The immaterial labor of conspiracy theory

In Network Culture, Tiziana Terranova makes the case, drawing on Italian theories of autonomist labor, that the kind of labor that infuses the Internet--the reviews, chats, blogs, YouTube videos, open source software, and so on--is a new kind of labor, but one that draws on a history of immaterial labor, that which people like Dick Hebdige studied in the seventies as part of subcultural studies. Subcultures, Terranova notes, have long fed multinational corporations, contributing ideas about fashion, film, video games, software, and so on, as part of processes (creative, unpaid endeavors) that are not immediately recognizable as labor in the classic sense. This puts labor in a strange category, as a virtuality that, because it is not "purely functional" to capitalism, but flows in and out of profit-taking structures, has the potential to become "an opening and a potentiality" that takes the Fordist worker's "struggle against work" in new directions. Coolhunting, to use Gibson's terms from Pattern Recognition, may take, but may not take, but the economy of street/commodified is flowing, and New Left/punk notions of "sell out" are flimsy, artificial lines that seldom hold. That said, Terranova continues, the character of such new labor as a "diffuse collective quality" "does not deny the existence of hierarchies of knowledge (both technical and cultural) which prestructure (but do not determine) the nature of such activities" (84). Such hierarchical structures inevitably affect how the "potentiality" of such labor becomes actualized: as, one might imagine, either an underground album which sells directly to consumers by independent artists (Radiohead's OK Rainbows), or a major label product that is marketed, distributed, and sold by capitalist enterprises (Radiohead, in other cases).
So, conspiracy theory, in its subcultural, homegrown form, is part of this immaterial labor. Conspiracy theorists work at home alone, writing manifestos, making connections, developing web sites, researching new details. And yet, as Claire Birchall and Mark Fenster have each demonstrated in different contexts, conspiracy theory is readily commodified, whether as an Illuminatus board game, a Mel Gibson film, or a Glenn Beck television program. The virtual potential of the small room can be an opening up, a disruptive set of energies that challenge and undo capitalist flows (as in the conspiratorial elements of Occupy Wall Street, or the conspiratorial energies that nurtured the early Burning Man, or the conspiratorial tinge of anti-corporate hacking qua Anonymous). But it can also take shape within existing structures of hierarchical knowledge, which is what both Bratich and Fenster argue in different ways, that conspiracy theory, as a negative site of unknowledge, serves to legitimate existing truths already cast into existing hierarchies.

Terranova continues her analysis of the multitudinous, productive space of networks by invoking the neural network/biological account of network productivity. She explains the process by which the open/potential becomes hierarchized as one of "subjectifying" through the introduction of a "selfish gene" which forms, in Deleuze and Guattari's terms, a cut, creating "dividuals" who no longer flow with the terrible power of the multitude, but instead become inscribed within a narrow economy of cooperation or competition:

The existential condition of living as a stripped down selfish gene, endowed with the intoxicating capacity to form a multitude, but recoded within the claustrophobic black hole of the selfishness structure. The threat of these swerves (fileswapping, terrorism, street movements) is that by rejecting the micromoulding of dividualism, they might push it out of control, towards a new plateau, whose outcome not only cannot be predetermined but might also veer the system violently toward catastrophic transformations” (128).

In order to forestall such swerves, the powers interested in extracting value from such systems necessarily introduce a form of "soft control." This is different than top-down control, and even different than the control of the panopticon; it is more akin, she notes, to the deployment of the family as a policing structure or mechanism. Or, she might have added, the counterproductive power of the Oedipus virus. For the multitude--as a mob with rising power, to "swerve" the system violently toward transformation--becomes transformed here into the limited subject of the reality television show, set loose within a seemingly open field, but infected with the virus of competition and the need for audience approval. Something of the same game is played on Facebook and Twitter, whose carefully constructed modes of expression doubtlessly foster their own viral infections: the Like button, the length of status/tweet, the automatic telegraphing of statuses, all propel the user away from multitude and toward dividual competition.

Form, Terranova implies, matters: the iterative form which circulates throughout a networked system serves to shape, and potentially hierarchize, the multitudinous productivity of the network. It is here that the dizzy glee of "everything is connected," the joy of surfing the network's flows, ceases in the dividual cut. The possibility for swerve is foreclosed when the body without organs become territorialized by Oedipus.

This, then, is a way to explain the potential productivity of conspiracy theory, its giddy generation of flows away from capitalized hierarchized, while simultaneously observing the restrictive limits introduced by a gender-bound manifestation of conspiracy theory. This is the place where Everything is Connected reverts to the limiting hierarchy of the paralleled small rooms and self-affirmation of the lone gunman.