In a New York Times article, part of a Pulitzer prize–winning investigative series on Apple, Charles Duigg and Keith Bradsher recount a dinner with Silicon Valley executives and U.S. President Barak Obama. Apparently, the President asked Steve Jobs why he didn’t build iPhones in the U.S., and Jobs replied that those positions are never coming back. Explaining why, the article, also discussed in Chapter 5 of this volume, describes the scale and flexibility of the Chinese company Foxconn, the human costs of this scale and flexibility, and the effects of this scale and flexibility on U.S. ability to compete in a global market. The Foxconn facility has over two hundred thousand employees. About a quarter of them live in company barracks and work twelve-hour shifts. Such enormous capacity enables Foxconn not only to adapt to new design specifications but also to command large numbers of workers to labor overtime. Both capacities mean that the company can get new products out quickly. As an Apple supply demand manager quoted in the article says, “They could hire 3,000 people overnight … What U.S. plant can find 3,000 people overnight and convince them to live in dorms?” The Times piece recounts the erosion of mid-wage jobs in the U.S., the increase in low-wage service sector positions, and the $2 billion in stock high-level Apple employees and directors received (on top of their salaries) in 2011. Overall, the piece is a depressing venture into the bowels of production: the conditions of workers in China and the U.S. are horrible, differently so, but linked in the misery of the Apple supply chain.
Duigg and Bradsher end the article with an app. They write:
Before Mr. Obama and Mr. Jobs said goodbye, the Apple executive pulled an iPhone from his pocket to show off a new application—a driving game—with incredibly detailed graphics. The device reflected the soft glow of the room’s light. The other executives, whose combined worth exceeded $69 billion, jostled for position to glance over his shoulder. The game, everyone agreed, was wonderful.
(Duigg and Bradsher 2012)
After all the inequality, the exploitative reality of the production of smart-phones out of hundreds of components made around the world and assembled in China, after all the incessant executive rhetoric of competition, of can’t and must, even as Apple’s revenue tops $108 billion, we end up with the app, the wonderful, fascinating app capable of capturing billionaires. The app fastens all their attention to the iPhone. The device delivers a little thrill, a little wonder. The executives can hold animation in their hands and interact with it. In this moment of fascination, work and play converge; after all, they are still executives doing the work of pressuring, lobbying, and networking. Yet their fascination with the app makes them momentarily childlike. The app rivets them to the phone such that they are completely and totally present in the moment of the game, which means they are at simultaneously withdrawn from the prior context of inequality and exploitation. Fascination with the app withdraws them into immediate presence.
Apps are fascinating; they are also fasteners. They fasten us to our tablets and smartphones. They enthrall us, each of us, as individuals, attaching us to personalized, individualized, customized experiences of our devices. In the mashed-up metaphors of an industry fanboy celebrating the fifth birthday of the iPhone:
The lingering bombshell that the iPhone has birthed is, needless to say, the idea of apps. Apps as a commercial prospect. Apps as a celebration of a device’s identity. Apps as fun. Apps as independent spirit … Apple made software cool again … The smartest thing Apple ever did with the iPhone is open up an opportunity for excited developers to create their own love letters and tributes to the iPhone, to show Apple and everyone else what their device could become.
(Stein 2012)
Apps make iPhones into affective machines. Without apps, we wouldn’t need or want smartphones. Regular mobile phones would be enough for texting, leaving messages, even talking to another person. As apps fasten us to our devices, they withdraw us momentarily from our larger world, the pressures of everyday life as well as the specific sites and transactions that constitute global capitalism’s technology supply chains. For some of us, actually many of us, the pressures of everyday life and the transactions that constitute supply chains are mutually interconnecting: we may work in factories, for retailers, in shipping, as developers, for corporations, as content providers and as data purveyors (insofar as our smartphones collect and transmit user and usage data). Fascination with apps is the affective attachment point tethering complex chains of production in which the app is less a product than itself another means of production. Yet with this in our hands, we aren’t emancipated, controlling the conditions of our work. We are even more slaves of the machine.
This chapter considers the generative dimension of apps, their ability to tether us to devices by generating senses of attachment, enthusiasm and fascination. I attend to the ways apps amplify and consolidate specific features of communicative capitalism—network exploitation (“powerlaw” phenomena, generation of the long tail and the one), individualist and individualizing fantasies (abundance, participation, personalization) and reflexivity.1 Before I make the argument, though, I provide some definitions and background. First, apps; then affect.
By “app” I mean a small piece of software designed for a specific narrow purpose. An app is to a software suite what a single is to an album: a short, individuated unit (Bogost 2011). It’s a fragment that is no longer a part but a new, smaller whole or unit, complete by itself. My focus here is on apps for smartphones and tablets, but there are also Web apps, social networks apps, and various different kinds of apps for laptops. Although there are interesting and important differences between Web apps and mobile apps, I don’t take these up but treat “app” instead as a generic term for both. I don’t take a position in the debate over whether apps are killing the Web by attaching users strictly to downloaded apps. It makes more sense to me to recognize the interconnectedness of Web and phone apps, particularly given the prominence of the Facebook app (Facebook claims a share of about 20 percent of smartphone daily usage) (Lomas 2013).
Most of us associate apps with Apple, the iPhone and the slogan “There’s an app for that,” which was used in 2008 for the iPhone 3G and the launch of Apple’s App Store. In the late nineties, though, there were already apps for mobile devices like the Palm Pilot and the handheld PCs running the Windows Mobile operating system. People could buy apps in nascent app stores like Handango.com and Pocketgear.com. Cell phones also featured a few basic apps—calendars, address books, simple games. Apple changed the playing field when it not only released the iOS software development kit so that third-party developers could write apps for the iPhone but also provided a way for developers to sell their apps. The App Store made apps available in one place. It used the payment features of iTunes to make purchasing an app quick and easy, and it made it possible to buy, download and upgrade apps nearly seamlessly with an App Store button right on the phone. Apple thus consolidated a series of previously separate actions. As it did so, it created a new market, what many tech commentators call an ecosystem so as to highlight the multiple interconnecting features of the market—developer, consumer, operating system, device manufacturer, service provider, analytics and store itself.
As of July 2013, there were over nine hundred thousand apps available in the Apple app store and there had been over fifty billion downloads. The apps sell the phone—no apps, no iPhone market. Apple’s own documents are up front about this point; if developers stop developing, “customers may choose not to buy the company’s products” (Streitfeld 2012). Because of apps, people have a reason to buy a smartphone; it can do a lot, more in fact, than one can even imagine.
Here are a bunch of statistics. As of December 2012, the majority of mobile phone users in the U.S. used smartphones. Ninety percent of U.S. smartphones use either Google’s Android OS or Apple’s iOS. As of February 2013, the majority used Android devices, although more apps are still being developed for iOS. According to an industry report, the dominance of Google and Apple is “reinforced by the two platforms’ well-developed app ecosystems” (Comscore Report 2013). In the five years since the launch of Apple’s App Store, there are now multiple app stores (at least seventy), the largest of which is Google Play. In July 2013, Apple abandoned a lawsuit it had been pursuing against Amazon for its app store for Android. All three companies—Apple, Google and Amazon—have app stores in multiple countries. There are also numerous country specific app stores as well as speciality and boutique app stores. Globally, as of August 2013, most app store revenue came from the U.S. (second were Japan and South Korea) (Schoger 2013). Even though Google’s Android OS is on the majority of smartphones, Apple’s App Store still generates more than twice as much revenue as Google Play overall (Schoger 2013). In the U.S., the top two hundred apps bring in about $1.1 million a day in Google Play. The top two hundred in the Apple App Store bring in $5.1 million a day (van Agten 2013).
In the U.S., four out of five mobile minutes are spent engaging with apps. One in three minutes spent online happens via phones and tablets—people aren’t tied to their laptops; they are tied to, nearly inseparable from, their phones. A recent report finds that over seventy percent of U.S. mobile users have their phones with them twenty-two hours a day. They check their phones as soon as they wake up and then over a hundred more times until they go to sleep (Stern 2013).
Contemporary communications media capture users in intensive and extensive networks of enjoyment, production and surveillance. My term for this formation is communicative capitalism.2 Just as industrial capitalism relied on the exploitation of labor, so does communicative capitalism rely on the exploitation of communication. Communicative capitalism is that economic-ideological form wherein reflexivity captures creativity and resistance so as to enrich the few as it placates and diverts the many. The media practices we enjoy, that enable us to express ourselves and connect with others, appropriate and reassemble our longings into new forms of exploitation and control.
My thinking about communicative capitalism draws from psychoanalysis, particularly from Jacques Lacan as interpreted by Slavoj Zizek. Lacan’s version of the psychoanalytic concept of drive is particularly useful because it provides a way to understand the reflexive structure of complex networks.
Lacan conceives drive as necessarily death drive (unlike Freud, who presents eros as also a drive). Rather than involving some kind of primary homeostasis or equilibrium, drives are a destabilizing force, a force that persists, that exerts a pressure, without regard for the pleasure and well-being of the subject. As a persistence that is not for the sake of the subject, drive has almost an un-dead quality. It is excessive, beyond the ostensibly natural contours of life and death. In the Lacanian view, then, drive as death drive encompasses the way that even a drive for life results in paradoxes wherein saving life entails sacrificing it, pursuing life leads to risking it, and cherishing life looks like a bizarre fixation on morbidity. Drive is negativity as a force.
Drive is also reflexive. It turns back in on itself, even into its opposite. Freud’s example is of how voyeurism becomes masochism. Why is it reflexive or why is drive a turning back? The answer is because drive, in psychoanalysis, is the force loss exerts on the field of desire. The familiar Freudian term here is “sublimation.” That the drive is thwarted or sublimated means that it reaches its goal by other means, through other objects. Blocked in one direction, it splits into multiple vectors, into a network. If Freud views the process as akin to the flow of water into multiple tributaries and canals, we might also think of it as an acephalic power’s attempt to constitute and reach its objects by any means necessary—and then to do it again and again and again and again, getting a little enjoyment in each repetition. Highlighting this reflexive dimension of drive, Lacan describes it as a loop, like that of boomerang. I think of it as like a slot machine or like drifting through Facebook or even fiddling around with the apps on my phone, which is sort of fun because they make the phone look cool even if I am not really doing much of anything. It’s a kind of mindless repetition that fills the gaps.
The best example of drive as a reflexive, negative force comes from the comedian Louis C. K., in an appearance on the Conan O’Brien show, the video of which has over five million views on YouTube (Team Coco 2013). Louis C. K. describes how phones take away the ability to just sit there. He explains this in a perfectly Lacanian fashion: underneath the person is the Thing, the forever empty, the knowledge that it is all for nothing and you’re alone. Our phones let us avoid confronting this horror at the basis of being a person—which is why, Louis C.K. says, that 100 percent of people driving are texting; they will risk killing themselves or another person just to avoid confronting this terrifying abyss. The phone lets us be neither completely sad nor completely happy, just kind of satisfied. He thus beautifully explains the basic Lacanian point that whereas with desire we seek an enjoyment we can never attain, with drive we end up with a little stain of enjoyment we can’t eliminate.
Drives are also partial. Lacan specifies this idea as “partial with regard to the biological finality of sexuality” (Lacan 1998). I understand the point to refer to the variety of changing, incomplete, and dispersed ways subjects enjoy. Drives do not develop in a linear fashion from infant to adult. Rather, they fragment and disperse as they satisfy themselves via a variety of objects. As Joan Copjec writes, “It is as if the very function of the drive were this continuous opening up of small fractures between things” (Copjec 2002, 43). Her language here is precise: the fractures are not of things but between them; the parts that are objects of the drives are not parts of wholes but parts that appear in the force of loss as new expressions of a whole (she uses Gilles Deleuze’s example of the role of the close-up as a cinematic device: it’s not part of a scene enlarged; rather, it’s an expression of the whole of the scene) (Copjec 2002, 53). Lacan refers to the partial object as an object of lack, an object that emerges in the void of the drive to provide the subject with satisfaction.
Correlative to the part is a further aspect of drive that Lacan renders as montage, a constant jumping without transition between heterogeneous elements. Montage suggests movement without message, movement with intensity, movement outward and back. Disparate images and sounds shift and mutate without beginning or end, head or tail. Lacan: “I think the resulting image would show the working of a dynamo connected up to a gas-tap, a peacock’s feather emerges, and tickles the belly of a pretty woman, who is just lying there looking beautiful” (Lacan 1998, 169). More contemporary ways to understand montage are mash-ups, samples and remixes—or, better, our engagement with the media, devices and networks of communicative capitalism. We check messages, snap and share selfies, play games, favorite a tweet, again and again. We close one app and open another, fingers sliding quickly back and forth across our touch screens in gentle repetitive strokes. Drive circulates, round and round, producing satisfaction even as it misses its goal.
I’ve emphasized the negativity of drive as well as drive’s fragmentation, partiality and circulation. One last general point regarding my approach to affect via psychoanalysis and the drive: as Joan Copjec argues, Freud and Lacan associate affect with movement. Freud views affect as displacement. Conventional readings of Freud construe this displacement as the way intense feeling distorts perception. Copjec disagrees, arguing that the affective experience of something as moving indexes a movement beyond the perceiving individual, a surfeit or excess that ruptures the perception, making it more than itself and enabling it to open up another register (for Lacan, the Real; for Deleuze, the virtual). Affect is this movement that estranges the subject from its experience. A thought, memory or perception is affective to the extent that it opens up or indexes something beyond me. The dimension of affect is this “more than a feeling” that imparts movement. At the same time that affect is movement, moreover, there is also a specific affect that is a halting or arrest. Copjec invokes the image of running in place. This affect that is an inhibition of movement is anxiety. For Lacan, the object of anxiety is surplus jouissance, objet petit a (Lacan 2007, 147). The experience of anxiety is a confrontation with excessive enjoyment, a paralyzing confrontation wherein one encounters what is in one more than oneself, an alien yet intimate kernel at the core of one’s being—Louis C. K.’s forever empty. Copjec writes, “Jouissance makes me me, while preventing me from knowing who I am” (Copjec 2002, 102). Finding oneself face-to-face with jouissance or thrown into awareness of one’s own inhuman double, one is pulled between incomprehensibility and extreme intimacy.
Such a transfixed pull is another word for fascination. It would seem, then, that fascination is an affect like anxiety. It arrests via a confrontation with objet a or a little nugget of jouissance. The attempt to escape anxiety results in capture at another point or level; this capture is the immobility of fascination. One is fastened to a thing or activity. In Seminar XI, Lacan notes that in his account of scopic drive Freud is able to link seeing and being seen in the fact that the subject sees himself (Lacan 1998, 194). Drive involves making oneself seen, as well as, Lacan adds, making oneself heard, and in so doing making oneself (Lacan 1998, 195). Apps fasten us to our personal devices as they let us see and hear ourselves. The difference between smart-phones and regular mobile phones is that the latter are for communicating with others. The former are about making ourselves: I see myself on the Temple Run; I see myself in the alignment of three matching candies; I see myself being seen by others as I ask them for help on a level or share with them my scores or post my scores in social media; I see myself in my busy calendar, seeing how important I am to others, my indispensability to work and friends; I see others seeing me as I quickly snap and share selfies, more concerned with appearing to them than with them appearing to me. Most of the time, or at least too easily, we enjoy the fact of making ourselves seen rather than think much about others’ reactions to or thoughts about the various instances of our self-making. It should come as no surprise that taking photos is second only to texting as the most frequent smartphone user activity (Comscore Report 2013, 33). Apps let us quickly engage others as the figures in our fantasies who watch us, anywhere, anytime. We imagine them seeing us and we feel important, connected, excited.
In sum, psychoanalysis opens up the way that people enjoy the circulation of affect generated through reflexive communication. The very system—the movement from my immediacy, to my viewing of my immediacy on my smartphone, to my sharing of my now mediated immediacy in ways that will immediately exceed my control—is captivating, generating and circulating affect as a binding technique. Bound to their phones, people are tethered to the network which means, as an industry report observes, “more monetization opportunities for media companies” (Comscore Report 2013, 11).
A behavioral study of the habits of smartphone users highlights, in a different vocabulary, some of the ways apps fasten users to phones. Seeking quick access to rewards, users quickly and frequently check various applications. Their interaction with their phones is characterized by short duration, isolated, reward-based sessions that respond easily to cues. Checking behavior can be stimulated and made to increase with apps that provide more rewards (Oulasvirta 2011).3
Apps are fabulous inventions for the circulation of drive. To enjoy the mindless pleasure of moving through digital environments we don’t have to be stuck at our laptops. Enjoyment is in our hands. The language mediating our engagement with smartphones exudes this enjoyment: customers are depicted as fans, as enthusiasts, as addicts, as obsessed. They love their phones, can’t live without them, are constantly stroking them and attending to them. With the right apps, phones and tablets soothe our children and help us lose weight. They can be and do anything we want, promising to bring us what we desire even as they function more as an object-cause entrapping us in drive.
I turn now to some of the specific ways that apps reinforce dominant elements of communicative capitalism. I begin with exploitation in complex networks.
Since Apple released the iOS SDK and opened the App Store, apps have been championed as the next big thing in the digital economy. Industry reports present apps as leaders in innovation responsible for significant job creation—hundreds of thousands of new jobs in the U.S. and UK (Mandel 2012; “European App Economy” 2013) are ostensibly so generative that they don’t just stimulate job growth; they incite entire app ecosystems that build around a basic platform and include developers, device manufacturers, service providers, and advertisers. Congratulating itself as a job creator, Apple takes credit for generating more jobs for UPS drivers (Streitfeld 2012).
Initially, apps were celebrated as opening up opportunities for independent and small-scale developers to break into the software market. Now, apps are recognizably elements in an intensely competitive market with high entry costs. With nearly a millions apps, getting attention is so difficult that there are now companies that specialize in marketing apps, in hosting conferences and workshops on app marketing, and in selling app analytics that can help developers identify usage patterns and better tailor their apps to the markets they want to reach. It’s no wonder that already existing and well-known companies have a strong advantage. Celebration of and competition within the app market are connected: the opening of the market to independent developers generated interest in and attachment to the devices, thereby further empowering the powerful without costing them anything. Apple didn’t have to pay its own developers—it could benefit from the free labor of thousands and even charge them a fee for being including in the App Store. Essentially, Apple offloads development costs and risks onto digital pieceworkers while it reaps the rewards.
Smartphone users typically have around thirty apps on their phones—there are limits to how many apps a given consumer can use (Google Report 2012). There are hundreds of thousands of apps, billions of downloads, but only a handful are widely popular. Here are some examples: the top free apps in the Apple App Store in August 2013 were the games Despicable Me: Minion Rush, Candy Crush Saga, Plants v. Zombies 2, YouTube and Google Maps. The top free apps on Google Play were Facebook, What-sApp Messenger, Candy Crush Saga, Line: Free Calls and Messages, and Facebook Messenger (Schoger 2013). The top publishers of free apps in both stores were Google, Facebook, Apple and Disney. Google, Apple and Disney were also in the top ten publishers of paid apps, which also included game publishers like Gameloft and Electronic Arts.
The same pattern of the dominance of the few and the weakness of the many reappears in a survey of 270 North American app developers. The vast majority make less than $15,000 a year. A very few make over $100,000 (Cravens 2012). This pattern of few winners/many losers dominates networked interactions. Complex networks are characterized by free choice, growth, and preferential attachment. As Albert-Laszlo Barabasi demonstrates, complex networks follow a powerlaw distribution of links (we can also say hits, downloads, views, purchases, etc.) (Barabasi 2003). The item in first place or at the top of a given network has twice as many links as the item in second place, which has more than the one in third and so on, such that there is very little difference among those at the bottom but massive differences between top and bottom. So lots of novels are written. Few are published. Fewer are sold. A very few become best sellers. Or lots of articles are written. Few are read. The same four are cited by everybody. The idea appears in popular media as the 80/20 rule, the winner-take-all or winner-take-most character of the new economy, and the “long tail.”
Exploitation in communicative capitalism consists in stimulating the creative production of a broad field in the interest of finding and monetizing the one. Expanding the field produces the one (or, hubs are an immanent property of complex networks). Instead of working for pay, one works for a chance at pay. Instead of Apple paying large teams of app developers, hordes of independent developers work for free, hoping that their apps will make something. Most won’t break even.
The fantasy, though, is that every app will be another Instagram or Angry Birds. This leads me to a second way that apps reinforce communicative capitalism—fantasy. In Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies, I present three animating fantasies in communicative capitalism: abundance, participation and wholeness. Apps extend all three—the sense that everything is out there and available (there’s an app for that), the sense that one is active and connected, really involved, when one is on call all the time, and the sense that one is part of a whole, integrated into a world and that the world accessed through the screen is that world. At the same time, however, apps amplify an additional fantasy, that of the individual as a unique locus of meaning and action. Apps are individualist and individualizing.
Apps intensify the fantasy of the individual at the level of the developer as well as that of the user. First, with regard to developers: in the five years since Apple released the iOS SDK, apps have been celebrated as programs that individuals can write. Unlike large software projects, the specialized focus of apps are within reach of individual developers, particularly developers laid off in the ongoing recession. App development could thus initially be imagined as the way an individual could hit it big, make millions, and do it independently. The app fantasy combines independence, creativity and financial success. In the words of one industry commentator, “The free-market feel of an app store suddenly allowed masses of creative free thinkers to suddenly dream of making millions nearly overnight” (Stein 2012). The app developer fantasy individualizes the developer as a creative entrepreneur, going it alone and beating the odds. His freedom is unleashed by the app store, itself a perfect, shining example of all that is good about free markets.
Although the dominance of corporations like Google, Facebook and Disney in the app marketplace has eroded the plausibility of the individualist fantasy, it hasn’t eliminated it completely. Instead, the fantasy is itself mobilized by analytics companies trying to attract developers to their services and to convince them that, with the proper tools, they can beat the odds. Analytics let the developers see themselves being seen—they can see how their users, customers and clients see them, how they engage them. The interaction of consumer and app isn’t hidden; with the proper analytics, developers can see it and thus themselves.
The fantasy of the individual developer is also mobilized by lobbyists trying to influence regulatory regimes. Relying on the image of the individual striving to be free to be creative, industry groups argue for the construction and regulation of markets freed from previous guarantees to workers. They present apps as a technological fix, a remedy to ailing economies, even as they use apps as opportunities to create new markets. For example, the group ACT, the Association for Competitive Technology, recently sponsored a report on the European App Economy. ACT presents itself as an international advocacy group for small mobile app developers and “other small business innovators.” Its goals are to “help its members leverage their intellectual assets to raise capital, create jobs, and continue innovating.” But its “sponsor members” include Apple, AT&T, BlackBerry, Facebook, Intel, Microsoft, Oracle, PayPal and Verizon.
As part of its emphasis on innovation, ACT opposed the U.S. Federal Trade Commission’s suit against Intel. It endeavors to strengthen intellectual property, copyright, and patent law (in the U.S. and EU). As ACT4Apps it has spearheaded a privacy initiative—this subset of ACT (recall, a small business group) is comprised of Facebook, BlackBerry, Apple and the data privacy management company TRUSTe. Presenting itself as supporting innovators, ACT pushes the fantasy of wholeness: it declares on its web-site, under the heading, One World. One Agenda: “Regardless of region or nationality, small business innovators have largely the same interests from governments and regulators: access, flexibility, and consistency.” Within this vision of wholeness–clearly ideological—it celebrates the individual innovator as an entrepreneur, and it uses this vision in its lobbying pressure: the report it sponsored on the European App Economy claims that apps are driving productivity, growth and jobs and that governments need to, indeed, must support this economy with a supportive and flexible business environment, releasing more spectrum for wireless services, making more government data available to app developers and embracing app-driven development across all sectors. The potential incongruity here—if the app economy is already creating jobs and wealth why is more support necessary?—is pushed aside by transformation-innovation tech-hype (“mobile apps represent the next phase of the ICT revolution”). What is presented as the transformative potential of apps—all the innovations and enhancements to every part of life that apps provide—becomes itself dependent on, an argument for, specific legal and regulatory transformations. The report says that the benefits of ICT required markets to be transformed; “organizations and individuals needed to find different ways of doing things” (“European App Economy” 2013, 4). For transformation to occur likewise in the app economy, labor and product markets will have to undergo further flexibilization. One such flexibilization, associated with apps and enterprise services, is “bring your own device,” which means that workers are to supply their own instruments of production. The benefit of this, according to ACT, is that the cost of ownership is diminished. We should see it as part of the ongoing efforts to fragment workers—which ACT explicitly encourages as it presents “hobbyists and part-timers” as key to “the job creation process in the App Economy” (“European App Economy” 2013, 10)
An individualist fantasy promotes app development. App consumption occasions a corresponding individualization of consumers. There are at least four components of this individualization all of which contribute to the enclosure of collective desires into individuated persons, dispersion of collective subjects and exacerbation of the fantasy of individual separateness and omnipotence.
In communicative capitalism, the loop of reflexivity is a form of absorption and capture—you might think of vicious cycles here. We saw an intensive version of such reflexivity in the finance sector with the crisis of 2008: the very measures taken to manage risk were the ones that increased it. Reflexivity with respect to apps is already part of the app ideology, of the self-understanding of the industry: prominent in its current rhetoric is the term “app ecosystem.” For example, some cellular service providers are considering whether they should also set up app stores, creating viable ecosystems where they can better dictate specifications that will suit their interests, interests that are primarily in apps that “drive up mobile data usage and generate new revenues” (Dalgety n.d.). Cellular networks want users to need and use more bandwidth, so they want more of the right kinds of apps in the hands of their customers.
A further example of reflexivity in the app ecosystem is a project of Facebook and Cisco Systems. They are offering free Wi-Fi to users who use Facebook to check in at certain locations, like specific restaurants and businesses. Checking in through Facebook, the customer accesses the business’s Wi-Fi network, providing Facebook and the business with data like age, gender, city, friends. Cisco says that helps provide “a very personalized mobile experience for customers while they shop, spend time with friends and family.” It also provides businesses with “more opportunities to connect with their customers,” that is, with data that will enable them better to target their customers with ads and promotions (Albanesius 2013).
The reflexivity of the app ecosystem appears like the self-conscious neoliberalization of software, one that fragments and stimulates in order to recombine under market conditions conducive to the generation of the one, that is, to furthering the dominance of, the capital accumulation of, the already prominent. Development work is piecemeal, part-time, done and only sometimes remunerated. Centralized in stores, access to which developers have to pay—whether or not they are hobbyists, whether or not the app is free—apps are part of a market that structures reward according to powerlaws, where the winners take all and there is a long tail of losers. Yet to further this economy, to create an environment in which this sort of app ecosystem will flourish, legislators and policy-makers are encouraged to further erode guarantees to workers in favor of guarantees to property—the system turns back in on itself to retroactively generate its own conditions.
And one of the primary conditions, the one that keeps the system running, that keeps up demand for smartphones, which would be nothing without apps, is fascinating the user. App analytics search for new ways to fasten the consumer to apps, whether these are health, entertainment, personal work organization or social networking (all of which together and singly rely on the loop of drive such that they shift between seeing to being seen to making oneself seen). An industry analyst focusing on the widespread availability of analytics notes that
Flurry Analytics has sections that report on session duration, session frequency and overall rate of retention as an application ages. Developers can customize how they collect data through events tracking … such as when someone likes a status, shares an article, beats a level or makes a purchase. Once events are set up, developers can also segment out sections of their audience according to behavior (i.e., purchasers) or according to more traditional audience metrics like age, gender or location (Josh 2013).
App use is traced and stored. It is use plus the record of use. The record of use is parsed and analyzed, new knowledge which is then put back to work in order to generate apps that are more fascinating, and users enjoy it. Critics have been highlighting what they see as the failure of young people to appreciate privacy, their seeming lack of concern with surveillance. I think this worry is misplaced. More significant is the way that the app ecosystem captures us in circuits where we enjoy making ourselves seen.
1. For more detailed discussion of network exploitation, see Jodi Dean, The Communist Horizon (London: Verso, 2012); for more detailed discussion of fantasy in communicative capitalism, see Jodi Dean, Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009); for more detailed discussion of reflexivity, see Jodi Dean, Blog Theory (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2010).
2. See Jodi Dean Publicity’s Secret (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002) as well as the books listed in note 1.
3. See also Elizabeth Cohen, “Do You Obsessively Check Your Smartphone?” CNN Health, July 28, 2011.
Albanesius, C. “Facebook, Cisco Offering Free Wi-Fi for Check-ins.” PC. October 3, 2013. www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2425179,00.asp
Barabasi, A. Linked. New York: Plume, 2003.
Bogost, I. “What Is an App? A Shortened, Slang Application.” January 12, 2011. www.bogost.com/blog/what_is_an_app.shtml
Comscore Report, “Mobile Future in Focus 2013.” February 25, 2013. www.comscore.com/Insights/Press_Releases/2013/2/comScore_Releases_the_2013_Mobile_Future_in_Focus_Report
Copjec, J. Imagine There’s No Woman. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002.
Cravens, A. “A Demographic and Business Model Analysis of Today’s App Developer.” Report for Gigacom Pro, September 2012. http://appdevelopersalliance.org/files/pages/GigaOMApplicationDevelopers.pdf
Dalgety, R. “Building a Mobile App Ecosystem to Drive Mobile Usage.” Telecoms. www.telecoms.com/11685/building-a-mobile-app-ecosystem-to-drive-mobile-usage/
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