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 Matthew David
Peer to Peer and
the Music Industry
The Criminalization of Sharing
Peer to Peer and the Music Industry

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Theory, Culture & Society
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Peer to Peer and the Music Industry

The Criminalization of Sharing

Matthew David

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© Matthew David 2010

First published 2010

Published in association with Theory, Culture & Society,

Nottingham Trent University

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 For Mike Presdee (1944-2009).

A great teacher, friend and sharer.

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Matthew David has done a rare and valuable thing with this work. He has
comprehensively exposed the inherent radicalism of peer-to-peer com-
munication and exposed the absurdities of the various efforts to quash the
practice and technologies. This book is certain to outlast the recording industry.
Siva Vaidhyanathan, Professor of Media Studies, University of Virginia

This book is far-reaching in its implications for our understanding of

modern society and culture and should be read by anyone with an interest
in the future of music. David’s discussion of the music industry’s response
to digitisation and the culture of downloading and file-sharing dispels the
myths about pirates stealing our musical heritage. It puts the spotlight
firmly on an industry that has exploited artists and audiences alike for years
but which now finds itself imperilled by a mixture of technological change
and the creative practices of (mainly) young people. The analysis is scholarly
and rigorous yet the book is accessibly written and contains moments of real
humour.
Graeme Kirkpatrick, Senior Lecturer, Sociology, University of Manchester

Too often the music industry is seen as merely being about entertainment.
In this closely and clearly argued book Matthew David explains in detail
why anyone interested in the future of our global information society must
understand the questions raised by this industry's relationship with its
customer base. Clearly establishing the importance of understanding the
production and distribution of music for the wider realms of the globalising
information economy, Matthew David develops an analysis of much wider
relevance. The challenge of openness that confronts the major record
companies is repeated across the information economy, and the struggle for
control of the distribution of content will be the economic issue of the new
millennium; Matthew David offers a clear and informative analysis of these
developments that will be of interest to social scientists, lawyers and music
lovers alike.
Christopher May, Professor of Political Economy, Lancaster University

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Contents

List of Figures and Tables xi

Key Acronyms and Abbreviations xii

1 Introduction 1
Much too much? 1
The file-sharing phenomenon 2
The structure of this book 3
The claim being made 9

2 The Global Network Society: Territorialisation and

Deterritorialisation 10
Introduction 10
The relative autonomy of the informational mode
of development? 11
Critical theoretical challenges 12
Feminist critiques 16
Informationalism and ‘capitalist perestroika’? 16
Critical theoretical challenges 18
The network as morphogenetic structure? 19
Ethnographic alternatives 19
From ethnography to discourse 21
Challenging discourse analysis from within 22
Post-structuralist approaches 23
Contingency, contradiction and contestation 26
Conclusions 28

3 File-Sharing: A Brief History 29

The hacker ethic – and U2’s manager 29
Media – compression and transmission 31
Early Napster 33
The closure 34
The rise of peer-to-peer 34
The development of a common media and platform 35
From peer-to-peer to peers-to-peer (torrents) 36
Commercial development – MP3 players, iPods and iTunes 37
File-sharing and social networking (decommodification and
democratization) 38

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Peer to Peer in the Music Industry

Mass/new media history 38

Web 2.0 and 3.0 – recommercialization or not? 40
From consumer revolts to revolts amongst artists 41

4 Markets and Monopolies in Informational Goods:

Intellectual Property Rights and Protectionism 42
Introduction 42
Intellectual property: an essential contradiction 44
The pre-history of patents and copyrights 44
Non-rivalousness 45
Natural rights discourses versus utilitarian balance
of interest constructions 47
American, British and French traditions: freedom,
control and enlightenment 49
Towards an international system, but slowly 50
Hollywood pirates, Mark Twain and Mickey Mouse 52
The fall and resurgence of international IP regulation 53
Fee culture or free culture? 55
The young versus the old 55
Conclusions: competition versus closure 57

5 Legal Genealogies 58
Introduction 58
Technology and legality 59
The US legal genealogy 60
A curious case of international and inter-media comparison 63
Comparative legal frameworks and interpretations 65
National specifics from three cases: Canada, UK and
Hong Kong 67
The emperor’s new sword 69
More on the Sony ruling 70
Conclusions 72

6 Technical Mythologies and Security Risks 75

Introduction 75
The surveillance society? 76
From Foucault to Deleuze: from discipline towards control 77
The panoptic sort? 80
Cybercrime 81
Surveillance – a limited hope for the recording industry 82
Attempts at anonymity 83
Counter surveillance 85
The birth of digital rights management 86
Hard and soft DRM today 87
The problem with format capture: closure versus exposure 89

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viii
 Contents

Managing the horror 91

The dialectic of technology 92
Conclusions 93

7 Media Management 96
Introduction 96
‘Piracy funds terrorism and will destroy our society and your
future enjoyment’ (FACT?) 97
Intellectual property theft is the new street drug 102
Intellectual property theft and illegal immigrants 103
Intellectual property, identity theft and student plagiarism 104
Intellectual property theft and airport security myths 106
Media scopes: the next big ‘clampdown’ –
July 2008: via ISPs 107
The mass-media and new-media 110
Spreading conspiracies 113
Conclusions 115

8 Creativity as Performance: The Myth of Creative Capital 118

Introduction 118
Artists should get paid like everybody else, right? 119
Creative industries? 120
The problem with music today 122
The ‘love manifesto’ 124
The emperors new sword revisited 125
The shift ‘back’ from recording to performance 127
The declining value of investment 130
The production function 131
The manufacture of physical product 134
Distribution and sales 135
The promoter function 136
Publishing rights and the management of wider rights 138
Creativity as embodiment and performance? 141
Conclusions 143

9 Alternative Cultural Models of Participation,

Communication and Reward? 144
Introduction 144
Five interpretations of file-sharing 145
Music today: myth and reality 146
Six case studies 147
Arctic Monkeys 147
Enter Shikari 148
Simply Red 149
The Charlatans 150

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ix
Peer to Peer in the Music Industry

Radiohead 152
Madonna 153
General discussion 154
Possible futures 156
Field colonisation (low truth/low proximity) 157
Delegitimation/reterritorialization (low trust/high proximity) 157
Relegitimation/deterritorialization (high trust/low proximity) 158
Reterritorialization and relegitimation
(high trust/high proximity) 158
Conclusions 159

10 Conclusions 161
Music and the network society 161
Reflexive epistemological diversity 162
Theories of the network society 163
An essential outline of this book 164
Versus ‘the winner loses’ theories of closure 165
Attention to the open character of ongoing conflicts 166
Capitalist glasnost and perestroika? 167
The future is not what it used to be! 168

References 169
Index 180

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x
List of Figures and Tables

Figures

1.1 The Nightmare, Henry Fuseli, 1781 (The Glynn Vivian

Art Gallery, Swansea) 2

Tables

4.1 ‘Growing old disgracefully’ 56

9.1 Alternative business models prefigured in current developments 157

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Key Acronyms and Abbreviations

A&R Artists and Repertoire

ACTA Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement
AOL America On-line
BBC British Broadcasting Corporation
BMG Bertelsmann Music Group
BPI The British Phonographic Industry
BT British Telecommunications
CCTV Closed Circuit Television
CD Compact Disc
CDPA United Kingdom Copyright, Designs and Patent Act 1988
CNN Cable Network News
DAT Digital Audio Tape
DCMA United States Digital Millennium Copyright Act 1998
DCMS United Kingdom Department of Culture, Media and Sport
DRM Digital Rights Management
DVD Digital Versatile Disc or Digital Video Disc
ECHR European Convention on Human Rights
EFF Electronic Freedom Foundation
EMI Electric and Musical Industries Ltd
EU European Union
F2F Friend to Friend Distributed Networks
FACT Federation Against Copyright Theft
GATT General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade
HRA United Kingdom Human Rights Act
HBO Home Box Office
ICT Information and Communication Technology
ID Identification Documents or abbreviation for Identification
IP Intellectual Property
IPR Intellectual Property Rights
IT Information Technology
ISP Internet Service Providers
ISPA Internet Service Providers Association
MAFIAA Music and Film Industry Association of America
MoU 2008 Memorandum of Understanding between BPI and
UK ISPs

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 Key Acronyms and Abbreviations

MP1,2,3 and 4 MP in each case is an abbreviation for MPEG, while the

numbers refer to MPEG protocols for digital compression
for different media
MPAA Motion Picture Association of America
MPEG Moving Picture Expert Group
MPPC Motion Picture Patent Company
NBC National Broadcasting Company
OECD Organization for Economic Cooperation and
Development
OPAC Online Public Access Catalogue
P2P Peer-to-Peer Distributed Networks
RIAA Record Industry Association of America
TPB The Pirate Bay
TRIPS Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual
Property Rights
WIPO World Intellectual Property Organization
WCT World Intellectual Property Organization Copyright
Treaty
WTO World Trade Organization
UK United Kingdom
US United States of America

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xiii
Acknowledgements

This work would not have been possible without the help of many people.
I would particularly like to thank Jodie Allen, Jack Birmingham, Peter
Campbell, Tori Durrer, Sergey Erofeev, Betsy Ettorre, Victoria Foster, Gill
Gower, Tim Hall, Dan (onions) Hartley, Dave Inker, Paul Jones, Gesa Kather,
Devorah Kalekin-Fishman, Jamie Kirkhope, Graeme Kirkpatrick, Andrew
Kirton, Lauren Langman, Chris May, Kevin Meethan, Ruth Melville, Steve
Miles (the original professor of ‘symbology’), Pete (‘Mr Incredible’)
Millward, Dave O’Brian, Sarah Louisa Phythian-Adams (the real
undercover economist), Jason Powell, Mike Presdee, Michaela Pyšńáková
(queen of the mainstream), Chris Rojek, Imogen Roome, Rebecca Saxton,
Jai Seaman and Iain Wilkinson. I would also like to thank Chris, Val, Rachel,
Siân, Brennan and Jasmine.

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1
Introduction

• Much too much?

• The file-sharing phenomenon
• The structure of this book
• The claim being made

Much too much?

Two wars rage today: one to control scarce ‘pre-industrial’ fossil fuels; the
other to control non-scarce ‘post-industrial’ informational goods. Global
capitalism requires the fusion of energy and information. Managing scarcity
in that which is naturally scarce and in making scarce that which is not
becomes paramount. ‘Corporate power is threatened by scarcity on the one
hand and the potential loss of scarcity on the other’ (David and Kirkhope
2006: 80). That every networked computer can share all the digital infor-
mation in the world challenges one of these domains of control. In such
conditions, sharing has been legislated against with a new intensity.
Scientists ‘manage the horror’ (Woolgar 1988) of never being truly sure,
with secondary repertoires, circular devices that give a sense of security and
closure that is otherwise lacking when confronting a confusing world. This
book looks at how parties to disputes over file-sharing ‘manage the horror’
of having no legal, technical, social or cultural foundations by which to
secure their economic interests, identities, strategies and alliances in relation
to the production and circulation of informational goods.
Nonetheless, one person’s horror is another person’s blessing. Henry
Fuseli’s 1781 painting, The Nightmare (see Figure 1.1), was pirated within
months of its first authorised reproduction (David 2006b). Fuseli was as
upset by the limited payment he received for the authorised reproductions
as he was with the pirates, who were distributing his name across the
whole of Europe with cut-price editions that made him a household name
and his work an affordable household item. Such fame added to the value of
the authorized versions. To bypasss contracts already signed, Fuseli simply
painted new versions of his original and sold the rights to these. Finally he
set up his own printing company. Additional contracts are prohibited
today in contracts issued by major record labels. However, the value of free
publicity and bypassing bottlenecks through self-distribution are still live

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Peer to Peer and the Music Industry

Figure 1.1 The Nightmare, Henry Fuseli, 1781 The Glynn Vivian
Art Gallery, Swansea

issues. Fuseli’s business model might be a nightmare for today’s major

labels, but such attempts to ‘manage the horror’ may benefit audiences
and artists alike.

The file-sharing phenomenon

This book is about file-sharing, the circulation of compressed digital computer

files over the Internet using an array of location and exchange software. In
making their music collections available online, file-sharers create a com-
munity of sharing that takes the affordances of network technology in a
radical new direction. Hundreds of millions of networked computer users
and upwards of a billion files made available at any one time challenge the
monopoly power of major record labels, whose ongoing concentration
stands in stark contrast to a free flow of information that threatens to sweep
them aside.
File-sharing software has increasingly migrated from central server medi-
ated forms of exchange to distributed forms of interaction. Each computer
in the network acts as client and server. Distributed systems are a response
to the criminalization of file-sharing software providers, uploaders, downloaders

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 Introduction

and even Internet Service Providers (ISPs). Legal moves come from film
and music companies who object to material they seek to sell being shared
globally. Legal strategies link to wider technical and cultural campaigns
to control intellectual property in patent as well as copyright. Currently,
dominant players in film and recorded music see file-sharing as a funda-
mental threat. They may be correct. They may or may not be successful. In
the course of conflicts, the very fabric of ‘they’ shifts, as such file-sharing
goes to the heart of contemporary network society, to informational capi-
talism’s discontents, challengers and those that seek to reinvent it.
The economic significance of informational goods increases in network soci-
eties (Castells 1996). So the potential to circulate such goods freely through
the Internet raises the prospect, as spectre or salvation, of an end to scarcity –
at least in the informational realm. Post-scarcity threatens profitability in goods
that command a price only as long as demand exceeds supply. Businesses built
on scarcity campaign hard to criminalize sharing. Protecting monopoly rights
in informational goods, even in suspending market forces at one level, is
deemed essential to the maintenance of market exchange relations in general.
Suspending market entry is designed to maintain scarcity and hence prices.
Most technologies that undermine scarcity were themselves developed
initially by the very companies now threatened. Today’s informational cap-
italist enterprises may be replaced from below or by higher forms of infor-
mational capitalism. File-sharing is not simply a product of informational
capitalism; it may drive out the old only to make way for a newer, more
powerful informational capitalism. Global media corporations are happy to
profit from free content where they can. But alternatives also emerge. Castells
(1996) suggests that the ‘informational mode of development’ (forces of
production) are not reducible to the ‘informational mode of production’
(network capitalism), even as critics like Chris May (2002) suggest the two
are not so distinct. Telecommunications and information businesses devel-
oped the digital recording and storage, along with compression and transfer
protocols, that now assist challenges to their monopolies. Hackers extended
initial products in new directions. The informational mode of development
is not merely extending the dominant mode of production, it is threatening
the fetters set in place by property rights regimes.

The structure of this book

The relationship between technical, economic and social networks and the
dynamics of change are explored in Chapter 2. Neo-Marxists such as
Castells, May and Kirkpatrick are contrasted with the more ethnographic work
of Hine, Mason et al. and Miller and Slater, as well as the post-structuralism
of Deleuze, Galloway and Kittler.
Chapter 3 explores the history of file-sharing; its first incarnation,
Napster, the legal actions which led to its closure in 2001/2, the subsequent

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Peer to Peer and the Music Industry

generations of software, and the laws that emerged to engage them and
which in turn shaped subsequent technical modifications. While Napster’s
central server offered a technical Achilles heel that allowed legal action
against its providers, new generations of file-sharing software adopted ever
more complete forms of distributed communication for location and
exchange. This circumvented certain legal liabilities on the part of the soft-
ware providers. The very limits to control have led to the growth of a mass
audience for online digital material, and in a standard format that overcame
the desire of individual suppliers to control their musical and film content.
This created the conditions for a market in download services and MP3/4
players. Suspension of property rights in one domain created the possibility
of new markets. Another development, alongside file-sharing, has been the
parallel growth (from the same month in 1999) of social networking ser-
vices. Chapter 3 ends by highlighting the parallel developments of audience
file-sharing and the actions of artists reaching audiences by similar means,
a theme explored further in Chapters 8 and 9.
A contradiction exists between the location of ideas within an irreducible
web of cultural production and the notion of property as discrete units for
private ownership. All formulations of intellectual property have recog-
nized that allocation of ownership rights in ideas should only ever be par-
tial and time limited, balancing the private interests of innovators with the
general interest of the culture out of which all innovations arise. At a time
when informational goods are becoming increasingly economically signifi-
cant, laws to shore up ownership in ideas seek to sweep aside such balance.
Chapter 4 demonstrates that perpetual and strong constructions of intellec-
tual property rights have no assured basis in natural rights philosophy,
romantic constructions of creativity or in utilitarian doctrines of the bal-
ance of interests. Today’s beneficiaries make universal claims to defend par-
tial interests. States, individuals, industries and genres that achieve ‘success’
claim those coming after should defer to their ownership rights over past
achievements. However, those states, individuals, industries and genres now
seeking to protect intellectual property rights from younger actors them-
selves rose to success by disregarding the monopoly rights claimed by those
that were dominant before them. Just as the old claim rights over the past,
so the young (states, individuals, industries and genres) defend their
exploitation of the creative commons on the basis of rights to development
and over the future.
Chapter 5 picks up Chapter 3’s history of file-sharing, through the prism
of legal developments outlined in Chapter 4. After Napster’s closure, dis-
tributed peer-to-peer softwares emerged and were themselves the target for
legal attack. US court decisions in 2003 and 2004 upheld the 1984 ‘Sony
Ruling’ which established the principle of ‘dual use’ whereby a provider of
a product with legal applications cannot be held liable for unlawful appli-
cations if they are not directly party to such uses and have not actively
promoted such uses. The result of the 2003 and 2004 rulings, despite a
challenge to the Sony Ruling in 2005, shifted attention from software

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 Introduction

suppliers to file-sharers. This campaign is ongoing in a set of cross-cutting

legal, technical and cultural forms which are explored in Chapters 6 and 7.
Chapter 5 examines how legal developments have unfolded across the
world. A global intellectual property framework through the World Trade
Organization (hereafter WTO), the Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of
Intellectual Property Rights (hereafter TRIPS) and the World Intellectual
Property Organization (hereafter WIPO) is emerging. However, the growth
of ‘immaterial imperialism’ – global intellectual property rights regime –
remains limited by diversity in national and regional interpretation and
enforcement. The same legal text can be acted on, or not, or differently.
Balance between intellectual property rights and human rights (to privacy
and freedom of expression) provides scope for multiple challenges, modifi-
cations, exemptions and limitations to a universal and strong form of prop-
erty rights in ideas, in principle and in enforcement.
Tension between encryption and surveillance in network communication
extends long-standing modern concerns over anonymity and regulation.
Chapter 6 examines digital rights management, in encryption and surveil-
lance, as a technical mythology – both false and self-contradictory. If
‘strong’ encryption existed it would be as useful to copyright infringing file-
sharers as such systems would be to copyright holders. Strong encryption
runs up against the fact that all currently available music in the world is
available in non-encrypted format, as CDs are not currently encrypted.
Even if every new piece of music were encrypted, it would only take some-
one to hold a microphone next to a speaker to make a recording of it. But
such a digital lock does not exist. Pure technical security is a myth. As long
as someone is given the key, it remains likely that it will be leaked. Every
encryption system ever developed to protect informational goods has been
broken by the global hacking community. The hacker ethic, ‘the spirit of
informationalism’ and/or ‘the informational mode of development’ itself,
routinely upsets the existing mode of production and its regime of intellec-
tual property rights.
Surveillance is used by recording industry proxies to trawl file-sharing
networks for copyright infringement. However, similar techniques are used
by file-sharers, through add-on software that blocks access to computers
whose searching trawls rather than shares. As two sides of the same coin,
encryption and surveillance do not in themselves determine outcomes.
Rather, it is their use and the success or otherwise of the social networks
of such applications that determine outcomes. Whether the resources
deployed by hundreds of millions of file-sharers and hackers will prevail rel-
ative to the resources deployed by ‘content industries’ becomes the focus
of attention. Such disputes take place at the level of courtrooms and legis-
latures, research and development laboratories and the global networks of
hackers and open source programmers, mass-media storytelling and chat
room/blogs, lobby group campaigning and content industry boardrooms,
and in the dynamics of musicians and artists deciding how best to reach an
audience, make a life and make a living, as well as in the everyday interactions

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Peer to Peer and the Music Industry

of countless millions of people online. If file-sharing software shows how

new technologies create new affordances that cannot be reduced to the
existing balance of social relationships, encryption and surveillance software
tend to highlight the counterpoint, which is that such affordances are not
themselves able to suspend existing power relations. File-sharing is an
asymmetric technology. Surveillance technology and encryption technology
are both, individually and together, symmetrical ones.
The tension between exposure and closure is irresolvable. The desire to
widen the circulation of information, whether as a profit-oriented content
industry or as a ‘strength in numbers’ file-sharing community (the bigger the
group the more there is for everyone to share – as copying is non-rivalrous),
stands at odds with the counter desire to limit access in either the protec-
tion of scarcity and hence prices, or in protecting identity in an attempt to
avoid prosecution. All sides to disputes seek to ‘manage the horror’ of their
inescapable vulnerability with myths of power and security, whether by
technical or other means. When courtrooms and gadgets so often fail – even
as persuasive fiction – it is no surprise that much effort has been directed
at mass-media representation, in the attempt to persuade non-experts that
they should not, cannot, better not try to file-share. Chapter 7 addresses
these attempts to manage the mass media. Linking file-sharing with com-
mercial counterfeiting, bootlegging and piracy – and then linking all these
with terrorism, drugs, drug dealing, illegal immigrants, school and university
student plagiarism, and identity theft – seeks to engender both a moral
rejection of copyright infringing file-sharing and the belief that both the
chance and the cost of getting caught are very high. These claims are tenu-
ous at best and have proven highly counterproductive, being largely
rejected, disbelieved and inverted by those targeted. In a classic case of
deviance amplification, lumping file-sharers, counterfeiters and pirates
together under the label of ‘pirates’ has led many who are not, legally
speaking, pirates to embrace their new-found deviant identity. The label
‘pirate’ has become a badge of pride. Claims concerning new clampdowns
and initiatives do more harm than good. Exaggerated and inaccurate
accounts discredit their proponents.
Yet mass-media coverage is more than just failed propaganda. Study of
such news coverage reveals the relative weakness of bodies such as the British
Phonographic Industry (hereafter BPI), the Recording Industry Association of
America (hereafter RIAA), the Motion Picture Association of America
(MPAA) and the Federation Against Copyright Theft (FACT) in controlling
and framing the stories they push. Frames have not tended to endorse the
content providers’ construction of reality. Media framing conflicts occur
between organizations and institutions, and the voices of file-sharers never
frame coverage, yet content industries face a range of other corporate bod-
ies keen to contest their version of events. Large multimedia conglomerates,
all of whom profit from the circulation of free content in one form or
another, seem keen to carve up the empires of former dominant players.
Record and film companies are often subsidiaries of the larger conglomerates

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 Introduction

that, in backing all the horses, appear willing to sacrifice some of their stable
in the interest of winning on other bets. Many such companies have stakes
in Internet service provision, mobile telephone networks, television, social
networking sites, record companies, computer manufacture, software and
gaming, as well as in film. The death of the major record label may see the
rise of new grass-roots production and performance models of culture and
business. It could be a stepping stone to a new age of ever more concentrated
multinational and cross sector integrated corporate power. These alternative
scenarios are explored in Chapters 8 and 9.
Chapter 8 questions the royalty based system of reward currently in
operation in the recording industry. Based on a version of romanticism, the
idea that artists are best rewarded by royalties, rather than being paid
directly for their work or performance, is not borne out by past or present
evidence. Study of the royalty system in the USA, France, the UK and else-
where shows chronic failure to reward artists. Headline record deals and
advances appear to make artists rich but are eaten up by a full spectrum of
recoupable costs set against them. Most recording artists owe their record
companies money, having failed to recoup. This is true even for most artists
whose work is profitable for their labels. It is not surprising, therefore, that
many artists resent their labels more than they do file-sharing fans. If record
sales have almost no impact on most artists’ incomes it is hardly their prob-
lem. Yet it is more than just a matter of indifference. Audiences saving
money by downloading for free spend more money going to concerts.
Ticket prices have increased in line with declining revenues from recorded
music. Alongside performance-related merchandising, revenues from live
performances are distributed much more in the artists’ favour than are
recording revenues. Artists benefit from free distribution. Why then would
artists sign recording deals? This is explored in relation to the five pur-
ported functions of major record labels, each of which is being challenged
by the advent of file-sharing. Where production, manufacture, distribution,
and right management are becoming increasingly dislocated from major
labels, the maintenance of relative monopoly power in promotion is the key
battleground for their continued existence. Loss of this gatekeeper function
would spell disaster – and this monopoly is being variously undermined.
Chapter 8 ends with a discussion of current shifts in representations of
creativity and subsequent claims to a share of rewards. Creativity can be
attributed to tradition, inner genius, interaction between performers, inter-
action between performers and audiences, or to the complex division of
labour. Shifts in the balance of reward parallel shifts in relative aesthetic
valuation of certain kinds of ‘creative performance’. In the age of file-
sharing we see the relative valuation of the creativity found in recordings
decrease relative to the valuation (material and aesthetic) credited to the
creativity (uniqueness) embodied in live performance. As challenges to
the myth of the recording artist intensify, so both aesthetic and material
valuations shift from rewarding music as capital to rewarding performance
as creative labour.

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Peer to Peer and the Music Industry

Challenges to the established business model of recorded music and

royalties brought about by file-sharing have created conditions for new
business models. Artists can reach audiences without major record labels. In
Chapter 9, six case studies highlight the possible. Two cases are of new
artists finding an audience by means of free distribution of content. Two
cases are of artists currently at the peak of celebrity, leaving their record
labels and either releasing music directly or signing with a promoter rather
than a record label, in both cases increasing their already considerable earn-
ings. The third pair of cases concerns bands who are in the post-limelight
stage of what were very successful careers and for whom self-distribution/
free-distribution online has increased revenues, either from recordings or
from increased revenues from live events.
Alternatives abound. Such alternative futures are many, diverse and
potentially at odds with one another. One such future is field colonization.
In the absence of major labels, non-music based cross-media companies
may occupy the commercial space vacated. This is prefigured in the prac-
tices of a number of such mega-players today. Such a scenario would inten-
sify tendencies within the current business model of major labels, that of
delegitimation (reliance upon law over trust in managing audiences) and
deterritorialization (the reliance upon globally distributed recordings over
unique and local performances). Alternatively, Madonna and U2’s reliance
upon law and mega-live shows combines ongoing delegitimation with
reterritorialization. Relegitimation combined with deterritorialization can
be seen in the practices of bands such as Radiohead and Simply Red, who
have pioneered new trust relations with fans online even while emphasis
upon live events declines. Relegitimation linked with reterritorialization
strategies establish new trust relations between audience and artists. Audiences
pay artists because they want to – even when the recorded music has been
distributed freely with the artists’ consent in advance. Live performance is
the primary means of such payment. The Charlatans, Arctic Monkeys and
Enter Shikari illustrate this possibility of making a living in a world of free
content and a renewed willingness to pay.
Chapters 8 and 9 show the future is open to diverse possibilities, and
current conditions are neither stable, equitable nor considered legitimate by
most parties to the musical/cultural economic field. Chapters 5, 6 and 7
show that ownership and reproduction rights in the age of file-sharing can-
not be secured by legal, technical and/or cultural guarantees. If Chapters 3
and 4 give the particular and general historical backgrounds to file-sharing
and intellectual property rights, this takes us back to the fundamental
character of the network society which was outlined in Chapter 2, and
which this book seeks to elaborate upon.
Chapter 10 highlights the ongoing and open character of conflicts over
file-sharing today, suggests the essential value of reflexive epistemological
diversity in studying such conflicts, and suggests a parallel between the
‘capitalist perestroika’ of the last thirty years and that in the Soviet Union
before its collapse. Where capitalism triumphed over statism in better

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 Introduction

harnessing the power of the informational mode of development, it now

confronts ‘informational perestroika and glasnost’ from below.

The claim being made

This book extends the insights of cultural criminology (Presdee 2000) to an

examination of the criminalization of culture. The study of file-sharing
shows that while technology is not reducible to current dominant social
relations of production and power neither is it an autonomous force. In
making certain actions easier, technical affordances may alter the balance of
social power, but only through their application within social networks of
action. Such action occurs at various levels (in conversation and interper-
sonal interaction, within organizations, and across larger networks of pro-
duction, trade, regulation and communication) and across a range of fields
(law, research and development, production, trade and the mass and new
media). To grasp such complexity requires research at the discursive, ethno-
graphic and ‘structural’ levels of data-collection and analysis, even when
such diverse research approaches challenge each other. We are compelled
to accept the value of ‘reflexive epistemological diversity’ (David 2005)
rather than retreating into singular theoretical and methodological camps.
File-sharing is ‘perestroika’ and ‘glasnost’ from below: an economic restruc-
turing and an informational opening up that challenge capitalist relations
of intellectual property rather than merely updating productive forces to
boost existing social relations, as was the initial application. Post-scarcity,
afforded by new technology and its challenge to hierarchical and bureau-
cratic systems of control and allocation, has not been undone for all the
legal, technical and cultural efforts to contain it. The future is not what it
used to be. The future remains to be made, and made better. What has been
happening in the musical field over the last decade is paradigmatic for the
network society more generally. Currently, conflicts in the fields of comput-
ing, film, television, pharmaceuticals and agribusiness hinge upon disputes
over intellectual property and the increased vulnerability of such property
rights that are both virtual in nature and easily replicated across virtual net-
works. As virtual property becomes central to the profitability of global
capitalism so its scope for global sharing becomes increasingly dangerous to
a system based on scarcity. The intensified criminalization of sharing can be
understood only in the context of this contradiction between profitability
and the potential suspension of scarcity.

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2
The Global Network Society: Territorialization
and Deterritorialization

• Introduction
• The relative autonomy of the informational mode of development?
 Critical theoretical challenges
 Feminist critiques
• Informationalism and ‘capitalist perestroika’?
 Critical theoretical challenges
• The network as morphogenetic structure?
 Ethnographic alternatives
 From ethnography to discourse
 Challenging discourse analysis from within
• Post-structuralist approaches
• Contingency, contradiction and contestation
• Conclusions

Introduction

File-sharing operates across the Internet. This chapter explores the character
of this global network, in particular the structuring and enabling character
of global computer networks. The chapter also examines Manuel Castells’
work, that of his critics and that of others who have developed distinct and
often divergent accounts of ‘network society’. At issue is the question of
how technical networks impact upon the social networks from which they
emerge. Castells claims powerful effects, while critics dispute this. Castells
does not claim that technology compels social change, rather that new tech-
nologies change the scope for action of individuals, organizations and
groups. It is possible to accept insights from his work without rejecting
those of his critics. Digital compression, peer-to-peer file-sharing software
and the Internet itself emerged out of particular sets of social relationships,
were reapplied and modified by different parties to such relationships, ren-
dering certain courses of action more or less effective and affordable, and
enabled various cultural, economic, legal and technical strategies and
alliances. This chapter is organized around three key claims made by Castells
regarding the character of the network society: that the informational mode

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 The Global Network Society

of development is relatively autonomous from the capitalist mode of

production; that the informational mode of development is driving the
development of ‘capitalist perestroika’ in the form of globalization and the
‘networked enterprise’; and that computer networks constitute a ‘mor-
phogenetic structure’ conditioning the actions of individuals within it. All
three suggestions require significant questioning and qualification, yet all
three remain productive provocations in the exploration of the present.
Each claim is discussed in relation to the counterclaims made by Castells’
critics. The concept of ‘affordances’ is offered as a way to overcome unhelp-
ful binary reductionisms, two examples of ‘post-structuralist’ approaches
are discussed as illustrative of problems already identified in Castells’
approach, while the chapter concludes with a discussion of the work of
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari as well as Michael Hardt and Antonio
Negri,whose writing continues to draw attention to the possibility of radi-
cal social change within network societies, something that Castells and his
critics are united in placing at the margins of their accounts of social repro-
duction in one form or another.

The relative autonomy of the informational mode of development?

Manuel Castells combines structural Marxist categories with elements

drawn from Max Weber. His ‘critical realism’ focuses upon relations between
the mode of production (otherwise called the social relations of production)
and the forces of production (what he calls the ‘mode of development’). In
distinguishing between ongoing capitalist relations of production and what
he calls the ‘informational mode of development’ he gives technological
development a relative autonomy and causal efficacy that can appear
‘technologically deterministic’.
Castells seeks to avoid the accusation of technological determinism or soci-
ological determinism of technology, yet his account suggests developments in
networked computing had significant implications for social development, even
while the opposite is also true. He makes the analytical distinction between
mode of production and mode of development (1996: 14). This parallels
Marx’s distinction between the relations of production (ownership and
control over productive resources) and the forces of production (that
which is available to be owned and controlled). Castells thus distinguishes
capitalism and industrialism. While capitalist development promoted
industrial production, industrialization was also achieved within statist
modes of production. As industrial society can have different modes of pro-
duction, so capitalism can have different modes of development. The move
from industrialism to informationalism is such a shift. If the dominant logic
of industrialism was the increase in physical production enabled by
increased availability of cheap raw materials, in particular energy, the dom-
inant logic of informationalism is the increase in informational production
through the increased availability and integration of cheap information

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Peer to Peer and the Music Industry

capacities. Castells suggests a five-dimensional account of the shift from

industrialism to informationalism (1996: 61–2). First, there is the growth of
technologies that act on information (computers); second, the increased per-
vasiveness of such technologies in every aspect of life; third, the increased
capacity to integrate such technologies within networks; fourth, the
increased capacity to foster flexibility within integrated production systems
through coordinating information transfer and machine reprogramming.
Finally, there is the increasing convergence of different technologies to gen-
erate integrated systems. For Castells these forces of production (i.e. the
mode of development) are generating new conditions of possibility within the
capitalist mode of production.
Castells recognizes role of the capitalist profit motive in developing
information technologies and in applying them in particular ways.
However, he is resistant to the view that capitalism determines the logic of
technological development or its use. While the Internet may have been
developed by the United States military, themselves driven by the desire
of US capitalism to fend off the perceived threat of communism, the
Internet is now used by radicals the world over to coordinate political
protest (1996: 6–7). The combination of military and economic investment
in developing information storage, processing and transmission capabilities
is certainly central to the rise of the information age, yet neither determines
development. Castells suggests that vast amounts of investment fuelled ‘the
autonomous dynamics of technological discovery and diffusion, including
synergistic effects between various key technologies’ (1996: 51).

In other words, the first Informational Technology Revolution clustered in

America, and to some extent in California, in the 1970s, building on devel-
opments of the two preceding decades, and under the influence of various
institutional, economic and cultural factors. But it did not come out of any
pre-established necessity: it was technologically induced rather than socially
determined. However, once it came into existence as a system, on the basis of
the clustering I have described, its development and applications, and ultimately
its content, were decisively shaped by the historical context where it expanded.
(Castells 1996: 52)

While the myth that Silicon Valley was the product of geeks in garages,
rather than the massive investment of states and corporations in a period of
military and economic globalization, is dismissed (1996: 60), Castells’ account
seeks to retain a relationship between technology and capitalism that is
semi-autonomous. This ‘critical realist’ stance is questioned by critical theorists,
who highlight the structuring of technology within ‘hegemonic’ relations of
hierarchy, ideology and control.

Critical theoretical challenges

Early critical theory combined Marx with German interpretivism and
its suspicion of modern techno-science (Kirkpatrick 2004, 2008). While

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 The Global Network Society

defending the Enlightenment, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer

(1979[1944]) suggest: ‘the deductive form of science reflects hierarchy and
coercion’ (cited in Kirkpatrick 2008: 51). Despite Adorno’s (2002) critique
of Heidegger’s ‘jargon of authenticity’, the world revealing consciousness
that precedes the ‘enframing’ of modern thought by instrumentalism,
Adorno and Horkheimer (1979[1944]) and Marcuse (1986, 2002[1964])
retain a suspicion of instrumental reason. The ‘original violence’ by which
nature is appropriated for purposes other than its own, a violence that – if
unrestrained – forms the basis for instrumentalized relations between peo-
ple, remains a concern for early critical theory.
Jurgen Habermas’ reformulated critical theory abandons anxiety over
instrumentalized nature. Instrumental/objective knowledge interests
(1972) over nature are seen as unproblematic. Only misapplication of
objectifying instrumentalism to purposive human actors violates Kant’s cat-
egorical imperative. Where such instrumentalism is applied as social engi-
neering and in the name of efficiency, Habermas calls this the ‘scientization
of politics’ (1971[1970]), the post-ideological ideology of ‘practical man-
agement’ and ‘modernization’ typical of late capitalism. Habermas distin-
guishes instrumental system logic oriented towards control from
communicative action oriented towards understanding. Political and eco-
nomic systems seek to colonize the communicative realm, ordering people
by rules of efficiency and control, but such systems remain parasitically
dependent upon lifeworld communication, oriented towards understanding,
as social rules require inter-subjectively achieved interpretations in practice
(1984, 1987). Habermas shows the limits of technocratic governance
and the foundations of resistance to it.
However, Graeme Kirkpatrick (2008: 56) suggests:

Habermas’ concern is not with technology as a mode of human action per se,
which he understands as quasi-natural, but with the inappropriate use of
instrumental reasoning to solve problems that involve meaning and value.
However, the system/lifeworld distinction abstracts technology from society …
he acknowledges that in practice the two spheres interpenetrate. However, the
separation of system and lifeworld conjoins technology, in its pragmatic func-
tion, so to speak, to a permanent association with coercive authority and makes
it inherently opposed to reason and communication.

Elsewhere, Kirkpatrick suggests Habermas sees ‘technology as innocent,

perhaps even benign when seen in social evolutionary perspective’ (2008: 74).
Essentially Habermas equates particular technologies with neutral and effi-
cient technology as such (rather as Castells does). Habermas neglects the
politics embodied in tools, focusing only on misapplication. Following
Andrew Feenberg (1991, 1999, 2002), Kirkpatrick suggests such ‘process
critique’, addressing how technology is applied, misses ‘product critique’ of
tools built for unethical purposes and ‘design critique’, attention to the social
interests built into tools and passed off as simply efficient. In Feenberg’s
‘dual aspect theory’ tools straddle the interface between physical and social

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Peer to Peer and the Music Industry

functionality. They must ‘work’ on nature but must also ‘work’ in social
contexts. Equating technical reason and ‘hegemonic technological rationality’
is to accept partial constructions of efficiency as natural and to limit
technology to truncated ends.
Kirkpatrick’s work focuses on ‘design critique’. To bolster this shift he
rather exaggerates Habermas’ limits. Suggesting that with increased telecom-
munications Habermas’ separation of instrumental and communicative
action is outmoded (2008: 35) rather misses the point of Habermas’ distinc-
tion between action oriented towards control and action orientated towards
understanding, and overlooks the fact that Habermas’ definitive study of the
rise and fall of the Enlightenment public sphere was itself a study of medi-
ated communication (1989[1962]). Contemporary conflicts over commer-
cial and communicative action through new-media highlight the continuing
relevance of Habermas’ theorization of early European print media, though
highlighting significant differences in the structure of new-media architec-
ture, i.e. the absence of an editorial centre. In this way the architecture of
the medium’s design is significant, as Kirkpatrick’s ‘design critique’ focus sug-
gests, even if it is not the whole story. It is premature to dismiss Habermas’
focus and insights just to make space for Kirkpatrick’s, valuable as they are.
Kirkpatrick’s ‘design critique’ applies Feenberg’s dual aspect theory to
search engines, PC interfaces, and computer games. ‘[C]reeping standard-
ization’ of Internet search engine algorithms, converging around Google’s
‘spider bot’ method of locating and ranking websites according to the number
of web-links to them (2008: 140–52) may at first appear merely the most
efficient means of finding a site. However, this standardization reinforces
what is already most visible and marginalizes non-corporate and alternative
sites further. Standardization also enables those with the means to pay con-
sultants to ‘position’ sites, constructing them in such a way as to move up
search engines’ ranking systems. Standardization increases the consequences
of ‘position’, jumping all the generically structured queues. Challenging the
suggestion that ‘this works’ equals ‘neutrality’ disrupts technocratic claims
that one version of efficiency equals progress as such. Kirkpatrick highlights
a range of alternative search engine designs.
The rise of the ‘user friendly’ interface appears to help the non-expert
user, but inhibits their understanding and so keeps them under control
(Kirkpatrick 2004: 22 and 26–68, and 2008: 73 and 122–5). Sherry Turkle’s
(1995) suggestion that the Windows interface seduces the user into a ‘life
on the screen’, a postmodern freedom to explore multiple identities and
positions, is rejected by Kirkpatrick as a manipulated illusion. He proposes
a Brechtian modernist aesthetic critique of false and misleading interface
designs, in favour of direct engagement with the machine through writing
syntax commands. Learning and writing commands would give users
greater control and freedom to configure the machine. ‘User friendly’ inter-
faces are said to configure the user to limited menu/icon options.
‘The mechanical, austere and challenging interfaces on older operating
systems were in a sense, consistent with a more realist aesthetic of technology

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 The Global Network Society

design’ (Kirkpatrick 2004: 23). At times Kirkpatrick’s ‘design critique’ is

realist, challenging designs which obscure real world power relations and
domination – such as in the case of search engine algorithm standardization
or where covert surveillance and adware are used to manipulate users. More
often Kirkpatrick’s critique is strictly modernist, rejecting artifice and
metaphor in form in favour of explicit presentation of the medium’s own
workings. Modernist attention to the medium’s truth in relation to the
mechanics of its functionality gives less significance to true representation
of the world beyond the medium. The primacy of ‘design critique’ in
Kirkpatrick’s critical theory lends itself to such attendance to the character
of the medium over the practices of users as such. The primary agents are
designers. Users are seen in large part as passive, having been configured by
the designs said to contain them.
The power of ‘hegemonic technological rationality’, despite Kirkpatrick’s
questioning of it (2008: 152), is most definitely assumed in his account of
potential resistance. Critical theory’s account of technocracy’s pacification
of class struggle itself struggles with questions of change and/or resistance.
Critical theory came to substitute itself for ‘imminent critique’, the self-
contradiction and self-confrontation claimed in classical Marxist accounts
of class-based societies. This can be seen in Kirkpatrick’s ‘design critique’,
itself seeking to effect ‘progressive rationalization’ in the face of dominant
constructions of efficiency. But who would adopt such alternative and
more challenging designs? Kirkpatrick finds some hope in computer
gamers, who he sees poised on the knife-edge of seduction by the interface/
screen and a desire to explore the algorithms that structure the game/
system. Drawing on Sloterdijk (1984), Kirkpatrick (2004: 69–88) identi-
fies a tension between the cynicism of suspended disbelief in the virtual
game on the screen, and the cynical questioner who wants to probe
beneath and perhaps question ‘the rules’. Instilling knowledge of computers
(to some extent), the dialectic of gaming is offered as a proto public sphere
for a new modernity.
Kirkpatrick suggests computer simulated war games fostered a realiza-
tion that the cold war was irrational, thereby encouraging its end. This is
hard to verify and designers/gamers offer only modest hope for redeeming
technology. However, when Kirkpatrick’s focus on design is allied with
product and process critiques imminent in the development and conduct
of file-sharing, technologies of sharing may offer a greater hope for democ-
ratic and progressive rationalization. Having distanced his critical theory
from earlier suspicions of technical reason per se and from accounts that
render technology as neutral tools (2004 and 2008), as well as in his dis-
tancing from constructivist and positivist accounts of technology (2008),
Kirkpatrick’s ‘minimal technical attitude’ of critical engagement with tech-
nology and technical reason as a progressive force ‘meshes better with a
realist stance on the technical object’ (2004: 7). This does not mean criti-
cal theory can be simply fused with Castells’ critical realism, as Christopher
May’s empirical objections outlined in the next section attest. Nevertheless,

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Peer to Peer and the Music Industry

the scope to draw insights from both traditions is increased, even while
enabling a more subtle engagement over their still significant differences.

Feminist critiques
Feminist Internet research tends to parallel critical theory. While Sadie
Plant (1998) suggests the Internet’s network character has a particular elec-
tive affinity with feminine weaving over masculine hierarchy, this is more
ironic subversion of masculine assumptions and designed to highlight the
non-reducibility of social life and/or technology to existing relations of
power. Alternatives exist, and can be fostered. Dale Spender (2003) simi-
larly highlights the potential for network communication to disembody and
eliminate gender distinctions online, even while she goes on to show how,
in practice, men use sexist language and images to colonize cyberspace.
Sherry Turkle (1995, 2005) suggests the disembodied character of computer
‘geek’ culture excludes women. Flis Henwood (1994) shows how the gendered
assumptions of teachers and boys reproduce female exclusion and self-
deselection from computing. Nevertheless, the rise of the computer and the
revaluation of ‘typing’ over more ‘physical’ forms of engagement with
‘technology’ have shifted gendered relations. Masculine forms of domi-
nance in framing skill and power remain (Wajcman 1991), but women’s
paid employment has been entrenched not weakened with the shift from
manual to non-manual engagement with machines (Webster, J. 1996).
Donna Haraway (1991, 1997), through her work on cyborgs, hybrids and
the post-nature fusions of humans, machines and other organisms, touches
on the Internet only tangentially. Technology is bound to patriarchy and
capitalism, but for her there is no recourse to a natural order. It is technol-
ogy itself that both undermines older repressive ideologies and fosters new
ones. Like Habermas, Haraway suggests instrumental rationalizations in the
interests of control can foster critical challenges.

Informationalism and ‘capitalist perestroika’?

The central argument of Castells’ The Information Age (1996, 1997 and
1998) is that we are becoming a global network capitalist society. In line
with Marx, Castells argues that social development is driven by economic
conflict. Capitalism has become global, over-running both pre-capitalist
and statist alternatives. Network capitalism is characterized by increasingly
distributed enterprises, trade systems and financial markets. Traditional forms
of geographical and class-based community are fragmenting. The network
society is, therefore, characterized by increasing individualization and increas-
ingly global connectivity. The tension between self and net – in economic,
political and cultural terms – is coming to form the dominant site of identity
crisis and reformation (1996: 3) in economic production, political power
and personal experience (1996: 14–15).

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 The Global Network Society

The context out of which the informational technology revolution

emerged and into which it developed was that of the United States’ rise to
global dominance, economically and militarily. Castells’ critical realism
holds that technology develops by producing increasingly powerful objec-
tive tools for the control of nature; and such an objective yardstick, for all
the potential for social manipulation and direction, gives technology a level
of autonomy from simple social determinism, and technical artefacts
impact upon social relations as though from outside. Increasingly powerful
tools enable increased economic productivity. Increased productivity is one
of the key drivers of social change, but it is not the only one. The other
three, Castells suggests (1996: 103–5), are: gaining access to larger, more
integrated and affluent markets; increasing the gap between cost and price
(which may be achieved by a number of means other than efficiency); and
effecting macroeconomic management at national and international levels.
The network society emerges as technical shifts in the mode of develop-
ment (the shift from industrialism to informationalism) enable shifts in the
other three dimensions. These other shifts are within the mode of production
(capitalism) and can be summarized as the shift towards global network
capitalism, what Castells (1996: 18–22) calls ‘capitalist perestroika’.
The rise of global corporations requires greater information storage,
processing and communication capacity, and their provision has enabled
the combination of greater centralization of ownership, more rapid flows
of capital through stock markets, and the development of integrated and
lean forms of production and distribution (flexible production and global
trade). Network capitalism is founded upon what Castells (1996: 172) calls
the network enterprise: ‘the network enterprise makes material the culture
of the informational/global economy: it transforms signals into commodi-
ties by processing knowledge.’ The ‘culture of the informational/global
economy’ is what Castells calls ‘the spirit of informationalism’. ‘[t]he “spirit
of informationalism” is the culture of “creative destruction” accelerated
to the speed of the optoelectronic circuits that process its signals.
Schumpeter meets Weber in the cyberspace of the network enterprise’
(Castells 1996: 199).
The consequences of this creative destruction are multidimensional. In
the realm of work the new network enterprise in the global market pro-
motes flexibility, leading to new forms of economic insecurity for many and
greater wealth for elites. According to Castells, we are now experiencing ‘the
individualization of work and the fragmentation of societies’ (1996: 201).
Established collective identities of class and nation are being undermined
by the new global informational capitalism, a new world of experience
characterized by what Castells (2000) calls ‘real virtuality’ (the increasingly
significant amount of dis-embedded/mediated experience), ‘the space of
flows’ (the increasing mediation of place by mobility – whether of things,
people or information) and ‘timeless time’ (the abolition of distance and
the increased scope for coordinated action at a distance). For Castells, the
gap between haves and have nots lies in relative access to informational

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resources and can be mapped in terms of virtual, spatial and temporal inte-
gration within the net.
Volume II of The Information Age (1997) describes the fragmentation of
national and class identities and the rise of new social movements (regionalism,
environmentalism and feminism in particular), and the transformation of
the state from nation state to network state (with its consequent dislocation
between government and democratic accountability).

Critical theoretical challenges

From within the Marxist tradition Christopher May (2002) questions the
radical nature of change in Castells’ ‘network society’. Identifying four
dimensions of supposed radical change in Castells’ work, May concludes
that continuity in each is far greater than change. First, the idea that soci-
ety has been fundamentally changed by information technology is ques-
tioned. For May, relations between owners of the means of production and
waged workers is not fundamentally changed. Second, May suggests
Castells’ separation of the mode of production from the mode of develop-
ment is unjustified. The nature of work and class relations is not radically
altered and talk of individualization of work is much exaggerated. Trade
unionism and workplace politics is certainly fluid, but the rise of flexible
production – with core and periphery employment, increasing part-time/
temporary contracts – cannot be explained by a shift in technology. Additionally,
it is still the case that the majority of employees in advanced economies
work full-time. The rise of industrial production in developing countries
and the increased paid employment of women across the world suggest
the rise of industrialism, not its demise. The very separation of industrial-
ism and informationalism is hard to justify. May suggests the same logic of
increasing productivity and profitability underpins capitalism in physical
and informational production. Third, May (2002: 81–113) questions
whether new social movements are either the result of the network soci-
ety or a sign of the death of class politics. Old and new movements use
new technologies to achieve action and communication. Finally, the belief
that the state is fundamentally transformed is questionable, both in terms
of its demise in the face of global markets and in terms of its centrality in
democratic political conflict. May is concerned by Castells’ structuralist
language, and his claims for the semi-autonomous and radical effects of
new technologies.

There is nothing natural, nothing inevitable about the information society:

while we can only make our own history in the circumstances we find ourselves
in, we should recognise that these circumstances are not as fixed or narrow as
many commentators on the information society tell us. (May 2002: 161)

This view is not fundamentally at odds with Castells’ own view, but
May offers a valuable corrective to technological determinist readings of
Castells.

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 The Global Network Society

The network as morphogenetic structure?

Volume III of The Information Age (1998) charts the relative position of dif-
ferent regions in the information age (the former Soviet Union, Africa and
Latin America, Asia/Pacific and Europe). The United States is very much
the epicentre of the new global transformation and the focus of attention
in Volume I. Such a grand accounting exercise tends to present a process far
above the heads of all those living through such changes. While networks
are commonly used in sociology to emphasize human agency, this is not
Castells’ intention.

Presence or absence in the network and the dynamics of each network vis-à-vis
others are critical sources of domination and change in our society: a society
that, therefore, we may properly call the network society, characterized by the
predominance of social morphology over social action. (Castells 1996: 469)

Social morphology refers to structural characteristics in social systems (see

Archer, 1995). Castells asserts that the network society is a social structure,
something that is not reducible to or controlled by conscious actors. It is an
environment in which humans act, and which constrains and enables such
action. In this sense Castells is an anti-reductionist. Society cannot be
reduced to the actions of individuals. Castells’ structuralism is in diametric
opposition to ethnographic research.
Ethnographic, ethnomethodological, conversation analytical and discourse
analytical studies have addressed the design process, the interaction
between design and use by ‘non-experts’, the discourses that surround com-
puter surveillance and simulation models, as well as the relationships between
networks in the formation of communities and technologies. Particular atten-
tion has been paid to the question of whether technology has effects. In
addition, the question of how to conceptualize the social in relation to the
computer will also be examined. This theme flows from the ethnographic
and discursive focus upon action and language, largely in opposition to
attention and belief in social ‘structures’. If technology is not independent
of the social and social structure does not mould technology, what is going
on? Ethnographic and discursive researchers highlight the ways computers
are imagined and used, challenging both technological and sociological
reductionism.

Ethnographic alternatives
Christine Hine’s (2000) ethnographic study of Internet use involved obser-
vation of, interaction with and interviewing users of both the World Wide
Web and a range of Internet newsgroups. The focus of the research was
Internet coverage and discussion of the English nanny Louise Woodward’s
court battle against charges of murdering the child she was looking after in
the USA. Hine’s interest lay in the anthropological themes of community and
identity formation. Would interaction in non-physical and often non-temporal

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proximity lead to weaker normative expectations and regulations? Would

the characteristics of the medium affect the way people interacted? Hine
suggests the space created for interaction on the Internet is both performa-
tive and a performance (2000: 116). In one sense the Internet creates a new
environment where people can interact without being co-present. In this
sense the Internet has effects. Interactions that would not otherwise occur,
do occur. Yet the medium itself does not determine how people will inter-
act. The way that the Internet is used is itself a performance, the medium
is interpreted and applied in ways determined by social negotiation
between the parties to the interaction. This process of performance has two
dimensions for Hine. The first sense of performance lies in creating contexts
and rules of behaviour. Groups create routines and places on the net where
they meet. Groups also establish patterns of expectation, inclusion and
exclusion. These regulate anti-social behaviour (2000: 115). Hine rejects
the idea that loss of face-to-face proximity will have necessary conse-
quences. People using the Internet are not denuded of normative context.
While the medium does not provide normative context, participants do. In
the second sense of performance Hine (2000: 144) highlights that partici-
pants in online interactions often continue interactions from non-Internet
life and interactions online always play upon materials drawn from outside
the Internet to create cultural context. Of particular interest in the case of
Louise Woodward were national identity and television coverage, two sets
of cultural resources that enabled online participants to identify themselves
as a ‘community’ – one that the Internet encouraged but did not create.
Daniel Miller and Don Slater researched Internet use in Trinidad and
found: ‘Trinidadians have a natural affinity for the Internet’ (2000: 2). The
expectation that the poor have less access and interest in information
technology (hereafter IT) was confounded in this study. In what is by most
indicators an economically poor island, the researchers found that one in
three households had direct access to the Internet, and there was little neg-
ativity and technophobia even among those without. Miller and Slater
conclude that far from being a detached and dis-embedding technology,
the Internet is deeply embedded in Trinidadian life. As a mobile popula-
tion, with high levels of migration across the world, the Internet fits. A lib-
ertarian ideal of free movement also resonates with a cultural emphasis
upon freedom, born of a history of slavery and resistance. Structural accounts
fail to capture the creativity by which communities engage and remake
technologies. For Miller and Slater, the ethnographic approach avoids both
the sociological determinism of Castells’ ‘network society’ and its techno-
logical determinism.
David Mason et al. (2001, 2002a and 2002b) use ethnography to examine
workplace surveillance. Fieldwork in diverse workplace situations examined
use of ‘surveillance-capable’ (2002b: 558) technologies, technologies that
collect data on the activities of employees, whether or not this is either
intentional or applied. Use was studied in detail. Rather than assuming how
or by whom capabilities would be used the research team observed what

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 The Global Network Society

happened. It was not simply the case that capabilities were used by management
to spy on staff, to increase work pressure, or to individualize work evalua-
tion. This presumption is referred to as ‘apriorism’. Mason et al. suggest the
value of ethnography lies in its more inductive approach to finding out
what is really going on. Capabilities were negotiated to a variety of ends and
in a variety of ways. Technology requires active involvement of staff in its
use and the data such systems generate is the result of negotiation, interac-
tion and interpretation. Use that does not increase management control
cannot automatically be assumed to be resistance. Using systems to moni-
tor work in order to keep a record of your actions could be resistance
against management pressure, or conformity. Sometimes staff felt monitor-
ing impinged privacy; sometimes they did not. The meaning of the technol-
ogy and what it meant for the technology to be working properly was
negotiated in context rather than being a top-down imposition. Technologies
afford possibilities, as do workplace situations, but neither determines
outcomes.

From ethnography to discourse

Steve Woolgar (2002: 14–21) summarizes a range of ‘virtual society’ ethno-
graphic and discursive research projects. He proposes ‘five rules of virtuality’.
First: ‘The uptake and use of the new technologies depend crucially on local
social context’. Information and communication technologies (ICTs) are
embedded in social life, not vice versa, and they certainly do not abolish
social context. Second: ‘The fears and risks associated with new technolo-
gies are unevenly socially distributed’, again reflecting local contexts. Third:
‘Virtual technologies supplement rather than substitute for real activities’.
Fourth, it is suggested: ‘The more virtual, the more real’. New ICTs drive
and extend existing mobility, communication and interaction. Finally: ‘The
more global, the more local’. ICTs do not abolish locality.
‘To talk of the impact of technology, then, seems to require us artificially
to separate the technology from some “social group” in the service of assess-
ing “the effects” of one upon the other’ (Grint and Woolgar, 1997: 93).
Better to say: ‘The “technology” is the machine’s relations with its users’,
rather than to imagine the machine as something outside society. This
seems strange. The machine still sits there when we leave. Grint and Woolgar
(1997: 80–2) cleverly highlight the discursive construction of the computer
as a freestanding thing in their account of the labelling placed on computer
casings to discourage the user from lifting the lid and transgressing the
boundary between thing and user. However, while the boundary is enforced
by rhetoric the machine still has a physical reality, with limits and possibil-
ities. Grint and Woolgar critique the view that information technology has
its properties and capacities ‘hard-wired’ into it by its designers. They point
out that in reaction to technological determinists, a generation of social
researchers emphasized the social shaping of technology. This social shaping
approach implied that technology was driven by macro social structures, with

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no intrinsic consequences of its own (MacKenzie and Wajcman 1985,1999).

A reaction to this tradition was to emphasize the way that technological
design built in certain features that had political consequences (see Winner
1985). Grint and Woolgar reject technological determinism, social deter-
minism and technological neutrality, the latter because it seems to imply
that the technology exists independently of its uses, waiting to be used one
way or another. In abolishing the distinction between technology and its
uses, they suggest that any artefact in use is a unique configuration. From
their ethnomethodological perspective, using technology differently
remakes the technology. Such rhetorical hair splitting makes a particular
point and does not dispute the existence of physical objects with particu-
lar properties.

We have no wish to insist that machines actually are texts. Rather the point
is to play against this metaphor, to see how far we can go with it. What happens
to the structure of our discourse when we introduce the notion of machine
as text? What, if anything, is special about machines by comparison with other
texts? What are the limits of talking in this bizarre way? (1997: 70)

Challenging discourse analysis from within

Ian Hutchby (2001) responds to the apparent abolition of artefacts in the
language, if not the intention, of Grint and Woolgar, using conversation
analysis of the way humans interact with and through computers, and
the expectations displayed in interactions with computers – expectations
drawn from human conversation. Conversation analytical attention to the
orderly yet spontaneous character of human talk highlights difference
between humans and machines. Computers are not oriented towards
understanding, performing programmed responses not human ‘conversation’.
Humans interacting through the Internet generate their own normative
contexts to regulate performance (Hine 2000). However, the videophone
did not ‘take off’ because it fails to provide the kinds of ‘taken for granted
cues’ available in face-to-face communication (Heath and Luff 1993). The
conventional telephone does not afford such ‘cues’ either but, as the video-
phone was promoted precisely in order do so, its failure reduced its appeal.
In reviewing Lucy Suchman’s (1987) ethnography of work within a hi-tech
company, Hutchby notes the way designers imported a range of metaphors
and assumptions from the field of computing into their designs for
human–computer interfaces. Assuming human thinking mirrors the
computational character of a machine encouraged designers to provide
interfaces based on incorrect assumptions. Human conversation displays
intentionality and an orientation to understanding not present in machines.
Hutchby concludes by saying (2001: 140): ‘The difficulties experienced by
users in both cases emerge from a lack of fit between the expectations
associated with the normative structures of ordinary interaction and the
artefacts practical communicative affordances.’ Hutchby outlines a range of
such affordances as well as the interactional work and communication

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 The Global Network Society

breakdowns that ensue when humans interact with and through machines.
Similar research explores libraries (Zeitlyn et al. 1999), medical expert
systems (Collins 1990) and McDonald’s (Kusch and Collins 1998).
Hutchby’s ‘affordances’ avoid seeing computers as carrying in built log-
ics of use, programmed either by technicians or society, or seeing machine
as texts only meaningful in the way they are read by users. Affordances are
the limits and possibilities of physical artefacts. While limits do not deter-
mine uses, to ignore limits is to ignore a fundamentally important difference
between humans and machines. Recognition of this difference underpins
ethnography, ethnomethodology, conversation analysis (CA), social interest
theory, Marxism and most feminist scholarship (David 2005), even if each
needs reminding for different reasons.
Affordances bridge Castells’ suggestion of technological ‘impact’ and his
critics’ attention to the social shaping of technology at different levels.
Affordances highlight that without use there is no technology, but also that
usage has limits. Different objects offer different possibilities. Critical real-
ists’ and critical theorists’ attention has been on the cutting edge organiza-
tions and designs within the network society, neglecting hidden users who
clarify and illuminate their insights. Where May is correct to suggest that
corporations remain corporate and in that sense hierarchical for all their
distributed infrastructure, that networks now enable every computer to
offer new affordances which challenge corporations does present scope for
radical change. Where Hine, Miller and Slater show that technologies can
only be understood in relation to the communities that use them, it is also
true that the performative scope to act is changed (as is Castells’ suggestion
also). Hostilities towards the music industry for its pricing of recordings
existed long before network technologies enabled relatively easy circum-
vention of payment. Piracy and home taping suggest that file-sharing is not
just a technical possibility that created a cultural desire.
The ‘post-structuralists’ Alexander Galloway and Frederick Kittler – in
radically different ways – highlight the value and limitations of attempts to
study technical networks as relatively autonomous, socially determining,
morphogenetic systems rather than as social practices.

Post-structuralist approaches

Alexander Galloway (2004) suggests early study of the ‘information society’

neglected the material reality of information technology, while later discus-
sions of the ‘network society’ tend to treat the term ‘network’ as a metaphor
for new forms of social interaction rather than as a physical infrastructure
and a command language built to distribute (regulate the flow of) data
across an electronic grid. Galloway suggests such ‘vapour theory’ of net-
works allows projection of polarized visions of social change onto technical
systems, first wave liberation technologists (Zuboff 1988, Gates 1995, 1999
and Reingold 2000) and second wave dystopian theorists (Bogard 1996 and
Lyon 2001) fail to understand the technical contradiction at the heart of the

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machines themselves. While Galloway overstates technical contradictions

within the Internet, his detailed discussion of software and infrastructure are
useful both in qualifying the theoretical projections he seeks to make and in
challenging either/or constructions of network potential.
Though critical of Castells, Galloway replicates his focus upon the
technical realities of networks even while coming to different conclusions.
Critical theorists, such as May (2002), observe in Castells a reified techni-
cal infrastructure too close to a ‘historical materialist’ form of Marxism,
where technical forces of production drive out ‘dated’ social relations of
production and ferment social transformation. Critical theorists suggest
technology is not an autonomous force for social change.
Like May, Galloway’s ‘political economy’ sets itself against Castells’
account of the Internet as a transformative social force, framing his discussion
of Internet protocol within Deleuze’s (1992) account of the ‘control society’
(discussed below). For Galloway, the architecture of the Internet, the man-
agement style embodied in its protocols, along with the concealment operat-
ing at every level of its interfacing, reproduce the society of which it is a part.
However, unlike May, who sees the continuities within ‘capitalist society’
manifested online, Galloway suggests Internet protocol materially mirrors the
reordering of the mode of regulation from a ‘disciplinary’ society (based on a
Foucauldian decentralized power) to a ‘control’ society (based on Deleuze’s
conception of distributed power). Domain names are allocated by a hierar-
chical set of designated agents (once totally centralized but now partially
decentralized), while distributed interaction requires a set of universal stan-
dards (protocols). The fact that peer-to-peer interaction via distributed
networks requires such a universal set of agreed programming standards leads
to what Galloway calls the ‘protocological society’.
Increasingly individualized communication requires increasingly standard-
ized media. Galloway exaggerates the difference between the centralised
(thought increasingly de-centralised) power over domain name allocation
and the distributed nature of data-transfer within the Internet. Removing
China’s domain name from the domain name system (DNS) would be
more akin to removing the word China from the English dictionary than
removing it from the English language. Galloway’s observation that China’s
‘.ch’ domain name could be removed within 24 hours is correct at one
level, but the actual numerical Internet address would remain. What would
disappear would be the ability of search engines using the most updated
versions of the protocols to locate Chinese Internet sites. As such, the
relationship between the dictionary and the language has changed. We
are more reliant on looking things up (through search engines) when using
the Internet than we are in our everyday language. Internet users rely on the
centralized ‘adhocracy’ of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) to
give them a system that links up. The extent to which such reliance has
consequences needs to be investigated at the level of actual usage. Galloway
seeks such power relations in the very material character of the Internet’s
language, its semantic naming system and its syntactic protocols. Galloway

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 The Global Network Society

locates contradictory but substantial power relations within the material

realm of the machine and the functional constraints and constitutions said
to emerge from its command language. Attention to the protocols is largely
separate from the discussion of his case studies of power and resistance,
viruses, cyberfeminism and tactical media (2004) as well as of terrorist
networks (2004, 2005).
These cases are only tenuously linked to his overarching ‘protocological
society’ theory, and relatively marginal to his attempt to theorize the
Internet as a language indifferent to the meaning communicated through it.
Such a structuralist/post-structuralist attention to the semantics and syntax
of the Internet as a material language discourages any serious attempt to the-
orize the substantive content – and thereby actual use of the Internet –
because syntax is said to condition the parameters of semantic content in
advance, rather than semantic content driving divergent uses of syntactic
systems. This explains Galloway’s strenuous, and at times contorted, attempts
to explain protocol in its own terms (as a system, even if a self-contradictory –
post-structuralism compliant – system). It also leaves his work open to the
accusation of reification, despite his otherwise interesting observations about
reification through concealment. While interesting, Galloway’s theoretical
framework inhibits research into much that is of interest about the Internet
and its use. While ‘vapour theory’ allows for the projections of cyber-optimists
and cyber-pessimists, this is no less true of the structuralist/post-structuralist
‘materialist theories’ of Castells and Galloway.
If much is gained from engagement with Galloway’s work, perhaps as
much can be gained through a critical distancing from the work of Friedrich
Kittler. Kittler’s account of three stages in the development of media –
1800 reformulation of storage media, 1900 developments in transmission,
and more recently the development of computational media – correspond,
as Kittler rightly shows, to popular and intellectual representations of the
human subject. Influential constructions of the mind draw still upon the
latest media technology. Romanticism, psychoanalysis and structuralism/
post-structuralism/systems theory pass off metaphors drawn from the
machines of their day as analytical categories. Kittler suggests today’s net-
work fusion of ‘partially integrated media systems’, of storage, transmission
and computation, will create (or has created) a fully integrated ‘system’ – a
self-contained information loop, no longer ‘media’ as it would not need
external points of reference to mediate between. This play on Foucault’s
(1974[1966]) ‘Death of Man’ through an inversion of McLuhan’s (1964)
‘Extensions of Man’ portrays a symmetrical system as unsustainable, in real-
ity, as the systems theoretical framework that seeks to conceptualize
it. Systems theory is a ‘performative contradiction’ (David 2006a: 81–2).
Paul Virilio’s claim that ‘the message is the velocity of the medium’ (2000:
141), making human intelligence the extension of artificial intelligence,
fails to explain the systematic failure of such high speed info-war to convince.
Similarly (contra Kittler 1997), the German military’s definition of radio broad-
casting as a technical weakness didn’t stop it catching on, and Intel’s

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imprinting of the PC’s basic operating system onto the chip’s silicon circuits
does not programme the PC user as a ‘subject or underling’ of corporations.
Kittler’s fascinating histories and counterintuitive accounts of media
technology’s relationship with war, literature and the human sciences
(1990, 1997, 1999) offer myriad insights and intellectual provocations.
Nevertheless, his ‘attempt to construct sociology from the chip’s architec-
ture’ (1997: 162) reduces social relations of technology to the codes of
media machines and metaphors for the human subject drawn from them.
The failure to distinguish the command language of computer syntax and
the inter-subjective characteristics of human language, interaction and
meaning formation, continues to encourage misrepresentations of humans
as computers (David 2002), and continues to ensure their inability to
examine human–computer interactions without reifying the former in the
mirror of the latter.

Contingency, contradiction and contestation

Marx termed the twofold movement of the tendency to a falling rate of profit,
and an increase in the absolute quantity of surplus value, the law of the coun-
teracted tendency. As a corollary of this law, there is the twofold movement of
decoding or deterritorializing flows on the one hand, and their violent and arti-
ficial reterritorialization on the other. The more the capitalist machine deterri-
torializes, decoding and axiomatizing flows in order to extract surplus value
from them, the more its ancillary apparatuses, such as government bureaucra-
cies and the forces of law and order, do their utmost to reterritorialize, absorb-
ing in the process a larger and larger share of surplus value. (Deleuze and
Guattari 1984: 34–5)

The above quotation captures both contradiction and contingency. Two

contradictory processes are paralleled and the contingent nature of both is
highlighted. What Marx (1995) refers to as the law of the counteracted
tendency is the tendency for the rate of profit to fall within competitive
market conditions. Goods being sold above their cost attract increased
supply. When this exceeds demand prices will be depressed, as is the rate
of profit. Various countermeasures can be enacted to reduce cost, expand
markets, and integrate horizontally or vertically to reduce competition or to
reduce price elasticity (by customer loyalty). One such countermeasure is
to prohibit entry with trade barriers, charters, professional or commercial
licences and other mechanisms that criminalize market entry by others.
Capitalism increases productivity to reduce cost. Rising output raises the
prospect of reducing scarcity to the point where supply exceeds demand, thus
threatening prices and profitability. As such, market inhibiting mechanisms are
as much favoured in restricting competition as are technical and productive
innovations designed to reduce cost. The rise of intellectual property monop-
olies designed to protect profitability are only contemporary manifestations
of longstanding counteractions to the tendency for the rate of profit to fall.

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 The Global Network Society

As such, for Marx, while crisis tendencies afflict capitalism by its very
competitive and profit-oriented nature, such tendencies must be set against
equally significant counter-tendencies towards the protection of existing
dominant positions by anti-competitive regulations. There are no necessary
outcomes in such dynamics and the way groups and individuals seek strate-
gically to ally and compete cannot be predicted fully in advance. Actors
must make choices as to how their best interests might be served, even as
their interpretations of what such interests might be are also subject to
competing claims and demands.
For Deleuze and Guattari a similar contradiction lies in the pressure
within capitalism both to exceed state and regulatory boundaries (to evade
restrictions), and yet to seek regulation and protection from attempts to
challenge regulations that protect them (to re-restrict at a higher level).
While information technologies for storage, processing and transmitting
data have emerged as part of existing economic, political and military
strategies, these strategies are themselves open to many alternative possibil-
ities. It is useful to explore how such new affordances may make certain
things more or less possible. Where once bootleg tapes and home taping
tweaked the margins of the record industry’s monopoly over recorded
music, digital compression and network distribution (both technologies
developed by the entertainment industry in the first instance) significantly
alter the relative costs and benefits of such appropriations.
The way artefacts act to stabilize and/or destabilize the relative position
and composition of social groups is something highlighted by the now
defunct Actor Network Theory. Latour’s (2005) attempt to fend off any
over-rapid movement towards sociological determinism, wherein estab-
lished social categories are wheeled in to explain the use of artefacts, is
legitimate – even if he rather labours the point. Like Castells, Latour can be
questioned for placing too much emphasis upon the potential for artefacts
to reconfigure the balance of power and composition within and between
social groups, yet the point remains true that negotiations over the forma-
tion and application of artefacts always involves some renegotiation over
the composition and relative dominance of humans. Such renegotiations
will not always be significant; however, they will not always be insignificant.
File-sharing offers an interesting case study. Expanding market reach and
reducing cost by deterritorializing production of informational goods, in
particular by means of digitalization of storage (digital compression) and
transmission (file-sharing protocols), evaded local regulations, but the same
artefacts were appropriated by competitors and non-market actors circulat-
ing freely by the same mechanisms to an even wider global network. Those
that once sought to escape regulation demand re-regulation at a higher
level. Whether this will be successful is an open question.
While Deleuze and Guattari (1984) highlight the open and contingent
nature of ongoing developments in struggles over power, culture and profit
in global information flows, Deleuze’s (1992) diagnosis of the shift from
territorialized discipline (in the form of Foucauldian institutional spaces

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and disciplinary fields) towards deterritorialized control through networks

of information and money (surveillance and debt) is more concerned to
outline the ‘coils of the serpent’ within ‘societies of control’. Deleuze’s final
suggestion to the next generation that ‘it’s up to them to discover what
they’re being made to serve’ (1992: 7) gives no answers, only the insight to
keep looking. This book takes the hint.
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2000) refer to the deterritorializing
action of networked multitudes within and yet beyond the control of global
empire. The actions of hundreds of millions of peer-to-peer file-sharers, in
taking information technologies and using them in ways that challenge
dominant logics of application and development represents just such a net-
worked multitude – an illustration of deterritorializing leapfrogging beyond
control by its own tools, and just such a challenge to existing social relations
by means of the affordances made by artefacts that could well have been
used otherwise. Yet, while such deterritorialization ‘from below’ may
challenge dominant practices, it can also be linked to new forms of reterri-
torialization, either through legal enforcement or new forms of trust.
The discussion of alternative business models in Chapter 9 highlights how
diverse configurations of proximity and trust play out the possibilities of
de/reterritorialization and de/relegitimation.

Conclusions

Where Castells grants relative autonomy to technology only to suggest such

new forces of production are driving the emergence of a new capitalism, his
critics tend to suggest established social relations continue to call the shots.
Similarly, while his critics suggest Castells is a technological determinist,
these critics are themselves more often than not guilty of reductionisms to
their own preferred levels of causal explanation (language, interaction,
hegemonic regime or mode of production). This chapter has sought to
highlight these symmetrical counter-reductionisms and to resist them.
Valuable insights have been highlighted at many levels. It is valuable to take
insights from researchers working at all levels of analysis precisely as in so
doing it is possible to identify the failure of any one level of explanation to
effect closure. Social change is neither determined nor discounted in
advance. This chapter draws upon the concept of ‘affordances’ as a bridging
term that allows for analysis across levels of explanation, from language and
interaction, to institutional and systemic social relationships and practices,
without recourse to reductionism of various kinds. Castells’ critics suggest
he goes too far in claiming technical affordances transform social relation-
ships. In some senses they are correct. In others Castells does not go far
enough. File-sharing technologies afford perestroika from below not simply
the reinvention of capitalism through new tools, though this is an alternative
affordance.

28 This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.
3
File-sharing: A Brief History

• The hacker ethic – and U2’s manager

• Media – compression and transmission
• Early Napster
• The closure
• The rise of peer-to-peer
• The development of a common media and platform
• From peer-to-peer to peers-to-peer (torrents)
• Commercial development – MP3 players, iPod and iTunes
• File-sharing and social networking (decommodification and democratization)
• Mass/new media history
• Web 2.0 and 3.0 – recommercialization or not?
• From consumer revolts to revolts amongst artists

The hacker ethic – and U2’s manager

Under the headline ‘Silicon Valley’s hippy values “killing music industry”’
Owen Gibson (The Guardian, 29 January 2008) writes:

U2’ s manager yesterday called on artists to join him in forcing the ‘hippy’ tech-
nology and Internet executives he blames for the collapse of the music industry
to help save it. Paul McGuinness, who has plotted the rise of the Irish group
over 30 years, said technology gurus in Silicon Valley such as Apple’s Steve Jobs
and Microsoft’s Bill Gates had profited from rampant online piracy without
doing anything to stop it. ‘I suggest we shift the focus of moral pressure away
from the individual P2P [peer-to-peer] thief and on to the multibillion dollar
industries that benefit from these tiny crimes,’ he said.

McGuinness’s attempt to blame the computing industry for declining

revenues in recorded music may in part stem from a desire to blame
someone large enough to successfully target for compensation, and a target
so wealthy and powerful as to make the claims of the recording industry –
that they are the impoverished victims of the current shift in music
listening – seem credible. Given failures to win sympathy for their case
when prosecuting teenagers for sharing music, what better strategy to pur-
sue than to turn attention to Bill Gates, someone who has garnered even
less sympathy than the recording industry’s executives in the course of his
monumental commercial success? In short, McGuinness’s claims may be
easily discounted as merely special pleading and self-interest, unlikely to

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Peer to Peer and the Music Industry

persuade anyone not in some way expecting to get paid by the successful
prosecution of such suggestions.
Yet McGuinness has half a point. We may not be persuaded by the moral
claims. Right or wrong, new technologies make it easier today to access
recorded music without paying the holder of its legal monopoly. McGuinness
can also be challenged in suggesting that Gates and Jobs are the legal ben-
eficiaries of crimes undertaken using technologies purchased from them.
No specific Apple or Microsoft products were developed for the purpose of
copyright violating peer-to-peer file-sharing. That such practices can be
undertaken using their products, makes them no more the legal beneficiary
than a car manufacturer whose cars are involved in speeding offences or
bank robberies.
McGuinness is correct to suggest the ‘hippy values’ of Silicon Valley, and
what Pekka Himanen (2001) calls the ‘hacker ethic’ (after Levi 1984), pose
a partial if not intentional threat to the taken for granted practices of estab-
lished information distribution and control. While Jobs and Gates are not
the best examples, the desire to explore the potential of any given technol-
ogy does challenge reliance upon the status quo. What Castells and Himanen
call ‘the spirit of informationalism’ (the passion to explore the potential of
today’s cutting edge technologies) is not a determining and independent
force, any more than was Weber’s (1930 [1905]) ‘Protestant ethic’, yet its
‘elective affinity’ with new networked conditions of work and creativity
incentivizes ‘hacking’, breaking down informational constraints to set infor-
mation free. Without a conscious and politically motivated desire to ‘rebel’
(though some have such a desire) the status accorded to anyone who can
‘go beyond’, who can ‘hack’ today’s limitations, spreads through globally
distributed networks of peer recognition. It is not technological determin-
ism, but rather ‘informationalism’ and the hacker ethic that challenge
present arrangements. Extending the possibilities of information technology
in the face of current legal and economic barriers becomes a vocation of
serious play.
Some innovations are taken up. Others are not. What is taken up may be
taken up in ways other than were intended by their developers. Change is
not simply the expression of technical ‘evolution’. It is merely the case that
exploration of informational potential opens up new forms of distribution
that could bypass traditional suppliers of informational goods. Himanen
(2001: 85–110) notes the ‘spirit of informationalism’, the hippy ethic that
McGuinness is so concerned about, is about setting information free.
However, this is understood as much in terms of freedom of speech as it is
about free access to information. The struggle against censorship has much
in common with the free circulation of ideas, but protection of free expression
also motivated developments to protect anonymity via strong encryption.
As Himanen documents, hackers were as concerned to provide new
technologies that kept communication private as to provide others that
opened communication up. If anyone represents McGuinness’s hippy
hacker it is John Perry Barlow, former songwriter for The Grateful Dead

30 This SAGE ebook is copyright and is supplied by NetLibrary. Unauthorised distribution forbidden.
Random documents with unrelated
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 MORTIFICATION
Far from being like to those great souls who from their childhood
practise all sorts of macerations, I made my mortification consist
solely in the breaking of my will, restraining a hasty word, rendering
little services to those around me without making anything of it, and
a thousand other things of this kind.
hist. d’une ame, ch. vi
As I had no taste for games, I should have liked to spend my life
reading, but I was only to take a very limited time for this chosen
recreation, and this was the ground of many a sacrifice, for I made it
a point of duty to break off promptly at the end of the time allotted,
even in the middle of the most interesting passage.
hist. d’une ame, ch. iv
I had accustomed myself never to complain when anything of mine
was taken away; and when unjustly blamed I chose rather to remain
silent than to defend myself.
hist. d’une ame, ch. i
I was ten years old the day that my Father told Céline he was going
to let her have lessons in painting; I was by, and envied her. Then
Papa said to me: “And you, my little queen, would it give you
pleasure too to learn drawing?” I was just going to respond with a
very gladsome yes, when Marie made the remark that I had not the
same taste for it as Céline. At once she gained the day; and I,
thinking that here was a good opportunity of offering a grand
sacrifice to Jesus, said not a word. So eager was my desire to learn
drawing that now I still wonder how I had the fortitude to remain
silent.
hist. d’une ame, ch. viii
In the world, on awakening in the morning I used to think over what
would probably occur either pleasing or vexatious during the day;
and if I foresaw only trying events I arose dispirited. Now it is quite
the other way: I think of the difficulties and the sufferings that await
me, and I rise the more joyous and full of courage the more I foresee
opportunities of proving my love for Jesus, and earning the living of
my children—seeing that I am the mother of souls. Then I kiss my
crucifix and lay it tenderly on the pillow while I dress, and I say to
Him: “My Jesus, Thou hast worked enough and wept enough during
the three-and-thirty years of Thy life on this poor earth. Take now
Thy rest.... My turn it is to suffer and to fight.”
counsels and reminiscences
The attraction to penance was given me, but I was permitted nothing
to satisfy it. The only mortifications I was allowed consisted in
mortifying self-love, which did me more good than corporal penance.
hist. d’une ame, ch. vii
At prayer I was for a long time near a Sister who used to handle
incessantly either her Rosary-beads or some other thing; perhaps
none heard it but myself, for my hearing is extremely acute, but I
cannot say how it tormented me! I should have liked to turn my head
and look at the culprit so as to make her stop that noise: however in
my heart I knew it was better to bear it patiently, for the love of God
in the first place, and also to avoid giving pain.
I kept quiet therefore, but was sometimes worked up to fever-heat
and obliged to make simply a prayer of endurance. Finally I sought
out the means of suffering with peace and joy, at least in my
innermost soul; I tried to like the teasing little noise. Instead of
endeavouring not to hear it—a thing impossible—I listened with fixed
attention as if it had been a delightful concert; and my prayer, which
was not the prayer of quiet, passed in offering this concert to Jesus.
Another time I was in the laundry opposite a Sister who while
washing handkerchiefs splashed me every minute with dirty water.
My first impulse was to draw back and wipe my face, so as to show
her who besprinkled me in that fashion, that she would oblige me by
working more quietly; but I reflected immediately that it was very
foolish to refuse treasures so generously offered me, and I took good
care not to show my annoyance. On the contrary, I made such
successful efforts to wish for a plentiful splashing of dirty water, that
at the end of half an hour I had really acquired a taste for this new
sort of aspersion, and I determined to come again as often as
possible to a place where happily such riches could be had
gratuitously.
hist. d’une ame, ch. x
I remember that sometimes, when a postulant, I was so violently
tempted to indulge myself by seeking some little consolations, that I
was obliged to go quickly past our Mother’s cell, and cling to the
banisters of the staircase so that I should not turn back. There would
come to mind a number of permissions to ask, a hundred pretexts for
deciding in favour of my natural inclinations and gratifying them. How
glad I am now of having denied myself from the outset of my life in
religion! Already I enjoy the reward promised to those who fight
courageously. No longer do I feel the necessity of refusing myself
consolations of the heart; for my heart is firmly fixed in God....
Because it has loved Him above all, it has gradually enlarged, even
so as to love those who are dear to it with a love incomparably
deeper than if it were centred in a selfish and fruitless affection.
hist. d’une ame, ch. x
In everything I must find self-denial and sacrifice; thus I feel that a
letter will not bear fruit unless I write it with a certain reluctance, and
solely through obedience. When conversing with a novice I am
careful to mortify myself and to avoid asking her questions which
would gratify my curiosity. If she commence to speak of something
interesting, then, leaving it unfinished, pass to a subject wearisome
to me, I take care not to remind her of the interruption, for it seems to
me that one can do no good by self-seeking.
hist. d’une ame, ch. x
God did not permit that our Mother should tell me to write down my
poems according as I composed them, and I would not have liked to
ask her, fearing lest that might be a fault against poverty. So I used
to wait until the hour of free time, and it was not without extreme
difficulty that I recalled to mind, at eight o’clock in the evening, what I
had composed in the morning.
These little nothings are a martyrdom it is true, but we must be well
on our guard not to lessen it by allowing ourselves, or seeking to be
allowed, a thousand things which would render the religious life
pleasant and comfortable.
counsels and reminiscences
When some one rings for us, or knocks at our door, we must mortify
ourselves so as not even to do one stitch more before answering. I
have practised that; and it is, I assure you, a source of peace.
counsels and reminiscences
Do you know my Sundays and festivals? They are the days when
the good God tries me the most.
counsels and reminiscences
Sœur Thérèse de l’Enfant Jésus says that she has not done any
great penances: that is because her fervour counted as nothing
those which were allowed her. It nevertheless happened that she
became ill from wearing for too long a time a small iron cross, of
which the sharp points were sunk into her flesh.
“That would not have befallen me from so slight a penance,” she
said afterwards, “if the good God had not wanted to make me
understand that the macerations of the Saints are not intended for
me, nor for the little souls who will tread the same path of spiritual
childhood.”
hist. d’une ame, ch. xii
To a novice whom she saw practise a little act of self-denial she said:
“You will be very glad to find that before you at the moment of death.
What you have just done is more glorious than if, by some skilful
measures, you had gained for the religious communities the good-
will of the Government, and that all France applauded you as a
Judith.”
counsels and reminiscences
To another who was bewailing her want of courage:
“You complain of what should cause you the greatest happiness.
Where would be your merit if you must fight only when you felt the
courage? What matters it if you have none, provided that you act as
if you had! If you feel too slothful to pick up a bit of thread, and that
nevertheless you do it for the love of Jesus, you have more merit
than if in a moment of fervour you were to accomplish something of
far greater importance. So instead of being sorrowful, rejoice to see
that in letting you feel your weakness the good Master provides you
with an opportunity of gaining for Him a greater number of souls.”
counsels and reminiscences
Being questioned as to her mode of sanctifying the repasts, Thérèse
made answer:
“In the refectory we have but one only thing to do: to accomplish this
so lowly act with thoughts uplifted. I declare to you that often it is in
the refectory the sweetest aspirations of love come to me.
Sometimes I am impelled to dwell on the thought that if our Divine
Lord were in my place, with the fare set before Him as served to me,
He would certainly partake of it.... It is very probable that during His
life on earth He tasted of the like food: He ate bread, fruits, etc....
“Here are my simple little rubrics:
“I picture myself at Nazareth in the house of Holy Family. If I am
served with, for instance, salad, cold fish, wine or anything of strong
flavour, I offer it to St. Joseph. To the Blessed Virgin I give the hot
portions, well-ripened fruits, etc.; and the feast-day fare, particularly
corn-flour, rice, preserves, these I offer to the Child Jesus. Lastly,
when a bad dinner is brought me I say gaily to myself: ‘Today, my
dear little child, all that is for you.’”
counsels and reminiscences
One fast-day when the Mother Prioress had ordered some special
little thing by way of alleviation for Sœur Thérèse, a Sister relates
that she surprised her in the act of seasoning this too palatable fare
with wormwood.
Another time she saw her slowly drinking some particularly
disagreeable physic, and exclaimed: “But be quick, drink that off at
one draught!” “Oh no!” was the reply, “must I not take advantage of
the trifling opportunities I meet with, to mortify myself a little, since it
is forbidden me to look for greater?”
counsels and reminiscences
An extremely interesting letter had been read one day at the
recreation in the absence of Thérèse who later showed a desire to
read it. Some time afterwards when returning the letter, she was
begged to say what she thought regarding something which should
especially have delighted her. She appeared embarrassed and then
replied:
“The good God has asked of me this sacrifice because of the
eagerness that I manifested the other day; I have not read it....”
counsels and reminiscences
She told the novices: “At recreation more than elsewhere will you
find occasions for the exercise of virtue. If you would reap great
benefit, never go to it with any thought of your own recreation, but
thinking of the recreation of others; practise therein total detachment
from yourself. If, for instance, you are relating to one of the Sisters a
story which seems to you interesting, and that she interrupts it to tell
you something else, even though this may not at all interest you,
listen to her as if it did, and do not try to return to your first subject.
By so acting, you will go from the recreation room with great interior
peace, and endued with fresh vigour in the practice of virtue, all
because you have not sought to gratify yourself but to give pleasure
to others. If one only knew what is gained by renouncing self in all
things!...”
“You know it well; you have always acted thus?”
“Yes, I have forgotten self, I have tried not to seek myself in
anything.”
counsels and reminiscences
 OBEDIENCE
As I had self-love as well as the love of what is right it was sufficient
but once to tell me: “Such a thing should not be done,” and I would
have no desire to do it again.
hist. d’une ame, ch. i
From what anxieties do we not free ourselves by making the vow of
obedience! How happy are single-minded religious. Their sole guide
being the will of Superiors, they are ever secure of going the right
way without fear of error, should it even appear to them certain that
the Superiors are mistaken. But when one ceases to consult the sure
compass, the soul forthwith loses her way in arid paths where the
waters of grace soon fail her.
hist. d’une ame, ch. ix
During her illness the Infirmarian had recommended Sœur Thérèse
to take a little walk in the garden every day for a quarter of an hour.
For her, this advice was a command. One afternoon, a Sister seeing
her walk with much difficulty said to her: “You would do far better to
rest; in such circumstances walking can do you no good, you
exhaust yourself, that is all.”
“It is true,” replied this child of Obedience, “but do you know what
gives me strength?... Well! I walk for a Missionary. I think how some
one of them far away, yonder, is perhaps exhausted in his apostolic
journeyings, and to lessen his fatigue I offer mine to the good God.”
hist. d’une ame, ch. xii
 POVERTY
After I was clothed with the holy Habit abundant lights on religious
perfection were granted me, chiefly regarding the vow of poverty.
During my postulate I was pleased to have for my use, anything that
was nice, and to find at my hand whatever was necessary. Jesus
bore with this patiently, for He does not like to disclose all to the soul
at once. He ordinarily gives His light little by little.
After Compline one evening I looked in vain for our lantern on the
shelves appointed for them; it was the time of great silence, not
possible therefore to ask for it back. I rightly supposed that a Sister
believing she took her own had carried away ours; but must I spend
a whole hour in the dark in consequence of this mistake? And just
that evening I had intended doing much work. Without the interior
light of grace I should assuredly have bewailed my loss, but with that
light, instead of experiencing vexation I was happy in thinking that
poverty consists in being deprived not only of things desirable, but of
those also that are indispensable. And in the exterior darkness I
found my soul illumined with divine light.
I was seized at this time with a genuine love for what was ugliest and
least convenient, thus I was delighted when I saw the pretty little jug
carried off from our cell, and received in its stead a large one, all
chipped.
hist. d’une ame, ch. vii
A novice expressed regret for having lent a pin which was very
serviceable to her:
“Oh! how rich you are,” replied Thérèse, “you cannot be happy.”
counsels and reminiscences
“Make haste and come down: for this day I must abide in thy
house.”[51] Jesus tells us to come down; where, then, must we go?...
At an earlier time the Jews asked Him: “Master, where dwellest
Thou?”[52] And He said: “The foxes have holes, and the birds of the
air nests; but the Son of Man hath not where to lay His head.”[53]
Behold whereunto we must descend if we would serve as dwellings
for Jesus: we must be so poor that we have not where to lay our
head.
xiii letter to her sister céline

FOOTNOTES:
[51] Luke, xix, 5.
[52] John, i, 38.
[53] Luke, ix, 58.
 CONFIDENCE
What offends Jesus, what wounds Him to the Heart, is want of
confidence.
i letter to her cousin marie guérin
Believing that I was born for glory, and seeking the means to attain
to it, it was revealed to me interiorly that my glory would never be
visible to mortal eyes but would consist in becoming a saint. This
desire might well seem presumptuously bold, considering how
imperfect I was, and how imperfect I am still after so many years in
religion; and yet I feel ever the same audacious confidence of
becoming a great saint. I count not on my merits, having none; but I
trust in Him who is Virtue and Holiness itself. He alone it is who
satisfied with my feeble efforts will raise me up even unto Himself,
will clothe me with His merits and make me a saint.
hist. d’une ame, ch. iv
Ours is an age of inventions: nowadays, with the rich a lift saves the
trouble of climbing the stairs. And I, fain would I too find a lift to bear
me up unto God, for I am too little to climb the rugged steps of
perfection.
Then I turned to the Holy Scriptures, seeking from them an indication
of this lift, the object of my desires; and I read these words which
have issued from the very mouth of the Eternal Wisdom:
“Whosoever is a very little one, let him come to me.”[54] Then I
drew nigh unto God divining truly that I had discovered what I
sought: wishing however to know what He would do with the very
little one, I continued my research and here is what I found: “You
shall be carried at the breast and upon the knees; as one whom the
mother caresseth so will I comfort you.”[55]
Ah, never came words more sweet, more tender, to gladden my soul.
Thine arms then, O Jesus, are the lift which must raise me up even
unto Heaven! For this I need not grow, on the contrary I must remain
little, I must ever tend to become yet more little. O my God, Thou
hast gone beyond my expectations, and I—I will sing Thy mercies!
Thou hast taught me, O God from my youth: and till now I have
declared Thy wondrous works. And unto old age and grey hairs[56]
will I proclaim them.
hist. d’une ame, ch. ix
Since it has been given to me too, to understand the love of the
Heart of Jesus, I own that it has chased all fear from mine! The
remembrance of my faults humiliates me, and urges me never to
depend upon my own strength which is nothing but weakness: still
more does this remembrance speak to me of mercy and of love.
When, with all filial confidence we cast our faults into the devouring
furnace of love, how should they not be totally consumed?
v letter to her missionary “brothers”
Though we must needs be pure indeed to appear in the presence of
the God of all Holiness, yet I know too that He is infinitely just; and
this justice which affrights so many souls is the ground of my joy and
my confidence. Justice not merely exercises severity towards the
offender; it moreover recognizes a right intention, and awards to
virtue its recompense. I hope as much from the Justice of the good
God as from His Mercy; it is because He is just, that “He is
compassionate and merciful, long-suffering and plenteous in mercy.
For He knoweth our frame. He remembereth that we are but dust. As
a father hath compassion on His children, so hath the Lord
compassion on us!”[57]...
Listening to these beautiful and consoling words of the Royal
Prophet, how can we doubt but that the good God will open the
portals of His Kingdom to His children who have loved Him even
unto sacrificing all for Him, who have not only left their kindred and
their country, for the sake of making Him known and loved, but, still
further, desire to give their life for Him?... Most truly has Jesus said
that there is no greater love than this! How then could He suffer
Himself to be outdone in generosity? How could He purify in the
flames of Purgatory souls consumed by the fire of Divine Love?...
That is what I think of the justice of the good God; my way is all
confidence and love, I do not understand those souls who fear so
tender a Friend.
vi letter to her missionary “brothers”
That joy to think that God is just, that is to say, that He takes our
weakness into consideration, that He thoroughly knows the frailty of
our nature. Of what then, should I be afraid? Must not the good and
infinitely just God, who with such tender mercy deigns to pardon the
Prodigal Son, must He not be just towards me too—who am always
with Him?[58]
hist. d’une ame, ch. viii
I want to make you understand by a very simple comparison how
much Jesus loves souls, even the imperfect, who trust in Him.
Suppose the father of two wayward and disobedient children, coming
to punish them, sees one tremble and draw away from him in terror;
while the other, on the contrary, throwing himself into his arms, says
he is sorry, promises to be good henceforward and begs for a kiss as
punishment. Do you think the delighted father will withstand the filial
confidence of this child? He knows nevertheless that his son will fall
again many a time into the same faults, but he is disposed to pardon
him always, if always there be an appeal to his heart.
I say nothing of the other child: you must understand that his father
cannot love him as much or treat him with the same indulgence.
viii letter to her missionary “brothers”
Truly the Heart of Jesus is more grieved by the thousand little
imperfections of His friends than by even grave faults of His
enemies. But it seems to me that it is only when His own chosen
ones make a habit of these infidelities, and do not ask His pardon,
that He can say: “These wounds which you see in the midst of My
Hands: with these was I wounded in the house of them that loved
Me.”[59]
For those who love Him and who come after each little fault and
throw themselves into His arms, begging His forgiveness, the Heart
of Jesus thrills with joy. He says to His Angels what the father of the
prodigal son said to His servants: “Put a ring on his finger and let us
rejoice.”[60] Oh! the goodness and the merciful love of the Heart of
Jesus, how little is it known! True it is, that to share in these
treasures we must humble ourselves, must acknowledge our
nothingness, and that is what many souls are unwilling to do.
vii letter to her missionary “brothers”
Our dreams, our desires of perfection are not vain imaginations,
since Jesus Himself has given us this commandment, He said: “Be
you, therefore, perfect, as also your Heavenly Father is perfect.”[61]
ii letter to her sister céline
Truly I am far from being a saint. I ought not to rejoice at the aridity of
my soul, but attribute it to the scantiness of my fervour and fidelity. I
ought to grieve because I fall asleep very often during my prayer and
my thanksgiving. Well, I do not grieve! I reflect that little children
when they sleep are as pleasing to their parents as when they are
awake; that in order to perform operations, doctors put their patients
to sleep; in fine, that the Lord knoweth our frame, He remembereth
that we are but dust.[62]
hist. d’une ame, ch. viii
I have no fear of the last combats, nor of the physical suffering how
great soever it may be. The good God has always come to my
assistance, He has helped me and led me by the hand from my
earliest years.... I count on Him ... my sufferings may reach their
furthest limits, but I am sure that He will never abandon me.
hist. d’une ame, ch. xii
It is confidence, and confidence alone, that must lead us to Love....
Does not fear lead us rather to think of the rigid justice by which
sinners are warned? But that is not the justice that Jesus will show to
those who love Him.
vi letter to sœur marie du sacré-cœur
O Jesus, suffer me to tell Thee that Thy Love reacheth even unto
folly.... What wilt Thou, in face of this folly, but that my heart dart
upwards to Thee—how can my confidence have any bounds?
hist. d’une ame, ch. xi
It is not because I have been shielded from mortal sin that I lift up my
heart to God in trust and love. I feel that even if there lay upon my
conscience all the crimes one could commit I should lose nothing of
my confidence. Broken-hearted with compunction I would go and
throw myself into the arms of my Saviour. I know that He cherished
the Prodigal Son, I have heard His words to Mary Magdalene, to the
adultress, to the Samaritan woman. No one could frighten me, for I
know what to believe concerning His Mercy and His Love. I know
that in one moment all that multitude of sins would disappear—as a
drop of water cast into a red-hot furnace.
It is related in the Lives of the Fathers of the Desert that one of them
converted a public sinner whose misdeeds scandalized the whole
country. Touched by grace this sinful woman was following the saint
into the desert, there to do rigorous penance, when, on the first night
of her journey, before she had even reached the place of her retreat,
the bonds of life were broken by the impetuosity of her loving
contrition. The holy hermit at the same moment saw her soul borne
by Angels into the Bosom of God.
That is truly a striking instance of what I want to express, but one
cannot put these things into words....
hist. d’une ame, ch. xi
Happy indeed am I to die and go to Heaven, but when I think on
those words of our Lord: “Behold, I come quickly, and My reward is
with Me, to render to every man according to his works,”[63] I reflect
that He will be very much embarrassed as regards me: I have no
works.... Well, He will render to me according to His own works!
counsels and reminiscences
 THE SERVANT OF GOD
THÉRÈSE OF THE CHILD JESUS
(The Little Flower of Jesus)
One evening as they were telling her something which had been said
at recreation, touching the responsibility of those who have the
charge of souls, Sœur Thérèse de l’Enfant Jésus spoke these
beautiful words: “‘To him that is little, mercy is granted.’[64] It is
possible to remain little, even in the most important offices; and is it
not written that at the end the Lord will arise to save the meek and
humble of the earth?[65] It says not to judge but to save.”
hist. d’une ame, ch. xii
A novice questioning as to whether our Lord were not dissatisfied
with her on account of her many miseries, Sœur Thérèse made
answer:
“Set your mind at rest: He whom you have chosen as your Spouse
possesses certainly every perfection that can be desired; but, if I
may dare to say it, He has at the same time one great infirmity: He is
blind! And there is a science which He knows not, that of calculation.
These two points which would be most lamentable deficiencies in an
earthly spouse, render ours infinitely lovable. Were He to consider
our sins and reckon with them, do you not think that in the face of all
these sins He would cast us back into nothingness? But no, His love
for us makes Him absolutely blind!
“See for yourself: if the greatest sinner on earth, at the hour of death
repent of his transgressions and expire in an act of love,
immediately, without calculating on the one hand the numerous
graces abused by this unhappy man, nor on the other, all his crimes,
Jesus sees nothing, counts nothing, but the penitent’s last prayer,
and delays not to receive him into the arms of His Mercy.
“But to render Him thus blind, to hinder Him from doing the least little
bit of reckoning, we must know how to lay siege to His Heart; at that
point He is defenceless....”
counsels and reminiscences
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