Information Politics

David Parry (bio)
Saint Joseph’s University

As review of Jordan, Tim. Information Politics: Liberation and Exploitation in the Digital Society. Pluto Press, 2015.

You can order the hardback of Tim Jordan’s Information Politics: Liberation and Exploitation in the Digital Society from Amazon.com for $60.19, or you can pay $21.98 for the paperback. That the two versions have different prices based on different materialities does not seem remarkable. But you can also “purchase” the book for $20.24 and read it on Kindle or on a computer with the Kindle app. “Purchase” is in quotes because if you choose to access the information that Jordan has authored in this way, you are not actually purchasing the book. You are rather purchasing a license to access the information according to certain terms and conditions set out by the publisher and by Amazon. You are renting access to the information. The fact that in this third case, the same information is presented to you at a radically reduced material cost (no printing), yet you only save $1.74, is a peculiarity of the digital age we have constructed. (There is of course a fourth option here: if you are privileged enough to have access to an academic library, you can read the information at no direct cost by checking out the book.) Information Politics seeks to explain how the same information comes to be available through a variety of means, yet with marked differences in materiality and cost. What are the circumstances that inform information structures and that politicize them in this way?

Jordan’s central tenet is that information is a new site of political struggle, and that to understand political power in the twenty-first century, it is necessary to engage the handling of information. Any theory that seeks to explain exploitation in the twenty-first century must now evaluate information as one of the sites of exploitation. Jordan is clear from the beginning that information is not some new master category that subsumes all other political antagonisms, but rather is one of multiple sites of engagement; he argues that information should be added alongside class, race, gender, and other more established sites of political struggle. Starting with this framework is one of the strengths of the book. Jordan recognizes that political struggle is multiple and takes place across myriad antagonisms, and that isolating one point of conflict allows for a deeper understanding only on the condition that it is then connected back to other political struggles. This is what the book sets out to do: to examine the forces that use information to structure exploitation and to use this investigation to expand our understanding of exploitation.

To make this argument, Jordan divides the book into three sections. The first explains the theory of information politics, analyzing both what it is that allows information to be leveraged for political gain, and also, perhaps more importantly, what about the digital makes information an especially powerful (and perhaps new) site of struggle. The second section examines particular patterns that develop as a result of these information structures, and the third is dedicated to engaging case studies meant to demonstrate the argument.

The idea that asymmetrical access to information produces inequality is not new to the twenty-first century, or even the twentieth: there is a long history of thinking about information as a central locus of power. Through one lens, the Protestant Reformation developed from a question about access to information, structured around changes in the material conditions of the reproduction of information. One can think about the field of communication studies as the study of how information helps to structure communities and distribute power; the work of James Carey is particularly instructive in this regard. As many critics have noted, the digital era has reshaped our relation to information because its substructure is now digital, not analog. One of the strengths of Jordan’s book is to provide specificity to this claim. Rather than asserting that digital information is a different type of information, Jordan supplies three reasons why the power of information has grown exponentially. The primary reason for this change is something Jordan labels “simultaneous complete use” (194): the idea that when information’s material structure is digital, more than one party at a time can completely use the information. Only one person can use an analog hardbound copy of Information Politics at a time: if I check it out from the library, you cannot also read it. But when information’s materiality becomes digital, this restriction is lifted. Everyone can share in a bit of information and use it to its full extent. Scarcity no longer becomes the defining means by which information is controlled. As a non-rivalrous good whose cost of distribution drops to near zero, and whose consumption does not preclude another’s consumption, the power of information thus changes. You can have your cake and let your neighbor eat it too, at least potentially.

But why then has this feature of the digital—the ability to simultaneously and completely use information—not led to the drastic lowering of the cost of information, coupled with universal access? Why is information now a more powerful site of political antagonism and not a lesser one? Why is it that despite information abundance, access to information is becoming increasingly unequally distributed? Why is it that the digital version of this book cost nearly as much physical one? The answer of course is copyright, or copyright as a stand-in for the numerous ways in which legal, cultural, and technical barriers have sprung up in the digital era. Instead of creating spaces where information is equally distributed, such barriers control information as a site of political power. Or, to put the matter simply, political power first inhered in land, then in factories, and now in information: Crops, Commodities, Copyright. This is all well-worn ground by media theorists, legal scholars, and political organizers alike. Since the late 1990s Mckenzie Wark has written about this change in power from materiality to information, with A Hacker Manifesto his most significant work. From a political and legal angle, Lawrence Lessig’s early work, Code, and then later, Remix, are directed at the history of legal battles around this question. Drahos and Braithwaite’s Information Feudalism: Who Owns the Knowledge Economy? is also particularly good on the history of this question across cultures and milieus. More recently, Cory Doctorow’s Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free: Laws for the Internet Age provides an approachable history of the way information has become the new site of control in the information age. In this regard, Jordan’s argument that information is now a key site of political conflict does not break new ground, even as it articulates the specificity of this moment in a useful way.

Jordan does outline why it is that information is easily controlled in the digital era (despite its non-rivalrous material nature) and points to places where we can observe this. The three places he points to are (1) recursion, (2) the devices we use, and (3) the way the network and protocols shape the flow of information. Each of these is instructive in its own right: the power of information to act upon information, the affordances and limitations of the devices we use to interact with the information flows, and the structures to which information must adhere to be transmitted across the network. But taken together, the interaction of these three aspects forms the ground through which Jordan wants us to build our understanding of the political power of information. We need to pay attention not only to information that one places in the Google search bar, but to the ability of Google to use that information to act upon other information, to build information that grows exponentially, and to claim ownership both over the recursion itself (the algorithm) and the product of that recursion (more information). We must also assess the limits of the devices through which we interact with Google, and the strict language of protocols and networks that provide access to Google servers and all of the places through which Google interacts with the web.

None of this is natural, of course; the way that these forces interact together to produce political winners and losers, to exploit some and empower others, is a matter of numerous complex decisions. For example, there is no reason that Google needs to own the information that is produced from recursion; this is a legal decision. That a digital book should require payment equal (or nearly equal to) a physical one says a great deal about who gets to own information, control access to devices, and determine how it interacts with the network.

The second part of Jordan’s book points to particular aspects of the adherence of power: cloud computing, securitization, and social networks. Each of these places creates a particular set of circumstances that leads to information inequality and ultimately serves as a site of exploitation.

Despite rhetoric to the contrary, the cloud is anything but magical and ethereal, and instead, by leveraging recursions, devices, and protocols, it is as a place where ownership of information is asserted. The entity that controls the cloud asserts property rights over the information it stores, creating a significant opportunity for exploitation. Similarly, nation states, claiming to keep citizens secure, now track and store massive amounts of data, creating information platforms that aim for total collection and control of all their citizens’ data. Finally, the seemingly public nature of data production on social networks is captured for private institutional profit. Social life is turned into free labor whose value is then captured by monopoly-level social media corporations. That all three of these sites of information creation, storage, and transfer carry political weight, again, is not particularly new. Much has been written on cloud computing, the information state, and social media networks. But in this case, the initial set up that Jordan provides helps the reader to focus on the particular ways in which information is being politicized through recursion, devices, and network protocols to create power inequality.

The final section of the book is somewhat different from the first two. While the second section is a broad analysis of sites of information exploitation, the third section takes up specific case studies (or “battlegrounds,” as Jordan calls them): the iPad, digital games, and hacktivism. The earlier sections provide a strong theoretical lens for analyzing information politics; the battleground section ends up delivering less. While all three of these sites are significant, each is too individually complicated for the space allowed them here. Each section barely covers the history and the introduction to the topic before closing and pointing out that further study is required to fully understand how information is politicized in these areas. If one wants to think about any of these specific battlegrounds, it would be necessary to read one of the numerous books that treat these topics with nuance and complexity. Hacktivism has a deep and complex history, and understanding the way that recursions, devices, and network protocols control information to generate political antagonisms requires far more analysis than Jordan is able to muster in one chapter. The same is true of the diverse field of digital game studies. And this is even more true of the iPad, both in terms of the politics of production (the labor that goes into it) and the politics of labor done on it (the jobs for which it is suited and those for which it is not).

This brings me back to the Kindle version of the book, available on the iPad. For a book that pays so much attention to the politicization of information, it really fails to address the way in which it engages in this politicization. Why restrict the simultaneous complete use of the information in the book? Or even more simply, why charge a near equal price for a digital version when its cost of distribution is so much less? To be certain, information, data, and knowledge are different categories, and the book is dealing primarily with the first two while producing the latter. But still one wonders how this book itself participates in the exploitation through information control that it so readily points to in other locations. How might we understand the book itself as a recursion of other places of information (through Jordan’s reference to the work of others), as a device (the choice to publish in print affects the interface and form), or as situated in the network (the legal means by which it is inserted into the network affects the flow)? More to the point, what would it mean to publish a free version of the digital book, not asserting property rights over the information, instead of restricting access? How would it flow across the network then? What information inequalities would be reduced if ownership were not asserted over the information, if the recursions in the book were not a site of the right to assert control but rather a means of liberation? That a book whose topic is information inequality unreflectively reproduces the inequality it analyzes by capturing its recursive information production, exploiting device affordances and limitations, and restricting the way that its information can flow across the network demonstrates the difficulty of engaging ethically with this antagonism.

Works Cited

• Carey, James W. Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society. Routledge, 2009.
• Doctorow, Cory. Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free: Laws for the Internet Age. McSweeney’s, 2015. Drahos, Peter, and John Braithwaite. Information Feudalism: Who Owns the Knowledge Economy? New Press, 2007.
• Lessig, Lawrence. Code: Version 2.0. Basic Books, 2006.
• ———. Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy. Penguin, 2009.
• Wark, McKenzie. A Hacker Manifesto. Harvard UP, 2004.