NBA superstar LeBron James is leaving the Cleveland Cavaliers to play for the Miami Heat. Cavs owner Dan Gilbert is dismayed. Both communicated their views to the public but in starkly different ways. James made his announcement via a live, hour-long broadcast on the cable network ESPN. Gilbert quickly posted an open letter to the Cavaliers' official website. While James' television special has been critiqued as being self-indulgent, he has not suffered near the humiliation as Gilbert's hasty internet response. Gilbert says some pretty unlikely things in his letter, such as promising that the Cavs will win a championship before James does, but the owner's letter has really been lampooned for its random inscribing of "scare quotes," its emphatic deployment of CAPS LOCK, and its grating use of Comic Sans font. In short, its Gilbert's formal eccentricities which have raised the most eyebrows—eccentricities in part made possible by the medium of digital discourse.
Gilbert isn't the only billionaire to make poor use of the internet recently. Apple CEO Steve Jobs has reportedly responded by email to user complaints about poor reception on the new iPhone. Jobs dismissively instructed these customers that the problem was simply that they were holding the phone the wrong way. After a week of bad press from Jobs' online flippancy, Apple has at last offered a full refund for customers who have had enough of the iPhone's problems.
There is some pleasure to be taken in mocking corporate mastermind's failures at digital discourse, especially when the Internet has so clearly become a conduit of power for capitalist institutions. But don't take my word for it: in their 2007 book, The Exploit: A Theory of Networks, Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker argue that 21st century power is organized as a network. A sovereign's power emanates outwards, web-like, to the sundry localities under its purview. Key to this networked relationship between sovereign and localities is that the sovereign's power is subject to the network's protocols—that is, its formalized codes of behavior. In grossly simplified terms, no matter how wealthy Gilbert or Jobs might be they still have to use the same Internet as everybody else. Whereas Lebron James used the privilege of his superstardom to command an hour of primetime television—something most people could only do via, say, terrorist attack—Gilbert's blog post was just one in a constellation of online reactions to James' decision to join the Miami Heat. Had Gilbert's post not been so tragi-comic, it would have never received sustained media attention.
But perhaps we're getting a bit ahead of ourselves. Digital discourse was also mobilized by the wealthy and powerful well before James made his Miami decision. Here's New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg—a man with a net worth $18 billion (James' is $90 million) according to Forbes—using the popular video site YouTube to make his plea:
Obviously Bloomberg didn't get what he wanted either.
But putting focus on these CEOs singular failures at Internet communiquÈ distracts from the fact that the privileged class they collectively represent won big—in no small way thanks to digital media and networked power. In her 2009 book Tactical Media, Rita Raley surveys several digital art installations which represent (a problematic word to use for digital art) what Raley calls "speculative capital" (or millennial capitalism or information capitalism). Raley writes:
The general belief at the end of the long twentieth century is that capital itself is given to mutation and flexibility, not to self-destruction but to autotelic reproduction and regeneration. This is the mode of the network, which is forced to function or else risk being destroyed. It must perform, not optimally or creatively, but basically. A complex, adaptive network, moreover, retains an inherent plasticity and carries along with it the power to reconstitute itself (Raley 134).
Raley's favorite example of this plasticity, is the art installation Black Shoals currently showing in Copenhagen. Black Shoals projects plasma-like constellations of light on a planetarium ceiling. The lights glow and dim relative to stocks' fluctuations.
Likewise, talking about the individual "Lebron James" (and here I hope my scare quotes are a bit more nuanced than Dan Gilbert's) as the subject of Gilbert or Bloomberg's (des)ire does not adequately address the way James himself has become digitized. In Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet, Lisa Nakamura finds sites where computer users are able to construct race via digital media. It is an epistemic shift from understanding how people are seen to how people see (Nakamura 208). But in some ways James has less liberty than the relatively anonymous online user. How he is seen—his "image"—is central to his career and there are financial benefits for James to maintain this image consistently across media. The James on the basketball court must be analogous to the James on the billboard or television special—and video game.
Managing one's image in the age of digital discourse, however, is not so simple—largely because the notion of the one is challenged by the structures—the protocols—of the digital network. De-individuation is a common word used to denote the break-up of the individual into component parts. It happens more often than we realize. If you have ever used Netflix or Amazon or Facebook—to just name a few—your individuality has already been broken up into qualities like age, gender, race, sexuality, taste in movies, purchasing habits (e.g. how much you spend and where you spend it). The point is—Netflix, Amazon, and Facebook have no sense of "you" the monad, the one, the individual. They can grasp only your component parts. And as commerce continues to move towards Rita Haley's notion of information capitalism the self will undoubtedly undergo economic transfigurations. Unfortunately, these digital components of the self—networked, archived, logged in databases—might potentially lead to a "resurgence of scientism," as Nakamura warns: "Digital systems such as facial recognition software operationalize and instrumentalize race just as the Human Genome Project tells us precisely which locations on the human gene set "contain" race" (Nakamura 209).
James has to confront this just like anyone else. Check out the Miami Heat's introduction of James below:
There's a lot going on here—the display of the athletes themselves, the Pro Wrestling atmosphere, the awkward staging of the athletes above the audience, the bizarre divide between the white interviewers dressed in coat and tie versus the black athletes in jerseys, the fact that the video is broadcast by ESPN, owned by the Walt Disney Company with its own history of racist depictions (see: Dumbo [1941], Song of the South [1946], or the numerous World War II Disney propaganda films). But aside from all that, you might also notice the words being projected onto the stage beneath James: "YES. WE. DID." This is of course the victorious pronouncement of Barack Obama's historical presidential election. So why use the phrase for James and the Heat? One somewhat suspect answer is that James' arrival at Miami is analogous to Obama's arrival at the White House. The digital explanation can be described through the texts I've mentioned above: "Yes we did" appears as a signal of Obama's sovereignty manifesting itself in the locality of the NBA generally and Miami specifically. It is likewise a sign of capital—yes we did make money without "producing" anything. Like capital, James is plastic—the only thing he ultimately "did" was change uniforms. And of course, yes we did carries the networked trace of race—one component which "links" James and Obama together. In other words, would the Heat have deployed the phrase if James had been a white athlete?
I'm not claiming that my brief analysis of "yes we did" is wholly accurate. The point is demonstrate a kind of digital logic that moves us away from the individual and the analogy to the networked and the digital. But let's return, in parting, to Dan Gilbert whose digital presence is marked by a digital incompetence. Gilbert's maniac letter stands out because it appears to have broken protocol—protocol of the NBA (they fined Gilbert for his diatribe), protocol of leadership, and protocol of typeface. But when it comes to the protocols of the networks of capital, sovereignty, and the (de)individual Gilbert, Jobs, James, and the rest of us can't help but obey. The joke, ultimately is on us—comic sans, sans rèsistance.
Works Cited
- Galloway and Thacker. The Exploit: A Theory of Networks. University of Minnesota Press: 2007.
- Nakamura, Lisa. Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet. University of Minnesota Press: 2007.
- Raley, Rita. Tactical Media. University of Minnesota Press: 2009.
