Beyond Mass: Distributed

I recently wrote about Rostow’s teleological model of economic development, with its highest or end stage of high mass consumption plus high mass production. I’ve also talked some about how an economy creates subjects and subects constitute an economy (consider some sections of my recent conference presentations, as well as what I’ve been doing with Gibson-Graham.

Zuboff and Maxmin offer an interesting spin on the intersection of these things, suggesting that we’ve already begun to move past simple “mass” consumption and production, and pointing out what that move has to do with the way individuals work in a networked economy of consumption. “In an advanced industrial society,” they write, “consumption is a necessity, not a luxury. It is what people must do to survive. It is the way that individuals take care of themselves and their families, much as hunting and gathering or growing crops were for people of earlier societies. For today’s women and men, consumption decisions encompass everything from education to health care, insurance, transportation, and communication, as well as food, shelter, clothing, and luxuries. Through the consumption of experience — travel, shelter, college — people both achieve and express individual self-determination. No one can escape the centrality of consumption. There is no distinct class of consumers. Everyone is a consumer, no matter what their status or income level” (7). So first, there’s an interesting construction of class; second, while the construction of education as a consumable experience good strikes me as problematic (I still don’t have an adequate understanding of the ways in which students, teachers, institutions, societies, and economies interact to produce and consume education, which may simply indicate that the production/consumption binary cannot be adequately applied to education), I’m happy to see them noting the informatization of consumption in addition to Zuboff’s earlier attention to the informatization of production.

Zuboff and Maxmin point out, as I’ve been attempting to, that digital reproducibility profoundly alters the relationships between production, consumption, the individual, and the economy. Today’s “new individuals express a very different orientation toward consumption as compared with the generation that preceded them. We call their new approach the individuation of consumption. It means that people no longer want to bend to the antiquated rule of business” but rather “want to be the subjects of a new commerce in which they are recognized as the origins of a new form of economic value that we call relationship value“, which “is realized in individual space, rather than created in organization space. It is at the center of a new economic framework called relationship economics. This framework redefines the commercial process as the origin of all value and the source of all cash. In this new perspective, all commercial processes are aligned with the individual end consumer, a principle enforced by a critical operational requirement: No one gets paid until the individual releases cash” (11). Again, I have some minor quibbles here, mostly with the way they construct the commodification of absolutely everything, which seems to fall in line with the construction of the implacable and all-consuming economy that Gibson-Graham finds so problematic, and which Colin Williams critiques quite handily.

But where all this comes together is in that “Once value is deemed to to reside individuals, everything changes. Firms no longer ‘create’ value; they can only strive to realize the value that already exists in individual space. In this way, distributed capitalism further expands the concept of ownership. Not only is share ownership dispersed, but value itself is dispersed. Individuals ‘own’ the sources of value, as all value originates in their needs, and all cash flows from the fulfillment of those needs. The dispersion of value necessitates the dispersion of control. Relationship value realization cannot be achieved through the hierarchical oversight of a central management structure” (Zuboff & Maxmin 14). This passage strikes me as absolutely amazing: Zuboff and Maxmin have tied a perspective on ownership and value that would shock Marx to a post-Foucauldian understanding of control in a space that could be understood as the space of Bourdieu’s relational infinitude of classes. Mark C. Taylor might suggest that to the Open Source movement’s model of distributed production, Zuboff and Maxmin have offered a workable theoretical model of distributed consumption. This is where I see the supercession of Rostow’s five-stage model: we’re already moving beyond high mass consumption and high mass production, and into high distributed consumption and high distributed production. (Here, I’m using Zuboff and Maxmin’s understanding of ‘mass’ as problematically monolithic — which offers another useful connection to Gibson-Graham, in their critique of such monolithic constructions.)

Whew. OK, that’s enough for today: time for dinner.

Beyond Mass: Distributed