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What would the world be like, if there would be exemplars of socialist media? And what would those examples be like? Can we think wikipedia as an example of socialist media? Do we have other examples; Tere Vadén and Juha Suoranta attempt to outline the principal characteristics of socialist media.


For starters: the malleability of the information society


The Deleuzian-Castellsian idea that the information society is somehow more ’spectral’, ‘malleable’, or ‘virtual’ than the previous crudely economical societies conceals the question of what types of pluralities and local communities it favors. There is little or no evidence, for instance, that the information society would not have sped up the death of languages or cultures. At the same time, the virtual-spectral level of the networks forgets the question of people. Like Ted Honderich points out, when we look at the life expectancy figures around the globe, ‘the average lifetimes of seventy-eight and forty could suggest to someone overhearing this talk of life-times, but not knowing exactly our subject, that we are concerned with two different species’ (p. 6). The group of people whose human rights are ‘virtual’ is roughly the one that lives a real half-life, to use the term coined by Honderich, in comparison to rich Western people.


The situation is simple: the affluent West has to be protected simply because the late-capitalist happiness-through-commodities can not be universalized. Every place on the planet can not become California. This is why ‘information society’ is simply not a concept in the same category as ‘feudalism’ or ‘capitalism’ (p. 193): as long as the cyber-communists and workers of immaterial production are not wholly spectral, they have to eat food and die a death. Digital technology gives the possibility of removing the scarcity of informational commodities; but this logic does not readily extend to the world of material goods.


The hope brought about by social media lies in the promised post-scarcity and in a non-alienated mode of labour. Even if a cybercommunist utopia is still far away, a change can already be felt inside the hegemonic forms of production. By adopting aspects of social media, the hegemony tries to present itself ‘with a human face’. This imitation is felt on many fronts: schools and universities want to expand their scope by providing access to informal learning using social-media tools, presenting themselves as hubs of social interaction, rather than as formal institutions of power; nation states want to shift attention from traditional industries to competition in terms of design and high-quality experiences; and companies invite their customers to co-create their future products in a process in which innovation itself is supposedly dispersed and equalized (for ‘innovation’ in this new setting, see Nigel Thrift, Re-inventing invention: new tendencies in capitalist commodification).


Slavoj Žižek has his finger on the pulse when he discusses a new form of business, in which ‘no one has to be vile’. It is one crucial step away from the utopia of cybercommunism, and Žižek calls this new ideal of capitalism with a human face, ‘liberal communism’:


These are the rules of the new nomadic, frictionless capitalism, geared toward the cultural industry:



1. You shall give everything away free (free access, no copyright); just charge for the additional services, which will make you rich.

2. You shall change the world, not just sell things.

3. You shall be sharing, aware of social responsibility.

4. You shall be creative: focus on design, new technologies and science.

5. You shall tell all: have no secrets, endorse and practice the cult of transparency and the free flow of information; all humanity should collaborate and interact.

6. You shall not work: have no fixed 9 to 5 job, but engage in smart, dynamic, flexible communication.

7. You shall return to school: engage in permanent education.

8. You shall act as an enzyme: work not only for the market, but trigger new forms of social collaboration.

9. You shall die poor: return your wealth to those who need it, since you have more than you can ever spend.

10. You shall be the state: companies should be in partnership with the state.


This is all well and good, as far as it goes. But the liberal communist economy conveniently forgets the essential structural conditions of its own existence. For Bill Gates to give huge sums from his fortune to charity , he first had to collect it using ruthless monopolistic practices. Liberal communism can work only by masking the structural (economic, social and political) violence on which its outsourced practices are based.


Let us proceed by attempting a hypothesis: the paradigmatic cases of ‘liberal communism’ such as the ’social web’ are precisely the places where the structural bias may be discerned. Since the free/open-source software movement is often presented as the ideal of the new forms of intellectual labour, let us consider the crown jewel of that movement, the GNU/Linux operating system. Linux is available free for anyone to use, modify and redistribute on the net. Nevertheless, the structures of inequality quickly kick in. Most Linux-kernel developers are male and relatively young. Moreover, most of them come from North America or Europe. For instance, in the case of Debian, the developers have typically received academic education, and the number of PhD’s is high – over 10%. The geopolitical bias is not just a fossil created by the initiation of the projects. During the 15 years or so that these projects have been in progress, only minor change has occurred. Indeed, there is as much reason to think that the economic divisions in the real world are exaggerated in the digital world as to believe that digital technology could bridge these gaps. If we consider that, during the year from summer 2005 to summer 2006, the Linux kernel took in more code from the .mil (US military) domain than from most third world countries, we instantly get the feeling of the old colonialism resurfacing in new guises.


Or let us look at Wikipedia. If we like Habermasian communicative rationality, the Neutral Point of View principle is nice, but it is corrosive with regards to certain types of communities (say, religious ones). In order for wikipedia to work, it needs a certain critical mass. The smaller the (linguistic) community or the group with a common rationality, the slighter the chances of a vibrant Wikipedia. Furthermore, critical mass means normalization, which in itself works against certain types of communal identities. From the user’s point of view, the fact that the English Wikipedia is so much better than, say, the Finnish one, provides an additional pull towards the hegemonic language and its values.


These two small examples should serve to indicate that the liberal communist utopia is by no means neutral with regards to local identities. The possibilities for small linguistic and cultural areas like Finland look bleak, notwithstanding its digital opportunities. What is ‘Finnish’ in, say, Nokia mobile phones? Precious little. Again, even the design of the phones is recycled global style, with minor improvements, and production is outsourced to the point where nobody wants to know about the toxic trail leading to illegal mines in Nigeria. If the promise of ‘liberal communism’ is so empty in the case of Finland, what can it be like in other, equally small, but less wealthy cultural areas?


This also means that attempts to understand intellectual labour or the social web cannot rely exclusively on the tools created in the heart of Europe. The post-post-isms springing from Italy or France have only so much purchase in a landscape that is only now entering the phase that cultural critics like Adorno described in their classic postwar writings. In Finland, the first generation that likes to shop, and which has never really worried about spending money and not saving it, is only now emerging. Likewise, a mass public for soap operas is a very recent phenomenon. Consequently, the critical analysis of a mass society is becoming topical at the same moment when it is also being left behind. If this non-synchronicity is true of such a pseudo-European area as Finland, what can be said of other non-European or non-Westerns places? If there are histories of the world that are not the history of Europe, then we also need multiple theories of the information society.


Social, socialized, socialist media


The term ’social media’ can be taken to mean the online platforms and software people use in order to collaborate, share experiences, views, and so on, and to create their social identity. Correspondingly, ’socialized media’ would mean, in this context, that such tools are owned, maintained and managed by the community of users itself. Examples of this kind of self-management are many inside the hacker community. There are even cases of actively socializing previously private media, like the 3D-animation software Blender.


But are these means enough to enhance peoples’ skills and opportunities in order that they participate in the digitalized world, and are in dialogue with each other by using such social media? And, more importantly, are these means themselves digital? It would not be hard to believe the contention that dialogue both in its traditional forms and in the form of social media, takes us only to the gates of substantial democracy. Maybe we must start to organize strategies to take the hacker ideology of Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) to its next logical step, that of ’socialist media’ where ’socialist’ refers to shared ownership, use and administration of a given media. As Žižek puts it in his analysis of ‘cybercommunism’:



Is there not also an explosive potential for capitalism itself in the world wide web? Is not the lesson of the Microsoft monopoly precisely the Leninist one: instead of fighting its monopoly through the state apparatus (recall the court-ordered split of the Microsoft corporation), would it not be more ‘logical’ just to socialize it, rendering it freely accessible? Today one is thus tempted to paraphrase Lenin’s well-known motto, ‘Socialism = electrification + the power of the soviets’: ‘Socialism = free access to internet + the power of the soviets.’


What would the world be like, if there would be exemplars of socialist media? And what would those examples be like? Can we think of wikipedia as an example of socialist media? Do we have other examples? To answer this question, we need first to answer the following one: What are the definitive presumptions and characteristics of socialist media?


Besides the obvious technological infrastructure (servers, computers, and other devices) which is needed in organizing and using social media, basic energy – electricity, food – is rudimentary. But the crucial question is, who owns and provides energy? The sad fact is that a majority of the energy resources are owned by private international corporations. These are in many ways key players in the arena of international politics directing foreign policies, and making decisions about war and peace. In this sense ’social’ and ‘political’ still rules the ‘digital’, for -imitating Žižek’s ‘Leninist’ formula- free access to Internet still demands electrical supply.


Without the logical step of being self-reliant when it comes to electricity, all efforts and activity towards open access is freedom without freedom. For without this ultimate step to overcome private ownership of material resources the ideology of FOSS remains yet another one-issue social movement without political consequences (as Torvalds is very keen to emphasize).


The physical energy – electricity – needed for running social media sites is one condition. Another is the less tangible energy and free time needed from individuals in order to contribute. The Northern and Western bias in most social media should direct our attention to the different possibilities that present themselves to individuals in different socio-economic settings. Also, the fact that cases like Blender and Wikipedia need substantial donations points to the importance of relative affluence. Linus Torvalds was at the time of starting the Linux-project a student in the University of Helsinki, and consequently enjoyed the common benefits of the Finnish welfare state, including tuition-free access to the university and its resources. In addition, the Linux code was initially hosted by the Finnish University Network (FUNET). All of this points to the fact that non-alienated knowledge work in the Internet does seem to need a certain basis of affluence before it takes off. However, it seems that often competences built in the free and public educational system will primarily go to the use of corporations like Nokia.


What is needed, consequently, is a counter-move to free people’s minds and intellectual resources from wage-slavery. Indeed, the step from a media constrained by liberal communism to socialist media needs not only basic welfare but also actual control of life-goals and non-physical needs. Paradoxically, or not, the road to the latter runs through the collective or common control of the production of basic welfare (including goods like electricity). Welfare strategies like a social wage, a citizenship income, or unconditional basic income would pave the way to socialist media.


This emphasis on a view ‘from below’ reminds one of Marx’s anecdote about one unhappy Mr. Peel, who moved from England to Australia along with 50,000 in currency and 3,000 workers. Unfortunately, Mr. Peel didn’t take into account the fact that what he could carry with him in the Colonies was ‘property in money, means of subsistence, machines, and other means of production’ but not as their correlative the wage-worker who is ready to sell him- or herself of his or her own free-will. In Marx words Mr. Peel didn’t understand that ‘capital is not a thing, but a social relation between persons’. As the wage-workers who discovered their freedom in the seemingly boundless land of West Australia, we are now witnessing more and more people discovering their freedom in the borderlands of information technologies.


In sum, we get the equation ’socialist media = basic welfare + common servers + the power of the soviets’. Of course, the order of the ingredients or the components in the formula can be different, in other words, there can be different orders of the free and open world without scarcity (i.e. basic welfare = electricity + the power of the soviets + socialist media).


An alternative way of conceptualizing the transition from social to socialist media is to think about the freedoms involved (see the path-breaking work on “Selbstentfaltung” by Project Oekonux and Stefan Merten) . The read/only-culture proposed by ultra-commoditized and mechanized life-styles can be seen both from the perspective of media and education. In one extreme, a totalitarian state like Plato’s utopia in The Republic, will want to control education, reserving true knowledge for the philosopher-kings and telling a ‘royal lie’ to the working classes in order to keep them at bay. Plato would have known exactly why the party and movement calling for the abolition of copyright is called the Pirate Party (for instance, the Piratpartiet in Sweden). This closed-source approach is strictly correlative with the concept of the media as a private profit-making business where information has an exchange value. As we move towards more free modes of media and education, we first encounter social media and education as entrepreneurship, where the subjects are empowered by active participation in economically constrained activities. This is the first order of freedom where you get free speech inside the confines of formal freedom: you are free in so far as you do not rock the boat. Strangely enough, the road to more freedom goes through realizing, that the economic constraints of liberal, multicultural capitalism are not nearly strict enough. Only when the ghost of exchange value is stripped off, the persistent and non-symbolic use-value or value in itself is revealed. In terms of media, this means Linux or Wikipedia, that do not have any exchange value, but a tremendous utility. But even that is not enough in terms of taking economics seriously: the oikos that humanity is facing is the planet.


Thus the last two modes of freedom are linked to an emergence of transformations in the modes of production, governance and property. These modes of production will ‘produce use-value through the free cooperation of producers who have access to distributed capital’: this is called ‘the P2P production mode’ which differs from the capitalist ‘anything for-profit standard’, or from public production by state-owned enterprises, a common feature of welfare states. The product and purpose of the P2P production mode is not to produce useless commodities or ‘exchange value for a market, but use-value for a community of users’. The changes will also be ‘governed by the community of producers themselves, and not by market allocation or corporate hierarchy: this is the P2P governance mode, or third mode of governance’. In addition they ‘make use-value freely accessible on a universal basis, through new common property regimes. This is its distribution or “peer property mode”: a “third mode of ownership”, different from private property or public (state) property’.


Especially the last two modes of freedom bring us to the fundamental epistemological turn. The first has to do with radical openness in the very media people use. It allows or demands of them to participate and collaborate with each other. And it also allows them to actually see how knowledge is constructed – as in Wikipedia and other wikis – where creation and negotiation processes can be tracked by pushing the ‘history’ and ‘discussion’ buttons. The second idea, that of reflective uncertainty, is linked to this process: the ability to track these changes leads to a world in which people begin to take for granted that many areas of human conduct and knowledge are based on processes of negotiations both in virtual and other spaces (a funny example of how wikiliteracy spills over to other areas are the ‘citation needed’ stickers). The idea of reflective uncertainty has a family resemblance with the ‘learning as participation’ metaphor that emphasizes participation in various cultural practices and shared learning activities. In this metaphor, knowledge and learning are situated and created in people’s everyday life, and as part of their socio-cultural context which existentially includes the material means of subsistence or production.

Special issue: social web
Tags: capitalism, Juha Suoranta, open access, open infrastuctures, Plato, software, Tere Vadén

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