2017
Speech at the 1th Annual Conference on Network Society
For now we see through a glass, darkly;
but then face to face
［...］
When I was a child, I spake as a child,
I understood as a child, I thought as a child:
but when I became a man, I put away childish things.
［...］
The network is infinitely vast.
——Mamoru Oshii, "Ghost in the Shell" (1995 / 2008)
Mamoru Oshii's profound dialogue is akin to a post-historical painting. When Motoko Kusanagi's consciousness "merges" with the Puppet Master, a novel socio-life form is birthed, evolving voluntaristic machinery cyberpunk into a networked planetary computing entity. From that moment, Motoko Kusanagi exists everywhere and nowhere simultaneously. Her "adulthood" signifies humanity's transition from the childhood of industrial age (symbolized by the Eiffel Tower) through the adulthood of global cities, and back to a new form of childhood in the network society: a cloud and the state geometries that build up new configuration with stacks. The post-human narrative of Ghost in the Shell prompts a renewal in sociology, a retreat from philosophical ontology, and the collapse of traditional cultural study tools such as value, meaning, and codes. I believe that the symptoms emerging today are no more avant-garde than Mamoru Oshii's imagination in 1995. However, the humanities and social sciences are now more subservient and dumbfounded by the field of technical information than ever before.
How to confront the challenges of childhood of network society is the paramount concern within the sociology of production amidst the industrial age. Sociology, as the scientific elucidation of industrial dynamics, endeavors to theorize the intricate contradictions inherent in urban capitalism. Historian Fernand Braudel clearly pointed out that capitalism was born in cities[1], and sociology emerged together with the capitalist mode of production driven by industrialized cities[2]. Although sociology that emerged in the 19th century originated in cities, its research object is still human society as a whole. Urban sociology, constructed by the Chicago School of Sociology at the beginning of the 20th century, returned to the birthplace of sociology. The Chicago School of Urban Sociology dominated for nearly forty years until the student movements of the 1960s caused its decline. In the representative work The City by Robert Ezra Park, Ernest Watson Burgess and Roderick D. McKenzie, the main problem of cities is "integration". The rational and objective analysis principle provided by them to urban planners is the "concentric zone model". They failed to recognize that the "zones of transition" most susceptible to crisis or disintegration are not the communities inhabited by minorities and the impoverished, but rather the complexities arising from the integration of anomalies and economic exclusion driven by dominant values (urban civilization). Even so, these theories provided the sociological imagination and national governance model of Roosevelt's New Deal in the United States.
When the student movement of 1968 erupted, the urban revolution challenged conservative academic thought, with one of its most vocal critics being Manuel Castells. Influenced by French Marxism, Castells' early seminal work, The Urban Question: A Marxist Approach, overturned the notion of integration as the core of urban social change, as it proved inadequate in addressing the conflicts brought about by urban renewal and polarization. Subsequently, Castells broke ties with traditional Marxist labor movements, as they persisted in viewing labor movements as the historical subject of revolution, instead conducting empirical studies across multiple global cities and summarizing in The City and the Grassroots that urban social movements are the core of urban change, driving shifts in urban meaning, positioning urban as spaces for changing historical subjects. Alongside critical geographer David Harvey and his own mentor, philosopher Henri Lefebvre (at the same time, there were also segments of the New Left and the British cultural study school), Castells hoisted the banner of the left, reinterpreting and studying cities through Marxist theory, conceiving of cities as the bases of revolution, about such theoretical spatial turn Foucault provided a clear exposition. They collectively pointed out: without liberation of space, all theories of liberation are unfeasible. These critical forces marched alongside the emerging neoliberalism, and the left's liberation of space in reality was diagonally opposite to the right's deregulation and privatization of space.
Until around 2000 and before Castells' trilogy on the network society (including rapid updates and reprints), sociology primarily dealt with physical spaces and the various struggles and conflicts of real human habitats. However, when Motoko Kusanagi lost her cyborg body, she also lost the physical space needed for that body, raising the question of what sociology's object should be. Although the network economy experienced a bubble in 2000, the infrastructure of fiber-optic cables and wireless transmitters gradually improved, and for the first time in history, a significant number of netizens emerged, representing specific classes and disseminating specific technological cultures. Globalization suddenly became a dominant ideology, with figures like the liberal Thomas L. Friedman enthusiastically embracing its myth. Venture capitalists and tech innovators, after the dot-com bubble, initiated Web 2.0, elevating consumers to proactive users, participants, and content providers. As the century turned, the excitement surrounding the dawn of the "we media" era echoed the atmosphere of discontent and hope prevalent from 1965 to 1980. There was widespread excitement about the present moment, as it seemed to herald a new future, a gateway to a realm of endless possibilities. Capitalism swiftly self-renewed, overcoming the stagnation of gradual accumulation, akin to how the social liberation fervor of the 1960s gave way to consumerism. Google and Facebook quietly laid the first bricks of their empires, and before we realized it, the gateway to the realm of endless possibilities could only be opened through network protocols under the control of internet behemoths.
What about the role of the state in sociology? Max Weber saw the state as a machine, Louis Pierre Althusser as a state machine, Michel Foucault as technologies of governance, instead, urban architectural theorist Benjamin H. Bratton proposed the concept of "the stack" to understand planetary computation and governance today, arguing that the machine itself is the state. Big data will be more useful than all statistical methods in social sciences, and even more powerful than statistics themselves. You don't even need to decide the purpose of the investigation and the sampling method in advance; you just need to "draw" the one you need from an infinite number of decks of cards. Marshall McLuhan's statement "the machine is an extension of human senses" is now reversed: humans are sensory extensions of the machine, with hundreds of millions of textual and visual data uploaded through human digital devices every day, and machines observing the world through human cameras. After the Internet of Things, artificial intelligence and machine learning have become more mature, and machines no longer need human assistance to press buttons. Therefore, the editor-in-chief of the tech hippie magazine Wired can say that big data has ended social theory, and Castells can lament, "there was (urban sociology) [...] there is currently not".
The fusion of physical space and cyberspace renders the distinction between avatars and true selves, truth and true, inconsequential. However, the power of identity systems appears unlikely to dissipate soon in sociology and cultural studies. In the second book of Castells' trilogy, The Power of Identity, a significant portion is dedicated to discussing identity in the network society, considering it to be the most important and dangerous force after the turn of the millennium. Reviewing the admirable work of historian Hobsbawm's Nations and Nationalism and Anderson's Imagined Communities, the armed form of identity (nation-states) and cultural form of identity (such as print capitalism) are truly astonishing. Now, Facebook almost daily stages a similar drama, using homology to distinguish between individuals performatively, turning geopolitical concerns into politics of computing geometrics. Facebook's influence enabled Trump's victory, its eavesdropping on conversations for targeted ads, and similar acts of warfare occur daily, addictively resembling a game. Identity still plays a central role in the online world, as we can see in the latest work of the young scholar Wendy Chun from Duke University, where there is a sharp analysis of exclusion mechanisms in the network society-space.
The real world is much more dangerous. If one were to only see a photo of a masked youth holding a weapon, no one could discern whether he is a indigenous knight of the Zapatista movement from 1994 or a child soldier of ISIS from 2014. The intervening twenty years mark the process from the promise offered by the internet to the self-tearing of human society. In 1994, Subcomandante Marcos of the Zapatistas, wrote emails from the jungle to world leaders and important international organizations, accusing the Mexican military government of atrocities, as the indigenous lands in Mexico were stripped due to NAFTA. Marcos also led his people on a march to the capital, ultimately securing an autonomous region. Marcos not only wrote emails, but also fairy tales. The fairy tale revolution was almost the most beautiful myth of this miraculous internet revolution. In an email sent from the jungle, Marcos said, "Don’t hate media, be media," inspiring the media movement in the 1999 Seattle anti-globalization protests. Printed publications on-site evolved into the first global independent media center spanning 120 cities worldwide, based on open-source code. Marcos is the Che Guevara of the age of network society. He explained why the fighters of the Zapatistas had to wear masks: "Because once we remove the mask, the world will see us as indigenous people. When we put on the mask, we are you." What an uplifting power of identity of inclusion rather than exclusion! Twenty years later, ISIS, similarly born out of resistance to persecution and convened through the internet, became the antithesis of the fairy tale revolution. As indigenous boys and girls in Mexico study their own culture in schools within the autonomous region, young men of the Islamic State point guns at the heads of enemies deemed violators of doctrine in front of cameras.
Now, we pay to use the products of our own living labor, serving as unpaid laborers on platforms like Facebook and Weibo. As new media-technological architectures take shape, we find ourselves can only widen our eyes like children looking back into our historical past for resources. Europe turns to old, underexplored theoretical treasures such as Gilbert Simondon and Alfred Whitehead and others to discuss technical objects, post-humanism, and the philosophy of technology. Meanwhile, in the United States, continuing the countercultural spirit, discussions within Silicon Valley focus on the open data movement, harnessing the spirit of hackers and whistleblowers.
Reality develops faster than theory. Like the crisis of traditional sociological tools, the tools of cultural studies theory have almost become obsolete. Comparing Raymond Williams's Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society with Matthew Fuller's Software Studies / Lexicon, entries about human subject, value, meaning, and thought have been completely updated to terms like software and algorithms. Initially, British cultural studies emerged to combat Margaret Thatcher's notion of "Englishness" and the slogan of "There is no alternative," actively engaging in struggles against mainstream cultural theories at the time, expanding perspectives into media, gender, and subcultures. However, after enduring the turmoil of postmodernism and consumerism, its legacy now barely deals with colored supplements rather than the front pages of economic and political issues. In the era of network society, scholars' progress is marked by their painstaking analysis of texts within the gender or political sections of online forums, much like how they previously analyzed literary and artistic works. Without methodological updates, how could success be possible? Of course, through arduous struggles, many cultural studies scholars have achieved self-renewal and opened up new battlegrounds, such as new directions in media archaeology and software studies. As for the plight of contemporary media/technology arts, it is even more embarrassed, entertaining oneself and others with the leftovers of defense military technology and Hollywood industrial technology, lifelessly.
So, what we can do for the childhood is to let children exercise their ability: to question.
The Institute of Network Society of the School of Intermedia Art at the China Academy of Art is first and foremost a factory for questioning and a school for exploration. It was established with the vision and support of Professor Gao Shiming, Vice President of the China Academy of Art, and Professor Guan Huaibin, Dean of the School of Intermedia Arts. In the technological and theoretical development of planetary computation, contemplating the emerging situations in the Southern Hemisphere and reflecting on the tremendous transformative forces of network technology and socio-economic changes in China over the past two decades will be key to understanding cloud-based neo-feudalism.
The information technology market has written a completely different history of urban trade development in China. From e-commerce, Taobao villages, e-commerce centers, to the rise of WeChat business in the past two years, it has completely changed the urbanization process as understood by the West, allowing us to witness the end of what Marx called the real subsumption of capitalism. According to the 2016 statistical report of Alibaba Research Institute, the transaction volume of Taobao Village alone is close to 6 trillion yuan. There are more than 1,311 Taobao Villages and 135 Taobao Towns in China, which is estimated to directly create 840,000 job opportunities. Taobao villages definitely represent an unprecedented new history of grassroots capitalism rising.
The 2016 Double Eleven Shopping Festival showcased the astonishing collaborative capabilities of cloud computing, Internet of Things, warehouse management, and transportation logistics. According to Alibaba's data, at midnight, trading commenced, 52 seconds later, the global transaction volume exceeded 1 billion RMB, compared to 72 seconds in 2015 to reach this level of transaction. After 6 minutes and 58 seconds, the transaction volume surpassed 10 billion RMB, nearly twice as fast as the 12 minutes and 28 seconds it took in 2015. It is worth noting that during this period, the proportion of transactions on mobile devices remained at around 88%. By 1:00 am, Tmall's global transaction volume had exceeded 35.3 billion RMB. In just one day, the transaction volume was estimated to be 140 billion RMB, equivalent to approximately 20.9 billion USD. Behind these transactions, we can imagine the supercomputing power of the space of flows; the first successful delivery occurred 13 minutes after the start of the event, allowing us to imagine the logistics and transportation systems behind it. The peak value of orders created was 175,000 per second, and the peak value of successful payments was 120,000 per second, compared to 85,000 per second in 2015.
Capital survives in motion. Once it stops, it dies. "Capital is value in motion" is evident in the encouragement of consumption by George Walker Bush after 9/11, as well as the issuance of consumption vouchers by Taiwan and South Korea during economic downturns. Capital has no moral inclination; it embraces accelerationism, embracing any market that can create new niches, whether alternative cultures or mainstream ventures. Technology enables capital to transcend national regulations and popular scrutiny, leading to traditional governance giving way to algorithms, to the extent that every click of our mice and swipe of our fingers on screens is working for capital, turning us all into unpaid digital laborers, and we further contribute the rest of our wages to purchase goods within our collective labor's fruits—Facebook.
The consumption climax of Double Eleven not only drives e-commerce but also the corresponding transportation industry. Logistics companies with dedicated planes adjust electronic orders and transmission architectures to become the world's most efficient transportation system. SF Express, which handles nearly 70% of express delivery business across the Taiwan strait, is the best example. Behemoths like Alibaba have transformed "enterprise sharing economy" into digital feudalism which refers to a platform capitalism where risks are socialized while profits are privatized, along with phenomena like Uberization of labour and low wages.
The comprehensive triumph of capitalism private property, along with the exacerbation of global wealth inequality, deteriorating environmental issues, blurred roles of national politics, and the lack of alternative strategies, sharply contrasts with the hope initially offered by the internet and the efficiency and euphoria presented by high-performance cloud computing. After Donald Trump was elected President of the United States, Alain Badiou published his weighty views ("Reflections on the Recent Election"), with which I completely agree: our poverty and inequality are not necessary social structures, we should not differentiate types of labor, we should not categorize humanity based on race or gender, and the role of the state may not necessarily be required.
We see the potential of networks and technology, and should learn to rephrase polluted terminology and start afresh. As Marx reminded us: "It took both time and experience before the workpeople learnt to distinguish between machinery and its employment by capital, and to direct their attacks, not against the material instruments of production, but against the mode in which they are used." I believe that network makes communing possible, as communing is the best way to reclaim "the mode in which material instruments of production are used". But we must connect the production of space with the production of the internet, connect production of space of places with the production of space of flows, and connect the new people (those transformed by social movements) with the new humanity (digital natives). In short, the kind of network society research we need is a life from which post-humanity can learn about the new life-society.
After the 2008 financial crisis, Castells led a group of scholars, many of them were doctoral students at the time, to study the specific situations in the United States and Europe. They compiled the book Aftermath, pointing out the possibilities for people's autonomy after the storm. In 2012, Networks of Outrage and Hope outlined the hope of global network social movements. Another Economy Is Possible, published in 2017, returned to economic and social organization, covering everything from individual autonomous living to the dwelling places of social groups. These three books can be seen as his latest trilogy, from network society to the possibilities of a new life-society. This brand new global map, co-created by people living together, will be our weapon in the future against the smart city networks monopolized by states and capital.
Just as if we were to discuss Platform Cooperativism today, there must first be a cooperative movement. We need more social movements, cooperatives, and a greater symbiosis of Platform Cooperativism. To end neoliberalism, it's not about resistance, but creation. We need to treat our own practices (living labor) as independent variables rather than dependent ones.
Translated by Lu Ruiyang
[1] Braudel, F. (1981). The structures of everyday life: The limits of the possible (S. Reynolds, Trans.). University of California Press. (Original work published 1987). See Chapter 8, "The City."
[2] The clearest explanation can be found in the book by Machimura, T., & Nishizawa, A. (2000). Toshi no shakaigaku: Shakai ga katachi o arawasu toki. Yuhikaku.
For now we see through a glass, darkly;
but then face to face
［...］
When I was a child, I spake as a child,
I understood as a child, I thought as a child:
but when I became a man, I put away childish things.
［...］
The network is infinitely vast.
——Mamoru Oshii, "Ghost in the Shell" (1995 / 2008)
Mamoru Oshii's profound dialogue is akin to a post-historical painting. When Motoko Kusanagi's consciousness "merges" with the Puppet Master, a novel socio-life form is birthed, evolving voluntaristic machinery cyberpunk into a networked planetary computing entity. From that moment, Motoko Kusanagi exists everywhere and nowhere simultaneously. Her "adulthood" signifies humanity's transition from the childhood of industrial age (symbolized by the Eiffel Tower) through the adulthood of global cities, and back to a new form of childhood in the network society: a cloud and the state geometries that build up new configuration with stacks. The post-human narrative of Ghost in the Shell prompts a renewal in sociology, a retreat from philosophical ontology, and the collapse of traditional cultural study tools such as value, meaning, and codes. I believe that the symptoms emerging today are no more avant-garde than Mamoru Oshii's imagination in 1995. However, the humanities and social sciences are now more subservient and dumbfounded by the field of technical information than ever before.
How to confront the challenges of childhood of network society is the paramount concern within the sociology of production amidst the industrial age. Sociology, as the scientific elucidation of industrial dynamics, endeavors to theorize the intricate contradictions inherent in urban capitalism. Historian Fernand Braudel clearly pointed out that capitalism was born in cities[1], and sociology emerged together with the capitalist mode of production driven by industrialized cities[2]. Although sociology that emerged in the 19th century originated in cities, its research object is still human society as a whole. Urban sociology, constructed by the Chicago School of Sociology at the beginning of the 20th century, returned to the birthplace of sociology. The Chicago School of Urban Sociology dominated for nearly forty years until the student movements of the 1960s caused its decline. In the representative work The City by Robert Ezra Park, Ernest Watson Burgess and Roderick D. McKenzie, the main problem of cities is "integration". The rational and objective analysis principle provided by them to urban planners is the "concentric zone model". They failed to recognize that the "zones of transition" most susceptible to crisis or disintegration are not the communities inhabited by minorities and the impoverished, but rather the complexities arising from the integration of anomalies and economic exclusion driven by dominant values (urban civilization). Even so, these theories provided the sociological imagination and national governance model of Roosevelt's New Deal in the United States.
When the student movement of 1968 erupted, the urban revolution challenged conservative academic thought, with one of its most vocal critics being Manuel Castells. Influenced by French Marxism, Castells' early seminal work, The Urban Question: A Marxist Approach, overturned the notion of integration as the core of urban social change, as it proved inadequate in addressing the conflicts brought about by urban renewal and polarization. Subsequently, Castells broke ties with traditional Marxist labor movements, as they persisted in viewing labor movements as the historical subject of revolution, instead conducting empirical studies across multiple global cities and summarizing in The City and the Grassroots that urban social movements are the core of urban change, driving shifts in urban meaning, positioning urban as spaces for changing historical subjects. Alongside critical geographer David Harvey and his own mentor, philosopher Henri Lefebvre (at the same time, there were also segments of the New Left and the British cultural study school), Castells hoisted the banner of the left, reinterpreting and studying cities through Marxist theory, conceiving of cities as the bases of revolution, about such theoretical spatial turn Foucault provided a clear exposition. They collectively pointed out: without liberation of space, all theories of liberation are unfeasible. These critical forces marched alongside the emerging neoliberalism, and the left's liberation of space in reality was diagonally opposite to the right's deregulation and privatization of space.
Until around 2000 and before Castells' trilogy on the network society (including rapid updates and reprints), sociology primarily dealt with physical spaces and the various struggles and conflicts of real human habitats. However, when Motoko Kusanagi lost her cyborg body, she also lost the physical space needed for that body, raising the question of what sociology's object should be. Although the network economy experienced a bubble in 2000, the infrastructure of fiber-optic cables and wireless transmitters gradually improved, and for the first time in history, a significant number of netizens emerged, representing specific classes and disseminating specific technological cultures. Globalization suddenly became a dominant ideology, with figures like the liberal Thomas L. Friedman enthusiastically embracing its myth. Venture capitalists and tech innovators, after the dot-com bubble, initiated Web 2.0, elevating consumers to proactive users, participants, and content providers. As the century turned, the excitement surrounding the dawn of the "we media" era echoed the atmosphere of discontent and hope prevalent from 1965 to 1980. There was widespread excitement about the present moment, as it seemed to herald a new future, a gateway to a realm of endless possibilities. Capitalism swiftly self-renewed, overcoming the stagnation of gradual accumulation, akin to how the social liberation fervor of the 1960s gave way to consumerism. Google and Facebook quietly laid the first bricks of their empires, and before we realized it, the gateway to the realm of endless possibilities could only be opened through network protocols under the control of internet behemoths.
What about the role of the state in sociology? Max Weber saw the state as a machine, Louis Pierre Althusser as a state machine, Michel Foucault as technologies of governance, instead, urban architectural theorist Benjamin H. Bratton proposed the concept of "the stack" to understand planetary computation and governance today, arguing that the machine itself is the state. Big data will be more useful than all statistical methods in social sciences, and even more powerful than statistics themselves. You don't even need to decide the purpose of the investigation and the sampling method in advance; you just need to "draw" the one you need from an infinite number of decks of cards. Marshall McLuhan's statement "the machine is an extension of human senses" is now reversed: humans are sensory extensions of the machine, with hundreds of millions of textual and visual data uploaded through human digital devices every day, and machines observing the world through human cameras. After the Internet of Things, artificial intelligence and machine learning have become more mature, and machines no longer need human assistance to press buttons. Therefore, the editor-in-chief of the tech hippie magazine Wired can say that big data has ended social theory, and Castells can lament, "there was (urban sociology) [...] there is currently not".
The fusion of physical space and cyberspace renders the distinction between avatars and true selves, truth and true, inconsequential. However, the power of identity systems appears unlikely to dissipate soon in sociology and cultural studies. In the second book of Castells' trilogy, The Power of Identity, a significant portion is dedicated to discussing identity in the network society, considering it to be the most important and dangerous force after the turn of the millennium. Reviewing the admirable work of historian Hobsbawm's Nations and Nationalism and Anderson's Imagined Communities, the armed form of identity (nation-states) and cultural form of identity (such as print capitalism) are truly astonishing. Now, Facebook almost daily stages a similar drama, using homology to distinguish between individuals performatively, turning geopolitical concerns into politics of computing geometrics. Facebook's influence enabled Trump's victory, its eavesdropping on conversations for targeted ads, and similar acts of warfare occur daily, addictively resembling a game. Identity still plays a central role in the online world, as we can see in the latest work of the young scholar Wendy Chun from Duke University, where there is a sharp analysis of exclusion mechanisms in the network society-space.
The real world is much more dangerous. If one were to only see a photo of a masked youth holding a weapon, no one could discern whether he is a indigenous knight of the Zapatista movement from 1994 or a child soldier of ISIS from 2014. The intervening twenty years mark the process from the promise offered by the internet to the self-tearing of human society. In 1994, Subcomandante Marcos of the Zapatistas, wrote emails from the jungle to world leaders and important international organizations, accusing the Mexican military government of atrocities, as the indigenous lands in Mexico were stripped due to NAFTA. Marcos also led his people on a march to the capital, ultimately securing an autonomous region. Marcos not only wrote emails, but also fairy tales. The fairy tale revolution was almost the most beautiful myth of this miraculous internet revolution. In an email sent from the jungle, Marcos said, "Don’t hate media, be media," inspiring the media movement in the 1999 Seattle anti-globalization protests. Printed publications on-site evolved into the first global independent media center spanning 120 cities worldwide, based on open-source code. Marcos is the Che Guevara of the age of network society. He explained why the fighters of the Zapatistas had to wear masks: "Because once we remove the mask, the world will see us as indigenous people. When we put on the mask, we are you." What an uplifting power of identity of inclusion rather than exclusion! Twenty years later, ISIS, similarly born out of resistance to persecution and convened through the internet, became the antithesis of the fairy tale revolution. As indigenous boys and girls in Mexico study their own culture in schools within the autonomous region, young men of the Islamic State point guns at the heads of enemies deemed violators of doctrine in front of cameras.
Now, we pay to use the products of our own living labor, serving as unpaid laborers on platforms like Facebook and Weibo. As new media-technological architectures take shape, we find ourselves can only widen our eyes like children looking back into our historical past for resources. Europe turns to old, underexplored theoretical treasures such as Gilbert Simondon and Alfred Whitehead and others to discuss technical objects, post-humanism, and the philosophy of technology. Meanwhile, in the United States, continuing the countercultural spirit, discussions within Silicon Valley focus on the open data movement, harnessing the spirit of hackers and whistleblowers.
Reality develops faster than theory. Like the crisis of traditional sociological tools, the tools of cultural studies theory have almost become obsolete. Comparing Raymond Williams's Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society with Matthew Fuller's Software Studies / Lexicon, entries about human subject, value, meaning, and thought have been completely updated to terms like software and algorithms. Initially, British cultural studies emerged to combat Margaret Thatcher's notion of "Englishness" and the slogan of "There is no alternative," actively engaging in struggles against mainstream cultural theories at the time, expanding perspectives into media, gender, and subcultures. However, after enduring the turmoil of postmodernism and consumerism, its legacy now barely deals with colored supplements rather than the front pages of economic and political issues. In the era of network society, scholars' progress is marked by their painstaking analysis of texts within the gender or political sections of online forums, much like how they previously analyzed literary and artistic works. Without methodological updates, how could success be possible? Of course, through arduous struggles, many cultural studies scholars have achieved self-renewal and opened up new battlegrounds, such as new directions in media archaeology and software studies. As for the plight of contemporary media/technology arts, it is even more embarrassed, entertaining oneself and others with the leftovers of defense military technology and Hollywood industrial technology, lifelessly.
So, what we can do for the childhood is to let children exercise their ability: to question.
The Institute of Network Society of the School of Intermedia Art at the China Academy of Art is first and foremost a factory for questioning and a school for exploration. It was established with the vision and support of Professor Gao Shiming, Vice President of the China Academy of Art, and Professor Guan Huaibin, Dean of the School of Intermedia Arts. In the technological and theoretical development of planetary computation, contemplating the emerging situations in the Southern Hemisphere and reflecting on the tremendous transformative forces of network technology and socio-economic changes in China over the past two decades will be key to understanding cloud-based neo-feudalism.
The information technology market has written a completely different history of urban trade development in China. From e-commerce, Taobao villages, e-commerce centers, to the rise of WeChat business in the past two years, it has completely changed the urbanization process as understood by the West, allowing us to witness the end of what Marx called the real subsumption of capitalism. According to the 2016 statistical report of Alibaba Research Institute, the transaction volume of Taobao Village alone is close to 6 trillion yuan. There are more than 1,311 Taobao Villages and 135 Taobao Towns in China, which is estimated to directly create 840,000 job opportunities. Taobao villages definitely represent an unprecedented new history of grassroots capitalism rising.
The 2016 Double Eleven Shopping Festival showcased the astonishing collaborative capabilities of cloud computing, Internet of Things, warehouse management, and transportation logistics. According to Alibaba's data, at midnight, trading commenced, 52 seconds later, the global transaction volume exceeded 1 billion RMB, compared to 72 seconds in 2015 to reach this level of transaction. After 6 minutes and 58 seconds, the transaction volume surpassed 10 billion RMB, nearly twice as fast as the 12 minutes and 28 seconds it took in 2015. It is worth noting that during this period, the proportion of transactions on mobile devices remained at around 88%. By 1:00 am, Tmall's global transaction volume had exceeded 35.3 billion RMB. In just one day, the transaction volume was estimated to be 140 billion RMB, equivalent to approximately 20.9 billion USD. Behind these transactions, we can imagine the supercomputing power of the space of flows; the first successful delivery occurred 13 minutes after the start of the event, allowing us to imagine the logistics and transportation systems behind it. The peak value of orders created was 175,000 per second, and the peak value of successful payments was 120,000 per second, compared to 85,000 per second in 2015.
Capital survives in motion. Once it stops, it dies. "Capital is value in motion" is evident in the encouragement of consumption by George Walker Bush after 9/11, as well as the issuance of consumption vouchers by Taiwan and South Korea during economic downturns. Capital has no moral inclination; it embraces accelerationism, embracing any market that can create new niches, whether alternative cultures or mainstream ventures. Technology enables capital to transcend national regulations and popular scrutiny, leading to traditional governance giving way to algorithms, to the extent that every click of our mice and swipe of our fingers on screens is working for capital, turning us all into unpaid digital laborers, and we further contribute the rest of our wages to purchase goods within our collective labor's fruits—Facebook.
The consumption climax of Double Eleven not only drives e-commerce but also the corresponding transportation industry. Logistics companies with dedicated planes adjust electronic orders and transmission architectures to become the world's most efficient transportation system. SF Express, which handles nearly 70% of express delivery business across the Taiwan strait, is the best example. Behemoths like Alibaba have transformed "enterprise sharing economy" into digital feudalism which refers to a platform capitalism where risks are socialized while profits are privatized, along with phenomena like Uberization of labour and low wages.
The comprehensive triumph of capitalism private property, along with the exacerbation of global wealth inequality, deteriorating environmental issues, blurred roles of national politics, and the lack of alternative strategies, sharply contrasts with the hope initially offered by the internet and the efficiency and euphoria presented by high-performance cloud computing. After Donald Trump was elected President of the United States, Alain Badiou published his weighty views ("Reflections on the Recent Election"), with which I completely agree: our poverty and inequality are not necessary social structures, we should not differentiate types of labor, we should not categorize humanity based on race or gender, and the role of the state may not necessarily be required.
We see the potential of networks and technology, and should learn to rephrase polluted terminology and start afresh. As Marx reminded us: "It took both time and experience before the workpeople learnt to distinguish between machinery and its employment by capital, and to direct their attacks, not against the material instruments of production, but against the mode in which they are used." I believe that network makes communing possible, as communing is the best way to reclaim "the mode in which material instruments of production are used". But we must connect the production of space with the production of the internet, connect production of space of places with the production of space of flows, and connect the new people (those transformed by social movements) with the new humanity (digital natives). In short, the kind of network society research we need is a life from which post-humanity can learn about the new life-society.
After the 2008 financial crisis, Castells led a group of scholars, many of them were doctoral students at the time, to study the specific situations in the United States and Europe. They compiled the book Aftermath, pointing out the possibilities for people's autonomy after the storm. In 2012, Networks of Outrage and Hope outlined the hope of global network social movements. Another Economy Is Possible, published in 2017, returned to economic and social organization, covering everything from individual autonomous living to the dwelling places of social groups. These three books can be seen as his latest trilogy, from network society to the possibilities of a new life-society. This brand new global map, co-created by people living together, will be our weapon in the future against the smart city networks monopolized by states and capital.
Just as if we were to discuss Platform Cooperativism today, there must first be a cooperative movement. We need more social movements, cooperatives, and a greater symbiosis of Platform Cooperativism. To end neoliberalism, it's not about resistance, but creation. We need to treat our own practices (living labor) as independent variables rather than dependent ones.
Translated by Lu Ruiyang
[1] Braudel, F. (1981). The structures of everyday life: The limits of the possible (S. Reynolds, Trans.). University of California Press. (Original work published 1987). See Chapter 8, "The City."
[2] The clearest explanation can be found in the book by Machimura, T., & Nishizawa, A. (2000). Toshi no shakaigaku: Shakai ga katachi o arawasu toki. Yuhikaku.