Today's headlines, "NASDAQ Drop Leads Global Market Fall,"
promises a definitive answer to the question as to whether "digital
cultural objects" are "assimilable within the capitalist commodity
form": "no."
1
Or perhaps just "not as easily as was thought." Raymond Williams
once complained that bourgeois theorists always construed short-term
fluctuations as long-term trends. None of us would want to be guilty of
that. But even exercising due prudence, it seems fair to say the
recent misadventures of a dot.com sector heavily involved in "digital
cultural objects" have revealed cybercapitalism as more problematic than
it appeared in the halcyon days of the new economy. I approach these
issues through three large concepts, all mutated marginalia of Marx -
"the world market," "general intellect," and "species being" - applied
to an examination of one digital cultural object, the video game.
Some definitions may be useful. The "world market" is simply
planetary capitalism,
a.k.a.
"globalization," a system of generalized commodity exchange now
operating with unprecedented geographical reach, speed, dominion, and
nomadism.
2
"General intellect" is introduced by Marx in
Grundrisse, where he prophecies that at a certain moment in capitalism's
development of productive forces the direct expenditure of labor power
will cease to be the most important factor in the creation of
use-values.
3
Wealth will instead depend on the forces of social knowledge -
the "development of the general powers of the human head." This will
manifest in techno-scientific innovation and the increasing importance
of machinery - "fixed capital." Marx points to two technological systems
in particular as signs of the activation of general intellect. One is
automation, the other the network of transport and communication devices
that achieve the famous "annihilation of space by time."
Read sympathetically, "general intellect" can be seen as a
prescient glimpse of today's knowledge economy, with production teams,
innovation milieux and university-corporate research partnerships
yielding the "fixed capital" of robotic factories and global computer
networks. The dialectical prediction of "classical" Marxism was that
"general intellect," though generated by the world market, would destroy
and supersede it. Technologies of automation and communication, by
reducing direct labor-time and thoroughly socializing production, would
render wage labor and private ownership obsolete, so that
"capital...works towards its own dissolution."
4
The assertion of neoliberalism, although phrased in very
different terms, is that the world market is completely compatible with
general intellect. The concept of "the new economy" is a marriage made
in heaven between high-technology systems and the commodity form, a
perfect union of Net and Market: "friction free capitalism."
In contrast to both positions, the proposal of this paper is
that the congruence of general intellect and world market, or of the
information society and global capital, is partial, incomplete and
contested. It follows a line of argument developed by Antonio Negri,
Paolo Virno, Michael Hardt, Maurizio Lazaratto, and others who suggest
that, in the consideration of "general intellect," the crucial issue is
not just the accumulation of "fixed capital" with advanced machines.
5
Rather, it is the variable potential of human subjectivity that
continues to be critical for the creation and operation of this high
technology apparatus - although often as indirect and heavily mediated,
rather than direct, hands-on, labor. This subjective element they
variously term "mass intellect" or "immaterial labor."
6
It is the human "know-how" - technical, cultural, linguistic,
and ethical - that supports the operation of the high-tech economy,
especially evident in the communicational and aesthetic aspects of
high-tech commodity production. The question is how far capital can
contain what Jean-Marie Vincent calls "this plural, multiform constantly
mutating intelligence" in the structures of the world market.
7
What is at stake in the development of "general intellect" is
nothing less than the trajectory of species being. "Species being" is
the term Marx uses refers to humanity's self-recognition as a natural
species with the capacity to transform itself through conscious social
activity.
8
In the era of general intellect the application of social
knowledge to production make this issue urgent and concrete; e.g. the
Human Genome Project. Given this context, the recent revival of the
concept of species being by authors such as David Harvey and Gayatri
Spivak, rather than constituting a reversion to a much-reviled "Marxist
humanism," marks a crucial consideration about the collective control
and direction of a techno-scientific apparatus capable of
operationalizing a whole series of post-human or sub-human conditions.
9
Alienation takes on a whole new dimension when it reaches up to
the creation of "alien" - non-naturally occurring - life forms, and when
the cut and paste biology of gene splicing and xenotransplants makes the
body itself tend toward the status of "digital cultural object."
The specific example on which I bring these large concepts to
bear, the video game (more properly, video and computer games, which
together make up the "interactive play" business) may seem too slender
to bear their weight. But the interactive game is a - perhaps even
the
- exemplary "digital cultural object" of cybercapitalism. Three
decades have seen its transformation from whimsical invention of bored
Pentagon researchers into the fastest expanding sector of the
entertainment industry. The US interactive-game business is now larger
than the Hollywood box-office.
10
Counting both console and computers, over half of North American
households, and some 80% of those with children, have a game playing
system. Over one-third of consumer software sales in the US are games.
Business analysts scan the virtual communities coalescing around online
games such as
Quake,
Ultima
and
Everquest
for e-commerce models. In many ways, interactive game industries
have been the poster boys of information capitalism's "new economy,"
for, as Nicholas Garnham notes, they "are in fact the first companies...
to have created a successful and global multimedia product market."
11
The interactive game reveals two sides of the world market/general intellect interface. It displays the dazzling success of cybercapitalism in integrating general intellect into the structures of the world market. It simultaneously demonstrates the traumas and limits of this process. These ambivalences, though in some respects particular to the game industry, also disclose more general dynamics of the "dot.com" meltdown. In the last section, I ask whether interactive gaming offers us a glimpse at ways of organizing the activities of general intellect other than through the world-market. This question assumes a particular cogency when we see how video games mirror contemporary dilemmas about issues of species being.
The Ideal Commodity
If we look first at the success of capital in enclosing general intellect, one entry point is through the Regulation School's account of Fordist and post-Fordist regimes of accumulation. In their account, Fordism is the mass production, mass consumption, Keynesian constellation of capital's post-war Golden Years that fell apart in the 1970s; post-Fordism an emergent synchronization of digitized production systems, segmented and transnationalized markets, and neoliberal economic policies. The literature on post-Fordism can be seen as an analysis of capitalism's galvanization and enclosure of the new work forms and technologies of "general intellect." But while Regulation School theorists tend to assume this project will succeed, those who talk of "general intellect" see the outcome as less certain.
Martin Lee suggests that that each regime of accumulation has an
"
ideal-type
commodity form" - one that reflects "the whole social
organization of capitalism at any historical and geographical point in
its development."
12
Thus, for Fordism, the ideal-type commodities were "standardized
housing and the car,"
13
Cars and houses were imprinted with the stamp of mechanical,
industrial production processes; sustained core industrial sectors of
the Fordist economy; and arrayed around themselves a whole set of social
practices and values vital to the regime. They incarnated the "sense of
fixity, permanence and sheer physical presence" characteristic of
Fordist consumer culture.
14
If post-Fordism is a major shift in capitalism, we should, Lee
says, expect to see this reflected in a different ideal-type
commodity-form.
15
Without specifying particular products, he cites "high-tech
commodities" and services such as "information, data, and access to
means of communication."
16
I nominate the video game as an "ideal-type commodity" for
post-Fordism, embodying its most powerful economic, social, and cultural
tendencies. To make this case, I schematically unfold the
commodification of interactive games along the length of an expanded
model of the circuit of capital. This includes the moments of production
(where commodities are made, and surplus value created); consumption
(where commodities are purchased, and surplus value realized);
circulation (where the passage between production and consumption is
enabled by operations of marketing, retailing and distribution); social
reproduction (where subjects are prepared and trained for their
positions as workers and consumers); the reproduction - or
non-reproduction - of nature (where raw materials are extracted from the
environment and wastes returned to it); and spatial expansion (whereby
the scope of all the preceding operations is territorially enlarged).
17
In production, interactive gaming is a paradigmatic information age sunrise industry. It demonstrates both the new technological paradigm of post-Fordism - digital objects constructed with digital tools - and its mobilization of immaterial labor in new, collectively organized forms of knowledge work. Here, the lab/studio teamwork conditions of software development appear to confirm some of the more optimistic prophecies about post-Fordism as a site of an emergent digital artisanship.
This new industry was a child not of the free market but in the
Keynesian welfare/warfare state. Interactive gaming - like the Internet
- is a spin-off of the military-industrial complex, a derivative of
nuclear war preparations; the most generally accepted candidate for
first digital game is "Spacewar," a military simulation "hacked" into
being by defense-related workers at MIT.
18
The digital game was thus born out of a state-led social
mobilization of collective resources that could (in however distorted,
destructive or inadequate a form) be seen as a rudimentary model of
"general intellect."
19
We are dealing here with more than the originating military
influence at the root of so many media technologies: interactive gaming
has a far more organic, persistent relation with the weapons complex;
not just "spin-offs" from the military to civilian applications but
"spin-backs" and "spin-ons." Pentagon simulation-makers constantly
transfer to commercial game-making, while the military frequently
contracts services from, adapts products of, or enters into
co-development partnerships with, the civilian industry - making
interactive gaming the most persuasive instance of a
"military-entertainment-complex."
20
It is, however, in the realm of consumption that interactive games have had their greatest influence. Here they exemplify what many authors see as a characteristic of post-Fordism - a switch in emphasis from material to experiential commodities. Digital games build on and extended foundations lain by older generations of broadcast media; console games depended on physical connection to the ubiquitous television set for their entry into the home. But interactive games altered the economics and dynamics of this penetration of domestic time and space. They directly commodify in home entertainment, rather like broadcast TV's reliance on the indirect commodification of advertising. They also dramatically intensify and fluidify the consumption experience, since they can be played anytime, almost anywhere. The escalation of this process runs from Nintendo's introduction of the hand-held Game Boy to the edicts issued by North American office-managers against the playing of Doom on LAN, to the development of game capable cell phones and PDA's; the most recent is Electronic Art's Majesty, an X-Files type conspiracy game in which players will be supplied with clues through their "real life" email, fax or cell-phone, so that they may be contacted by game characters during a work meeting, over dinner, or in bed.
Crucial to this intensified absorption of cultural commodities
has been a smoothing and speeding of circulation. Though video game
companies first relied on the novelty of the new technology to attract
interest, they rapidly realized high-intensity marketing was critical to
growth. In the early 1990s, competition between Nintendo and Sega made
video games test commodities for aggressive, ironic, "in your face,"
MTV-style television advertising. Nintendo and Sega were among the first
companies to "brand" on the electronic frontier, creating an enveloping
ambience of games-tips, phone lines, magazines, films, merchandising
tie-ins, virtual tournaments, sponsorships, websites, game rentals and
trials, and a host of other marketing and public relations strategies.
Such an apparatus not only transmits advertising, but also
simultaneously gathers transactionally generated information about
customer preferences and habits to be resinscribed into the production
and marketing process. Video gaming thus became one of the first
industries to perfect a post-Fordist "cybernetic cycle" between
production and consumption.
21
The cycle reaches new heights with digital gaming's e-commerce experiments. Networked play became widely available with the popular explosion of the Net in the early 1990s. Online game sites have been test beds for a variety of e-revenue models: subscriptions, pay per play, advertisements, sponsorships for tournaments and other gaming events, and numerous hybrids. Equally importantly, online players are guinea pigs for experiments in yet more effectively "closing the loop" between capital and consumer: culling online information, practicing forms of "viral" marketing, getting players to add value to games by distributing their own levels and scenarios; and creating worlds of sociality - virtual communities - predicated on renewed commodity consumption.
The degree of controversy attending interactive gaming may be explained by the ways it impinges on the sphere of social reproduction. One aspect of post-Fordism's search for new markets has been an explosion of selling aimed at youth and children, a process that really ignited in the 1980s. Early video games were part of this moment. They were sold as toys - targeted primarily to boys, aiming to enlist their sense of rebellion and mobilize their "pester-power" to open parental wallets. For the industry, this early implantation yields opportunities to expand by continually "up aging" its products--so that games are now marketed heavily to young adults familiarized with them a decade ago. For cybercapital as a whole, however, the juvenile targeting of interactive toys has a wider significance. Gaming familiarizes children - especially boys - with digital skills (while contributing to a plague of obesity amongst youthful "mouse potatoes"). It thus constitutes a sort of an extra-curricular training ground for immaterial labor, and e-consumers.
All these developments are occurring on an increasingly
international scale, in the process hyperbolically represented by
popular accounts of globalization - where digital games often figure
prominently. Ken Ohmae, business theorist of a "borderless world" speaks
of "the Nintendo kids" as a cosmopolitan echelon of youth who are
"forging links to global economy, turning their backs on older
generations and traditional values, and using new technologies, such as
the Internet, to circumvent government restrictions."
22
Such accounts point for substantiation to the mixed genealogy of
video gaming, which began as a US industry, annihilated itself in the
Atari crash of 1984, and was revived by a triad of Japanese companies -
Nintendo, Sega, and Sony, to subsequently evolve a series of
trans-Pacific and trans-Atlantic enterprise webs. These economic forces
underpin a cultural hybridization of Japanese
anime
cartoon styles, American super-heroes, British neo-colonial
nostalgia, and German military precision, in a demonstration of
post-Fordist "time-space compression" where "the cultural streams of
East and West swirl into the Tastee-Freeze of global entertainment."
23
The head of Nintendo's game development says, "We don't find any
difference in kid's feelings nation-wide or world-wide. Our development
R&D is thinking about the world as a target for each of their
products."
In all of this, we are dealing not just with a "world market," ceaselessly expanding its spatial dimensions, but also with a "worlds market," generating increasingly persuasive virtual realities. Writing of electronic financial markets, McKenzie Wark refers to post-Fordism's creation of Third Nature, a sphere of communication and information flows called into being by advanced capital to control and coordinates the industrial structures of Second Nature, and the biosphere of First Nature. Video gaming is the domestic version of this domain. As such, it is a quintessential part of the postmodern ethos often seen as the cultural correlative of post-Fordist production. "Hyper-reality" is precisely what the industry promises. Fredric Jameson's famous description of simulacrum culture as one where "the world...momentarily loses its depth and threatens to become a glossy skin, a stereoscopic illusion, a rush of filmic images without density" - an experience "terrifying" and/or exhilarating" - could well be an account of playing a level of Unreal Tournament.
In an "ideal" post-Fordist capitalism, computerized production,
digital media, e-business, global expansion, and postmodern culture
would connect in a smoothly integrated circuit. The digital game
embodies the virtuous cycle of this virtual economy: it gives us virtual
consumer goods constructed with virtual tools to meet virtualized needs
in virtual environments, "all hermetically sealed by the
institutionalized forces organized around the technology": Sim Capital.
24
The Nightmare Non-Commodity
But interactive games also embody the contradictions between the world market and general intellect. They display the forces that make immaterial labor, informational technologies, and digital cultural products resistant to commodification. Interactive games constantly threaten to flip from ideal commodity to nightmare non-commodity. Once again, this process can be schematically followed around capital's circuit.
In production, interactive gaming is an example of what Tessa
Morris Suzuki characterizes as information capitalism's "perpetual
innovation economy," in which business seeks to maintain continual
expansion by generating and marketing a ceaseless stream of new
commodities with ever-shortening product cycles and life spans.
25
This speed of innovation comes from the systematic mobilization
of immaterial labor, and the accelerated cycles of information flowing
from producers to consumers and back. Such velocity of change -
Schumpterian "creative destruction" not just as episodic convulsion but
daily
modus operandi
- promises information capital a higher rate of profit than the
slower cycles of traditional manufacturing.
But it also brings greater risk, "as the investment needed for
innovation is high and the window of opportunity to realize the
investment is ever smaller."
26
The danger is that the blistering pace of change will immolate
vast expenditures of research and development before they can be
translated into profit.
27
Such an upgrade economy places a premium on renewing and
expanding consumer capacities to absorb digital commodities. But the
conditions of "general intellect" simultaneously undermine consumption
power, in a variety of ways that track back to the system's requirements
- and lack of requirements - for human labor.
The most dramatic of these drains on consumption is piracy.
Digital gaming, with its origin in the unauthorized play of MIT
programmers, is a child of hacking. And while information does not want
to be free anymore than it wants to be paid, there are plenty of people
who want free information and free games, and know how to get them. This
is a result of what Peter Lunenfeld refers to as the "commerce of
tools."
28
The software commodities that are amongst the most attractive
offerings of digital capitalism are not only consumer goods, but also
"the tool commodities of technoculture," which enable "new commodities
and new work." So the relationship between producers and consumers is no
longer simply "a case of sellers and buyers" but of "a relationship
between hyphenates: between manufacturer-producers and
consumer-producers."
Lunenfeld notes how this process pushes what Marx termed "the
social character of private labor" to an unprecedented intensity, so
that "although the commodity still retains its awesome power, the "made"
character of the technocultural commodity is consistently foregrounded
for the consumer-producer."
29
But this informal takeover of the means, not just of production,
but also of near-instantaneous and costless
reproduction
by immaterial labor, constitutes a major dilemma of the world
market in the era of general intellect.
30
In the game business, two pirating technologies have recently
attracted special attention - "emus" (software "emulators" that enable
software for one platform to be played on another), and "modding"
(modification that enables people to copy and play game CDs). But these
are only the latest manifestations of an endemic problem.
According to the Interactive Digital Software Association, game
pirates released approximately $3.2 billion worth of packaged goods last
year: this figure is
only
for packaged software, and excludes Internet traffic in games,
for which, according to Douglas Lownstein, president of IDSA, "there are
no hard figures." Since worldwide sales of legal games are approximately
$17 billion, this would mean that pirated games are equivalent to just
fewer than 20% of total business. Such figures should be viewed with
skepticism, since they rest on the improbable assumption that all these
games would have been bought at the normal market price. Game makers'
associations have an interest in overstating the problem in order to
persuade government action against pirates.
31
But even allowing for hyperbole, illicit, free software is
clearly having a major impact: according to Lowenstein "Piracy in all
its forms represents the biggest threat to the continued growth of the
industry."
32
This problem is inseparable from the intensified speed and scope
of cybercapitalism's preferred means of circulation - the Net. A highly
sophisticated, competitively organized system of online game "warz" has
flourished for years, using private FTP servers, Internet Relay Chat
(IRC) and, to a lesser extent, short-lived Web sites to distribute
"cracked" titles.
33
The peer-to-peer explosion will multiply this problem. Although
the music giants have been the first in the firing line, interactive
games companies will be next, as video-capable P2P networks such as
Swapoo emerge.
34
"I think Napster and Gnutella are pretty serious threats to the
games industry," Lowenstein says: "As you get to more broadband, I think
they become even more dangerous."
35
The hazards of perpetual innovation and the hemorrhage of piracy place a premium on expanding digital markets. Gaming participates in the "80:20" - actually more like "90:10" - formulae common to many cultural industries. A small minority of "hits" supplies the vast majority of profits. Making money depends on selling these hits very fast, very widely, before the obsolescence of perpetual innovation and the bleeding of piracy take effect. But here too, the industry faces a problem of its own success - that of extreme market segmentation.
We have already noted as digital gaming colonization of youthful minds that can be cultivated on a life-long basis. But the particular line along which this youth market has been developed creates its own limits. For most of their brief history, digital games have been "toys for boys." The version of "general intellect" cultivated by the military entertainment complex is actually not general, but partial: a masculine collective mind dominated by the most reactionary element of a quite traditionally gendered social brain. The complex grooves worn between the weapons complex and the gaming industry have suffused game content with the narratives and the subject positions of "militarized masculinity." This has made it a target of criticism from educators, parents and psychologists concerned about the effects of media violence - and about a gendering of digital play that deprives girls of an informal high-tech head-start program. The industry has an interest in responding to such criticism - and not just to avoid political heat and preempt regulatory legislation and civil actions. Expanding beyond the male niche offers the