Here we address digital means as a distinct, emergent form of material.
> Importantly, this school services the college too; a college has to be distributed collective, deploying digital means.
See also:
Here we develop a mapping of emergent digital infrastructure and its governance in a commons.
Here we develop a mapping of relationships between capability-building practices in activist formations (formaciòn) and a digital toolstack.
**Cognitive capitalism? The Golemic** Some discussions of these complex emergent phenomena take the ‘x era-of-capitalism’ form: cognitive capitalism? Others - Mackenzie Wark, for example - name it as a distinct kind of cultural and economic evolution that is now in train - in the same way that the anthropocene doesn’t reduce to a phase of capitalist economy, has different kinds of material relationship at its centre and a different temporal span.
Some of the relations of production of the digital do seem rather like those of land or colonisation (‘primitive accumulation’): raw digital territories ‘wired for sound’, appearing ‘public’ and ‘free’ (or at least, nominally un-owned) but with tolls, tithes and rents exacted by oligarchic corporations; which then trade commodities of attention-production with the old economy, make old-fashioned profits, accumulate old-fashioned (financial) capital - and at the same time constitute a *deduction from* those spheres of capital. This is reminiscent of the transition from feudalism to capitalism, and the contradictions and class struggles of interests invested in land-ownership-rent and capital-enclosure-accumulation.
I’m inclined to regard the era of digital means as **The Golemic**, leaving open the question of its relations (of alliance, of conflict) with *capital* as a hegemonic, historical mode of social organisation.
> The mythical Golem was a figure of clay, animated by placing a written scroll of significant wisdom (the Torah) in its mouth. The mythical Golem was powerful but stupid, whereas ‘the Golemic’ already can discriminate and respond to patterns very finely, if coupled with an infrastructure of data encoding machinery and intensively trained.
This is being widely but unwisely named as artificial ‘intelligence’. Golems are powerful, stupid, limited in their capability - and un-fluid. There is no poetry in a Golem, they do not sing, their mouth is crammed full of stuff that was forced on them; that determines them.
> Free software may be produced in a commons - which is wonderful to see - but even the *use* of free software is no longer a commons (a commons of *running code*, shared data and app-deployment). This is a new kind of challenge.
> More to develop here xxx