Nick Dyer-Witheford

Playing on the digital commons: collectivities, capital and contestation in videogame culture

This article examines the complex relation of commodity and commons regimes in video and computer game culture. Digital play is today both a multibillion business and the site of numerous ‘do it yourself’ practices of production and reproduction, ranging from warez networks and abandonware archives through ‘modding’ (game modification) and machinima-making to the player-created content of massively multiplayer online games. Such practices are variously symbiotic with and antagonistic to commercial gaming. They are the occasion of extraordinary cooperative arrangements between game developers and players, and of fierce disputes over intellectual property. In both cases, video and computer games reveal the subversion of ‘unidimensional’ media institutions, positing sharp distinction between producers and consumers, by an emergent ‘multidimensionality’ of new media in which these roles are deeply confounded.

Prolegomenon to a theory of slump media

The great crisis whose onset was marked by the fall of Lehman Brothers in 2008 has now lasted some six years, passing from financial meltdown to general recession to an age of austerity that, in North America and the Eurozone, is forecast to last a generation, and carries uncertainty to the entire world market. David McNally (2011) calls this vast faltering of capital, teetering on the brink of massive depression, not quite falling over, yet promising only long term stagnation, the ‘global slump.’ This article is about ‘slump media’: focusing on news media in North America, it discusses how television, radio, the press, the Internet and social media at once contributed to the making of the slump, were themselves its economic victims, culturally defined its meaning, and hence shaped responses, acquiescent or rebellious, to the convulsion. It is a ‘Prolegomenon’ in that it is not so much a report on research findings, as preliminary introduction to such a study; a mustering of intellectual resources and laying out of initial hypotheses. The article begins by presenting the major critical concepts that inform it, explaining why conceptual instruments forged to analyse media’s role at the start of neoliberalism can, with some adaptations, be applied to the crisis that may mark its end. Within this theoretical perspective, we then posit five moments of news media involvement in the global slump: 1) as a causal contributor to the bubble economy and its implosion; 2) as a relay for the ideological confusion and disarray of ruling elites caused by market catastrophe; 3) as a casualty of the crisis, one of the many industries ravaged by recession; 4) as an agency

Struggles in the Planet Factory: Class Composition and Global Warming

This chapter examines the class composition of global warming. It looks at the class struggles integral to both capital’s ongoing burning of fossil fuels and the rebound of solar radiation, examining the conflicts igniting and ignited by each within a global “planet factory”. On the ascending emissions side, we begin with the class dynamics of capital’s mining and oil industries; go on to the class clashes and armistices that created the Fordist factory and its mass production of automobiles; and then to the cognitive labor of a digitized capitalism whose computerized infrastructures and scientific labors at once identified global warming, aggravated its industrial effects, and fostered new movements of environmental protest. On the descending side, where the trapped heat returns to land and ocean, we find anti-extractivist revolts; the migrations of desperate populations fleeing drought and war; and the travails of China’s new proletarians, toiling in industrial cities beset with smog and flood. The chapter concludes by assessing the likelihood of new climate-change-driven cycles of class struggle.

Reprogramming Japan: The High Tech Crisis Under Communitarian Capitalism

Reprogramming Japan: The High Tech Crisis Under Communitarian Capitalism. By Marie Anchordoguy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005. 257p.

Digital Play: The Interaction of Technology, Culture, and Marketing

39.95. Over the last 20 years, Japan has passed from wunderkind of global capitalism to problem child, troubled by recession and stagnation. Marie Anchordoguys Reprogramming Japan joins the growing body of analysis diagnosing this sad falling off, focusing on the crisis of the high-technology sectors where silicon samurai once seemed to reign supreme. In Anchordoguys view, the cause of the problem is “communitarian capitalism.” This is a capitalism that depends heavily on state direction—governmental support for select large firms, a social contract assuring citizens permanent employment, regular wage increases, and union–management deals for labor peace. This, she suggests, is something verging on socialism. Although it has “all the trappings of private property and profit-making institutions,” the dynamism of the market is constrained by a system that “favor[s] social stability over efficiency” (p. 7). It is, in her view, “quasi-capitalism” (p. 7). Communitarian capitalism, she argues, laid the basis for Japanese success from the 1950s through the 1970s, when global economic conditions were positive, technological trajectories were clear, and foreign products could be reverse-engineered. But in the 1980s and 1990s, intensified competition, transnational outsourcing, and fiercely enforced intellectual property rights made this system a fetter on the very forces of production it had fostered.