SOPA/PIPA, Megaupload, & the Rhetorical Forum

If you've been following the news lately, checking Facebook, or even just trying to use Wikipedia to finish that first assignment of the semester, it would be hard to miss the recent SOPA Strike, the controversy over PIPA, or the take down of the major file sharing/hosting service Megaupload.  On the 18th, over 9000 (115,000 to be exact) sites "blacked out" in protest of SOPA/PIPA. Participants found among their ranks the likes of Google, Wikipedia, Reddit, Wordpress, and Wired, as well as many personal blogs and webpages - including mine.  The strike seemed to be as successful as could be hoped, with many senators - even those who had co-sponsored the bills to start with - withdrew their support.  Yet just the next day, Megaupload was taken down, their servers and their owners taken in by the Feds, for "conspiracy." Anonymous, of course, retaliated via DDoS attacks (#opMegaupload) that temporarily shut down sites for the FBI, RIAA, MPAA, and others.  

So just what the hell is going on here?  

Well, the short answer is that content-creation industries are trying to end piracy.  To that end, they have a bunch of lobbyists, & a bunch of money to spend, to convince a bunch of old guys who don't even know how the internet works to write bills that would allow them to punish said pirates, & any website they could claim aided in copyright infringement.   Then, ya know, a bunch of people who do understand how the internet works got pissed off & did what they knew how to do: used the internet to make a point.  They did this irrespective of their individual beliefs about the sanctity of copyright.  Then the Feds stuck out their proverbial tongue & flaunted their ability to kill a website at one go.  To which, again, they got a response.

But that's just the short answer.  In order to really understand what happened, really what is happening, we need to understanding what the internet was intended for, what it is, and how it works - not necessarily as a technical achievement (though it is certainly that), but as a discursive achievement. & it's equally important to understand how the enactment of bills is likewise a discursive achievement - that is, incidents like the UK student being extradited over his website or the shutdown of Megaupload do more actual work than the laws in the law books.

First of all, the internet is literally discursive, made up of language.  Or, to be more accurate, several languages, like HTML, PHP, or CSS.  How we interface with the lingual construction that manifests as the internet can be said to be a rhetorical forum.  Thomas Farrell defines the rhetorical forum as "an encounter setting sufficiently durable to serve as a recurring 'gathering place' for discourse . . . the forum provides a space for multiple expressed positions to encounter one another" (88).  Importantly, the rhetorical forum must, by definition, emerge when "there is the potential for resistance" (89).  Furthermore, the forum can only exist as "a web of interrelationships established through the presencing of others" (89).  Farrel writes: "more important, I think, than the actual physical presence of persons in each other's public space is the conscious awareness of each other's presence in the symbolic landscape" (89).

According to Farrell, a forum must have three things:

• durability and continuity over time
• accessibility to those who wish to participate, recurrently
• capacity for the projection and retrieval of messages

The internet seems to fit the bill pretty squarely.  It's a virtual gathering place, or many gathering places, in which social behavior is (re)created, and in which all the things that make up our culture, including our media, is made, remade, exchanged, shared, debated, celebrated, or reprimanded. Specifically, "stable or not, the critical function of the forum is to warrant, frame, and constrain the appearance, shape, and direction of rhetorical practice" especially in regards to "challenging disputes about what constitutes proper authority, integrity, and responsibility" (Farrell 90-91). So then the internet is not just discursive, but also a place where discourse is (re)formed.

And the discursive rules of "proper authority, integrity, and responsibility" in terms of internet behavior are no accident; they did not develop in a vacuum.  

A mock-up of Vannevar Bush's Memex

The idea of linking ideas together starts, perhaps most notably, with Vannevar Bush in the 1940s.  Inspired by the collaboration of scientists and other academics during WWII, Bush found himself disheartened when the collaboration seemed to fade away once the war was declared over.  His invention, the Memex, was one way he believed we could continue to inspire the innovation that came of academic collaboration.  Utilizing what he called "associative indexing," or what we might call "linking," the Memex was designed to aid scholars in sharing information and content, both original, and found (Bush, "As We May Think").  The idea was, essentially, that if scholars had easy access to all of the information out there, & could organize it in meaningful ways, new discoveries would be born from the networking.

This idea continued through the development of computing more broadly, researchers often "stealing" and improving on each other's ideas.  And when the internet was conceived, for the military and universities, it had two core goals: 1) to allow communications even when one node on a network has been destroyed, and 2) content sharing.  We can see these end goals manifesting in all sorts of ways, including a pretty recent TEDtalk by Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the browser.  Thus, the spirit of our rhetorical forum has been, from the start, the continuation of communication at all costs, and the sharing of information.  Or, in other words, the founders of the internet were pirates (yes, this includes the government).  

But remember, the rhetorical forum is one that is built around tension and resistance.  Even as users enact this historically "proper authority, integrity, and responsibility" in regards to the purpose of the internet, the content-creation industry has been fighting to regulate, control, and flat-out strip our ability to do so.  Remember the "don't copy that floppy" campaign? 

The problem with their attempts is that more & more, consumers are owning tools capable of production.  We must no longer be mere consumers, but instead, we can make new, remake, remix, cut, distribute, comment on, link to, and otherwise interact with the media that make up our culture and cultural artifacts.  And all of their attempts to make us stop haven't really worked - why, just take a look at this remix of "don't copy that floppy!"  

And what about the laws that have been passed in regards to copyright infringement?  Well, frankly, because of the very design of the internet, they're pretty damn hard to enact efficiently.  Hence the spectacle of one or two high profile cases against housewives & 14 yr olds for illegally downloading bad 90s anime & that one Metallica album.  These spectacles, although sometimes they are abiding by the legal letter of the law, do more than simply punish "criminals."  

Instead, things like the take down of Megaupload, or the earlier transformation of Napster into a pay service,  create an ideological reality - they attempt to change what is considered proper rhetorical behavior in the forum.  Actions like these are a rhetorically savvy demonstration to users that perhaps they should reconsider downloading that song for free (it's not like they weren't going to buy the album on iTunes later anyways).  Essentially, users are being trained, through fear tactics, not to share.  & I'm pretty certain that we all learned in kindergarten just how important sharing is.

What this whole mess boils down to is a struggle over who gets to shape "the boundaries of the rhetorical community itself" (Farrell 91).  Who gets to make the rules about what is appropriate behavior in the rhetorical forum?  Who gets to decide what kind of communication is allowed to happen?

Obviously, we all have a vested interest at stake.  Whether you are a content creator, sometimes (understandably) frustrated by people "stealing" your work, or a user who  helps content creators spread & market their work, we are participating in the rhetorical construction of our virtual space.  And so is our government right now, and the lobbyists who put the money in their pockets, and the people who actually make the money off of content (usually not the artists), and, of course, the services that host the content. 

But, really, it's not about the content.  It's about the creation of our culture.  And really? None of this is new.  It's just in a different place, a rhetorical forum that has taken a new shape, found a new home.  A new home that I'm not ready to give up without a fight.  The internet was made for sharing; it is built on the premise that sharing information & content should be a core value, one that will advance our culture and lead to creative, scientific, & social advancement.  Despite the actions right now of those who doth protest too much (I'm looking at you, RIAA & MPAA), I think the Anonymous responses & the SOPA Strike are "evidence that [the internet's] own constructive possibilities are far from over" (Farrell 95).  Don't let them scare you; this is our space, & we will keep it that way.  We are the creators of our culture.

█████████████ ███████████ ███ ████ ███ ████████. ███████████ ████ ████ . █████████████ ██████████ ██ █████████ ██████████ ██. ███████████ ██████ everything ███ █████ is ██ ████ fine ████ ███ █ ██████ trust █████ ███████ ███ your █████ ████ government.

Works cited:

Bush, Vannevar.  "As We May Think."  The New Media Reader. Eds. Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort.  Cambridge: the MIT Press, 2003.  Print.

Farrell, Thomas.  "Practice the Arts of Rhetoric: Tradition and Invention."  Contemporary Rhetorical Theory: A Reader.  New York: The Guilford Press, 1999.  Print.

MACHINIC SUBJECTIVATION & MEMES (pt1)

felix guattari, circa 1981.
i love this guy so hard.

"Technological machines of information and communication operate at the heart of human subjectivity...Recognition of these machinic dimensions of subjectivation leads us to insist, in our attempt at redefinition, on the heterogeneity of the components leading to the production of subjectivity...It's impossible to judge such a machinic evolution either positively or negatively: everything depends on its articulation within collective assemblages of enunciation. . At best there is the creation, or invention of new Universes of reference... a Post-modern era characterized by the reappropriation & resingularization of the use of media" (Guattari 4-5).

 If guattari theorized in 1992 that machinic tools of information & communication were an important component of subjectivity, then how much more seriously we must take this now, as the internet becomes more integrated into the daily lives of the public--despite the digital divide.  One way to conceptualize this is the virtual performance of self in relationship to things as simple as cell phones or Facebook. The way we use those technologies, how we can use them, & the ways we imagine being able to use them in the future, influence our performances of identity as well as further developments of technologies. If we continue to push the aesthetic limits of the form of subjectivation, we move in the direction of the new Universes of reference Guattari refers to.

I believe the "Postmodern era" (5) Guattari imagines here is the remix culture we see happening now.  It isn't just the mixing of popular musics even, but video, audio, & text, as well as even physical remixes in the form of dance trends (such as "Geddan Get Down" or "Crank that Soulja Boy") & the like made possible by our machinic assemblages.

More specifically,

"there is thus a certain type of fragment of content that 'takes possession of the author' to engender a certain mode of aesthetic enunciation...fragments which I place in the category of 'existential refrains'" (14-15).

 I'm thinking here of particularities of the spread of internet culture--generally  what we call internet memes.  I use both Wikipedia's definition of an internet meme and Susan Blackmore's discussion of memes & temes to arrive at a definition of internet memes: a viral concept spread from person to person via the internet, usually in the form of pictures, video, audio, a catchphrase or joke, or any combination thereof.  What separates an internet meme from a teme--those memes that Susan Blackmore says spread through technology, & demonstrate self-replication of a sort--is that the spread of internet memes seems to remain mostly organic, peer-to-peer.  Although one might argue that with the algorithms of a Google search in play, internet memes do in fact act more like temes.  Probably internet memes are double articulated in this way, & hence the trouble I have defining them.  Regardless, the repition of particulars in this form means they act as refrain, creating Universes of reference as well as subjectivation through the creation of culture & cultural artifact simultaneously.

"Like Bakhtin, I would say that the refrain is not based on elements of form, material or ordinary signification, but on the detachment of an existential 'motif' which installs itself like an 'attractor' within a sensible & significational chaos.  The different components conserve their heterogeneity, but are nevertheless captured by a refrain which couples them to the existential Territory of my self" (17).  

 Thus, it is not the form, per se, but the series of themes that run through the specific assemblages that matter here.  That these themes arise amidst the sheer volume of artifacts being produced is what becomes refrain that then becomes part of the larger "hyper-complex refrain" (16), which I might refer to as internet culture.  It is this hyper-complex refrain that play an important part in the production of a polyphonic subjectivity.  A really practical example of this is the person who roleplays as several characters online, as well as perhaps performing the identity they may claim as public. Each of these RP scenarios may have different sets of informal rules & social codes, access to specialized language or slang, etc, that influence the performances the roleplayer gives for each character, including public or RL persona.  As an interation of cultural scripts, each performance can be seen as a refrain, & the unique combination of performances as simply part of the hyper-complex refrain.  The interactions of the performances of these particular scripts would create a unique polyphonic subjectivity, as the roles being played become literally part of synaptic firings of the brain.

As for the internet meme, the refrain that went viral,

 "it's efficiency lies in its capacity to promote active, processual ruptures within semiotically structured, significational, & denotative networks, where it will put emergent subjectivity to work" (19).

 The meme is viral in the sense that is very form calls for & necessitates participation.  Even choosing not to pass along, repeat, remix, or reproduce a meme is still in interaction with it.  The meme exists because of the network, more specifically the network of people infected & affected in its proliferation.  The kind of remix inherent in memes certainly appeals to John Dewey's notion of the radical democratization of art, when the art-making practice has left "the elite world of museums & private galleries behind & become part of the everyday life of the masses" (Martin 56).  This is not the passive mass media that Guattari seemed unfond of, but a rhizomatic, collaborative, & interactive aesthetic assemblage being maintained in digital space, in fact dependent on the digital/machinic assemblage.

The very speed with which memes are disseminated, rise & subsequently fall from favor, paired with the constant need for participation, also meets another standard of Dewey's democratization: "it shows us how fragmented & plural public spheres are in contemporary democracies" (Martin 64).  The sheer volume alone would make it near impossible for any one person to participate with every meme, yet also provides an almost infinite number of ways to interact with meme-making practices & internet culture.

Surely this must be changing our subjectivities & our embodiments as we perform self through polyphonic digital landscapes.  Granted this does not necessarily mean all of it is "good."  The aesthetic is not always ethical, which would be why Guattari pushes for an ethico-aesthetic paradigm, to be constantly moving towards new Universes of reference at the expense of normalizing (& sometimes damaging) discourses.


Works Cited: 
Guattari, Felix.  Chaosmosis: an ethico-aesthetic paradigm.  Trans. Paul Bains and Julian Pefanis.  Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1995.  Print. 

Martin, Jay.  "Somaesthetics and Democracy: Dewey and Contemporary Body Art."  Journal of Aesthetic Education 36.4 (2002): 55-69.  Print.