[-empyre-] empyre Digest, Vol 111, Issue 8

[Michael Dieter]

>
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> By the way, Michael, I don?t really get your point here, like I don?t
> understand the ?economic lineage? but with it you seem to go somewhere very
> interesting. Maybe you can explain this a bit?
>
>
Hi all,

I just wanted to circle back to the political economy framework I gestured
to earlier this month, when Mercedes was asking about why I was emphasizing
these lineages. It's a difficult question; I'm going to attempt a brief and
belated response (it's almost as if I've been avoiding this!).

So critical considerations of contemporary media can, of course, inspire a
wide variety of possible approaches, such as mapping out historical
genealogies, discursive formations, medium-specificities, legal frameworks
and specific emergent cultural practices, aesthetic experimental or
unanticipated uses. Within all these possibilities, a focus on something
like a critique of the political economy of information is of particular
interest to me since the dominant narrative over the past decade and a half
for digital, networked and mobile technologies has arguably involved a
massive accumulation and consolidation of infrastructure, data, expertise
and capital beyond any organizations predominantly invested in, say, public
resources or the common good. Indeed, we could say this is yet another
chapter in a longer story involving the expropriation of general intellect,
as the multitude theorists might put it.