hyperlink: POST-ROMAN VIRUS
We argue that those who print are essentially conservatives, whereas the digital is really a kind of city-building, a developing and generating of a new parallel political economy; it is infrastructure (in which a radical form of participation is possible). The digital is a complication of the physical, not its naïve replacement.
Hyperlink is, as a project, really an idea. It involves diagonally linking programs online. For publishing, it means something like trying to cut across the naïve, unanalysed expectations of why we do what we do:
Why do we write? Why do we use paper? Why do we publish?
Is the digital not the most explicit complication of these simple social measures? Are we not moving backwards in attempting any form of print publication? The argument is, ultimately, simple: it is not that we should not print physically, but that, in simply printing physically, we are acting as if nothing has changed. The physical has changed; this is the exposed meaning of the digital.
In order either to keep printing physically or at least engage the digital directly, we have to argue at first for precisely the kind of diagonal relationships which will allow us to hyperlink certain, otherwise more traditional, parts of the printing process. For example, print at home. Is this not the simplest way of linking a PDF with a readily available printing press? Why are we overcomplicating what is, ultimately, supposed to be about writing? Is not all of this emphasis on graphic design, on texture, on “physicality”, a kind of counter-digital ideology in its own right?
What is the meaning of the printing press itself? Beyond even its production of the things we write, as a productive enterprise what exactly do we add socially when we try and pretend as if advances in publishing have not occurred? What are we repressing in the form of the printing press itself, in staging it as an archaic thought which we are trying to nobly resurrect, while ignoring its very clear development? What are we so afraid of in these advances themselves that we have to forcibly paralyse our own process of production just in order to feel something, to feel perhaps less guilty for doing anything, that is, producing anything, in contemporary society?
Our purpose is therefore to engage the terrifying new, and not to relent, adding more work for ourselves as publishers, mimicking on the small-scale our gargantuan commercial competitors. It must be said, after all, that contemporary publishing is a racket: it does not really exist. This is the sick inversion of the above physicalist fantasists; namely, that so-called really existing publishing is, in fact, a kind of elaborate ponzi scheme or fraud which relies upon ghost-written celebrity memoirs and repeat authors. How does this work? It’s quite simple: you “write” something and we “publish” it. Even publishing is effectively ghost-written insofar as it doesn’t happen
at the same level (ontologically speaking) as the printing press happened;
Meaning: the political economy of publishing is not about publishing. It simply mobilises the interest of various audiences in significant persons, while fundamentally subtracting the act of writing, the daring of writing, the social significance of writing from the equation. Publishing itself, in turn, is not about publishing anything; it is, instead, a deeply illusory form of social movement. One that, ultimately, relies upon a parallel political economy of its own: speculative finance.
In order to be as precise as possible, however, it must be argued that even this parallel political economy requires an elaborative and supportive fantasy in order to exist. For example, the contemporary illusion of publishers themselves is that both Amazon and a “Netflix for books” represent the twin evils facing publishing. It is strange that, in reality, this is an elaborate act of repression in the guise of a seeming acknowledgement of the problem. On the one hand, digital companies are recognised, but their role is misformulated. Instead of their being part of a change to the DNA of political economy, they are posed, ultimately, as equivalent, but more pressingly successful, rackets, whose only real achievement is their increased capacity to effectively generate audiences. Even contemporary discourse surrounding TikTok makes the same mistake: it is argued that TikTok has created a technology capable of generating virality, as opposed to merely waiting around for it, through algorithm-based curation. Is it not obvious, however, that TikTok has effectively demonstrated a different political economy to be at work in the digital, one which we could try and pin down with the old formulas ultimately of such things as “venture capital”, etc., but which we should probably try and define, much as we should Netflix and Amazon, as radically new forms of infrastructure for an as-yet totally undefined digital space or commons within which, fundamentally, the DNA of the triptych PRODUCTION, DISTRIBUTION, and OWNERSHIP is completely changed? Once again, the “twin evils” facing publishing are really the same one: the advent of digital infrastructure, of a digitalisation of political economy, of which Netflix and Amazon are also already an exploitative misformulation, is precisely that which forces a social rethink of what we have ever called publishing.
It is in this respect in which either the physicalist or the commercialist fantasy represent self-disciplining regimes of repression of an already manifest change to the social meaning of writing and publishing. As an example, let us formulate a simple question (and ask it, so to speak, through the change):
What is paper?
Is it just a naïve substance? Atoms? Science is useless here. The printed press, as it exists today, is more abstract, more reactionary in its contemporary usage, than a digital composition. A digital composition, after all, makes much more immediate use of the aforementioned triptych. Once you stop using this triptych, either by almost literally ghosting it (through capitalism as a mode of production) or supplementing each stage with an abstract division of human “effort”, you are more or less repressing the basic social dimension of why you ever wanted to say anything in the first place. The physicalists are, to be fair, infinitely more dangerous in this respect, because they present themselves as defenders or sympathisers of an apparently dying breed of social existence. In fact, what they defend is the opposite: a total paralysis of the social meaning of publishing, drawn out through an act of repressing one of the most substantial changes to our social existence to have ever taken place for our species, in the form of a fantasmatic imitation of “really existing publishing.”
Everything is conceptual—even paper. This is, in fact, partly the point. When you observe a piece of paper, depending upon what is written on it, how it exists formally, that is, how it exists as a measure of social existence, changes what it is. You blur the conceptual limits and edges of paper depending on what it is. Is it, after all, again, a purely physical combination:
Trees + processing chemicals + ?
After all, are not trees also analysable in terms of their own chemical composition? At which level of reality are we then really looking at paper? Once we observe digital paper, we confront an entirely new physical arrangement of what we had previously meant by paper in which trees and processing chemicals have been entirely subtracted. Are we supposed to ignore what this means for our social existence or our political economy? How about for our writing? Should this not change, to some extent, what we write, how we write, why we write? If one observes the advent of the printing press itself 500 years ago, one can see in what respect every single one of these questions was also asked and effectively turned upon its head. Even then, paper was already radically conceptual; the meaning of the technology itself was preceded by the meaning of dramatic social changes that opened up with the possibility of mechanical reproduction (which is really only one way of describing what the printing press was, not unlike our own digital infrastructure).
As an aside, consider the woods near a convent. These are the woods in which the friars like to walk to help their thinking. They are not, perhaps, in a traditional cloister, and so it is normal for them to take their walks in the park abutting the convent. In the convent woods, which path do you take? If it is a single road, okay, it is simple: two possible directions, forming a single ring. If you have, say, two rings which intersect at two points, the permutations grow. At this point, though really from the very beginning, the concept of the pathway is already complicated by the fact of how we are meant to process the imaginary structure of the pathways in the convent woods. There is not a simple path that just exists, and the reality is that a piece of paper is no different. THEOREM: paper 2.0.
In view of this, one would expect, again, production, distribution, and ownership to change in view of some social change and vice versa. A digital press, for instance, readily engages with the explicit changes the digital offers to the triptych. For instance, ownership in the digital is entirely attached to one’s minimal management of digital infrastructure of one’s website, press, etc. Insofar as one is using other platforms, such as Google Docs or Google Drive, etc., one should rely upon a hyperlinked model wherein different modes of communication (and, more generally, online production) may be linked somewhat counter-formally. For example, why shouldn’t a YouTube video connect to a Google doc while also using the YouTube comment section to explicitly generate, say, subjects for discussion? Ownership in the digital implies effectively some literal ownership of digital (imaginary) material. As for production, it is clear that what we produce online (Wikipedia articles, reels, Google Docs, etc.) are already defined formally from within the digital, i.e., there is already a certain open way of thinking and collaborating in the digital that does not need to be externally defined (not least because the digital itself is an explicit means of imaginary external formation). Independent, then, of any specific form, the entire terms of such an open-ended political economy of production change the simple DNA of production; something which is already true of something as simple as paper. The idea of digital paper represents a change more to the formal bearing of how and why we think of ourselves as producing any such space such as paper.
A further crucial question is that of
building a bridge in the air which everyone has access to;
this is the cloud: it is not an image; it is an explicit formal definition of what is materially going on within digital production. Does anyone really see it like this? Sadly, not. There is, in short, an immediacy of access and participation that is core to whatever value is generated on the digital.
At this level, the naïve Marxist formula of “seizing the means of production” is already radically accomplished in the digital. What we should concern ourselves with is, in part, defending that this immediacy of participation and construction remains intact, that its integrity is not questioned, all while using it; using it as explicitly as possible. As a parable of what might happen if we don’t, consider in what respect the socialist and communistic visions of the 19th-century only ever succeeded in positing an alternative based upon replacing the factory; but it was never enough to replace the factory. If you replace the factory, you continue to produce within the factory. Now, to an extent, the industrial factory was among the radical inputs of political economy redefining social life in the 19th-century, but its very formulation as a factory for industrial capital inputs might have already been a misformulation (similar to how Amazon and Netflix define digital political economy at present). In other words, it was possible the factory could have been a different kind of “house”, so to speak, such as for a more fundamental market commons. This is not to say that productively we didn’t need factories, but the form of any production is explicitly the DNA of whatever is produced. It is not secondary to what produced that we produced it within the factory, nor indeed, as Marx already pointed out, were the social ills generated either. More to the point, however, the horror of Stalinism emerges very precisely from this formula of socialising a factory, but not necessarily changing its form. If, for example, you create an ownerless factory, which some socialists might argue is not equivalent to a factory in which everyone owns (but why would this be any more desirable if your productive method remains that of capitalist surplus-value extraction. It is not, after all, obvious that the factory and surplus-value are not inextricably linked. For example, it is possible that these factories were only ever good for producing in any explicit way, i.e., they could not have just produced, naively, anything. Indeed, no political economy works that way: we do not just produce, naively, “what we need”; we produce in view of some productive strategy that allows us to conceive of pathways through a given production. We will produce not only very different things depending on our productive setting, but the fact that we “produce” at all is something we constitute the form of that production), and in this ownerless factory, not only do you continue to produce a specific productive setting for surplus-value, but you also maintain the imaginary or virtual need for an owner. This virtual owner was effectively Stalin, or that to which Stalin himself could refer, and for which he was an arbiter. This was the basis, in short, for Stalin’s ruthless interventionism, something that grew out of the necessity of maintaining a factory that never fully excluded the topos of the master or owner. This is not to say we are opposed to ownership, but ownership of a factory depends upon a manifest change of the DNA of the productive setting of the factory, not merely an imagined change in socialised conditions. Once again, the digital is such an unexpected radical form of socialisation of the very means of production; one which also changes the means of production themselves.
As a second illustrative aside, consider the strange question: why were there no magazines in the 16th-century? Perhaps there were, of a kind; but in the way we imagine them as a social form today. We could, of course, ask the question inverse: why do we them so readily today? In the 16th-century, a period in which forms of proto-capital were emerging, from navigational technologies to printing presses to international trade routes and banking, there was an intricate, muscular, and delicate social arrangement of production (and motivation). For instance, this motivation was intensely civil and theological. As for production, its management required extraordinary social forces, such as the administrations of the state and the church. As a social balance, language was key. To produce language was, then, very dangerous. This is why the Gutenberg press represented a change in the fundamental dynamics of political economy: this intricate social balance could now be more effortlessly disturbed. Equally fundamentally, we may read Martin Luther’s Protestant reforms as an inevitable reaction to the birth of the human being (which occurs, at least, philosophically and culturally in the humanist movements); a human being who can now think, but also, and more importantly, produce language more explicitly for himself. Is it any surprise that Luther’s own reformation hinged on language, on the vernacular translation of the Bible? This human being emerges alongside, or rather because of, changes in what is now socially possible in how we may conceive of the social arrangement of our production; a change that manifestly changes production itself (just like the digital does). The point, however, is, ultimately, that the peasants of the 16th-century could have taken over the “means of production” (largely their own) in an afternoon; this would not have necessarily been meaningful. Indeed, such seizure only becomes seriously meaningful with the advent of industrial capital economy. Beforehand, one’s intervention would have almost had to have been entirely linguistic, or, at least, with the advent of new proto-capital productive forces, managerial vis-à-vis the larger social arrangement. In our time, unfortunately, language matters less, meanwhile we are engaged in totally repressing radical changes to our political economy, so that we cannot even presume, at least, with respect to our floating bridge to participate in the equally new social arrangement appearing. It is like we have invented the printing press and are refusing to print with it, to embrace the radical new, to change.
It is worth mentioning, at this stage, an even earlier formal dysfunction vis-à-vis a similar change at the level of what we could produce. Insofar as Adam Smith penned his masterwork The Wealth of Nations, it was perhaps inevitable that the post-Roman virus that has defined much of modern western European civilization would continue on well into the present period. Why? Because “nation” is a hang-on of the mediaeval state, itself a radical misformulation of what was, in fact, generatively proposed in the post-Roman transition. For example, the post-Roman transition implied the horizon, at least, for much of north-western Europe, the concept of laws (in the modern sense), collectivity, bureaucracy, new agricultural technology, engineering, etc. These things, again, should have changed everything in the form of new social arrangement. Instead, they were degeneratively synthesised in the form of the mediaeval, feudal state. We might think it “obvious” to have need of some synthetic union; but, rather like the factory, there is nothing obvious about the form of the mediaeval, feudal state. What was at least possible was a radical new horizon of collective, productive existence. Flash-forward to Smith and we can see in what respect an analysis of emerging capital market inputs as, in part, reducible to the competitive advantages of nations was also going to continue the spread of the post-Roman virus; that is, maintain the same assumption of the preponderance of feudal production within the form of the mediaeval state without asking how else one could have produced a meaningful social arrangement from the newly available productive inputs. In the case of the post-Roman period, these “inputs” are as radically conceptual as either the digital or paper. In fact, in many respects they are more so, utterly, and crucially, imaginary, from the collective language-birthing that was happening with romance languages to the infrastructure of the post-Roman empire to enormous theological transitions/conversions, etc.
In closing, consider an apple orchard. What occurs in the combination of digital + apple orchard? The apple orchard, like the convent woods, is a radically social entity. Indeed, all of our forms of subsistence are radically social and, therefore, conceptual. The question of the digital press is the question of how we might think of something as simple as an apple orchard in view of digital changes to our triptych of production, distribution, and ownership. It is obvious that the digital does not replace the orchard, not least because the orchard is already a concept. The real idea is that the digital, at the very least, is a new concept itself; a new infrastructure for production. It changes what we have ever meant by the physical, or by the orchard. It changes the how and the why of the orchard. Why should we not imagine apples connected to our
floating bridge
at the level of production (i.e., how we describe what we are doing when we grow apples), distribution (i.e., how we conceive of their social management), and ownership (i.e., what it means that we have “orchards”)? It is clear that the orchard itself changes, much as it changed when it became a feudal, agricultural unit, or when it became a capital input and therefore subject to international commodity markets.
Our press is then one such further change. What is the printing press in view of the digital? Already our language and writing are changing. To edit a Wikipedia article represents a more intimate, and explicit, formal change of society than almost anything physically published. Why? Because our social world, which is increasingly digital, takes immediate note of the change. It is a deeply public change. This very public dimension is almost the minimal definition of infrastructure itself and therefore of what we even mean by production more generally. The digital is an extraordinary development of infrastructure and production, one which, like John Keats in the cherry tree, our soul-companion in the domain of the new, we may reach into and beyond so as to feel the warmth of the sun that rests just above it. The sun of reality.