Jennifer WallaceTheory of InteractionProf. Moulthroup

To Bit or Not to Bit…

When it comes to knowledge, how can one truly claim to have an unbiased

opinion? Modern day intellectuals ride the fence, condemn or condone humanity and its

love affair with technology. One thing all can agree on is the exponentially increasing

importance of knowledge, information and intelligence — everything else has become a

passing derivative. Pierre Levy, in Collective Intelligence and Cyberculture, argues that

the knowledge space is the new anthropological space, the latest addition to the chain of

the earth space, territorial space, and the commodity space. Levy’s portrayal of the role of

collective intelligence is hard to refute as he cuts all critics off as representing either

transcendent schools of thought —those that objectify humans under some a priori

representation of the good — and as mechanical and conservative — trying to maintain

current hierarchies of discourse and power. Although Levy offers intelligent insight on a

number of issues concerning culture and technology, Levy also suffers from cogito

interruptus, which is “typical of those who see the world inhabited by symbols or

symptoms — indubitable signs of something that is neither here below nor up above, but

that sooner or later will happen.” (Hyperreality, 222) In the words of Umberto Eco, a

respected professor of semiotics, those who embrace symbols and symptoms neglect “to

articulate equations, for cogito interruptus demands that symbols and symptoms be flung

by the handful, like confetti, and not lined up, bookkeeper style, like little balls on an

abacus.” (Ibid, 223) In his analysis of the commodity space and knowledge space, Levy

incorrectly groups issues of power and issues of pure causality, or at least oversimplifies

the situation, barricading any refutation of his theory by employing clever instances of

cogitus interruptus.

COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE

In his work by the same name, Levy defines collective intelligence as “universally

distributed intelligence, constantly enhanced, coordinated in real time, and resulting in

the effective mobilization of skills,” its goal being “the mutual recognition and

enrichment of individuals rather than the cult of fetishized or hypostatized communities.”

(CI, 13) Eco sees Levy, himself, as a fetishizer of mass culture. Eco defines a type of

scholar, the integrated intellectual, as one who sees the results of mass media as making

information processing pleasurable and easy, “with the result that we live in an age in

which the cultural arena is at last expanding to include the widespread circulation of a

‘popular’ art and culture in which the best compete against each other.” (Apocalypse

Postponed, 18) Eco sees Levy’s use of collective intelligence as a “positive fetishizing”

of mass culture: “The integrated intellectual produces for the masses, plans mass

education, and in that way collaborates in the process of massification.” (Ibid, 25) Levy

would wholeheartedly not agree, saying that self-organized knowledge communities

consist of individual producers and consumers, but in a non-hierarchical and universally

lateral group. Levy’s argument waxes vague as he fails to draw the line between group

and mass.

In order to recognize individuality and subjectivity, Levy says humans need new

forms of social identity constructed by a knowledge culture, for ethnic, national and

religious forms of kinship have led to confrontation. By forming relationships through

knowledge, Levy claims “we will encourage the growth of a deterritorialized civility that

coincides with contemporary sources of power while incorporating the most intimate

forms of subjectivity. (CI, 11)

ROLE OF COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE

In the chapter of Cyberculture titled “Critique of Criticism,” Levy states that

cyberspace won’t change power relations and economic inequalities. In the same

paragraph he cryptically asserts:

By increasing market transparency and promoting direct transactions between buyers and sellers, there is little doubt that cyberspace will facilitate a ‘liberal’ evolution of the economy of information and knowledge, and very likely the overall operation of the economy.” (214)

In the cycle of collective intelligence, “the state and current structures of government

could be maintained, providing their functions are redefined…they would become the

guardians, guarantors, administrators, and executants of collective intelligence.” (Ibid,

73) If a government’s functions are redefined, especially by a scenario that displaces the

focus on capital by a universal embrace of collective intelligence, one can hardly say that

current structures would be maintained. A government’s role in Levy’s world of

collective intelligence, even if it were to operate under extremely liberal conditions,

would still hinder the laterality needed for the full realization of this utopian ideal.

Levy admits that universalization and virtualizing tendencies correspond to an

increase in financial inequality and a widening gap between the universally connected

and non-participants; however, he feels that the emerging collective intelligence

augmented by cyberculture will be considered in a positive enough light that humans will

redirect their formerly “labor-intensive” (under a capital-centered regime) energy and

skills towards the sustenance of a dominating knowledge space — the maintenance and

propagation of the collective intelligence. “Collective intelligence will become the source

and goal of other forms of wealth, open and incomplete, a paradoxical output that is

internal, qualitative, and subjective. Collective intelligence will be the infinite product of

the new economy of the human.” (Ibid, 35) If knowledge is the traded product, the thing

of value, there will still be haves and have-nots, especially because of this “unstable

universe,” where ones’ skill sets constantly need to be upgraded to compete in the

knowledge sector. Networking, as long as humans have needs other than cognitive that

must be met, will remain a significant part of survival.

Theodore Roszak, a scholar of the school that Eco would classify as

“apocalyptics,” sees a diminished value of humans brought on by cyberspace and

technology, “Computers have come to play a central role in downsizing companies and in

the creation of a part-time, temporary, low-paid, non-benefited workforce. The brutal

economic fact of life in today’s marketplace is that we could generate more good jobs by

outlawing computers than by multiplying them.” (Roszak, The Cult of Information,

xxxviii) Granted, Levy asserts that humanity must release the anthropological space of

commodity from the fetters of capitalism, but using the arts of cogitus interruptus, — or

idealism — fails to articulate how this can be done.

THE GOOD AND THE BEST GETS UGLY

Levy states, “Collective intelligence is a utopia of the unstable and the multiple. It

responds to an ethics of the best rather than a morality of the good...The good doesn’t

change, the best is different wherever it is found” (CI, 250) Unlike this promotion of the

entrepreneurial best, in an earlier chapter Levy promotes the concept of good: “Anything,

therefore, that causes the growth of human beings would be judged good, and primarily

moral: dignity, recognition, communication, collective intelligence.” (Ibid, 28)

If every niche of collective intelligence members has its own idea of what is best

and tries to apply this universally, how can doom not prevail? In order for Levy ‘s ideal

of collective intelligence to work literally every member would have to synchronize, even

though each is supposed to focus on increasing his individuality and subjectivity. For

Levy:

The just man includes, he integrates, he repairs the social fabric. In a society of the just, and in accordance with the conventions of a reciprocity, everyone strives to include the other. In a world where everything is in flux, in which everyone is faced with change, hospitality, the morality of nomads and migrants, becomes the very essence of morality.” (Ibid, 26)

Hierarchy and power relations cannot be supplemented by Levy’s concept of a

pure form of strength. Levy defines strength as purely good, and power something

measured by its ability to limit strength, destroy, and create fear. Furthermore, “Power is

boisterous; it prevents the community from communicating with itself. Power comes into

being and sustains itself only by impoverishing the qualities of being around it. The just

avoid power. (Ibid, 28)

Aside from the overgeneralizations Levy makes, Levy uses a very negative and

one-dimensional view of power to fuel his campaign for a liberated knowledge space.

Clearly the influences of Giles Deleuze and Paulo Fieire present themselves in Levy’s

presentation of power, while he neglects to explain how power, as a social influence,

would still be present in his web of collective intelligence.

Towards the end of Collective Intelligence, Levy states:

“Because of the diversity of human worlds, calculation of the best cannot be aligned with a monodimensional good, one that is molar, solid, and transcendent. A single good for everyone and for all moments (even those of a commercial nature), blocking the emergence of new forms of strength, would obviously no longer be the good.” (Ibid, 84)

Here Levy has the good asserting power since it is impeding strength, which earlier was

seen as purely good, thus contradicting his earlier dichotomy between strength and

power.

THE COSMOPOEDIA

Levy defines the new organizational method of the knowledge space as the

cosmopedia:

“…A dynamic and interactive multidimensional representational space…at its extreme the cosmopedia contains as many semiotics and types of representation as exist in the world itself. The cosmopedia multiplies nondiscursive utterances…the cosmopedia will dematerialize the boundaries between different types of knowledge.” (Ibid, 216)

Yes, in interacting with ones environment the significance and relevance of objects do

not remain the same; as Jim Gee remarks, humans must constantly construct context in a

real-time scenario, assigning value judgments on the fly. But this is merely exercising the

power of reason, which can be represented by Levy’s “unbroken, dynamic topology.”

(Ibid, 217) Isn’t thinking defined as the processing and organization of information

followed by filing it into associational and relational categories? There is an undeniable

ranking of objects, ideas and actions with which humans must deal daily; if we treated all

information as potentially equal, either nothing would be accomplished or we would

delete ourselves from the knowledge space rather quickly.

THE CINEMAP

To apply Levy’s ideas to present reality, a task Levy abhors as chaining the

potential of the free and ideal knowledge space to the current constraints of the

commodity space, it is possible to deflate his claims of collective intelligence. Levy’s

cinemap is a navigational instrument of the knowledge space that has no a priori

determined hierarchy of location of nodes, but instead can show the lateral relationships

of every possible quality and attribute of every object in the information universe.

“Within the knowledge space, individual identity is organized around dynamic images,

images it produces through the exploration and transformation of the virtual realities in

which it participates…” (Ibid, 155) Levy trusts that the participants, in a completely

liberal free market arrangement of producer-consumer, reader-writer, will develop a

useful “world of signification, a hypermap linked to a multitude of thinking beings,

works, and communities, a compass of the mind that points to other maps and other

worlds.” (Ibid, 155) Although the World Wide Web is still a relatively new technology,

no realization of this seemingly obvious (to Levy) chain of events presents itself. A

mixture of the elitist Ortuk social network conceived by Google and the Web’s data

deluge comes to mind.

As seen through mass media, when dealing with groups — even interactive

participants —the lowest common denominator prevails to preserve equality and

laterality. A great interest has arisen among those involved with education, writing, or

any kind of media interaction, about the younger generation’s use of IM abbreviations

and the canonizing of lowbrow phraseology that has resulted from the need to transmit

messages quickly. In a base sense, collective intelligence can be witnessed in man’s new

ability to self-publish on the Internet in a space accessible to all, a big ever-changing

library where everyone can be an author, and no subject is ever closed.

IDENTITY

Levy states that even if one is unemployed, “He is not useless. He is not

interchangeable. He has an image, a position, dignity, a personal and positive value

within the knowledge space. All of us have a right to be acknowledged as a knowledge

identity.” (CI, 13) Levy’s collective intelligence members encounter other knowledge

beings in the faceless virtual world, “no longer as flesh and blood, as social rank, an

owner of things, but as an angel, an active intelligence — active for himself but potential

for me. Should he ever agree to expose his face of light, …I will contemplate his in

knowledge or his knowledge of life, the projection of his subjective world upon the

immanent heaven of the collective intellect.” (Ibid, 102) He states further that:

“The raw material of the economy of qualities is composed of human acts and potentialities…The quantum nature of quality is not based on conventional analytic and Cartesian rationality, for the quanta involved are emitted by subjects, they are semantic, not objective, solid, and fixed.” (CI, 158)

Levy says that forms of ranking and hierarchy are results of the territorial space, not the

knowledge space. Even though on some level every person is the vessel of loads of

knowledge, there has to be some means of discrimination and value assignment. Social

theorists, such as Martin van der Gaag and Tom Snijders, have attempted to create a

measurement for individual social capital, but still apply capital-centric —according to

Levy — terms like network and resource. (See

http://stat.gamma.rug.nl/snijders/WHF9_Snijders_vdGaag.pdf) Levy assures us that

collective intelligence will not severely change the commodity space, but will wrest

human potential quantified as labor from the bonds of capital(ism). Instead of addressing

whatever he imagines would result, Levy simply pats our heads and tells us things will

just be better that way.

Viewing this cosmopedia in the worst-case scenario, what happens if the other

lies to you? What about current cyber-instances when the other is actually a child

molester, thief, stalker, etc.? Concerns of reciprocity, trust and reliability are currently

addressed through transcendent networks and social identities — teacher-student, parent-

child, mentor-apprentice. Levy’s liberal restrictions on authority creates a huge

responsibility at the level of the subjective individual, bringing to mind Lev Manovichs’s

concerns with the freedoms granted through digital media in general.

Levy sees the current fragmentation of identity and social forms as a signifier of

the coming of the dawn of the knowledge space. Couldn’t this fragmentation be a result

of this knowledge space, where one can don as many faces as he can handle when

forming his relations with others in a nonhierarchical setting? Consider Sherry Turkle’s

story of the man who truly thought he knew what it was like to be a woman since he

played a female character on a Multi-User Domain. Will the collective intelligence,

whose medium is currently computers and their screens, suffer from this binary

uniformity, the curse of digital compression, which can make it difficult to determine the

value of the message? Theodore Roszak thinks the literacies taught by hypertext — the

digitized media of cyberspace — “run the risk of overloading and further fragmenting the

attention span (already so badly battered) that is basic to intelligence.” (The Cult of

Information, 21)

Collective intelligence will be manifested through cyberspace, a medium that

accommodates messages that “will now revolve around the individual receiver, and the

author function of modernity giving way to a reader-writer continuum, where the roles of

creator and interpreter blend.” Adding further to the fragmentation of identity lost by the

author function, Levy wants as a primary goal of collective intelligence the prevention of

quick closure, with the “accent …shifted from work to progress.” (Ibid, 123)

Levy says a means of communication beyond writing is needed. Collective

intelligence is supposed to be the human attribute that is more hominizing than language,

but which operates at a much higher level; languages are made for communication within

small communities “on a human scale.” Writing made communication and human groups

connected through language much bigger than speech could have accommodated,

therefore now — to combat the “division of society into a bureaucratic information

processing machine based on writing on the one hand and ‘administered’ individuals on

the other” — Levy wants the processing of information to be universally distributed, our

common property. Levy sees digital media as the destroyer of logocentrism, “the

destitution of the supremacy of discourse over other modes of communication.” (Ibid,

118) Wresting away the communicative controls from the technology of writing, Levy

sees virtual worlds, simulation and hypertext as the platforms of secondary literacy.

While this may be true, it still does not make the case for collective intelligence.

Levy claims that the concept of the book is a slave to territorial space, “a reserved

domain, confiscated and transcendent.” (CI, 211) The collective intelligence of the

knowledge space would be an ever-open forum for the pandering of ideas. But Eco brings

up a worthy point:

How to prove a conjecture about the intention of a text? The only way is to check it upon the text as a coherent whole. This idea, too, is an old one and comes from Augustine (De doctrina christiana): any interpretation given of a certain portion of a text can be accepted if it is confirmed and must be rejected if it is challenged by another portion of the same text. Thus every act of reading is a difficult transaction between the competence of the reader (the reader's world knowledge) and the kind of competence that a given texts postulates in order to be read in an economic way. (Apocalypse Postponed, 46)

When one has a singular and unchanging text, one can easily discuss pathways of

thought and organization. With a continuously morphing text how is one supposed to

know which particulars are contextually relevant, when the context of the author and

reader can never be pinpointed?

Collective intelligence is the over-language that will allow us to become a

universal community, the only way our societies can meet their objectives. How has

man’s ability to reason not sufficed? Levy cannot accept the permanence of capital and

all of its resulting ills, and thus continues to expand on his vague image of the knowledge

economy, creating new terms for concepts already identified by philosophers, such as

Plato and Aristotle. Instead of the lofty grandeur of a collective intelligence, why

couldn’t we all just have a memex?

According to Walter Ong, writing allowed mankind to produce abstract thought.

Cyberspace has not yet been proven to enhance the mind’s cognitive capabilities; it does,

however, give us plenty of irrelevant bytes to sift through since the screen can allow all

information an equal playing field.

Eco says, “Any excess of information produces silence. Sunday’s Times contains

too much information and I do not have enough time to consume it.” (Apocalypse

Postponed, 67). Levy has a more positive view of silence, “In the silence of thought, we

will travel the digital avenues of cyberspace, inhabit weightless mansions that will now

constitute our subjectivity.” (CI, 157) How is one to participate in real-time collective

intelligence and really and truly be productive when collective intelligence is on such a

global scale? To truly be equal, those participating in a collective intelligence must let

everyone have their equal say, all being hospitable and patient. This way of acting is

following the pragmatic rules of language – the etiquette of call and response. But Levy

proposes that collective intelligence will be an over-language, freeing us of the

territorialization of language and the forms of social identity that accompany it.

THE KNOWLEDGE ECONOMY

Deep in the middle of his book, Levy sticks in that, yes, capitalism is irreversible,

that there is no economy without capitalism, and the commodity space is a permanent tier

in the layers of anthropological spaces. However, mankind can still escape the “vortex of

capital.” (Ibid, 138) Presently, however, the knowledge space is still a servant of

capitalism’s competitive supply and demand ethos. Levy sees the possibility of the

knowledge space, currently a u-topia, to break from the bonds of capital, placing value

back on human qualities instead of capital gains: “This fourth anthropological space,

should it come to fruition, will harbor forms of self-organization and sociability that tend

toward the production of subjectivity…Not exactly an earthly paradise since the other

spaces (nomadic space of the earth, territorial space, commodity space) will continue to

exist.” (Ibid, 141) Levy calls for the constriction of the anthropological space of

commodity, which has become “a huge cosmopolitan machine, self-organized, creative,

destructive.” (Ibid, 146)

According to Levy, there is no reason why in the past civilization ultimately

settled on capitalism, instead of, say, an empire. First, one cannot even begin to imagine

what the state of the anthropological spaces would be under an empire; without

capitalism, one would be forced to make a case that the technological tools for collective

intelligence would exist in the first place. How would a libertarian survive under

Alexander the Great? Much to the horror of economists everywhere, Levy ponders, “Is

economy as a discipline anything more than the flattened, analytic form of the eternity of

capital?” (CI, 149)

Levy claims that capitalism limits the extent of subjectivity: “Capitalism is

deterritorializing and, for the past three centuries, industry and commerce have been the

principal engines driving the evolution of human societies.” (CI, 137) Instead of seeing

capitalism as an impediment to the creative nature of collective intelligence, Joseph

Schumpeter, a father of modern days economics, said that intellectual freedom was a

product of capitalism: “It was the nature of capitalism itself—its precision, rigor, and

logic—that had given birth to modern patterns of analysis and thought, which in turn

underlay technological advance.” (Rosenof, 101) Economist Joel Kurtzman has this to

say of the global knowledge economy — “when the economic unity is the globe, where

do people fit in? What citizenly use of this technology can counterbalance a shift of

power on this scale?” (Kurtzman, 121) Levy thinks that collective intelligence will

subdue the instability of the virtual economy propagated by deterritorialization.

CRITICISM

Levy refutes any kind of criticism against his utopia by saying that the critics are

merely afraid of it leading to totalitarianism. “Either the denunciation of utopias is simply

a mask for conservatism or the logical criticism of utopia culminates in the

dismantlement of the destructive mechanisms of transcendence and power.” (CI, 86)

Levy covers all of his bases so as not to allow for criticism: “The object of the

knowledge of the fourth space is beyond the reach of the humanities because its subject

— the collective intellect — does not claim to produce objective knowledge of itself or

its world… The thinking community cannot be dissected by any system of transcendent

categories.” (CI, 205-206) Levy smoothes out any technicalities by saying that these

things will come to pass in the future, and that we can’t comprehend them yet, since the

solutions surpass our present mental ability.

ARE WE SMARTER NOW?

The contemporary French philosopher, Jacques Ellul, in The Technological

Society (1964) is not as thrilled as Levy is about the bond between humanity and

technology. Levy’s collective intelligence could exemplify the undesirable effects

described by Ellul:

This is why there is such an incredible stress on information in our schools. The important thing is to prepare young people to enter the world of information, able to handle computers, but knowing only the reasoning, the language, the combinations, and the connections between computers. This movement is invading the whole intellectual domain and also that of conscience. (p. 136)In a problem of misidentifying causation and correlation, Levy sees cyberspace as

a medium for restoring humanity to humans. Concepts of collective intelligence did not

surface as a result of a progressive and modern telecommunicative society. Levy is trying

to use modern technology as a tool by which to reenter the Garden of Eden, whereas we

should not burden the useful tool of speedy data transmission with such lofty goals.

Considering the kind of knowledge being pandered around in chat rooms, Eco points out,

in his essay The Future of Literacy¸ “Cathedrals were the TV of their times, and the

difference with our TV was that the directors of the medieval TV read good books, had a

lot of imagination and worked for the public good.” (Apocalypse Postponed, 66) Roszak

adds, “Thanks to the high success of information theory, we live in a time when the

technology of human communications has advanced at blinding speed; but what people

have to say to one another by way of that technology shows no comparable

development.” (Roszak, 16) Levy himself states, “The worst scenario would be for the

Internet to be replaced by a gigantic system of ‘interactive television,’” a spectacle well

on its way to maturity. (Cyberculture, 207) Roszak says that technology is a mature

industry, one that creates just as many problems as it solves. The benefits stop

outweighing the means. Might it be the case that the retention of too much data — more

than a single mind can judiciously deal with — compromises the quality of thought?

“Data, data everywhere, but not a thought to think.” –Jesse H. Shera.

Levy paper works cited:

Eco, Umberto. Travels in Hyperreality. New York: Harcourt Brace and Co, 1986.

Eco, Umberto. Apocalypse Postponed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994.

Ellul, Jacques. The Technological Society. Vintage Publishing, 1967.

Kurtzman, Joel. The Death of Money: How the Electronic Economy Has Destabilized the

World's Markets and Created Financial Chaos. New York: Simon & Schuster,

1993. ...

Levy, Pierre. Cyberculture. Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press, 2001.

Levy, Pierre. Collective Intelligence: Mankind’s Emerging World in Cyberspace. New

York: Plenum Press, 1997.

Rosenof, Theodore. Economics in the Long Run: New Deal Theorists and Their

Legacies, 1933-1993. Chapel Hill: Chapel Hill University of North Carolina Press,

1997.