Opaque Cartographies: Territory and Agency in Networks*
The undeniable popularization and welcome improvement and falling cost of software and technological devices have been accompanied not only by new spheres of experimentation, but also by new apparatuses for domesticating and controlling the collective imaginary through the commodification of hacktivist discourses and practices.
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These procedures operate by domesticating the senses and enforcing conformity to models and rules of conduct, seeking to appropriate the nomadic dynamics of networks and make them sedentary, like the apparatuses of capture in relation to the war machines discussed by Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus.
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A good example is the exponential growth of social networks, which indicates the success of the rhetoric of what I have been calling “the era of cuddly capitalism.” A capitalism in which everything sounds onomatopoeic, happy and rounded, like the logos and names of the leading Web 2.0 social networks.
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A fundamental element of this cultural landscape is the experience of mobility. After all, what is striking about the cultural experience of mobility is its attachment to the corporate sphere. It is virtually impossible to talk about creative projects in this field without running into a brand logo.
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What is made to run on Android, the mobile operating system developed by Google, for T-Mobile subscribers, for example, will not work on Nokia’s Symbian system for subscribers to the same carrier. In extreme cases, a device may even be exclusive to a single carrier, as with the iPhone 3G, exclusive to AT&T subscribers in the United States.
To deny the importance of mobile projects such as Layar and Wikitude—augmented-reality browsers for urban space developed for HTC devices running Android—the iPhone itself, or new corporate perspectives such as Nokia’s concern with ecological solutions, would be to display a syndrome of nostalgia for what we never were.
No technology is neutral, and the history of technological aesthetics has been a process of creation within industrial chains at least since the emergence of photography, the first postindustrial art according to Vilém Flusser. On the internet, this tense relationship between the consumer-goods industry and creation was not only intensified: in its first decade of existence, it became its artistic horizon. That artistic horizon was fundamentally critical and questioning.
Within the culture of mobility, there is much less room for projects of this kind, given the ties between manufacturers’ brands and carriers. Services and products for mobile devices are increasingly linked not only to a particular brand and device model, but also to agreements between carriers and device manufacturers.
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In this context, “produsers,” “fansumers” and critical users become the central actors in processes unfolding on networks. This lecture will present the strategies that define the lines of force of these groups’ actions. I believe that investigating the zones of tension emerging from their confrontations and accommodations allows us to map their processes of territorialization and agency, making their dynamics less opaque.
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* Abstract of the opening lecture at the 4th arte.mov, Belo Horizonte, November 11, 2009