“ The time is out of joint. The world is going badly. It is worn but its wear no longer counts. Old age or youth-one no longer counts in that way. The world has more than one age. We lack the measure of the measure. We no longer realize the wear, we no longer take account of it as of a single age in the progress of history. Neither maturation, nor crisis, nor even agony. Something else. What is happening is happening to age itself, it strikes a blow at the teleological order of history . What is coming, in which the untimely appears , is happening to time but it does not happen in time. Contretemps.
— Derrida, Specters of Marx
Should one be in doubt as to the value of critical accounts of privacy, one only need consider the scale of informational industries. The New Scientist has an interesting snippet pointing out that in 2012 Facebook is expected to launch on the stock market with an initial public offering (IPO) valuing the social network at $100 billion. As with oil, gas, metals, diamonds or any other industry that relies on a standing reserve or resource to be mined, we might want to pay careful attention to these practices, particularly as in the case of information it is our information that is being mined. To de-abstract “information”, and not to mention demographic signifiers and movements across the web, it is our life events, aspirations, motivations, friendships, insights, feelings and moods that are being mined. Although this information only becomes valuable in relation to other bits of information, this should not detract from the premise of what comprises fuel for the informational industries. (Andrew McStay)
“The open source culture of new media really means one thing today: it means open interfaces. It means the freedom to connect to technical images. Even source code is a kind of interface—an interface into a lowerlevel set of libraries and operation codes. Thus, when Google or Facebook open-sources resource x, it provides an API (application programming interface) granting managed access to x. Let us not be fooled: open source does not mean the unvarnished truth but rather a specific communicative artifice like any other. And in this sense one should never celebrate a piece of source code, open or closed, as a bona fide original text (whatever that might mean). The interesting question is not so much whether open source is more open or less open than other systems of knowledge, but rather the question “How does open source shape systems of storage and transmission of knowledge? […] The bad news—or good, depending on one’s proclivities—is that this source has almost nothing to do with concerns around sources and essences […] Instead one sees that the open sourcing of media systems (information wants to be free, desire wants to be free, capital wants to be free) is really about the migration into a new way of structuring information and material resources, which, as Rancie`re might say, also has its corresponding regime of art. But, as in previous times, one is still free to read the truth of social life through such structures—as Jameson does with his perennially useful methodology known as cognitive mapping—provided, of course, that one is not dazzled by the short-term candy of openness as such.” A. Galloway
Cyberspace, not so long ago, was a specific elsewhere, one we visited periodically, peering into it from the familiar physical world. Now cyberspace has everted. Turned itself inside out. Colonized the physical. Making Google a central and evolving structural unit not only of the architecture of cyberspace, but of the world. This is the sort of thing that empires and nation-states did, before. But empires and nation-states weren’t organs of global human perception. They had their many eyes, certainly, but they didn’t constitute a single multiplex eye for the entire human species.
