’re independent brands, we did this for a reason, not to be like the establishment brands,” he said. “It’s, like, what’s the purpose? Why’d you start your brand — just to be an offshoot of a major company?”

But while A-Ron has figured out how to turn his lifestyle into a business, it is still not a business with much scale. “I don’t want to be sitting at my desk 10 years from now,” he told me, “trying to be cool and witty, better than the next little brand.” He is trying to tie aNYthing to more projects, with more meaning, to more people: music, books, even a documentary. He has opened an online store on his Web site, where his blog announces the latest parties and offers pictures of the cool people dropping by his store. He traveled to Europe for the summer trade shows there and has been thinking about whether he can open a store in Japan.

But lately he has come to the conclusion that to join the time line of underground movements that left a mark on the culture, he has to figure out how to get aNYthing recognized well beyond Delancey Street. To “cross over,” he said, you need “to make your thing official, to stamp it” — the way rap videos did it for A Bathing Ape in the U.S. or how the brief glimpses of Supreme logos in Larry Clark’s movie “Kids” helped that brand. You need access to the mainstream. He would not even rule out shopping malls, under the right circumstances.

“My whole thing now is if you don’t sell out, you sell out on yourself,” he went on to announce. If he could get the money, the resources, he could go bigger, with more creative projects, reaching more people — and he wouldn’t worry about being called a sellout. He raised his eyebrows for emphasis: “I was cool before this thing happened. It didn’t make me cool.” It’s a line of thought that many cultural rebels come around to, sooner or later. “We’re here,” he told me, “to do business.”

Rob Walker writes the Consumed column for the magazine and is working on a book about consumer behavior.

* Second, there is a philosophical argument, taken from Hegel. Very briefly, Fukuyama sees history as consisting of the dialectic between two classes: the Master and the Slave. Ultimately, this thesis (Master) and antithesis (Slave) must meet in a synthesis, in which both manage to live in peace together. This can only happen in a democracy.

* Finally Fukuyama also argues that for a variety of reasons radical socialism (or communism) is likely to be incompatible with modern representative democracy. Therefore, in the future, democracies are overwhelmingly likely to contain markets of some sort, and most are likely to be capitalist or social democratic.

* Shocked - 13,900
* Stunned - 10,400
* Outraged - 6,480
* Perplexed - 1,760
* Astonished - 1,500
* Astounded - 872
* Mesmerized - 841
* Mystified - 736
* Aghast - 652
* Dumbfounded - 535
* Befuddled - 513
* Flustered - 510
* Agape - 496
* Perturbed -492
* Flabbergasted - 492
* Mortified - 488
* Bamboozled - 316
* Awe-struck - 262
* Stupefied - 179
* Discombobulated - 49
* Pusillanimous - 45
* Thunderstruck - 40

Among these was a book called Post-Scarcity Anarchism which had a profound early influence on my own political thinking. I was deeply inspired by Bookchin's advocacy of a radical democracy inseparable from sustainability, his advocacy of an ecological consciousness inseparable from a demand for emancipatory technoscience. I drew abiding clarity and confidence from his uncompromising repudiation of corporate-militarist vocabularies of global "development," from his repudiation of uncritical technophobia or nostalgic luddisms, and from his refusal of the facile biological determinism that freights so much of the discourse of technoscientific culture to this day. My own insistence that technoprogressives should never speak of "technological development" but always of "technodevelopmental social struggle" (despite the gawky awkwardness of the phrase) derives ultimately from Bookchin's own insistence that technologies are never politically neutral.

An online archive of works by Bookchin is available here , and I can think of no better tribute to Bookchin than to encourage those who do not know his work already to begin an exploration of his thinking online today.

Here are the opening paragraphs from a piece published in 1969, Toward a Post-Scarcity Society:

The twentieth century is the heir of human history -- the legatee of man's age-old effort to free himself from drudgery and material insecurity. For the first time in the long succession of centuries, this century has elevated mankind to an entirely new level of technological achievement and to an entirely new vision of the human experience.

Technologically, we can now achieve man's historical goal -- a post scarcity society. But socially and culturally, we are mired in the economic relations, institutions, attitudes and values of a barbarous past, of a social heritage created by material scarcity. Despite the potentiality of complete human freedom, we live in the day-to-day reality of material insecurity and a subtle, ever-oppressive system of coercion. We live, above all, in a society of fear, be it of war, repression, or dehumanization. For decades we have lived under the cloud of a thermonuclear war, streaked by the fires of local conflicts in half the continents of the world. We have tried to find our identities in a society that has become ever more centralized and mobilized, dominated by swollen civil, military and industrial bureaucracies. We have tried to adapt to an environment that is becoming increasingly befouled with noxious wastes. We have seen our cities and their governments grow beyond all human comprehension, reducing our very sovereignty as individuals to ant-like proportions -- the manipulated, dehumanized victims of immense administrative engines and political machines. While the spokesmen for this diseased social 'order' piously mouth encomiums to the virtues of 'democracy,' 'freedom' and 'equality,' tens of millions of people are denied their humanity because of racism and are reduced to conditions of virtual enslavement.

Viewed from a purely personal standpoint, we are processed with the same cold indifference through elementary schools, high schools and academic factories that our parents encounter in their places of work. Worse, we are expected to march along the road from adolescence to adulthood, the conscripted, uniformed creatures of a murder machine guided by electronic brains and military morons. As adults, we can expect to be treated with less dignity and identity than cattle: squeezed into underground freight cars, rushed to the spiritual slaughterhouses called 'offices' and 'factories,' and reduced to insensibility by monotonous, often purposeless, work. We will be asked to work to live and live to work -- the mere automata of a system that creates superfluous, if not absurd, needs; that will steep us in debts, anxieties and insecurities; and that, finally, will deliver us to the margins of society, to the human scrapheap called the aged and chronically ill -- desiccated beings, deprived of all vitality and humanity...

The debasement of social life -- all the more terrifying because its irrational, coercive, day-to-day realities stand in such blatant contradiction to its liberatory potentialities -- has no precedent in human history. Never before has man done so little with so much; indeed, never before has man used his resources for such vicious, even catastrophic ends. The tension between 'what-could-be' and 'what-is' reaches its most excruciating proportions in the United States, which occupies the position not only of the most technologically advanced country in the world but also of the 'policeman of the world,' the foremost imperialist power in the world. The United States affords the terrifying spectacle of a country overladen with automobiles and hydrogen bombs; of ranch houses and ghettoes, of immense material superfluity and brutalizing poverty. Its profession of 'democratic' virtue is belied daily by racism, the repression of black and white militants, police terrorism, Vietnam, and the prospect of Vietnams to come.

We are persuaded that Virtual reality is now entering, with other emerging technologies, an acceleration phase without bounds. Indeed, VR technology is in a phase similar to that of the Web of the early 90s, where some aficionados were already developing very interesting things with immature technologies, but the mainstream business world had not fully realized the potential of the new technology for "serious" applications.

Serious cognitive capitalism time y'all!