1

DEBT AND PUBLIC COMMUNICATION: TOWARDS AN INTERSPATIAL

COUNTERPRACTICE Oliver Vodeb

Published in:

InDEBTed TO INTERVENE, Critical Lessons in Debt, Communication, Art and Theoretical

Practice (2013) http://www.memefest.org/en/indebtedtointervene/

City and Debt

The city has increasingly become humans’ primary habitat. Its economic power

creates flows of millions of rural inhabitants who move to the city, while its cultural

nature creates an environment that seems to fulfil the most passionate of human

desires. It shapes our social ties, our relationship to nature, technologies, lifestyles and

aesthetic values we desire (Harvey 2008). In this light, it is also a medium for the

capitalist accumulation of power.

Urban sociologist Robert Park beautifully describes the city as:

 man’s most successful attempt to remake the world he lives in more after his heart’s desire. But, if the city is the world which man created, it is the world in which he is henceforth condemned to live. Thus, indirectly, and without any clear sense of the nature of his task, in making the city man has remade himself. (Park in Harvey 2008)

The city is a space of collective political, cultural, and emotional life. Jürgen

Habermas (1989) sees the city as a vital centre of the public sphere. True political

activities—action and speaking—cannot take place without the presence of others,

without the public, without the city, and its public spaces, writes Habermas.

Moreover, Hannah Arendt argues that the notion of a city denotes the space of

appearance where one can be seen and heard by everybody, but the notion also

connotes the common world, which not only gathers us together, but prevents us from

falling over each other (Arendt 1958).

The city plays a highly important role in social change. In relation to debt, the city has

become a crucial medium; one where capital is parked in real estate under the

conditions of the ruling class; one where the physical space as well as the urban

2

culture makes sure that those who ‘wake up’ the city every morning and provide the

services for the official economy are made invisible. They come early, they leave late,

and they live their lives in the suburbs—not in the city centre or its wealthy parts.

Within the dynamic of the city, low-paid, mostly precarious, contract-based workers

along with the creative workers, the artists and designers—the cognitariat—help its

real-estate worth to rise. But the physical representation of these classes, the

movement of their bodies, is strictly regulated and channelled so that it does not

interfere with the mechanisms of capitalisation that the city carefully implements

under the rule of those in power. Most cities exemplify this.

The city, through its strategies of urbanisation, channels the regimes of capitalisation

into its centres. Meanwhile, in the suburbs, aside from the economic projects, the

social and political dimensions of urbanisation are intriguing. Suburbs are being made

through private debt, and a fascinating dimension of social control is involved in this,

since, as a rule, indebted homeowners don’t go on strike. Further, the biggest debt-

related profits are being made by credit-card and subprime-mortgage businesses who

are lending money to the poorest people who don’t live in the urban centres or

gentrified suburbs. This is a very similar technique to the World Bank and

International Monetary Fund who entangle third world countries into debt from which

it is almost impossible to escape; these countries pay such high interest that they have

little or no money left over for essential functions.

Urbanisation strategies are intertwined with macro-economic strategies and corporate-

business strategies. Capital needs to control urbanisation, as urbanisation is the result

of class power in action (Harvey 2008).

The public has a right to participate in the city’s power structures for very pragmatic

reasons. Henri Lefebvre and David Harvey elaborate on the idea that not only are the

affordances of physical environments changed by development, but also human

experiences are proscribed and defined in doing so. Harvey argues that the right to the

city “is a right to change ourselves by changing the city”. It is “moreover, a common

rather than an individual right since this transformation inevitably depends upon the

3

exercise of a collective power to reshape the processes of urbanisation” (Harvey

2008).

The City: Beyond Physical Communication

Urban environments however, like social life more broadly, reflect an accelerating

division between digitally mediated experiences and physical space, which in fact

signals a wider process of the digitalisation of many aspects of social life. The rise of

the so-called network society has changed spatial relations, which have become

mediated, virtualised, and organised into networks and digital experiences. Manuel

Castells labels these relations “the informational city”. He observes that people still live in places…but because function and power in our societies are organised in the space of flows (the digital, networked and mediated space), the structural domination of its logic essentially alters the meaning and dynamics of places. (Castells, 2000)

Communities therefore are not necessarily linked only to ‘place’, and may be quite

varied in how their environments are constructed—in terms of both their physical and

digital dimensions. Physical and digital experiences are profoundly disconnected: the

space of “flows” (digital) and the space of place (physical) are separate entities and

power is mainly organised in the space of flows, which allows for distant,

synchronous and real time interaction. (Castells 2000) Although our bodies move in

the city, as the physical space, our mind travels more and more in the digital as we are

constantly engaged in network technologies through devices such as our smart

phones. As this trend continues, social experiences become further disconnected, thus

creating significant problems in constructing sustainable communities while, at the

same time, potentials for resistance in the physical space are being weakened.

In this age of globalisation, the media, the use of public spaces, and other citizenship

practices have all been reshaped by the processes of privatisation and

commercialisation in urban areas. For example, many debates of the public sphere

and public space today are dominated by a narrative of decline or loss (Sorkin 1992).

But there is a strong argument in the debates about emancipatory spatial

developments too. From political activism and civil engagement to self-improvement

and opinionated reflexivity, the proliferation of especially urban media is supposedly

4

challenging the authority and exclusivity of mainstream media and restructuring the

‘traditionally dead’ public spaces. Urban electronic media in particular (such as

monitors, videos, the electronic billboards and screens, together with ubiquitous

computing) are changing our public spaces. However, one should be cautious of

making hasty conclusions over the emancipatory potentials of this new technology.

Although new, it operates, in most cases, on old principles and functions—that

Wodiczko described a long time ago as a contribution to the grand aesthetic curatorial

project of the city—and contaminates space with bureaucratic-aesthetic pollution

(Wodiczko 1987).

Edward Soja’s (1996) understanding of “place” as being comprised of three mutually

dependent aspects—an objective material space, the ways in which space is imagined

and represented, and the ways in which it is experienced by people—is reaffirmed by

Lefebvre, who thinks place is most coherent when all three of these constituent

elements are in alignment (Lefebvre 1992).

While cities compete on the global market, squares are becoming spaces most

attractive to branding strategies employed to put cities on the map of tourist,

commercial, investment and media attraction. From political spaces, they are

becoming commercial—branding locations. Merging architectural strategies of fluid

physical spaces with digital environments, squares become multi-media(ted)

environments, generating complex social, political, cultural, and economic relations.

Besides its physical locality, squares are digital environments in the sense that they

become important symbols and signifiers in the digital media’s sign economy. Its

meaning, image, and perception gets constructed on the spot, through the interplay of

space, architecture, media, events, and human interaction as well as within the

complex digital media sphere, ranging from online branding strategies, on one hand,

and more personal and alternative and DIY bottom-up public media (such as blogs or

real-time communication platforms, usually connected with on-the-spot mobile phone

use), on the other.

Squares’ on-the-spot media cultures usually range from artistic to commercial and

entertainment. Its digital media platforms—for example, digital screens—are usually

in the service of advertising. While places like squares are somehow open and public,

5

they are also regulated and controlled by its (mediated) cultural practices and

surveillance. They are mostly controlled and shaped by the city’s branding

strategies—a complex commercial (social) technology of exclusion and regulated

(commodified) interaction (Vodeb 2008).

From creative-city concepts and manifestations of gentrification to advertising’s

natural tendency to use the public cityscape as a private billboard, the physical space

of the city is transformed into a commercial interface. The digital use of physical

space paired with mobile technologies uses the city as a commercial amusement park.

The physical experience is more and more shaped by digital commercial preferences.

Nevertheless, the city as a public space remains powerful in its potentials. It is, in my

opinion, the crucial space for social change. There is a long history that demonstrates

the relationship between cities and revolutions. In recent history, we have learned

about cities’ potential, via the Arab Spring uprisings, the uprisings in Slovenia, and

the worldwide Occupy Wall Street movement. While all of these initiatives also used

digital social media to network and organise, it was the movements’ presence,

representation, and impact in the physical space—the presence of human bodies in

central location—that achieved real communication success.

The processes of marketing colonisation, privatisation, and control in the city,

however, seems unstoppable as the physical becomes subordinated to the digital, and

technology works more and more as control mechanisms that creates a spatial relation

of de-differentiation.

In the disciplinary society, one leaves one space to enter another: distinct realms of leisure, labour, domesticity, punishment, treatment, training, and so on become the hallmark of specific disciplines exercised within their relevant spaces: factories, prisons, schools, etc.

In the digital era, we can start to list the ways in which these distinctions continue to be reconfigured by what might be described as post-enclosure strategies: distance learning, telecommuting, house arrest, and various forms of technology dependent “de-institutionalisation”. The promise of spatial de-differentiation as a form of alleged empowerment for those once confined to institutional enclosures takes shape against the background of disciplinary strategy. How else to construe the promise of being able to work from anywhere as “liberating”? (Andrejevic 2013)

The pseudo liberation through working from anywhere anytime comes with the

promise of economic progress through creativity. Berlin, for example, as the mecca of

6

creative industries, has experienced difficult times in the past. It was described as

“Poor but Sexy” by its mayor back in 2005. It was about then that the new strategy for

Berlin as a creative city was put in action. It was then that Berlin’s debt doubled. It

was then when debt-driven public-communication strategies were set in place. Today,

one in every five people living in Berlin live under the poverty line and the number

grows every day. (Slobodian and Sterling 2013) But the advertising approaches in

Berlin are cutting edge; for example, those who are too media savvy to really pay

much attention to traditional media are captured through free wireless spots accessible

at bus stops via an installed app that then, of course, tracks and feedbacks information

to the advertiser. The new profiles of the consumer targets are also advanced, such as

the highly mobile Yummies:

Yummies like to consume. The target group tends to spend more than planned and to make spontaneous purchases. They are curious and open to inspiration. They are always up to date, follow trends and become trendsetters themselves. They never miss anything, thanks to their digital companion, the smartphone. (Slobodian and Sterling 2013)

In the networked city landscape of debt, advertising does not sell our demographics

but it sells our networked self. As I will show, these technologies are directly related

to debt. Or, more accurately, debt is embedded in their very design principle.

Debt designs us

The specific of capitalist domination does not come only from “buying power” but

from the possibilities of reconfiguration relations of domination and subjectification

(Lazzarato 2012, 93).

In order to think about possible interventions that would combat existing and

accelerating divisions of power between space of flows and space of place, it’s

necessary to look at two things. First, the logic under which web-based network

technologies operate, from the perspective of capital; and second, the logic under

which the worker operates in relation to debt.

Consider the worker in current conditions enforced by the ideology of debt. Maurizio

Lazzarato offers a compelling and useful analysis of this figure in his book The

Making of the Indebted Man (2012). He writes about conditions where the ‘laws’ of

market competition are extended to all areas of social life. Health and education, for

7

example, are to become investments made by the individual in his or her individual

capital. The worker is no longer only labour power; he/she is reconceived as personal

capital, making business choices through good or bad ‘investment’ decisions as he or

she moves from job to job. These strategies increase or decrease his or her capital

value. This reconceptualisation of the individual as an entrepreneur-of-the-self

teaches us about a significant shift in the nature of governance of capitalism

(Lazzarato 2012).

The individual entrepreneur-of-the-self works within the realm of free market choices,

such as products and services, life styles, technologies, time, etc. How can one apply

the concept of governance to the free market choices of individual entrepreneurs-of-

the-self? Individuals make their choices in environments made by other forces and in

response to the behaviours of others. They cannot predict or control these powers and

relations. Neoliberal governance is thus exercised at the level of the environment in

which people make decisions. The point is that people mainly think that their

decisions are autonomous. Debt supported by public communication (mostly

advertising and PR) can function as a mechanism of normalisation of people’s desires

and wishes. Brian Holmes described the immersion of one’s personality and its

change into the so-called flexible personality as neoliberalism’s way to interpelate the

individual. The worker is blinded by the mobile technology, flexible working times,

the myth of creativity, and the attached freedom that seems to enable him or her to

live a life and especially work according to his or her personal and personalised life

project standards (Holmes 2002). But the flexible personality is flexible because it

needs to answer to the always-changing precarious life conditions. But here lies the

key: debt designs the individual as the entrepreneur-of-the-self. Since the financial

crisis that started with the dot com bubble burst, capitalism has forced the individual

to take on everything that finance companies and the social state are externalising in

to society. The entrepreneur-of-the-self is not only dependent on the institutions that

should provide him/her with some sort of capital and security, even if it’s on

precarious terms; they are dependent on themselves (Lazzarato 2012, 103). The

‘independence’ and ‘freedom’ that is attached to the situation of the individual is

paradoxical only at the first glance. First, the independence is undergoing

8

a economic colonisation of the Freudian super ego as the “ideal self” can’t be any more the authority that protects the “moral” and values of the society and guarantees for them, but has to protect also and above all the productivity of the individual and guarantee for them! (Lazzarato 2012, 103)

The productivity of the individual becomes the lens through which we see the world.

The flexibility becomes the culture of our actions and the technology enables us to

perform in a time space continuum that is deteritorialised and almost instant.

Marketing Communication and Debt: The Ultimate Social Control

Marketing-based communication shares something fundamental with debt. Both

became naturalised. Together, they form a technology of social control that works

interrelatedly and supports each other.

Debt in relation to marketing-based communication works on two levels. First, it

creates a dynamic of dominance through colonising the mind. Second, it creates a new

dimension of governance—a self-governance—which is constantly reinforced by

advertising and other marketing-based communication.

The logic of debt and the logic of marketing-based communication operate as one;

one supports the other. This process happens on two levels, which will be discussed

below:

a) submission through a specific authority that is paradoxically linked to

freedom, which both derive from the nature of debt-related governance and

marketing-based communication;

b) through the destruction of attention and therefore care.

Considering the first point (a), I will discuss how the logic of submission through

authority is linked to freedom. In his book The Treatise on Liberal Slavery: Analysis

of Subordination, French social psychologist Jean Leon Beauvois (2000) describes the

clear distinction between the premise of behaviour we have rare access to, and the

meaning we attach to behavior, i.e., social and social-psychological circumstances

that affect our actions, and the meaning we attach to our own behaviour (Beauvois

2000, 32–35).

9

We must find again the roots, which have luckily not been completely erased by the endeavors for “the end of ideologies”, and say that a social psychologist should, with the help of ideological analysis of social action, discover the meanings society puts in the place of certain premises. (Beauvois 2000, 35)

Beauvois argues that the processes involved in the everyday explanation of events are more

influenced by the social usefulness of offered explanations than striving for validity, which

would cause people to seek real explanations from the point of view of events’ premises. His

argument is based on the following four points (Beauvois 2000, 35):

1. In our societies, there is a norm of judging or assessing a social norm of internality,

which defines values to explanations that stress the casual weight of the actor (the so-called internal explanations).

2. This social norm of internality is connected with the implementation of democratic liberal authority.

3. Social utility of internal explanations in personalised cognition originates in assimilation of a) evaluation (their worth, their usefulness) and b) psychological diagnostics, referring to these people (i.e. men and women). This very assimilation seems important for the meanings, the democratic liberal authorities’ implementation practices attribute to these events.

4. This usefulness can be put into action without the use of more vast cognitive resources, namely since internal explanations are easier to discuss than external. From the cognitive point of view, the everyday course of events is easy to attribute meanings to, full of social utility, demanded by the democratic liberal authority implementation. These meanings have proven to be efficient cognitive weapons for internalisation of social utility.

The actions’ meanings, which in practice replace the actions’ premises, must comply with

certain socially created norms.

In The Indebted Man, Lazzarato is interested in particular subjectivities that the

indebted man develops. He links these subjectivities to the associated right to

evaluation, moralisation, and temporalities, and the right to evaluation. The essential

point about moralisation—and, clearly debt is a moral burden; a moral obligation that

is socially and culturally reinforced even if most of the debt is not legitimate in the

first place—is that the indebted subject is associated with two kinds of work. Firstly,

there is salaried labour. Secondly, there is the work upon the self: the work that is

needed to create the entrepreneur-of-the-self, the work that is needed to produce a

subject who is willing to give promises and to repay debt. This subject must also be

ready to assume its guilt for being an indebted subject. But more than that, a specific

set of temporalities is produced with indebtedness. The indebted man must be able to

repay (to remember one’s promise). In this process, one has to make one’s behaviour

10

predictable, structured, regular, and calculating. Lazzarato argues that such

temporalities directly negatively influence future resistance, as there has to be a

reproduction of a situation where one reinforces one’s own capacity to repay.

Interestingly, Lazzarato also makes the point that this dynamic creates an erasure of

the memory of past rebellions and collective resistances, which are characterised by

disrupted time and behaviours that are hard to predict. Moreover, the indebted subject

is constantly allowing and openly evaluating others, as seen in individualised

appraisals at work, credit ratings, interviews with those hoping to gain credit, etc.

To reiterate, the indebted (wo)man is an entrepreneur-of-the-self; thus, all social

networks and situations, private or public, are here to be used for the entrepreneurial

life project. The subject is thus in a situation where he or she needs to show that he or

she will be able to repay debt; he or she also has to show the right attitude and assume

individual guilt for any failings. Through these attitudes—through assuming

individual guilt—not only does submission happen but also value is ascribed to the

submission.

Beauvois’s (2000) analysis of several social-psychological experiments demonstrated that an

individual, when put into a certain situation and addressed by authority,1 will submit to this

authority and do what he/she is asked to do. Here, Beauvois divides experimental situations

into two very interesting variations. Though claiming that an individual can succumb to

expectations, which can be contrary to their values, the difference lies in whether their

subordination changes the individual's beliefs they held in regard to the action they are

expected to carry out. Beauvois discovered that an individual who has been granted freedom

will normally rationalise their subordination and change their beliefs. Granting freedom,

furthermore, carries two additional consequences: an individual will be engaged in

subordination, and they will be engaged in subordinating to authority—and not necessarily

the demanded task—while at the same time making their subordination a value (Vodeb

2006).

1In his case, this was symbolic or institutional authority, while most cases dealt with professional-scientific authority.

11

Here it is necessary to understand the logic of submission. Debt is strongly associated with

freedom; therefore, the moral obligation to repay debt, the self-disciplining mode of the

indebted entrepreneur-of-the-self, becomes value. The perception of freedom comes from a

new governance of the mind, which is strongly supported by marketing-based

communication, the flexible personality of the precarious worker, and the resulting role of

the entrepreneur-of-the-self who is ‘free’ to take care of everything that previously the state

took care of (Lazzarato 2012). In addition debt interpelates, as it answers the need to live in

the “constant now” (Rushkoff 2013). The debtor is very active, but he/she is not able to

govern his/her time or to evaluate his/her own behaviors. His or her capacity of autonomous

action is strictly limited.

I will now consider the second point (b) in detail. The first level of connecting marketing-

based communication with the logic of submission through granting freedom is the logic of

‘cool’. Established in the creative advertising revolution in the 1960s, cool is, in principle,

about breaking rules projected onto social norms. As a communication approach, it

addresses the individual and the postmodern mass at the same time. Cool was convenient as

it created distinction and used the obsession consumer culture had for authenticity to sell

through the medium of advertising. Breaking social norms (those that were not difficult to

break) and packaging them into aesthetics, driven by popular slogans, and attractive

products misused advertising’s representational potential that could work as a cultural

critique. And here is the key: cool mostly uses the appearance of cultural critique to create

its momentum. It attaches itself to nothing less than resistance, even revolution, but in reality

is of course not part of it. Instead, it creates a cool culture of pseudo-authenticity through

acts of consumption that work on the principles of cool.2

But here, I am more interested in another dimension, namely attention. Marketing-based

communication works within the political economy of attention. Over the decades, audio-

visual industries have learned how to capture our attention in order to capitalise on it. A

quick look at some advertising methodologies reveals the underlying ideologies as

effectiveness tends to be measured on the basis of attention spans, ‘eye contact’, times of

exposure, etc. While, from the perspective of advertising, attention equals capital and profit,

from a social perspective, attention is related to care. 2 For an extensive analysis on this read Rebelliousness as a condition for the engaged subordination to the advertising authority. (Vodeb 2006)

12

Attention is the reality of individuation in Gilbert Simondon’s sense of the terms: insofar as it is always both psychical and collective. Attention, which is the mental faculty of concentrating on an object, that is, of giving oneself an object, is also the social faculty of taking care of this object—as of another, or as the representative of another, as the object of the other: attention is also the name of civility as it is founded on philia, that is, on socialised libidinal energy. This is why the destruction of attention is both the destruction of the psychical apparatus and the destruction of the social apparatus (formed by collective individuation) to the extent that the later constitutes of system of care, given that to pay attention is also to take care.3

Bernard Steigler relates the destruction of attention through cultural industries is directly

related to the destruction of care. Stiegler extends on Michel Foucault’s concept of

‘Biopower’ to his own concept of ‘Psychopower’ as the next stage of governance. While

biopower, for Stiegler, is a form of care imposed by the state—even for disciplinary

purposes—the new governance, namely psychopower, is based on a state of care-less-ness

that controls hegemonically through psychotechnologies (Stiegler 2012). The purpose of this

power is to control and produce consumers: Stiegler calls it a consuming machine (Stiegler

2012, 132).

According to Stiegler, the destruction of attention happens through the “most brutal and

vulgar techniques” (2012, 42). Besides specific marketing techniques, there is something

else in play, which is connected to this destruction: technologies we use to communicate

work in real time. These technologies are the essential part of marketing-based

communication. What happens now is what matters. Consumers are being trained to crave

for a state of mind that is constantly in a choice mode.

I have already discussed that debt imposes a particular type of self-governance designed

around the profile of the entrepreneur-of-the-self. While care used to be related, to various

degrees, to the state and to the public sphere, care-less-ness is related to the entrepreneurial

project of the self. What matters is our ability to be productive, and, as social networks,

including friends and family, become also business networks, care that is linked to the other

disappears.

13

For the ‘indebted man’, the entrepreneur-of-the-self personal networks become

business networks; work is happening everywhere and all the time. The personal

computer and the mobile phone allow us to be networked at all times, and online

social networks like Facebook become the environment of self-representation and

self-commodification. The main point, however, is that language is the key means of

production. The end product itself is language. The relations these languages are

producing are crucial in reproducing power relations between the cognitive capitalist

and the creative worker. Further, the relations that these languages are producing also

determine the relations between the cognitive capitalist and resistance.

Marketing-based communication cultures—advertising, design, public relations—are

the arm of the operation of cognitive capitalism. The objective of these operations is

to gain control over social networks, that is, the digital networks wherein new models

for the capture and formation of psychic attention as well as collective attention are

revealed: it is a new age of reticulation that is being implemented, and it constitutes a

new stage of what Steigler (2011) described as a process of grammatisation. At this

stage, it is the mechanisms of transindividuation that are grammatised, that is,

formalised, made reproducible, and thus calculable and automatable.

Transindividuation is the way psychic individuations are meta-stabilised as collective

individuation: “…transindividuation is the operation of the fully effective

socialisation of the psychic” (Steigler 2011:41)

The gigantic financial crisis sending tremors all over the world is the disastrous result of the hegemony of the short term of which the destruction of attention is at once effect and cause. … marketing, from the emergence of the programme industries, transforms the psychotechniques of the self and of psychic individuation into industrial psychotechnologies of transindividuation, that is, into psychotechnologies threaded by networks, and as the organisation of an industrial reticulation of transindividuation that short-circuits traditional and institutional social networks. (Stiegler 2012)

Transindividuation is the meta-presence of the individual that is inscribed in

technological networks that, as in the case of Facebook and other social networks,

keeps working. We like and can’t stop liking. If our post is liked, we are indebted to

like back. It is an economy. Why do we congratulate our ‘friends’ for their birthday

on their Facebook wall instead of sending them a private message? And, more

importantly, do we know that we are working when we are on Facebook? What is

digital labour?

14

Digital labour describes a type of labour based on the technologically mediated

exploitation of work that happens mostly through network-based technologies. The

process of capturing creativity began with the transformation of the Internet to a

media environment that transmitted content to consumers, which paid for its content

mostly with the time that consumers were exposed to online advertising. The change

to a web 2.0 model transformed the Internet into a media environment that was not

merely producing content but was providing platforms for content-producer-

consumers. These consumers became digital labourers. The capitalisation happens on

the level of exposing online platform visitors to advertising. But more than that, it

happens on the level of data mining and selling data-related information for which the

source is the very content or online behavior—such as linking, searching,

commenting—that is produced by digital labourers. The shift on the level of

exploitation is in the very relation of the online labourer in relation to capital. The

digital worker does not know he/she is working; neither are they getting paid for their

work. (Scholz ed 2012)

It is important to note that digital networks can act as a tool for emancipation. They

do have a value, but the value is organisational. Tools like Facebook and Twitter have

proven to be helpful in social movements, uprisings, as seen in the Arab Spring or the

uprisings in Maribor, the second biggest city of Slovenia, which ultimately led to the

change of a highly corrupt city government, and the change of the national

government in Slovenia.3 But these digital networks, through the process

grammatisation (Stiegler), systematise, calculate, and organise data that is being used

so as to find new ways to surveil people, predict their behaviours, and capitalise on

them. These digital networks capture attention and channel it in a particular way.

Datasift, for example—a company that is focused on producing state-of-the-art data-

filtering technology and “claims to have around 1,000 clients willing to pay up to

10,000 pounds a month to analyse tweets for them”4—has recently bought two years’

worth of public tweets from Twitter. Certainly, in the tweets that were bought would

be those used in organisational processes for social movements. The Guardian

recently reported that the fifth-largest defence contractor in the world, the

3 For more information on this process see: http://www.memefest.org/en/memeblog/2013/02/a-ghost-is-haunting-slovenia-the-ghost-of-revolution/?showme=1 4 http://www.forbes.com/sites/davidthier/2012/02/29/twitter-to-sell-your-old-tweets/

15

multinational company Raytheon, has secretly developed software named ‘Riot’ that

mines social-network data as a “Google for spies”.

The sophisticated technology demonstrates how the same social networks that helped propel the Arab Spring revolutions can be transformed into a "Google for spies" and tapped as a means of monitoring and control. Using Riot it is possible to gain an entire snapshot of a person's life—their friends, the places they visit charted on a map—in little more than a few clicks of a button. […] photographs users post on social networks sometimes contain latitude and longitude details—automatically embedded by smartphones within "exif header data." Riot pulls out this information, showing not only the photographs posted onto social networks by individuals, but also the location at which the photographs were taken. […] Riot can display on a spider diagram the associations and relationships between individuals online by looking at who they have communicated with over Twitter. It can also mine data from Facebook and sift GPS location information from Foursquare, a mobile phone app used by more than 25 million people to alert friends of their whereabouts. The Foursquare data can be used to display, in graph form, the top 10 places visited by tracked individuals and the times at which they visited them. (Gallagher 2013)

As data that they generate gets used, the entrepreneur-of-the-self needs to exist in the

conditions forced upon them through debt. Debt as an instrument for social control

does not, as discussed, operate only on the logic of someone owing money, but its

cultural, social, and psychological effects produce a particular form of (self)

governance that is tightly connected to marketing communication. It is direct as well

as indirect. Psychopower works on the level of care-less-ness, as meaningful

relations implode and the image becomes necessary capital for the indebted (wo)man

to repay debt. As the state does less and less to guarantee the indebted (wo)man’s

education, health, and employment, the individual, the flexible personality, the

indebted (wo)man need to use technological networks for his/her own promotion. The

process of branding-of-the-self is a substantial part of the indebted (wo)man, the

entrepreneur-of-the-self. It is the unavoidable tool of re-presentation of the self. It is a

meta-process that embodies in the form of an image of flexible identities that are

working simultaneously on various technological platforms. As this need is

fundamental, the industry offers appropriate services. The Company More Friends for

you offers to sell you Facebook friends: one can buy five hundred friends for $29.95!

Their website is a fantastic example of the current perception of necessary behaviour.

Do you like to be popular? Do you want a bunch of people at only a click distance, for broadcasting your messages quickly? Or maybe you just want to impress your friends or family with hundreds of social media contacts? Then Buy Facebook Friends it’s the product for you. Adding new friends on Facebook means you increase your popularity and notoriety in the social media world. It will significantly improve your personal branding and will determine a chain reaction. When someone becomes your friend updates will be shown

16

to all of his friends and this will lead to an increasing interest for your profile. (More fans for you web page)

The company claims to use only so-called ‘white hat’ techniques approved by

Facebook and offers a money-back guarantee. Besides friends, it also offers ‘likes’.

Some companies use robots that create fake accounts and then populate these

accounts with software that automatically likes someone’s profile or someone’s posts:

a total automatisation in the process of grammatisation.

The coercive impact of these marketing-driven processes can of course also be seen in

the sphere of politics. Consider the case of Slovenia; below is a screenshot of a profile

from Maribor’s corrupt ex-mayor, Franc Kangler, who has launched a Facebook

profile “Franc Kangler should again run for mayor”, after he resigned because of a

series of massive, partly violent street protests that spread over the whole country.

People from outside of Slovenia with non-Slovenian names populate his list of

Facebook friends. The dots cover faces of his real Facebook friends. The campaign

was created to capture artificial symbolic capital in the same medium that was used

by the protesters to organise themselves. But for Kangler, the aim is not organise

anything but to create an image. The campaign was created by a local advertising

agency after the mayor created millions of euros of debt for the city of Maribor.

Marketing-based communication penetrates all social relationships, as does debt.

The entrepreneur-of-the-self invests in him/herself to peruse the project of existence.

He/she needs to use all his/her networks also for business purposes, as he/she is often

in a precarious working position and works on a project/contract basis. Facebook

17

works as a gramatisation platform in Siegler’s sense as well. The ways of capturing

and formatting psychic attention are inherently related to the social situation of the

precarious (digital) labourer. The user’s attention is formatted to work towards self-

promotion; this again, on the second level, is formatted to generate direct financial

profit. The social relation is formatted to act reciprocally in the sense of automating a

business transaction. So, a user posts content for which they think will work

according the self-representational strategies in line with their personal brand. There

is a hierarchy of attention that is designed by the Facebook interface as the receiver of

the message will not always be exposed to one’s posts in the same way. In the process

of informal communication, between so-called friends, through various media and

genres on Facebbok, business goals for the entrepreneur-of-the-self need to be

implemented. This was always the case, informally, as the social networks on all

levels partly act as networks for business purposes. But in September 2012 Facebook

launched a new service that helps users promote their posts; this means that the post

will generate more attention since it will be represented differently to one’s friends

through the Facebook interface. This promotional activity is a service that people pay

for. The level at which psychopower works is revealed in the sentence: “your friends

will not know you promoted this”. Marketing legitimises the invisible colonisation of

human relations as a personal-business strategy, for which Facebook offers the tools

for communication. This promotion uses another tool of psychopower—participation

in the ‘like economy’ through the mechanism of ‘likes’, which is also explicitly

promoted in the text on the advertisement below and embedded in the very

technology as a key element. In the beginning of 1990s, the Copy Research Validity

Project’s findings showed that if an audience considers an advertisement likable, this

directly relates to the product’s sales. (Russel at all 2000) A related article in the

Journal for Advertising Research suggested that liking is more important than other

marketing parameters of success, such as recall or clarity of message (reference).

Confirmed by research findings the Advertising industry today understands that

positive feelings towards an advertisement meant an association of such feelings with

the product and the brand. Significantly, at that time, researchers theorised that liking

an advertisement meant paying attention to the advertising and the product/brand.

‘Liking’ abstracts and categorises the emotions and complex thoughts it contains and

it provides a quantification of this complexity. (Gehl 2013) ‘Liking’ works both ways;

18

it promotes the person that likes since it associates the personal brand with potentially

likable data. In return, it provides highly valuable data for marketing strategies as

‘likes’ are monitored. Surveillance plays a crucial role in this and is part of the

psychopower’s logic in the culture of care-less-ness.

In sum, personal branding is a reaction to the logic of the surveillance economy, and, to be fair, the pleasures of surveillance. The personally branded enjoy connecting with one another, engaging in the synopticon, collaborating, and constructing their identities. They see the subjective possibilities of Web 2.0.

But there is more involved than those pleasures; personal branding in Web 2.0 is an explicit attempt by users attempt to use social media to increase their economic capital. It is the attempt to objectify the pleasures of the Web, much as the ideology and technology of Web 2.0 has been deployed by new media capital to objectify Web pleasures. (Gehl 2011)

Marketisation of attention interestingly used to be related to care in official corporate

statements. Facebook described the like button as a way for users to “give positive

feedback and connect with things [they] care about”. (Gehl 2013) Today, it describes

it very differently: “Clicking Like under something you or a friend posts on Facebook

is an easy way to let someone know that you enjoy it, without leaving a comment.”

(Gehl 2013) From commodified care to pleasure through self-branding. Since liking

operates in an attention economy, the very act of liking becomes currency. In order to

balance one’s social network, as all these acts happen publicly; the digital labourers

are indebted to like back and expect to be liked in exchange for their likes. The logic

of debt and marketing communication are inseparable.

19

Commercial colonisation of social relationships has happened for a long time, as

marketing technologies aim to capture any productive energy embedded in human

activities. But we are going through a new and more extreme phase of this process

caused a new level of abstraction, as labour is no longer dominated by a physical

force (power) but by an abstract force, mostly through the culture of debt.

Digital abstraction leads to the virtualisation of the physical act of meeting and the manipulation of things. Financial abstraction leads to the separation of the circulation of money from the production process of value itself. These new levels of abstraction not only concern the labor process- they encompass every space of social life. Digitalisation and financialisation have been transforming the very fabric of the social body, and inducing mutations. The process of production is merging in the infosphere, and the acceleration of productivity is transforming in to an acceleration of information flows. Mental disorders and psychopatologies are symptoms of this dual process of virtual derealisation and acceleration. Digital abstraction and the virtualisation of social communication in general has so deeply transformed the social environment, that the cognitive process of learning, speaking, imagining and memorising is affected. (Berardi 2012)

Social relations are shaped according the instruments that control them. Debt and

marketing communication work in the realm of care-less-ness, because the level of

abstraction imposed on social relations—with the underlying ideology of profit tied to

the actions of the entrepreneur-of-the-self—destroys care. The financial abstraction,

debt, again happens together with the abstraction of communication on the level of

signs. Semio-inflation happens because of the forced increase of productivity in the

sphere of semio-capital, cognitive capitalism’s main domain. Semio-inflation happens

when: “we need more signs, words and information to buy less meaning” (Berardi

20

2012). For Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, precarity starts when the language gets

disconnected from the body (Berardi 2012). Today’s generation learns more language

from machines than from their mothers. The social attention span has its limits. The

ongoing pressure on rising productivity through the semio-sphere destroys care. The

technologies (machines and marketing-based communication approaches) used for the

new governance are inherently designed to produce semio-inflation. And they are

inherently designed to capture attention and destroy care. The marketing-based

service society has also developed another mechanism of capture. Through the

endless invention of services, we become less able to do things, to take care of things.

We lose knowledge and, in turn, we lose civility (Stiegler in Crogan 2010). The

current crisis is therefore also a crisis of knowledge and the effect is the

proletariatisation of the consumer- who does not have knowledge, but has the power

to consume - care- less, while working at the same time.

21

Against Debt/Marketing Communication: Interspatial Counter Practice

The only real form of deep attention is dialogue. —Plato

Submission to debt and marketing communication happens in the process of

psychopower’s governance, which colonizes and destroys attention and with it care.

Societies organize knowledge in relation to attention. Care becomes care-less-ness.

The precarious, indebted entrepreneur-of-the-self has less and less knowledge, but

more and more skills in how to promote or brand him/herself. The flexible (digital)

laborer seeks to end the never ending mode of constant self-representation, but his/her

personal brand needs to continue and is forced to be in this permanent game as

grammatisation works as psychopower only if it never stops.

The pure logic of indebted life designed according to the empty image becomes all-

encompassing in an economy of meaningless-ness. The idea of sustainable

communities seems distant. Relations between people become a medium through

which psychopower operates in the space of flows as well in the space of place.

The space of place and the space of flows needs to be bridged for any attempt towards

sustainment in a society build on solidarity and respect. The city needs to play a

fundamental role in this process.

Thinking of sustainment needs to include the relations of attention/care and

labour/freedom in a way that changes and avoids the logic and the reproduction of the

predatory combined logic of debt and marketing-based communication. Because debt-

driven public communication fuels the neoliberal logic of profit for the 1 percent

through economies of exclusion, we need to think of public communication that

distributes power more equally in relation to economies of distribution. Our

perspective therefore needs to be twofold: first, we need to think about public

communication in relation to sustainable economies in the city; and second, we need

to think about public communication in relation to protest, subversion, and social

change.

22

Key parts of cultural sustainment are relations between communities and economies

that enhance viable social ecologies. Distributed economies, in particular, foster a

regional approach to promote innovation by small- and medium-sized enterprises, as

well as sustainable development of communities. A big advantage of distributed

economies is that they enable entities within the network to work much more with

regional/local natural resources, finances, human capital, knowledge, technology, and

so on. It also makes the entities more flexible to respond to local market needs thus

generating a stronger motivation for local participants. Therefore, distributed

economies become a better reflection of their social environment and are more

effective in improving the quality of life (Johansson 2005).

Distributed economies rely heavily on their networked organisation mediated by

digital technology and as they are manifested in both the physical and digital

environment, they can contribute to a decentralised relation between the physical and

the digital. Here the question of the type of technologies that should be used must be

raised. How do we overcome the corporate and state surveillance mechanisms and

how do we avoid the debt-driven mechanisms of coercion through marketing-based

public communication?

At the level of distributed economies, I mean economies of collaboration, sharing,

participation, and open-bottom-up innovation. This includes peer-to-peer, open

source, gift economies, and crowd-driven (crowd sourcing, crowd funding)

economies. Distributed economies are mainly based on the logic of a) decentralised

power; b) the notion that sharing benefits the person who shares as well as the broader

community; c) collective self-governance; and in many cases d) a common/shared

property (Bauwens 2005; Johansson, 2005). This logic fundamentally shifts the

precarious position of the worker, and it creates an ethic that works in opposition to

the enforced individualism enforced through debt.

This approach can significantly contribute to the social capital of places. They are

enabled through decentralised technologies of the Internet, but their effects go beyond

the digital. Peer-to-peer production, for example, creates value in the forms of ideas,

23

concepts, and knowledge that can be used for production of space and products that

are then become part of a local physical economy. Urban space is fundamentally

connected with local economies; we should examine the relation between

communities, the relation of ‘space of place versus the space of flows’, and how it can

be mediated through public communication, bearing in mind that the indebted

(wo)man is also someone who, because of lacking resources, can consume less and

less. In many cases, he/she can’t consume at all. This is probably the main reason that

new inclusive and collaborative cultures of production and exchange emerge: “we're

seeing barter networks, social currencies, co-operatives, distributed economies.

Networks of providing services for free to others in the expectation people will do the

same for you” (Castells 2012). While this is now happening all over the world, the

strategic link to public communication that would work against the logic of debt

remains missing.

The important step towards empowering communities of sustainment and countering

the coordinated effects of debt and marketing-based communication is that this

approach to communication and representation does not deploy only the symbolic

image of the community but is focused on its operative dimension. It is about the

visualisation of citizenship (Cruz 2012). Things become visible not mainly through

the image but through communicative inter-action and response-ability strengthening

informal cultures, autonomous flows of social relations, dialogue, improvisation, and

transparency.

Urban design that is focused on the development of communities is not approaching

the nature of economies from a perspective that would include the problems of the

gap between space of place and space of flows; neither does this approach consider

economies from the perspective of cultural sustainment. Debt and related marketing

communication need to be considered in any serious urban-design strategy.

The majority of practitioners do not recognise the important relation of institutions of

representation/communication with local economies, besides the usual top-down

marketing approach. Institutions of representation and bottom-up distributed

economies need to be redefined and strategically integrated in the urban-design

process. A participatory process inclusive of local creative communities and official

24

urban-design strategies needs to be based on decentralised cultures of sustainment,

communication, and value creation.

At the level of institutions of representation, I refer to socially responsive

communication. (Vodeb 2008) It is crucial to understand that this type of

communication creates different power relations—more evenly distributed—than

dominant marketing-based communication, since it fundamentally questions and is in

conflict with the dominance of instrumental marketing and social marketing, but at

the same time does not completely exclude commercial value creation. This, I believe,

is very important, because we have to establish a dynamic of both non-institutional,

radical pressure as well as structures of institutional socially responsive

communication. In between, there should be again a relation of conflict coming from

the bottom up.

These approaches create dialogue and/or conditions for dialogue in a public sphere

that is colonised by instrumental commercial communication (Vodeb 2008, 2010).

The approach includes four communication approaches5 working on various

institutional levels: 1) informal, mostly non-institutionalised, bottom-up, critical,

sometimes radical, public interventions, such as culture jamming6; 2) participatory

communication; 3) formal institutional “NGO” driven practices of socially responsive

social communication (that does not, in opposition to ‘social marketing’, treat social

issues as products, and audiences as consumers); 4) socially responsive (commercially

driven) advertising, on one level, is strictly focused on representing companies,

services, and products that are in line with sustainment. On the other level, it connects

the market economy and the gift economy (which is a distributed economy) through

the integration of a communicative surplus/gift in the form of social value of

sustainment.

Socially responsive communication can exist as interspatial communication

frameworks at intersection points in ‘the informational city’ to provide a tie between

5 These four communication approaches need to be researched further and additional approaches need to be developed in the future. 6 I use the term ‘culture jamming’ in a broad sense (i.e., not only related to image production), although I still see it as a semiotic conflict that turns the dominant discourse against itself through various strategies and tactics.

25

digitally mediated networks (or ‘flows’) and ‘the space of place’. The very nature of

distributed economies is to create communities of collaboration, in which they operate

in both the physical and digital dimensions with strong potentials of bridging between

both. Socially responsive communication can also act as an alternative information

and communication system, which is critical for the development of distributed

economies. Although the Internet provides open-source tools that can act as such,

socially responsive communication can create open and participatory physical and

digital public spaces and discourses connected to a particular urban area. It can

facilitate between the different community nodes within the system of local

distributed economies and the wider local community. This connection between the

digital and physical is crucial in order to establish a communication/ social ecology of

sustainment. A coordinated relation between specific representations through socially

responsive communication, distributed economies, and urban design bridges the space

of place and space of flows not only through decentralised distribution of power that

happens in both the virtual and physical space but also through a more synchronous

experience of time.

-----------------------------------

I would like to thank the members of the Memefest Kolektiv for keeping on working on all this wonderful things and the broader Memefest network for creating great possibilities for extradisciplinary research. Big thanks especially to everyone who was involved in the Debt issue of the Festival. I would also like to thank Scott Townsend for the important discussions we had in relation to the city and design.

References:

Andrejevic, Mark (2013) Indebted Interaction: The Wages of the Digital Economy, first published in this publication Arendt, Hannah (1958) The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press Bauwens, Michel (2005). “The political economy of peer production.” Arthur and Marilouise Kroker (red.). http://www.ctheory.net Bauwens, Michel 2006. “The Political Economy of Peer Production.” post-autistic

26

economics review 33-44. http://www.paecon.net/PAEReview/issue37/ Bauwens37.htm Beauvois, Jean Louis (2000) The Treatise on Liberal Slavery: Analysis of Subordination Krt, Ljubljana

Berardi, Franco “Bifo” (2012) The Uprising On Poetry and Finance, Los Angeles: Semiotext(e) Castells, Manuel 2000 The Rise of the Network Society: The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture Volume I (Information Age Series), Malden, Blackwell Cruz, Teddy (2012) Mapping Non- Conformity: Post-Bubble urban Strategies, Visual Culture Reader third ed. Mirzzoef, N. (Ed). Routledge Gallagher Ryan (2013), Software that tracks people on social media created by defence firm, the Guardian, last retrieved (July 20. 2013) http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/feb/10/software-tracks-social-media-defence Gehl Robert W. A History of Like (2013) The New Inquiry. Last retrieved (July 23. 2013) http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/a-history-of-like/ Gehl Robert W (2011) Ladders, samurai and blue collars: Personal branding in Web 2.0, First Monday. Last retrieved (August 2. 2013) http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/3579/3041 Habermas, Jurgen (1989) The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Cambridge: MIT Press Harvey David (2008) The Right to the City, New Left Review http://newleftreview.org/II/53/david-harvey-the-right-to-the-city Holmes Brian (2002) The flexible personality, For a New Cultural Critique, http://eipcp.net/transversal/1106/holmes/en

Johansson A, Kisch P, Mirata M., 2005, Distributed economies- A new engine for innovation, Journal of Cleaner Production 2005; 13;971-9, Elsevier

Lazzarato, Maurizio. 2012. The Making of the Indebted Man. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e) LeFebvre, Henry (1992) The production of space. Blackwell: Oxford Park, Robert On Social Control and Collective Behavior, University of Chicago press 1967

27

Russell I. Haley and Allan L. Baldinger (2000) The ARF Copy Research Validity Project, Journal of Advertising Research, Cambridge. Last retrieved (May 9. 2013) https://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=162739

Rushkoff, Douglass (2013) Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now, Penguin Putnam Inc, New York

Scholz, Trebor (2012) Digital labor reader, Digital Labor: The Internet as Playground and Factory, Routledge: London Slobodian, Quinn and Sterling, Michelle (2013) Sacking Berlin How hipsters, expats, yummies, and smartphones ruined a city, The Baffler No 22 https://www.thebaffler.com/past/sacking_berlin Sorkin, M. (1992) Variations on a Theme Park: The New American City and the End of Public Space. NY: Hill and Wang

Steuer, Eric (2013) How to Buy Friends and Influence People on Facebook, Wired, last retrieved (August 11. 2013) http://www.wired.com/business/2013/04/buy-­‐friends-­‐on-­‐facebook/   Stiegler, Bernard (2012) Care, Telemorphosis, Theory in the Era of Climate Change, Cohen, T. ed., Open Humanities Press Stiegler, Bernard and Rogoff, Irit (2010) Transindividuation http://www.e-flux.com/journal/transindividuation/ Stiegler, Bernard (2001) For a New Critique of Political Economy. Polity Press: Cambridge Vodeb, Oliver (2008) Socially Responsive communication. Ljubljana: Faculty for Social sciences VODEB, Oliver (2006) Changes in the business of interaction. Revista KEPES, aficio 3, no. 2 Vodeb Oliver, Janovic Nikola (2011) Demonstrating Relevance: Response- Ability, Theory, practice and Imagination of Socially Responsive Communication, Ljubljana: Faculty for Social sciences

More fans for you corporate web site: Buy Facebook Friends 1000+ for 29.95$ http://morefansforyou.com/buy-facebook-friends/ , last retrieved (August 15. 2013) Wikipedia, Like button, Facebook help Centre. Last retrieved (August 24. 2013) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Like_button

28

Wodiczko Krzysztof in Foster H, ed. (2009), Discussions in Contemporary Culture, no.1. Strategies of public address: Which media, which publics? New York: Dial Foundation, 41-45 BIO Dr Oliver Vodeb (PhD) is a Slovenian sociologist of communication and design,

researcher, theorist, practitioner and educator, currently living in Australia. As

communication practitioner his work focuses on the public sphere where he uses

mainly visual communication, art and photography to design social futures. As an

educator and researcher he believes that design and communication practices need

to change fundamentally if they want to become relevant in times of radical

uncertainty and environmental degradation. In the past ten years he taught and

researched at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design, University of Ljubljana and at

Queensland College of Art, Griffith University in Brisbane. From 2014 he is an

academic at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne.

Oliver Vodeb is a member of the communication/ theory/arts Memefest Kolektiv

and founder, facilitator, curator and editor of the Memefest Festival of Socially

Responsive Communication and Art. Among others, he is author of the monograph

Socially responsive communication, has co-edited and co-curated the book

Demonstrating Relevance: Response-Ability, Theory, Practice and Imagination of

Socially Responsive communication and has with his communication studio Poper

co directed/authored the biggest self-initiated human rights campaign in Slovenia

for the “Erased” people.