Thesis 6 of 95: Clearing the Human Throat from Abstractions

Part of the blogging project about the 95 theses of the Cluetrain Manifesto. All posts of the project are found here.

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

The Internet is enabling conversations among human beings that were simply not possible in the era of mass media.

Now, in earlier posts, I think I've made this point repeatedly (one might say it IS my point), but this is a way more straight forward way of saying it. I don't think I need to be long-winded here. It might not be as intellectually stimulating, but it's good to get less abstract and more concrete sometimes. What I mean with the "Conversational Markets" are exactly this: a new form of value exchange not possible in the era of mass media.

Let me take some time and define all the interpretations of the Cluetrain terms I've used thus far:

Markets/Conversation: Exchange of value between humans (on a societal level, not individually).
Conversational Markets: A value exchange between humans that is emerging out of the capitalist market. Values are exchanged on the Internet and the possibilities it has given us. 
The Human Voice: The specific "structured structure" of a market. The exchange of value between humans has a "felt exchange of humanity" to it, it "sounds human". People exchanging the value  that the "Human Voice"-structure recognizes as legitimate means those people recognize each-other as humans. 

The Internet is a big part of this. Though the old is not ancient yet, and we still have to deal with the real political, social and economic problems of it, but that's not a reason to ignore the new. The Internet is destroying the media and communication monopolies necessary for the old market of capitalism, and is giving the ordinary people, of almost any economic class, access to exchange in a new market, of "conversation". 

Media, arts, journalism and debate is now in the reach of most people, through the various new possibilities of the Internet. It's not perfect, and sometimes it's barely even decent, but it's a thing. Realizing it's thing-ness means taking responsibility and control over it. As of now, I'm not sure this new exchange of value is really ready to go face-to-face with the old, but I'm hoping it will at least do some serious damage.

See you soon, thesis 7. 

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

Thesis 5 of 95: Hear the Human

Part of the blogging project about the 95 theses of the Cluetrain Manifesto 

Language is as old as consciousness, language is practical consciousness that exists also for other men, and for that reason alone it really exists for me personally as well; language, like consciousness, only arises from the need, the necessity, of intercourse with other men. The German Ideology - Marx, Karl

To say that we "recognize each other as such this voice" is to say that we recognize each-other from the legitimized and internalized form of value exchange between humans, The Conversation. Those who can enter into this Conversation can be legitimized as humans through it. 

Depending on the form of the Conversation, some people are excluded, and included in this voice. Not everyone can participate, and not everyone can make the Human Voice. For example, in capitalism, those who are physically or socially unable to conform to the value system of socially necessary labor hours get dehumanized and deprived from speaking in public (in the educational, economic, religious, social, political institutions), they are seen as parasites to get rid of or weak people to take care of.

Language, or practical consciousness, can be seen as the Human Voice as such, and the "intercourse with other men" is the Conversation. The particular form of "intercourse with other men" is historically and socially constituted. 

The Human Voice of Capitalism, however is not static and unchangeable, even though its "open, natural, uncontrived" character leads us to perceive it in this way. There is, as, Bourdieu (1977) puts it, a "struggle for the power to impose the legitimate mode of thought and expression", or the legitimate form of the Conversation, and the "sound of the Human Voice". This is due to its characteristic as an antagonistic class society. There are people don't feel like that "language exists" for them and wants to change it. 

The Conversational Market is changing the way people recognize each-other as human beings. "Making the Human Voice" of this market is giving us an opportunity to start recognizing each other more and better. We just have to be aware that we are making it. 

See you soon, Thesis 6. 

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

Thesis 4 of 95: It talks like an angel, but I got wise

Part of the blogging project about the 95 theses of the Cluetrain Manifesto 

In the last post, I defined the "Human Voice" as "the felt exchange of humanity in an exchange of value between humans." This felt exchange of something that is "us", when we exchange things which are not "us" as such, but products of ourselves that have been frozen in time as a "thing of value" which can now be exchanged for another "thing of value", created by somebody else.

That the Human Voice exists, that its part of a Conversation  a Market, or a Conversational Market is no way necessitating it as virtuous. It can sometimes be destructive. 

Whether delivering information, opinions, perspectives, dissenting arguments or humorous asides, the human voice is typically open, natural, uncontrived. 

Now, this is a good thing, right? The Human Voice being "open, natural, uncontrived", aren't those all words which sound good? The problem, I think, isn't how the voice is saying it, it is what is said. When we face these "structured structures that are pre-disposed to structure structures", what Bourdieu calls "The Habitus", we learn to "refuse what is anyway refused and to love the inevitable". 

An thus, the Human Voice might tell us to work until our bodies are useless, to buy until our pockets are empty, to dull ourselves down until we don't feel much of anything, and that the Human Voice is all there is, and we will accept our faith as if it was an independent choice we made.

The Human Voice in Capitalism feels open, natural and uncontrived. It's specific categories and constructs that limit human freedom and happiness are posed as Things as They Are, Were, and Will Be. It makes you feel as if its "open", "uncontrived" in that it talks as if it were the champion of free choice. The thought of something else - a new way of making the world, the Human Voice, is shunned because Listen To The Sound Of The Voice We Made Last Time Isn't It Great I Totally Want To Do That Again! When you actually listen to the words, rather than the sound, though, they make less sense. You have to inquire if you want to understand.

I've been running with this idea of a Conversational Market, appearing as a change in the Human Voice. A market were the values are exchanged in the way Mauss described, not in the commodity form, but in the form of social interaction which groups and individuals engage in. The creation of the Human Voice in this market is the creation of structured structures (filesharing websites, social media websites, new technologies, new personalities, new politics and positions of power) which are structuring structures (filesharers, tweeters, smartphones, @dril, Occupiers and Mark Zuckerberg). 

Have we created this new Human Voice well? Well, we may have made some mistakes, but the more we are aware that we are making Human Voice, the more power we have to experiment with it.
------------------------

Thesis 3 of 95: Make the World

Part of the blogging project about the 95 theses of the Cluetrain Manifesto 

To change the world, one has to change the ways of making the world, that is, the vision of the world and the practical operations by which groups are produced and reproduced.- In Other Words - Bourdieu, Pierre

To produce and to reproduce.

Conversations among human beings sound human. They are conducted in a human voice.

Earlier, I have both said that markets are conversations, and that conversations are becoming markets. Weird, huh? Now, I want to get all up in this Human Voice business. Conversations among humans, in whatever form, are the product of humans, and (as Mauss will tell you), humans tend to perceive products they made as a part of themselves, of their "humanity", if you will*. In this sense I understand the "human voice", the thing in the conversations (or markets) which "sounds human", as the felt exchange of humanity in an exchange of value between humans.

The human voice is produced, and is reproduced. It is a structured structure predisposed to function as a structuring structure, (that's right I'm getting my Bourdieu game on). Now, the conversations which create "The Human Voice" is nothing but a way of making the world. If Bourdieu is right, then we can change that way of making the world, or the human voice. Whichever thing suits you the best.

Let me explain what is meant by a "structured structure predisposed to function as a structuring structure". For this, I will borrowsteal Glen Whelan's example about the individual driver and the side of the road they're driving on. An example of a "structured structure" is road signs, traffic lights and the general flow of traffic. This "structured structure" predisposes the individual driver to (usually) drive on one side of the road (in Sweden its the right), because else they don't get any information, and risk crashing head-on into other drivers, and so  the (unthinking) individual becomes a "structuring structure". The structuring structures tend to reproduce the structured structures they derive from.

The Human Voice is structuring the Humans which are structuring the Human Voice. In the market of capitalism, the structured structure that is the Human Voice is first and foremost labor, or "socially necessary labor hours" (a point which I will most likely elaborate in the future), commodities, government, capital and the usual suspects. The structure structures us to act and make choices that tend to structure it, that is, we are products of it, we produce it and it reproduces us, to reproduce it again.

The market of conversation is emerging in this context. We are meant to speak in this Tone ( here comes the "conducted in a human voice" part). Although the market of conversation, as opposed to commodities, is in the process of changing this Tone, the Conversational market is maybe only a slight change of accent thus far. Maybe the consonants are starting to sound softer, maybe the vowels are dragging on a bit longer. The structured structure that I call Conversational Markets that is starting to emerge, is being structured by agents who have been structured by the capitalist structure (woah, did u get that?).

That is, the new way of exchanging value still largely appears as secondary and dependent no the value exchange of capitalism, and emerges out if it. It seems, though, to be quickly structuring us into being new forms of embodied structure makers, which are increasingly less fit to reproduce the old structure of capitalism.

It's getting a bit late for me to talk of these new Structures that are weakening the old, but I'm fairly sure you can imagine this for yourself..

Pheeeew. So what do we have here? What does it all lead up to? Well. I'd like to restate the quote in the beginning in terms we've been using on this journey thus far:

To change the Human Voice, one has to change the ways of making the Human Voice that is, the Sound of the Human Voice and the practical operations by which Conversations/Markets are produced and reproduced.

Got it? I hope so.

See you soon, thesis 4.
------------------------------
You can find the rest of the posts in this project over here.
------------------------------
*One of the most interesting instances of this is found in Anna Megis essay "Food as a cultural construction" about the Hua people, found in Food and Culture: A Reader.

Thesis 2 of 95: Talk To Me

Part of the blogging project about the 95 theses of the Cluetrain Manifesto

(first post)

"You've been chosen as an extra in the movie adaptation of the sequel to your life."

Sometimes, I feel like this line from this Pavement song called "Shady Lane". Like the representation of "me" in the public eye is not "me", and whatever it is that seems to have replaced the real "me" in the public eye has more power to define me then I have on my own.

And I'm sure, what with all the privileges society has granted me, that some have it way worse.

It's easy, and frankly a bit boring to speak of how you "only see people as individuals". Besides, seeing everyone as "individuals" is usually the act of removing your prejudices from groups of people to all of mankind, asserting things about their "nature" which are just as destructive as asserting the same things about groups.

Removing prejudices against groups from your system of thinking is a process of talking and interacting with those people in a way that lets them show their true self, not simply dismissing any thoughts of groups existing on the basis of an idea about what the essence of every individual is.

That is, if the representation of "me" in the public eye is not the real me, you can correctly assume that it has to do with what group of people I belong to, but if you turn your view of me into a destructive universal view of "human nature", and avoid finding out how I really am, you've misrepresented me again, and you haven't understood me.

You have to inquire if you want to understand.

This is why seeing conversations as markets, a new form of value exchange in the era of the internet, is interesting. As I argued in the first post, markets should not be thought of the act of swapping material wealth, but any of form of significant exchange of values between human beings. Conversations, I argued, thanks to the internet, is emerging as a significant new form of value-exchange between people.

I would like to clarify why, if anybody is confused. Conversations haven't been markets now for a while. Commodity exchange and abstract human labor has. Sure, people might have individually had conversations were there has been a sense of value-exchange, but it cannot have been said to be a "market", since it didn't occur on a large scale as an important form of social activity. With the Internet, that has changed. Conversation and sharing of opinions is beginning to become a significant part of the common persons life, in a way that it can't be said to have been before. Anyway.

Lets introduce the thesis this post is about: "Markets consist of human beings, not demographic sectors". If conversation is a new market, a form of social exchange which is emerging out of technological developments, what might be the "marketing" of this particular "market"?

Marketing, in the world of capitalism, is built on assumptions. Assumptions about groups, and about people in general. Marketing in capitalism is forced to make assumptions to succeed. It is not efficient to know exactly what everyone wants individually, so it prefers to keep things general. Those people seem to want this. These people seem to want that. It's simple,easy and for the purposes of capitalism, it works great. The purposes of capitalism, however, might not be the purposes of creating a better world.

The marketing of conversation, on the other hand, is built on something different. Talking to each-other as a form of value exchange requires some will to understand. Unless there is a will to understand by both parts or parties of the exchange, nobody is going to return to the conversation. That is, if I enter I attempt to start a conversation, and I talk to the person as if I'm talking to "an extra in the movie adaptation of the sequel to their life", I am not going to get a good response. Probably, what is going to happen is that they will stop talking to me after a while, and I can't exchange values with that person any longer.

There is, of course, nothing that says that this new market is, or will be, magical and perfect. Sometimes, I bet, it will even suck, bad. But it does present us with a radically new way of "marketing", one that needs to take actual human beings, not demographics, into account.

See you soon, thesis 3.

All posts that are or will be part of this project can be found here.

Thesis 1 of 95: Are conversations markets?

Part of the blogging project about the 95 theses of the Cluetrain Manifesto

Markets are not about selling or buying. Markets aren't about commodities. They aren't about investing in finance, money, not about the right to own property, and not a scheme to either liberate or enslave mankind, either.

Because we hear so much about markets, in their present form, about whether they're free or not, or whether they should be, what they should do, how it should be regulated or deregulated, if it turns us to economizing rational actors or irrational consumerists, etc. etc. we tend to assume that what we today call The Market (as if it was a singular thing) is The Market that would have happened 400 B.C, or in the Mesolithic period, or in the middle ages, or in the future, say some 500 years from now.

This is obviously false. The Market of Late Capitalism is different from markets as such. Let me quote some Marcel Mauss, from his analysis of gift-giving in archaic societies at you:

It has been suggested that these [archaic] societies lack the economic market, but this is not true; for the market is a human phenomenon which we believe to be familiar to every known society. Markets are found before the development of merchants, and before their most important innovation, currency as we know it. They functioned before they took the modern forms (Semitic, Hellenic, Hellenistic, and Roman) of contract and sale and capital. We shall take note of the moral and economic features of these institutions. The Gift: Form and Reason of Exchange in Archaic Societies - Mauss, Marcel 

Now, at first, this quote sort of annoyed me. Being the commie-pinko that I am, saying that markets is a "human phenomenon... familiar to every known society", especially in a book that was recommended to me as an example of how societies without markets can be sustainable, seemed to me as just a restatement of bourgeois ahistorical claims about how capitalism is "human nature". However, I quickly sobered up to what Mauss was actually saying. Of course, as I was well aware, Markets are Not Capitalism, and what markets Mauss were talking about seemed fundamentally different then what capitalist markets were about. Let's quote some more:

In the systems of the past we do not find simple exchange of goods, wealth and produce through markets established among individuals. For it is groups, and not individuals, which carry on exchange, make contracts, and are bound by obligations; the persons represented in the contracts are moral persons—clans, tribes, and families; the groups, or the chiefs as intermediaries for the groups, confront and oppose each other. Further, what they exchange is not exclusively goods and wealth, real and personal property, and things of economic value. They exchange rather courtesies, entertainments, ritual, military assistance, women, children, dances, and feasts; and fairs in which the market is but one element and the circulation of wealth but one part of a wide and enduring contract. The Gift: Form and Reason of Exchange in Archaic Societies - Mauss, Marcel 

So, what Mauss is saying here is basically: markets are markets, regardless of what they exchange, and who is exchanging in it. The point here is not to romanticize these archaic markets, their hierarchy, patriarchy and spirituality, but rather to bring home the point: people exchange things. They all do. They don't have to appear in the form of the of the commodity, exchanged for money, nor do they even have to have anything to do with material wealth as such.

So, you may be asking now: cool, but what has this to do with the thesis?

Markets are conversations. It doesn't take much thought to understand the concept. But are conversations also markets? In the internet age, where conversation has entered a new paradigm, where media and commentary are in the process of being liberated from the high-overhead market that dominated, excluded and disengaged people just some decades ago from making their thoughts public, I'd say the conversation is emerging as a new form of market, where new values are exchanged. Of course, conversations have been had since time immemorial, but the act of communicating publicly is emerging as a new form of value-exchange.

Conversations, by the common man, used to be held in private, as a secondary, but still necessary act to the primary acts of making, buying, selling, and consuming commodities. Far away was the thought of the agora of Ancient Greece, where conversation-making and opinion-stating was the highest form of social activity. The philosophical, spiritual, scientific and political argumentation at the agora, which was also the commodity market of the Greek cities, fits neatly into the Maussian concept of a market being something else than just M-C-M^ exchanges.

Now, it is not my intention to praise the slave-owning and patriarchal Greeks, but I can't help but make the connection. A modern agora is reemerging, where I can have this opinion, you can read it, critique it, praise it,  respond to it, and share it. Understanding this as a market is understanding it has a new form of value exchange, just like the value exchanges in those old societies often labeled "communistic" were also markets. It is separate from capitalist markets in that it doesn't turn the basic necessities of existence into exchangeable goods and commodities.

Call it a market where losing out isn't that much of a threat to your basic rights.

See you soon, thesis 2.

Joining in on the Cluetrain Manifesto blogathon

Read about it here. Expect posts soon. :)