commentary

Always fun when a game publisher doesn’t appear to know anything about games. Or gamers. Or publishing games. Or making games. Or stories. Or history. Or much of anything pertinent to what it’s actually supposed to be doing.

Yesterday, Ubisoft technical director James Therien commented on the lack of a playable female lead character (and before I continue let me note that I reeeeeeally don’t like how binary/trans-exclusionary this discussion has been) in the co-op play for the forthcoming Assassin’s Creed Unity with the explanation that it’s just too much work to do all those extra lady animations and voices. The Internet, as one might imagine, did not respond well.

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I was working recently on a short essay about net neutrality and, in the process, ended up writing a much longer piece about net neutrality. My aim in writing that longer piece (below) was twofold: I wanted both to demonstrate that net neutrality isn’t too technical and complicated for normal people to understand, and also to trace out how a trio of closely related issues—net neutrality rules, regulatory classifications, and the push to convert all voice traffic to digital—fit together, as well as what their combination might mean for the so-called “open Internet.”

SPOILER: You need to pressure the FCC to adopt strong net neutrality rules, and then you need to do a bunch of other stuff. Net neutrality isn’t enough, and neither Big Telecom nor Big Digital is talking about the pieces that will have the greatest (and most unequal) impact on Internet users.

Without further ado, here’s my attempt at a guided tour through roughly 18 years of Internet-related regulatory history:

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No doubt of interest to sociologists, Facebook is throwing a sociology pre-conference on its campus ahead of the annual American Sociological Association meetings this fall. When the company is interested in recruiting sociologists and the work we do –research of the social world in all of its complexity– their focus, as shown in the event’s program, is heavily, heavily focused on quantitative demography. Critical, historical, theoretical, ethnographic research makes up a great deal of the sociological discipline, but isn’t the kind of sociology Facebook has ever seemed to be after. Facebook’s focus on quantitative sociology says much about what they take “social” to mean.

My background is in stats, I taught inferential statistics to sociology undergrads for a few years, I dig stats and respect their place in a rich sociological discourse. So, then, I also understand the dangers of statistical sociology done without a heavy dose of qualitative and theoretical work. Facebook and other social media companies have made mistake after mistake with their products that reflect a massive deficit of sociological imagination. The scope of their research should reflect and respect the fact that their products reach the near entirety of the social world. more...

When I was in Madison (Wisconsin) during Memorial Day weekend for WisCon (a long-running feminist science fiction and fantasy conference), I was approached after a panel by a man – Mark Soderstrom – who wanted to talk to me about labor in SFF. Specifically, he wanted to mention a short story of mine that I was talking about on the panel that used the Lattimer Massacre as a backdrop, and to note that while SFF seems perfectly content to deal with robots and elves, it has a history of shying away from any sort of rich or meaningful examination of what literatures of the fantastic can teach us about labor, capital, and social change.

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This is cross-posted from Its Her Factory.

In an earlier post, I asked what happens to femininity when the kind of second-shift care work traditionally assigned to women is increasingly a feature of all work, especially conventionally masculinized jobs. This post picks up where that one left off. Here, I’ll use Michelle Murphy’s concept of “the financialization of girls” to help me argue that “femininity” is something that distinguishes unpaid care labor (which is feminized, or girl-ized) from the kinds of profitable self-investment in one’s human and social capital required, nowadays, for success.

Analyzing NGO promotional videos, reports, mission statements, and the like, Murphy shows that the figure of “The Girl”–the so-called “Third-World” or otherwise poor, victimized, “thoroughly heterosexualized” young woman–has become the primary focus of international development discourse and practice. This “abstract and universalized girl-child” is one huge stereotype: it’s how the global elite thinks poor girls in non-Western liberal democratic societies are. This girl is always undereducated and undervalued.

Because of her lack of formal education and her situation in a “traditional” society (a society that seems, to the global elite, more misogynist and regressively patriarchal than Western liberal democratic societies), The Girl is seen as a risk, and in her personal risk hangs the balance of the entire planet’s future. If she has an “unproductive life”–one with many children and little economic contribution–then the world’s environment and economy will only suffer. If she has a “productive life,” however, we all win. Basically, The Girl is human capital ripe for flipping–if we invest a little in her, we’ll get back huge returns. [1]

The Girl is human capital. This is absolutely fundamental to Murphy’s analysis. It’s what distinguishes this type of patriarchy from more traditional types which treat women not as capital, but as private property–not something to invest in, but something to exchange (I’m thinking about Gayle Rubin’s famous piece on “The Exchange of Women” and Luce Irigaray’s reading of Marx in “Women On the Market,” for example). When women are treated as private property, patriarchy focuses on regulating women’s reproductive capacity. This is because reproduction and the family form are about the transmission of private property (from father to “legitimate” children). But, as Murphy explains,

A focus on human capital moves the point of intervention and adjustment from fertility itself to education; from distributing contraception to “women” to producing the conditions for higher rates of return on “girls,” a change that has come to dominate World Bank and UN-affiliated programs in the last decade. Since the 1990s, the figure of the racialized, “third-world girl”—typically represented as South Asian or African, often Muslim—has become the iconic vessel of human capital.

The Girl is the effect of viewing gender through neoliberal lenses that turn everything into a financialized market. Or, in other words, financial capitalism has altered gender roles, on the one hand, and the techniques by which one assumes or is assigned a role, and The Girl is one prominent example of a financialized gender role.

In the 70s, feminist theory (most famously the Rubin and Irigaray pieces I mentioned above) explained how commodity capitalism structured patriarchal gender roles and relations: “men” were the people and institutions in the position to exchange and profit from exchanges of “women”; “women” were the people and institutions in the position of being exchanged, whose circulation generated profits for others. I talk a bit about that model of gender as exchange here and here.

But in financial capitalism, nothing gets exchanged–investment directly compounds the value of money, seemingly growing money right out of, well, money. In this model, girls are what are financialized–they’re low-value, relatively low-risk ‘stock’ that “men” invest in. In financialized capitalism, “men” are the people and institutions in the position to invest in and profit from The Girl; “women” are the people and institutions who are or have been invested by others, and who do not get the profits/surplus value from their own human capital. Having the surplus (human, social) capital to invest, for example, in service labor is the effect of being a “man”–that is, of occupying the position of structural dominance in a patriarchal system. Lacking the surplus capital to invest in oneself, let alone in others, is the effect of being a woman or a Girl–that is, of occupying the position of structural subjection in a patriarchal system.

Investing in Girls generates surplus human capital for the investor, not for the Girl whose capital is vested. Investing in Girl-capital is fundamentally different than feminized care/affective labor. Care and affective labor are often investments in others–for example, I’m investing my time and my talents in my students when I mentor them on the weekend over Facebook Messenger as they scramble to finish an application before a deadline. However, I don’t get the surplus value back from that investment–my students do. In this example, I’m investing in others, in others human capital, but in a way that doesn’t return profits to me. You might say my investment of human capital is alienated from me. That’s feminized care labor. Investing in Girls, on the other hand, generates human capital value for me–for example, doing white saviorist-y volunteer work boosts my human capital, and my own self-esteem (which is a kind of human capital). In both cases, the feminized position–that of the care worker, the Girl-as-finance-instrument–is the one in which investments reap profits for others.

When I perform the traditionally feminized work of hyperemployment, it doesn’t feminize me, it doesn’t turn me into a Girl. I am investing in myself, in my future success. I am my own capital. The Girl is feminized because she is capital for others–others invest in and profit from her. So, the financialized Girl is a necessary complement to hyperemployent and the generalization of care/affective labor: it’s how we mark gender roles now that everybody’s supposed to do the things conventionally regarded as “women’s work.”

This idea of the financialized Girl has a few more important implications that, though don’t have time to develop here, I would like to pursue in the future.

1.  Earlier this week on Facebook, Erin Tarver (@drtarver) and I were talking about the trend of using “Football 101” to market college football fandom to women. Erin brilliantly observed that these type of events include women in football fandom as inherent, eternal novices–as needing a “101” course because whatever knowledge they may have of football isn’t the “right” knowledge. Including women via remedial education both expands the market for football and maintains the normative masculinity of football fandom, football fan discourse, and so on. So, it’s a way to include women while maintaining male/masculine dominance. This moves strikes me as similar to the financialized Girl, b/c Girls are included in capitalism as sites of remediation: girls need to be educated, improved, ‘flipped,’ etc. This Football 101 example makes me think that middle-class, college-educated, Western–that is, more privileged–women are still financialized, but in more subtle ways. Isn’t this what “Lean In” culture is?

2. Along these lines, what about our dominant narratives about women in technology? ….“Girls Learn To Code” programs which treat girls as sites of investment for the future of technology (i.e., the future profits of tech venture capital)? Also, what’s the gender politics of crowdfunding sites? How does the financialized Girl fit into David’s critique of Upworthiness?

3. This is a nerdy theory point: The financialized Girl model suggests that Tiqqun’s Young Girl is, as they claim, not a gendered concept. If the YG is their metaphor for mainstream Western human capital, then structurally the YG is masculinized–the YG reaps the profits of her investments in herself. The YG is the opposite of the financialized Girl. This means that Tiqqun’s gendering of YG as feminine, then, is really just a way to use a ton of implicit misogyny to critique dominant discourses of human capital–that is, it’s a way for them to transfer the negative associations we have about women and femininity to this concept of human capital.

[1] Murphy argues: “Her rates of return are so high precisely because her value begins so low. The girl is an undervalued stock for global finance and for future global economic recover precisely because she is constituted as the “poorest of the poor.”” The Girl is the cheapest stock available, so with just a small investment it’s possible to sell quite high what you’ve bought quite low.
[2] In fact, human capital theory was largely a rejection of the Marxist idea of alienation–treating oneself as capital means that you reap the profits from your labor, not your employer.

Robin is on Twitter as @doctaj.

Okay, maybe the title is a bit dramatic, but hear me out. Vacation responders, those automatic emails that tell would-be correspondents that you are away from your inbox, are contributing to unrealistic work demands. The vacation responder directly implies that if it is not activated, the response should be prompt. It sets up a false binary wherein we are either working or on vacation. Its easy to tell that the work/vacation split is dubious because these two states of being that are in increasingly short supply. Lots of people are out of work, and those who do have jobs are working longer hours than ever before. Obviously vacation responders aren’t the cause of our economic woes (that can be found here) but they do enforce the worst parts of late capitalism’s work ethics.

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What sort of ideological context would make the emergence of social media, as we know it today, both possible and likely? What background ideals and institutions would motivate the development of what we now know as social media? In other words, what theory of society would help us understand why today looks like it does, why media technology and culture developed in the ways that they have, why, out of all the uncountable possibilities the internet offers, we have Facebook, Twitter, tumblr, and Instagram, and not something else?

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When news stories started popping up around the mysterious YouTube account Webdriver Torso, more than one person noted that the truth behind it would almost certainly turn out to be nowhere near as interesting as all the speculation about what that truth might be. More than one person suggested that it might be better if no one find out the truth at all, because mysteries are pleasurable, no matter how much we might think we want them to be solved.

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How does one begin a blog post about a profoundly tragic event? With shock? Only, I’m not shocked. With anger? I am angry, but starting there doesn’t feel right. Empathy, I think, is how I have to start.  I can only imagine the pain and fear of the people of Isla Vista, and honestly can’t imagine the depth of pain felt by those who lost family members and loved ones in Friday’s shooting.

As we all fumble through this event—which feels like yet another blow in a terrible but patterned chain of violent events—I believe many of us can’t help but wonder: how did this happen? How does it keep happening?

As with all things, the “how” is a complex question, one for which complete answers are largely impossible.  In this case, however, I can identify two key interlocking factors: digital dualism and misogynistic culture. more...

This is a slightly expanded cross-post from Its Her Factory. 

The Chainsmokers’ song “Selfie” is the new novelty song that everyone (or, almost everyone) loves to hate. In this Fact Magazine critics roundup, the song is called everything from “a low point…even for EDM,” to the one thing worse than the “arena-bound, taurine-fuelled, optimised-for-raging EDM” that the song nominally parodies. It seems like everyone hates it because they think it embodies what one might interpret as Tiqqun’s “Young Girl,” the ideal subject of neoliberal capitalism, human capital itself–or at least, the song gives voice to who we derisively imagine that ideal neoliberal subject to be: the vapid, selfie-obsessed young woman who is only concerned with amping up her value (her “likes” on Instagram) and her enjoyment (or her male/bro equivalent).

Is all the derision targeted at what the song’s about? Or do people dislike it because of how it sounds? Or both?

I want to leave aside, at least for a moment, what the song is about and focus on how it sounds, how it works as a piece of music. Maybe a better understanding of the music will give us a more nuanced grasp of “#Selfie”’s lyrical and visual content, and people’s reactions to that content.

The song is basically a combination of (a) a ripoff of the treble synth riff, cued up here, from LMFAO’s 2011 “Party Rock Anthem” and (b) the soar from Psy’s “Gangnam Style.” The LMFAO rip is first audible in the very beginning of the song, and the Soar (the soar is: (1) the Zeno’s-paradox style rhythmic intensification up to and past the limit of our ability to hear distinct rhythmic events + (2) the measure of instrumental silence with the “but first, let me take a selfie” vocal + (3) the “hit” or drop on the following downbeat) you hear starting here:

So, musically, the song regurgitates two, well, old megahits. “Party Rock Anthem” and “Gangnam Style” are not fresh or trendy–they’re worn out, too young to be retro but too old to be hot. Though the song’s soar would not have been out of place in, say 2012, most contemporary EDM pop uses a much more restrained, less exaggerated and crassly maximalist soar. (Think, for example, of the soar in Calvin Harris’s most recent single, “Summer.” Compared to his 2012 “We Found Love,” the soar in “Summer” sounds refined and demur.) Compared to its contemporaries on the pop and dance charts, “Selfie” sounds both backwards and vulgar (both excessive and common). But this is the point: it’s a parody song. It’s not designed to sound “good.” It’s presenting us a caricature of EDM at its supposed worst, much in the same way that “Spaceballs” parodies late 20th c space operas, or “Scream” parodies horror films. This raises the question: if you’re making a parody EDM track to skewer mainstream EDMC (EDM culture), why make that song about selfies? If the Chainsmokers were looking for some lyrical content to compliment their sonic caricature, why choose the so-called “selfie” as this compliment? Why is the selfie–or what the song presents as a selfie (which, like the musical content, is likely a caricature of ‘selfie’ practice)–the best content to compliment this sonic caricature?

I’ll get back to that question later. For now, I want to stay focused on the music. First, it’s interesting how the refrain “but first, let me take a selfie” serves in place of the scream or silence or other sonic shock that precedes the drop. For example, in a lot of brosteppy songs, the drop is immediately preceded by some sort of distorted, disruptive vocal–”bangarang” in Skrillex’s “Bangarang,” “tsunami” in DVBBS’s “Tusanmi,” you get the idea. I like to think of that vocal disruption as analogous to the “shock” in shock capitalism: in the same way that a tsunami wipes out civilization and prepares it for redevelopment, the sonically distorted “tsunami” interrupts the flow of the song and prepares listeners to experience the reintroduction of order (the ‘hit’ on the next downbeat) as even more intensely pleasurable. The idea is that this apparent disruption isn’t actually disruptive–the shock is not an end, but a necessary first step. Why, then, would a girl taking a selfie be so (apparently, but not actually) disruptive? Why does the girl selfie need to seem like a disruption? Who benefits from–where’s the profit or surplus value in–the perception that girl selfies are disruptive?

Perhaps the answer to these questions is this: the devaluation of girl-selfies as disruptive is what makes other kinds of human capital appear both more valuable and less disruptive/violent/appropriative/etc. In the same way that the song’s hook and soar are too crass and unsophisticated for anything but the dumbest and most mainstream of EDM listeners, are selfies just too crass and unsophisticated a means of human-capital building? I mean, anyone can take a selfie, but not everyone can, say, take an unpaid internship, get plastic surgery, lose weight, quit smoking, etc. Or, perhaps in the same way gendered devaluations of pop music give “classic” or “intelligent” music its (gendered) value, the devaluation of girl-selfie-capital gives more sophisticated kinds of human capital its worth. (As musicologist Susan Cook argues, “the ‘popular’ gives the ‘classical’ its worth; the ‘classical’ is worthwhile only if the ‘popular’ is worthless” (141).)

So, that’s the song. But the video is also very interesting. It’s basically a montage of fan selfies. That in itself isn’t particularly noteworthy. However, the fans’ participation in the video was an explicit and intentional marketing decision. As Liv Buli notes in her Forbes.com article, this participatory (what art historians and aestheticians would call “relational”) strategy

creates a personal connection between the video and the fan, ensuring that not only would there a built-in audience for the video, but that there would be the added imperative to share. “It is social engineering to an effect,” says Luckett. [one of the Chainsmokers]

The Chainsmokers and their managers wanted to make a hit record; and, given the way the music industry measures hits, the best way to make a hit record, apparently, is to make a viral video. And the best way to make a viral video is to build in fan participation. [1] The article notes that the duo also take this approach to their music: they encourage remixes and samples because that contributes to the, erm, virality or clout, I guess, of their original. Thing is, it’s a lot easier to take a selfie than it is to remix an entire pop song. So, it seems like the way to maximize fan participation is to find the media to which fans have the most mastery and access.

I’m obviously rather pleased that this seems to support my argument here that music is coincidental to contemporary music industries and mainstream consumption practices. But at this point I also have a number of other questions:

1. What’s the relationship between virality as an industry strategy (or a ‘mode of production’), on the one hand, and relational aesthetics or social practice, on the other? (Has anyone written on this?)

2. Is listening as an aesthetic practice or leisure activity getting disarticulated from other aspects of mainstream music fandom and the music industry? Maybe not. But regardless, what’s the role of listening in an aesthetic and an economy that de-centers the musical work and musical experience?

[1] Buli’s article begins by noting that “#Selfie” is the most viral of all viral music videos to date: “The EDM duo currently ranks as the most viral act on YouTube, both in terms of plays and new subscribers over the past 90 days. They are all over Soundcloud, trail 5 Seconds of Summer for most viral on Wikipedia in the past 90 days, and have the fifth largest percentage increase in US radio spins of all artists in the last month.” So there’s something measurably, perhaps even qualitatively different about the kind of virality it exhibits.

Robin is on Twitter as @doctaj