Wikipedia and the Politics of Openness

Nate Tkacz has published an article in The Fibreculture Journal special issue on 'trolls and the negative space of the internet'. Abstract:

The warm and fuzzy rhetorics of network cultures–words like collaboration, participation and open communities–have always been made possible through acts of analytic metonymy. Once an ‘open community’ has been established, to take an example, deviations are all too often depicted as one-off exceptions, as problematic individuals bent on destroying the common spaces and creations of the well-meaning many. The figure of the troll and its modus operandi of ‘flaming’ are exemplary in this regard. The act of naming someone a troll, not only reaffirms the general ‘good faith’ of the rest of the community, but also transforms antagonism into a mere character flaw. In this article, I suggest the notion of the frame, read primarily through Bateson and Goffman, can be translated into online spaces in order to make visible the structural conditions that underpin forms of online antagonism. Drawing from “article deletion” discussions in Wikipedia, I show how the ascription of negative subjectivities–trolls, vandals, fundamentalists etc.– is the result of an a priori ‘frame politics’.

After the one-day conference 'Where Do Neoliberals Go After The Market', CIM's Will Davies and Nate Tkacz sat down with Professor Philip Mirowski to talk more about some of the main themes of the conference. Mirowski talks more about his recent research, including the developments that led to his new book Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste. The podcast also includes discussions of the reemergence of openness; the position of Popper within the Mont Pelerin Society; Wikipedia and Facebook; Neo-positivism and Big Data; and the limits of Social Studies of Finance in relation to Neoliberal political strategy.

http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/cim/news/cim_podcast_with_philip_mirowski.mp3