MGD: How does gold-farming re-map and reinforce repressive structures and global inequalities? Does it transcend these in any ways? Does it have the potential to?
UM: Virtual gold, or “gil,” might not be a tangible good like coffee or strawberries, but its exchange in the market is subjected to the same economic forces–which means that yes, there is the potential for this practice to replicate the inequalities inherent in capitalism. At a fundamental level, we are talking about supply and demand here: someone doesn’t have the time to collect all that gil, but they’ve got the money, and someone else has got the time and needs the money. But then we have to look at it as a global trade issue as well: some parts of the world have a “comparative advantage” when it comes to supplying cheap labor — the question of course is why. It is not accidental that the videogame players are sitting in North America and Europe, while most of the gil collectors (they don’t like being called “gold farmers” — it’s a pejorative term to them) are sitting in China or Indonesia. So it is unavoidable to talk about global inequalities when we talk about gold farming. Does the practice have the potential to transcend these inequalities? Maybe so. According to the interviews I’ve seen, some of the gil collectors find it preferable to engage in such practices as opposed to working in actual farms or factories.
MGD: Is the perception of gold-farming as abusive with sweatshop-like conditions over-represented? Can the over-representation of a victimizing narrative be harmful and possibly prevent positive social change?
UM: I think gil collectors should be the ones answering the question of whether they feel exploited or not. I do believe there is a tendency for us in the “First World” to look at an image of, say, a bunch of shirtless guys in a room somewhere in Asia and immediately think “sweatshop” and “oppression.” Which is not to say that we should overlook the ways in which this practice obviously fits into the context of global capitalism, like I said earlier. But I do believe that there is a underlying cyber-Orientalism in the tropes of Chinese Gold Farmers or (Amazon’s) Mechanical Turks. I think this Orientalism serves to conceal the fact that, as I heard Alex Galloway say recently, we are all Gold Farmers. In other words, in this age of user-generated content, we all find ourselves being (sometimes willingly) exploited by Web 2.0 companies. You might derive some benefit from poking your friends around in Facebook, but basically it’s a glorified marketing ponzi scheme where you surrender your personal data and your privacy. It’s just that we find it much easier to think of those being exploited as being Chinese. You and I, on the other hand, could never think of ourselves as being exploited by Google. But at least the folks in China are getting paid!
MGD: On your web site you talk about the paranodal and the network as a site to resist the commodification of the social — how can these ideas be applied to gold farming?
UM: The paranodal is the space between the nodes in a network. This space is not empty. It is populated by multitudes that do not quite conform to the organizing logic of the network. In essence, my concept of the paranodal is just a way to talk about the politics of inclusion and exclusion in networks. All networks exclude. For every node you have paranodes, at once attached to and detached from the network. So if we think of MMORPGs as networks, then gil collectors could indeed be an example of the paranodal, working and existing in the interstices of the network. In a recent alternate reality game I organized for the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival, we played with a gold farming scenario and we contemplated whether there could be Fair Trade gil, just like we have Fair Trade coffee and chocolate–in other words, a system for compensating workers appropriately. But in reality, I don’t think this would work. For one thing, the Chinese government is already getting involved in trying to prevent or limit the exchange of virtual currency for real goods and services. Secondly, my guess is that companies that produce MMORPGs, while they initially tried to ignore and then repress gold farming (by closing the accounts of farmers, for instance), will eventually adopt the sale of virtual goods as part of their business models. They will realize there is a demand and figure out a way to make money form it. What started as a paranodal practice will become mainstream, and more importantly, automated. Some companies like Sony already started doing this, with their Everquest Station Exchange. So I’m not sure gold farming as a paranodal practice has much relevance to resisting the commodification of the social. In the end, however, I am more concerned about *my* paranodal resistance. I would definitely want to work on that before prescribing what someone in China should do.
Here’s a project for FLEFF I just launched. You are all invited to participate!
Can you help a bunch of ghosts wage topological war, one Google Map at a time?
Welcome to Open Space, the Alternate Reality Game hosted by the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival (FLEFF).
An Alternate Reality Game (ARG) is an interactive, multiplayer Web-based exercise in collective storytelling and distributed inquiry. Everyone can play, and participants can shape the actions of the characters and the outcome of the story.
The theme for this year’s FLEFF is Open Space. This ARG is intended to help us explore how exactly space is opened — not just physical space, but conceptual and political space as well.
How the Game Works
Each month or so, we provide a street-view Google Map, a little window into our modern world.
Then we ask our rival teams of dead or imaginary characters (including intellectuals like Marshall McLuhan, revolutionaries like Commander Ramona, or even mythical creatures like Jingwei) to explore the myriad forms and meanings of ‘open space.’
Waging a discursive battle (a high-brow flame war), they fight to defend or liberate the Google Map.
What does it mean to defend or liberate a Google Map? Well, that’s up to you! Go to our website, get more information, and start playing!
The texts and videos of the lectures and keynotes presented during the 4th Inclusiva-net Meeting: P2P Networks and Processes (July 6 through 10, 2009) are now available for download!
My paper, Peerless: The Ethics of P2P Network Disassembly, is available here (o si deseas la versión en español esta aqui). The video of the lecture is also available.
What is often lost in framing the ongoing Net Neutrality debate as one that pits the Left v. the Right is how both sides are often after the same thing: advancing the corporate agenda. The debate is increasingly eroding the notion of Internet users as citizens instead of just consumers. Sadly, this points to the lack of any real political alternatives or ‘open spaces’ around this issue. But let us examine each side’s position more carefully.
Net Neutrality started as a call from idealist cybernauts to keep the government off the Internet (wait… wasn’t the Internet a government invention to begin with?). The goal was to resist any attempt at censorship, taxes or bureaucratic regulations. Information, after all, wanted to be free! This position was popularized by academics and now, in the Obama age when it is cool to trust the government again, has been transformed into the belief that the real threat comes not from government, but from greedy corporations. Thus, we have the FCC issuing not only a defense of Net Neutrality, but hinting of regulations that would ensure transparency and corporate accountability. [Read more →]
I have been invited to be a guest blogger at FLEFF 2010’s Open Space Project (I will be cross-posting the content here in my regular blog). This project asks: “How do we find open spaces in geography, community, melody, materiality, digitality, virtuality? How do we identify, locate, question, create, and imagine open space(s)?” My blog is called Disassembled Spaces. Below is my first post.
Disassembled Spaces: Opening spaces through the disruption of networks
Networks are powerful determinants. They condition the ways we think and interact with the world. I’m not talking about the network just as a material structure, but as a way of thinking. From the design of living spaces to the design of information spaces, the network episteme has emerged as the dominant model for assembling the social, organizing knowledge, and mapping reality.
As with all dominant structures, the network episteme needs be questioned. The network has become a template actualized and enforced by code, by the circuitry of electronic devices. Everything can be connected, we are told. But as Kothari and Metha remind us, total inclusion allows for total exclusion.
In my work, I am interested in exploring the network as a machine for increasing participation while simultaneously widening the gap between ‘rich’ and ‘poor’ nodes. Networks produce inequality. The larger the scale, the more efficient the network will need to be at creating and managing disparity.
So I guess this blog will be about open space as an un-thinking of the digital network. Obstruction, defection and disassembly will be explored as opportunities for transcending the network as technological determinant. This theorizing is in itself ‘open,’ so I hope you join me in this inquiry.
I recently participated in a formal debating exercise as part of my school’s ALANA Conference. We were randomly assigned a position to argue, and I was part of the team debating that we have not seen the end of racism just because we have a black president. Since I believe that to be the case, it was easy to debate that position. Below are my notes from the debate. Interestingly, a big part of the debate ended up being about what constitutes ‘institutional’ racism. We know that racism prevails, even at an institutional level. But does the fact that these institutions officially renounce racism and have mechanisms for the redress of grievances mean that racism is no longer institutional? Does it make a difference?
Resolved: We have seen the end of racism in the United States
with the election of the first President of Color
Ulises Mejias: “No, we have not.”
Rebuttal (4 mins):
Racism is a system of group privilege. In the US, this means that white people have constructed a system where they enjoy certain advantages just by virtue of being white, and where they deny these advantages to non-white people.
The election of a black president has not magically dismantled this system of oppression, which has been developed over the course of centuries. In contrast to my opponents’ genuine but misplaced optimism, I would like to offer some plain facts that suggest racism is not on its way out:
