Abstract
An inaugural title in the Pluto Press series “Digital Barricades: Interventions in Digital Culture and Politics,” edited by Jodi Dean, Joss Hands and Tim Jordan, Jordan’s Information Politics offers a succinct introduction to the complex political operations of information within contemporary forms of digitally mediated exploitation and attendant struggles for liberation. Organized into theoretical chapters followed by case studies, the book weaves together a number of conceptual frameworks familiar to critical scholars of media and communication, integrated with insights from software studies and science and technology studies. Illustrations of information politics in action include specific “platforms” and “battlegrounds” for wars of information arising from digitization. Throughout, the book provides a clear and lively argument for conflict around information as a key antagonistic politics of our time.
A broadly poststructuralist definition of information through the notion of difference (where communication, relatedly, is difference that moves) anchors the theoretical chapters’ articulation of three constitutive substrates of information politics: recursion, device proliferation, and network protocols. Recursion describes how information as difference implies a “difference-from,” where automated processes of algorithmic logic recur. Information is subjected to software operations that modify it and thus produce new information, which is then itself operated upon by algorithms in a continuous cycle resembling Noam Chomsky’s (1975) notion of generative grammar. “Information eats itself,” Jordan writes, and as such, generative recursion forms the basis for modes of immanent exploitation that undermine collective information ownership. A Foucauldian and Deleuzian understanding of exploitation as “force” gets established in the idea of recursion and maintained through the materiality of information politics made manifest in networked devices. Increasingly, Jordan notes, devices are presented as ways of managing information overload—the defining feature of digital society—just as they paradoxically generate additional information, combined in ever more sophisticated ways. Search technology exemplifies this dynamic where recursion is used to manage information overload but results in the creation of new information in the interstices between networked nodes. Focusing on the organizational parameters that afford information’s political capacity, Jordan points out how network protocols do not in fact resemble the often celebrated decentralized social formation that the term network evokes. Rather, the flow of information through networks rests on what Alexander Galloway (2004) has elaborated as control through protocol, the step-wise procedural directives that shape the architecture of the network. In combination then, networks and protocols produce the forms of information that organize (or dis-organize) how recursions and devices comprise an infrastructure for information to act politically.
The spaces where information politics get enacted are presented in the book’s second part that concentrates on three sorts of platforms: cloud computing, the securitized Internet, and social media networks. Each is discussed in turn as an abstract architecture of information politics; they interpenetrate each other while giving form to dynamics of exploitation. Not unlike the argument made by James Boyle (2008) about aggressive copyright reform as a second enclosure movement, Jordan outlines how the characteristics of platforms enable the privatization of collective informational resources. Yet it seems almost too encompassing to articulate the affordances of platforms at the level of abstract generality, to define platforms as “material configurations of information politics” (Jordan, 2015, p. 79), when the following section deals with what are called “battlegrounds.” Platforms are also battlegrounds and some of the battlegrounds presented, most evidently Apple’s iPad, could also be seen as platforms. Despite the definitional ambiguity, Jordan’s case studies of battlegrounds for information politics—the iPad, death in gaming, and hacktivism—illustrate the sociotechnical circuitry constitutive of exploitation-liberation conflicts. The antagonisms of information in each case is contextualized among other kinds of political antagonisms, such as the way that death in networked games operates through wider structures of gendered social relations and militarized masculine violence. Connections between multiple kinds of politics through information antagonism also opens up possibilities for liberation, most closely examined in the final battleground case of hacktivism.
Jordan concludes by linking the platforms and battlegrounds discussed back into the book’s theoretical contribution in order to distinguish information exploitation from other related struggles. Here, the key characteristic of information as amenable to proprietary regimes enables Jordan to draw together the dynamic body of scholarship underpinning his argument. By establishing principles of information as political antagonism, the book offers some intriguing possibilities for future interrogations of how digitization presents complex sociotechnical dynamics of exploitation and, perhaps less strongly argued here, liberation. As an expansive and vivid account of the political significance of information, Jordan’s title succeeds in framing the “Digital Barricades” series by articulating a theory for how to approach such barricades in terms of intersecting political struggles.