Sean Cubitt

Bio

Sean Cubitt is Director of the Program in Media and Communications at the University of Melbourne and Honorary Professor of the University of Dundee. His publications include Timeshift: On Video Culture, Videography: Video Media as Art and Culture, Digital Aesthetics, Simulation and Social Theory, The Cinema Effect and EcoMedia. He is the series editor for Leonardo Books at MIT Press. His current research is on public screens and the transformation of public space; and on genealogies of digital light technologies.

Abstract

After Tolerance

Where the gift of labour has been commercialised, as it has in social networking, the surveillant functions of the database economy serve not only to target but to average. Here the virtual nature of the crowd, its power to act, is removed by a process of forecasting how much deviance is tolerable in a population. The challenge then is to challenge the auto-archiving of network activity with its extension. What is essential is not the actual, nor identity, but precisely non-identity: the non-identical nature of the world to which Western thought perpetually ascribes identity. The challenge is to drive the logic of individualism to its far side; to turn the compulsory choice of consumerism into actual freedom.