a thaumaturgical compendium

I had a dream this weekend of Utopia. But there is a reason for this.

This blog is a series of non-sequiturs, but in order to cushion the move from cuttlefish and conference sponsorship to pre-Marxist socialism, I should note that I spent most of Saturday engrossed in Stoppard’s entire Coast of Utopia trilogy. It was an excellent play, and I’m really glad to have seen it all at once rather than in three parts. I was, as I suspect many might be, a bit intimidated, not only by the idea of 12-hours of theater, but by the content of the play. I know a little about the development of socialism among the Russian intelligentsia, and had even run across Isiah Berlin’s Russian Thinkers at one point in graduate school, in support of a political agency seminar led by Lavaque-Monty. I checked out a copy of the book in order to review before the play, but never got round to looking at it. Our host yesterday noted that the New York Times had provided a reading list for the play (including the Berlin book), but that Stoppard had suggested that it was unnecessary to study in preparation, which was luckily the case.

I won’t review, because I am rarely very good at that. It was, however, an excellent production. The plays were well written, though the third seemed a bit more harried than the first two. The acting was generally excellent. Ethan Hawke got on my nerves—I am sure that was why he was cast in the role—and tripped on the lines at one point, but I’m sure it has to be a bit harrowing to do three different shows in a day. Tom Stoppard was in the audience (as were some familiar faces, including Bill Bradley, Nathan Lane, and Jane Krakowski), and was dragged on stage to take a bow at the curtain call. The staging was breathtaking, and director Jack O’Brian deserves special credit for making this an astoundingly engaging performance, making use of lighting, a stage turntable, sets, sounds, and odors to draw the audience into the dialogue. In all, a great experience.

The plays engaged a number of themes, most pointedly the tension between lived existence and utopian idealism. I have always been a fan of utopias, because I think they are the best way of understanding what people’s assumptions are. If you ask people what the intention is, they tend to mumble something about summum bonum and wave their hands around a bit. The purpose of utopia is as a tool for understanding assumptions. Note that I say above that I have always liked utopias, in the plural. My utopia is one of a large number of city states, each different enough to provide for something satisfying a fairly large number proportion of humanity. I like the play because it brings Herzen back to the forefront, and with him an alternative to Marx’s univeralizing dialectic that insisted on a global capitalism followed by an eventual global socialism. Herzen was one of a group of what were sometimes called utopian socialists (which Marx countered with “scientific socialism”), which drew on a number of thinkers.

Charles Fourier is hardly a footnote in the play proper, invoked as a defender of non-competition and free sex. Fourier had some unusual social ideas, including the creation of “phalanxes” of 1620 people who would live in Grand Hotels and collaborate. As a practical matter, Fourier followers had a pretty rough time of establishing utopian settlements in the US, but the ideas continue to resonate. Especially now, as people are trying to understand how open source and distributed collaboration works, they find little help from traditional economic theory. It is the socialists, especially those outside of the strictly Marxist tradition, who provide starting points for such understanding.

Marxism is very much a theory of the industrial revolution. Even now, it is harder to think of the proletariat as a defined class. The “infernal machines” required certain industrial forms of organization. But those forms are disappearing slowly from many institutions as we move to new forms of distributed production. The idea of a “creative class” has recently emerged, but does it really have the marking of a class, or of a cultural movement?

The Lincoln Center Theater Review took advantage of the trilogy to interview Margaret Atwood on the idea of utopias. I just recently read (and assigned to part of one of my classes) Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, and so I was particularly interested in her take. Unfortunately, she suggests that individualism is antithetical to utopian societies. To a certain degree this is true, of course. Community requires certain limits on individual action. But for me, a utopian society is one in which difference is celebrated. The bounds of that difference are no more than that required to ensure the well-being of others in the society.

Herzen suggests this, both in the play and in real life. Although at several points the play pokes fun at Herzen’s bourgeois lifestyle, it was not antithetical, in his mind, to socialism. While the image of Marx working away in the British Library might seem somewhat hypocritical for a celebrant of the proletariat, since Herzen never suggested that a class-based revolution was a necessary step toward utopia, there is nothing inherently wrong with a lavish chandelier or servants. You can be against slavery, and still have staff. Indeed, the rallying cry for Herzen throughout is in memory of the Decemberists, and the idea of revolution “from above” is not only a possibility, but a necessity. Herzen, after all, was the person who harnessed the means of communication for socialist thought in Europe, even when that socialist thought took directions that he would ultimately not approve of.

Marx was a technological determinist of sorts, and I suspect Hertzen would be as well. What happens in a period of abundance, during a time in which alienating work is either eliminated, or effectively eliminated? Is it the case that the hiding of the underclass—the ignored worker in the US or abroad that still provides for our material well-being—is always an act of unconsciousness? I wonder if HG Wells got it wrong. The idea of the technological cooperative—Linux and Wikipedia standing as clear examples here—puts the constructive work in the hands of the Eloi and not the Morlocks. That is, in order to collaborate, basic levels of comfort and sustenance need to be achieved. Over the last century, this basic level has been achieved by a larger and larger number. While that number remains very small when compared to the society as a whole, it may be that the revolution comes not from the worker, but from the digerati.

It’s not too late to become a sponsor of the Internet Research conference in Vancouver this year. On my about page, I note that I will sometimes promote organizations I’m involved in, and this is one of those cases. The IR conference is a great opportunity to make clear your commitment to social research on the internet, and help encourage new ideas and research. At present, a number of organizations are sponsors, including the Annenberg Center, Simon Fraser University, Microsoft Research, my old friends at the University of Washington’s Department of Communication, and the creator of Second Life, Linden Lab.

If you would like to add the name of your own organization to the august examples above, please drop me a note at 06 at halavais.net. There are opportunities to sponsor a range of activities—lunches, drinks, workshops, etc. and I can give you some of the basics or put you in touch with those who can help further.

When I was a grad student, a group of faculty and grads talked about doing an animal communication class. Despite none of us knowing anything about the subjects, we figured we would each take a week and present some of the research and ideas relating to communication within the species. There were some obvious choices: bird calls, orangutans, dolphins. My choice was the cuttlefish. It amazes me that more people are not as fascinated by cuttlefish as I am: not as lunch or as a beak sharpening implement, but as a highly communicative and equally unusual creature. So, I was pleased to see that Google Video has this Nova special on cuttlefish available on the web.

Anthony Curtis, a journalism prof at UNC, writes a bit about his experience of teaching a journalism class in Second Life. It’s an interesting report. Now that this semester is winding to a close, I’m thinking in more detail about the Fall course in Second Life, and how to organize it to minimize the learning curve. I’ll probably be leading students through some fairly guided activities to begin with, and coopting the most able students to be mentors. It seems like the best approach.

From Curtis’s description:

To carry out the project, students enthusiastically climbed what for some of them was a steep learning curve into the SL world. After a period of exploring for familiarization, they individually identified possible article coverage of several unusual and interesting areas of social, cultural, political and commercial life. They proceeded to locate reporting resources including SL residents to interview, places to investigate, and sites to photograph.

I suppose I have to be a bit circumspect about commenting on local New York City politics, given that I am a relatively recent arrival in the city. But I am completely behind Bloomberg’s announced congestion pricing for downtown Manhattan. Anything that will reduce the smog and traffic downtown is a good thing.

There are plenty of arguments against the fee. To be honest, most of the traffic I see consists of a mix of yellow cabs and towncars, both which would be exempt from the fee. But the move to more hybrid cabs makes this at least a bit better. And after all, these are forms of quasi-public transportation. One of the major complaints is that this amounts to a regressive tax, making it only possible to drive in New York if you are rich. I really don’t know many people who can afford to drive in New York if they aren’t already rich—parking is already so difficult that it doesn’t make much sense. I think there is something to the argument, but not much. Even the very wealthy are generally smart enough not to keep cars in the city.

I also think they should exempt low-emissions vehicles from the fee. This may already be part of the plan, but I haven’t seen anything about it. (There’s a nice discussion over on WorldChanging NYC.) If you are driving an electric or natural-gas powered vehicle, this should be encouraged. And for those hybrids that have significantly reduced emissions, I think there should also be an exemption or reduction in fee.

Finally, no word in this article about the proposed opening of the East River to seaplane traffic. I really hope they allow for this, as it provides another route into and out of the city. I can absolutely see a healthy (although not necessarily for the environment) commuter plane business operating out of the East River.

Ah, I have been working on something like this (more news later), but it looks like Great Pockets has beat me to it. Nice use of Flash here—not something I am usually wont to admit.

Kevin Warwick is giving a talk entitled “Upgrading Humans: Why Not?” this Monday at 7 PST in the main auditorium on Uvvy Island in Second Life. I’ve always been a fan of many of the transhumanists. I tend to be too much an adherent of the appropriate use of technology to fit in well with the that crowd: too much the humanist to make a good transhumanist. Nonetheless, it seems every year I seem more a tech promoter and less a critic.

There is some discussion in several circles, for example, now critical of user-created media. Trebor others have been discussing this a bit on the iDC list recently. I find it very difficult to associate the work of blogs, Flickr, and YouTube with labor, despite the fact that it is making the systems’ owners collectively very rich, very quickly. I won’t sketch out a complete argument, because I don’t have one, but I’ll start with a provocation:

Marx would have dug whuffie.

I asked my class a few weeks ago what they would do if they won $10 million in the lottery (the amount most say would be necessary to live comfortably). How they would fill their days. (The course is related to the development of User-Created Media.) Of course, I suspect the reality is that you would invest the money, but the question was what you would do with your time. I noted that smoking marijuana all day and playing X-box was a perfectly acceptable response, and a few people in the class agreed that this would be their aim. Most, however, suggested that they would make movies, do voiceovers for cartoons, take up photography more actively, teach in underprivileged areas, become an interior decorator, or flip real estate (not merely speculating, but creatively reforming).

After work, we still work, we just don’t have to any more. I think a lot of the contributions to open source projects, and a lot of the videos of people on YouTube, reflect the dawning of a new kind of work for the privileged classes. I think Google reflects one vision of that workers utopia, though there are others. I also think that the cult of celebrity that many have seen as disturbing among the youth suggests a post-career view of what work and money mean. Kids would rather be famous than rich, because they already know they will be rich. And some of them are right to make that assumption.

It’s a natural outgrowth of the global hollowing out of the middle-class. Many people don’t have to work. Or, rather, their work doesn’t feel much like work. It is dependent on their ability to be creative, and the means of that production is fairly unalienable. It’s not the end of capitalism—it’s all built on a working class that is more shrouded from its role in society than ever before. But how strange it would be if the revolution came not from below, but trickled down.