[NetBehaviour] Agony and the Ecstasy: On Zoom Burnout. (pre-paper draft)

[Edward Picot]

Patrick,

Lots of interesting thoughts here! I partially agree with Alan - 
Facebook and Twitter I find it difficult to get along with, but I've 
developed online acquaintances with some very interesting people via 
Instagram, and I'd certainly miss the connectivity and 
instant-availability of Web 2 if it were suddenly taken away. All the 
same I do hanker for the old days of the World Wide Web, version one - 
HTML, JavaScript and all that stuff - when you could just build your own 
website and it was as good as anybody else's. Not really, it wasn't, but 
for a while you had that feeling. I don't suppose the web was ever free 
really, but it's a bit like the difference between tap water and bottled 
water - tap water is controlled by commercial interests too, but bottled 
water is so much more obviously a commercial product.

People use things like Zoom, Facebook Rooms, Microsoft Teams, Facebook 
itself, Twitter, Instagram, etc etc pragmatically - some use them 
experimentally or counter-culturally: just because the platforms are 
commercial, it doesn't necessarily mean that the the people using them 
buy into the commercial ethos, or that the activity taking place on them 
has no human value... but it'd be nicer if you didn't have the uneasy 
feeling that they're hoovering up all of your personal bits of 
information and storing it all away somewhere, to be used against you 
later in the form of manipulation. It'd be nicer if you didn't feel that 
you're always putting more money and power in the hands of people who've 
already got far too much of both. And as you say, Patrick, their 
objective is to have all of your attention all of the time. Sometimes 
it's just nicer to switch them off and do something else instead.

Edward

On 21/07/2020 13:44, Patrick Lichty wrote:
>
> Agony and the Ecstasy: Net-hanging in the age of Covid
>
>
>
> The era of Covid lockdown is Zoom-time. Although at the time of this 
> writing, the crest of the wave is starting to pass, its impact is 
> evident. In over three months of lockdown, stay at home, 24/7 Zoom 
> culture has come to dominate global telepresent communications, 
> standing in for ever-present cyber vernissages, online conferences, 
> talks and visits. The need to work, communicate, and even socially 
> function has necessitated the rise of platforms like Zoom and Adobe 
> Connect, and what I have come to understand as platform politics and 
> their neoliberal connotations.  Although places like The Well and John 
> Perry Barlow’s Declaration of Cyberspace Independence call and were 
> founded under the notion of cyberfreedom and fluid congregation 
> outside of the agendas of capital, the Covid pandemic has created a 
> scenario where the private sector has found tenterhooks into the 
> foundations of institutional communications. This is not to say that 
> Social Media does not do this, but one of the differences I want to 
> allude to is the institution-in-itself (facebook) as opposed to 
> platform as channel of communication for institutions. Unlike a public 
> utility, Zoom, as well as others like Adobe Connect, and Facebook 
> Rooms, and so on are portals in which institutions found a necessity 
> for network that was not facilitated by a commons, but by 
> corporations, and by agendas of maximizing connections and 
> communications. These two effects(institutional adoption of private 
> protocols [Galloway] and the necessity of a will-to-connect)  are the 
> poles in which capital has pushed further into the control regimes of 
> markets, networks, and political engineering as to where private 
> interests further govern sociocultural concerns. It even got the UAE 
> to release its national ban on VoIP communications. That isn;t so much 
> about any particular country, but the effect that Zoom has had on 
> global communication under the Covid crisis.
>
>
>
> This isn’t the first time the idea of having online platforms be the 
> lens for focusing social interaction. Second Life, with its inherently 
> capitalist foundations, tried to tout itself as the 3D World Wide Web, 
> almost like an analogy to the 3D Internet analogue in the Robert Longo 
> movie, Johnny Mnemonic.  With the neoliberal dream of the Linden 
> Dollar superceding John Perry Barlow’s Declaration of Cyberspace 
> Independence, FOMO-driven corporations from Domino’s Pizza to Playboy 
> flooded into the platform.  christian von borries, documentary, The 
> Dubai in Me, imperfectly compares financial speculative evangelicalism 
> between Second Life and the “Dubai Miracle”, much of which operated on 
> the notion of rotating real estate speculation. For some time, this 
> was reflected in Second Life, when the mythology of Chinese real 
> estate trader Anshe Chung announced that she had made her first 
> million dollars on virtual real estates.  However the differences 
> between a foundation based on a technology (HTTP) and that based on a 
> single-provider platform (Second Life) in that a provider often takes 
> a majority of the profit, and that the upsurge of traffic caused 
> multiple technical issues, caused most of those glittering dreams to 
> collapse within 2-3 years. Another difference is that while the 
> interaction with the World Wide Web is relatively simple Second Life 
> required a relatively powerful machine and at least a couple days 
> learning SL’s rather cumbersome interface. In interaction and commerce 
> design, the rule is that the least friction yields the greatest returns.
>
>
>
> But then, the socio(economic) frictionlessness is one of the biggest 
> problems with platforms like Zoom, or Adobe Connect, or whatever 
> flavor you mention.  In the artworld, I always saw the necessary 
> friction that artists thought had to happen was exclusivity or access, 
> to an event or an object.  But then, I had not inhabited Istanbul or 
> Dubai, which are big enough cities with capital to support a 
> contemporary cultural community, (and even Chelsea is similar), but 
> with accessibility comes the expectation to access.  Once you are 
> there and become part of the community, there are expectations to be 
> met, places to be seen. And this is a crucial point – the demand to be 
> seen. Further linkage to privilege in the case of Zoom is 
> multilayered, from communities that wish to engage, and from the 
> company, wishing to focus social capital through its portal.
>
>
>
> What is important about this will-to-access is not that it is 
> resultant from the community, it is resultant from the platform. The 
> first layer of a demand-to-access is expectations to attend, but the 
> other is that of the platform, and in the end, the platform is a 
> cybernetic system that os a control apparatus. Although Adobe Connect 
> has also been adopted widely, the frictionlessness of the Zoom 
> platform has allowed it to be quickly adopted by the institutional 
> community, and without having a professional account, interactions are 
> limited to 40 minutes.  This has a number of effects from further 
> socioeconomic limits to access to further neoliberalization of 
> communications.  The emergence of a solution in a panic event-space 
> mitigates an acritical adoption in light of necessity. This means that 
> Zoom, although possessing the least friction, is corporate, requires 
> payment for the best experience, and still mitigates certain resources 
> for optimum connection. And the notion of panic adoption has resulted 
> in the institutionalization of Zoom as one de facto standard without 
> full security or best practices development.  There is a need, there 
> has to be a solution, and the market supplies one, and it has to be 
> adopted as soon as possible.
>
>
>
> The other problem with post-COVID networked society is that the notion 
> of access falls under the optical control regime of neoliberal 
> capitalism.  What this means is that, as Sara Cook noted in the 
> discussions surrounding the Sleep Mode exhibition at Somerset House, 
> that internal documents by companies like Facebook consider sleep a 
> challenge to their business model of attention optics. The show 
> described sleep itself as a tactic against neoliberal infocapitalism’s 
> need to consume and convert every possible resource into use-value. In 
> another text, Event Horizons, I describe that even if sleep were to be 
> conquered, there would be the Malthusian limit of the sidereal day 
> itself. How do you multiply the cognitive load of the attention span 
> of one human being once the physical limits of the system are met. 
> Perhaps there are exotic solutions like parallel cognitive loading 
> across multiple machines, or even more abstract metaphors likening the 
> deterioration of attention to the evaporation of a black hole due to 
> Hawking Radiation, but the reality is far more simple. A human being 
> is simply not going to stay awake 24 hours a day to comment on your 
> cat video, and taken to extremes, we simply cannot fulfill zoom’s 
> Second Life’s, or whoever’s desire for us to be together constantly, 
> forever public, forever panoptic.  It is an ontological equivalent to 
> the 2008 financial collapse – expectations for access, like capital 
> productivity, continue to balloon until all methods to appease the 
> machines collapse, mitigating solutionism.
>
>
>
> It’s just not going to happen.
>
>
>
> Things have changed.  With the Coronavirus not going anywhere soon, 
> and the automation of the labor-site, even if that labor is 
> visibility, collapses into the home, institutions see no need to be 
> entirely physical anymore, and like the “gig” economy, investiture in 
> the physical space is no longer entirely necessary.  Therefore look 
> for a more “hybrid” ontology. Relating to New Media Art of the 1990’s, 
> There are some parallels, when the network was the necessary channel 
> for connection, then due to the small size of the community, now due 
> to the necessity to distance.  But the frictions of infrastructural 
> support are less with the privately funded model of Zoom.  In the 
> neoliberal environment, when governments pull away from funding of 
> infrastructures, favoring market politics, the ability to link capital 
> to the network facilitates the platform. Period. Even incrementally, 
> with minimal cost, this is a wringing out of the socioeconomic frame 
> of need to solution, and Zoom life is the solution.
>
> It’s a cost-benefit solution. Online portals like Zoom create less 
> frictioned telepresence give access to more programmes, create more 
> opportunity to interact by the screen. But on the other hand, there is 
> the pressure to take ten classes a month, be at twenty vernissages, 
> call ten friends, up your productivity tenfold – from your home. It’s 
> a win-win. Actually, it’s more like The Matrix, where we are tied into 
> our scopophilic pods, viewing and being viewed. Zoom as new 
> Panopticon, regulate by the frictions of the platform, epidemiology, 
> and socioeconomic politics. As I see the age of 60 on the horizon, I 
> realize that the cost-benefit of being increasingly online has not 
> always realized itself, and when I move back to America in 2021, I 
> want to be truly “hybrid”, that is, more engaged with the real, like 
> time with my family cooking, seeing nature, and being physically 
> present with friends.  This is also ironic in that VR artists are 
> becoming more obsessed with realism through programs like Substance 
> and ultra high rez scans.
>
>
>
> But from this writer’s perspective, this is the frission that 
> venturing closer to the event horizon of total access leads; the lure 
> of connectedness while being paralyzed at the computer screen. This is 
> the paradox, and a site of resistance, as it is neoliberal forces that 
> encourage this effect, and as Sarah Cook suggested, perhaps sleep, 
> managing willful disconnection and social intentionality are the 
> things that will shape the post-Covid culture.
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> NetBehaviour mailing list
> NetBehaviour at lists.netbehaviour.org
> https://lists.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.netbehaviour.org/pipermail/netbehaviour/attachments/20200721/d0be2a90/attachment.htm>