Tiziana Terranova’s Network Culture

Chapter Two

Network Dynamics

In this chapter, Terranova describes the way in which networks actively shape the whole

of the system that they connect by informing the topography between all connected points. In the

same way that national broadcast radio and television lead to the development of “the nation”, the

Internet has facilitated a new sense of global citizenship (albeit, one that is exclusive to those

with Internet access). As it continues to expand its reach, the Internet is developing into what

Terranova calls a “hypernetwork”: “a meshwork potentially connecting every point to every other

point” (41). Increasingly, the term “network” is less a descriptor for generic interconnected sys-

tems, but rather an indicator of the system: the dynamic, multidimensional informational agora,

which in our advanced capitalist climate, inherently privileges those with the capital to control

it. 

Terranova turns to the work of geographer Manuel Castells, who opines that the Internet

is very explicitly the mechanism through which “a globally connected elite is coming to domi-

nate and control the lives of those who remain bound to the world of locality” (43). The Internet

functions as a kind of privileged and instantaneously navigable space which is increasingly be-

coming the primary location of the globalized economy. The Internet is organized on a hierarchi-

cal grid known as the Domain Name System (DNS), which, when the Internet was opened to

commercial organizations, turned into a new form of real estate, as individuals and corporations

rushed to claim valuable DNS addresses. As Terranova explains, “Within the gridded space of

the DNS, the brand re-emerges as a star…an identifiable name that guides the netsurfer through

the anonymous space of the IP number world” (45). Computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee identi-

fies this phenomenon as a point of friction between the local and electronic space, as the corpo-

rate entities of traditional geography attempt to superimpose themselves onto this non-bordered

frontier.  Despite the distortion of traditional geography, Terranova points out that (at least in

principle) the Internet is still largely organized through the figure of the grid. This is significant,

as the grid has strong metaphorical ties to Cartesian rationalism. The Internet, in this sense,

serves as a kind of utopian expression of human rationalism: a perfectly symmetrical warehouse

of information, instantaneously and uniformly accessible. 

Terranova goes on to demonstrate that this grided view of the Internet does not fully ac-

count for the informational cartography produced by major websites like Facebook, Google and

CNN, which function as central hubs or continents for large fractions of Internet users. In this

way, the Internet can be reimagined as a space in which information itself forms the constantly

shifting topography. The project for Terranova, then, is a geographical model that accounts for

both the nodal grid that structures the Internet, as well as the dynamic informational geography

inhabited and experienced by its users. 

In an effort toward reconciliation, she suggests that the conception of the Internet as a

grid might have inadvertently ensnared us in a classic metaphysical trap: “that is, of confusing

time with space” (50). She turns to philosopher Henri Bergson’s interpretation of Zeno’s para-

doxes of infinitesimals, in which he suggests (i.e., Bergson does) that “the specificity of duration

is unaccountable on the basis of the notion of an infinitely divisible space” (50). That is to say,

movement cannot be understood simply as a passage between two points, but, crucially, must

also involve the duration. In this sense, duration is an inherent property of motion, one that is

problematically misunderstood in Western metaphysics. Bergson points out that traditional un-

derstandings of motion characterize it as the movement of an object through space. In this way,

motion is split into two abstract formations: “on the one side a homogeneous time (the time that

is, that says that a plane leaves at 17:00 and arrives at 21:00); on the other side a homogeneous

space (the space in which the plane can always be located at a definite longitude and latitude”

(51). In the case of the Internet, motion appears to happen instantaneously, such that there ap-

pears to be no time at all, only a single, infinitely dense unitary space. Bergson explains that this

conception of motion is the product of a necessary cognitive reduction1. For Bergson, this reduc-

tion problematically ignores the virtuality of duration, or “the qualitative change that every

movement brings not only to that which moves, but also to the space that it moves in and to the

whole into which that space necessarily opens up” (51). The motion itself brings a qualitative

change to both the object in motion and the system through which it it moving. In the same way,

information does not simply jump between points, but rather, propagates, and in doing so, affects

the overall topography of the system as a whole.

Terranova goes on to point out that despite a tendency to overlook duration, modern sci-

ence is deeply interested in network dynamics, as mathematicians and physicist have developed

models of the dynamic landscape of Internet traffic, concluding that the Internet is “the epiphe-

nomenal manifestation of hidden physical laws that make [it] part of a more general class of bio-

physical systems” (63). In this way, Terranova displays the vast disparity of conceptions of the

Internet: On one hand, it is a technology that seems to have collapsed the concept of time and

space into a  singular infinitely dense and instantaneously navigable point, on the other, physi-

cists point to a dynamic system governed by laws that must be discerned and formalized. In the

space between these two visions is the actual lived experience of Internet culture. Terranova sug-

1 in the example of the plane, my brain reduces the whole flight into the abstract notion of a whole and unchanging object starting at one point and ending at another. I kind of know this isn’t exactly the whole of the experience of the flight, but it’s the most computationally efficient way of dealing with it.

gests that this “transversal line of culture” (64) provides another way of framing our understand-

ing of the Internet.

One of the defining features of the Internet as a culture is its “many-to-many” mode of

distribution (as opposed to the “few-to-many” model of television or radio). This decentralizing

of content distribution is demonstrated even in the technological style through which information

is moved from point A to point B. Unlike previous networks that relied on channels, the Internet

uses a method called “packet switching”, in which information is broken down into smaller units

that disperse and reassemble at their destination. This feature characterizes the movement of in-

formation as something diffuse and chaotic, and lead Internet activist John Gilmore to suggest

that “the Internet treats censorship as damage and routes around it” (64). A little-discussed

byproduct of the packet switching mode is a phenomenon called “fringe intelligence”: Because

packets travel through various nodes relative to overall system bandwidth traffic, the network is

less defined as a relationship between aerials and transmitters, but rather “an assemblage of semi-

autonomous nodes that are programmed with a kind of basic intelligence” (66), such that they

can negotiate which route is the fastest for each packet, based on destination and bandwidth con-

gestion. In this sense, the distributed nodal network of the Internet is not only a medium through

which information travels, but is itself an active and dynamic informational machine. For this

reason, each individual packet moves through the system with an awareness of the topography of

the system as a whole, and plans its route accordingly. Thus, the Internet is a system in which

motion must be conceived of as nonlinear, characterizing the Internet, as whole, “not so much as

a unified electronic grid as a chaotic informational milieu” (68).

Chapter Three

Free Labour

Terranova then turns to a discussion on the role of labour in the Internet age. To do this,

she examines the similarities between contemporary Internet culture and a phenomenon identi-

fied by Italian autonomists as the “social-factory”, a process through which “work processes have

shifted from the factory to society, thereby setting in motion a truly complex machine” (74). 

She looks at the work of Richard Barbrook, who developed a working definition of the

digital economy as a hybridization of new technologies (like the computer networks discussed

above) and new types of worker (so-called “digital artisans”: Youtube video creators, freelance

bloggers, app designers, etc.). This new economy includes a public element (i.e., the state ’s fund-

ing of ARPANET (i,e., a sort of proto-Internet, technologically speaking)), a traditional market-

driven element (i.e., “old school” capitalism), and a gift economy. For Barbrook, the gift econ-

omy is “the true expression of the cutting edge of capitalist production which prepares its even-

tual overcoming into a future ‘anarchy-communism’”(76). The predominance of international col-

laborative relationships without the exchange of capital suggested a new and viable economic

model for the Internet age. Rather than money, social cohesion was achieved through mutual

obligations created through the sharing of time and ideas. The new gift economy, then, func-

tioned as a process of “overcoming capitalism from the inside” (77).

Terranova points out that this ideological view of the Internet as a platform for the emer-

gence of a kind of digital communism greatly overestimates the autonomy of the gift economy

from capitalism. She points out that the value created by the gift economy is an important force

for advanced capitalism: in a digital economy, the emphasis is on knowledge as the main source

of added value. Therefore, a kind of labourer who is willing to produce knowledge purely out of

a sense of obligation to her peers effectively functions as “free labour” for capitalist forces that

provide the venue for their exchange2. 

Management theory has also become increasingly interested in harnessing the value of

human knowledge. Management theorist Don Tapscott, for example, points out that while human

knowledge can provide a base for a new kind of digital economy, it cannot be managed like tra-

ditional styles of labour. The role of management for this new class of labourer is to “provide the

creative and open communications environment where such workers can effectively apply and

enhance their knowledge” (78). Crucially, unlike the industrial economy, in which the labourer

was alienated from the means of production and forced to seek fulfilment through leisure, the

labourer of the digital economy is actively involved in the means of production and can therefore

achieve fulfillment through her own work.

With this model in mind, Terranova points out that the notion that “traditional capitalism”

is preying upon the authentic culture that is produced outside of capitalism, within smaller niche

scenes, is a fiction: “Rather than capital ‘incorporating’ from the outside the authentic fruits of the

collective imagination, it seems more reasonable to think of cultural flows as originating within a

field which is always and already capitalism” (80). The monetization of genuine cultural artifacts

is not the delayed capitalist reaction to cultural trends, but rather, the final step of a process that

is, as a whole, the new face of capitalist production.

Terranova then turns to the work of Pierre Levy, who opined that, with the emergence of

the Internet, human cognition was moving away from the Cartesian model of cogito to a collec-

tive or pluralistic cogitamus, writing, “the more we are able to form intelligent communities, as

open-minded, cognitive subjects capable of initiative, imagination, and rapid response, the more

2 A website like Yahoo Answers is a pretty textbook example of this: people voluntarily create the actual content for each other based on mutual interest, and then Yahoo capitalizes by selling the IPs of those in-terested parties to targeted advertisers.

we will be able to ensure our success in a highly competitive environment” (85). Terranova ob-

serves that this conception of cognition is willfully oblivious of the very real dynamics of power

that are inherently embedded within the notion of a collective sense of cognition. She points out

that Levy’s notion of a collective mind does not fully account for the operations of capital over-

all, which is problematic largely because capital is “the unnatural environment within which the

collective intelligence materializes” (86). She turns to the Italian autonomists, who were the first

to realize that collective intelligence (or what they, following Marx, called the “general intellect”)

was directly related to fixed capital, and therefore cannot exist independently of the structure that

facilitates it. In this sense, the Internet is simply the latest and most efficient iteration of a capi-

talist machinery that functions primarily to facilitate the production and exploitation of a general

intellect. 

With this in mind, the free labour which drives the digital economy must be understood

not simply as the commodification of content created outside of capitalist modes of production,

but rather, a function of a new kind of culture that is inherently embedded within capitalism. In

this sense, simply interacting with the Internet is creating value for capitalism to commodify.

New trends like open-source programming, far from being an expression of some kind of com-

munal digital utopian future, are a necessary step for capitalists who wish to gain access to the

benefits of an open-source development community: “the near-instantaneous bug-fixes, the dis-

tributed intellectual resources of the Net, [and] the increasingly large open-source code base”

(92). In this way, capitalists are able to exploit the ideological rhetoric of a gift economy while

also achieving their ultimate goal of increased traffic and higher bandwidth consumption. Terra-

nova gives the example of Internet browser company Netscape, who, after posting losses in the

last quarter of 1997, turned to the open-source model. As John Horvath explains: “what better

way to shed staff by having your product taken further by the freeware people, having code-dab-

bling hobbyists  fix and further develop your product?” (93). In this way, advanced capitalism is

effectively warping the ideological notion of the Internet as a digital commune into a new highly

efficient and fulfilled labour force, populated by labourers who freely and voluntarily participate

without interest in compensation.

Chapter Four

Soft Control

In this chapter, Terranova examines the ways in which technological progress is mod-

elled from biological processes, noting that just as biological study of the human ear and throat

lead to the invention of the phonograph, the field of biological computing examines our new hy-

perconnected lifestyles in order to produce higher functioning computers. As Terranova explains,

the project of this chapter is an exploration of the “entanglement of organic and inorganic, the

physical and the biological, and the natural and the technological, in order to catch a glimpse of

the emergence of a kind of abstract machine of soft control” (100).

To do this, she first examines the impact of the shift toward biological models of comput-

ing within the context of “a larger techno-scientific reconceptualization of life” (101), during

which artificial life theorists such as Charles Taylor argued that all life can be understood as the

result of the interactions of simple elemental units. In this sense, living organisms could no

longer be understood as singular complex machine, but rather, the aggregate result of a complex

network of interacting machines, each of which is relatively simple. In this way, “life” is not un-

derstood as a property of a single entity, but rather as the organization of a population of ma-

chines such that their dynamic interactivity is "alive”.

This same model can be used to explain massive economic systems such as the tech

boom in Silicon Valley, which can be understood as an ecosystem “whose growth and success

can be attributed to the incessant formation of a multitude of specialized, diverse entities that

feed off, support and interact with one another” (103). Terranova points out that the secret to re-

producing such a spontaneous hotbed of economic production lies not in examination of the spe-

cific start-ups that contributed to the rapid expansion of the ecosystem, but rather, an accounting

of the necessary initial conditions that allowed for such an ecosystem to emerge in the first place.

Because these open systems are by definition acentred and without definite leadership, there is

no single control mechanism that can be reliably manipulated. Similarly, because the “life” of the

ecosystem is a property of their dynamic interactions, it is impossible to examine any specific en-

tity in isolation from the whole. In the case of Silicon Valley, the complex fluidity of the system,

which is the necessary condition for the vast creative and experimental expansion, is a force that

is both extremely valuable and dangerously unpredictable. For this reason, a goal of management

theory is to develop a reliable mechanism to contain the productive forces of fluidity, while stop-

ping it from expanding outside managerial control. What is needed, Terranova explains, is a

“phase space”, or a specific level of fluidity “perched between the unproductive extremes of so-

lidity and gaseous chaos” (107-08). This mechanism is defined by Terranova as a “soft control”: a

kind of planning, before the system actually emerges, in which growth is anticipated through the

initial conditions. Because of the acentrality of the potentially emergent system, it is impossible

to fully govern or control growth or computation when the potentiality of the system is actual-

ized, but rather, “it must be modulated with a minimum amount of force” (108).

Terranova goes on to describe the mechanisms that can be used to influence these fluid

computational networks, such that the “global aims and objects of computation” (114) can be

managed. She points to the “genetic algorithm” model, which functions by searching the whole

of the computational system and measuring the success rates of different nodes within the sys-

tem. The most efficient nodes within the system are identified and placed in close competition

with each other, such that they swap traits and become even more efficient. In this way, genetic

algorithms essentially function as a kind of arbitrary evolutionary sieve, eliminating nodes

viewed as unfit for the particular global task or objective (standardized testing of school children

functions on this same principle). As Terranova notes, this approach “has been criticized as being

unable to produce true emergence, that is phenomena of self-organization and computation that

are not explicitly programmed by a human agent [outside of the system]” (115). The criteria for

determining fitness, if applied too strictly, limit the system’s ability to produce true novelty, or

events not inscribed within the threshold of the algorithm. In this sense, the genetic algorithm

model is both a mode of control and the limits of a system. For management theory, the goal is to

locate the “sweet spot” of fluidity in a network, such that individual nodes are all working toward

a similar broad goal, but are only minimally constrained by operational rules such that they can

produce novel ways of achieving that goal. It is in this spirit that Wired Magazine editor Kevin

Kelly defines a network as “the least structured organization that can be said to have any struc-

ture at all” (118).

This biological model of fluidity can be applied to the Internet as a whole, such that it is

understood not as “unstructured or formless, but…minimally structured or semi-ordered” (121).

In this way, the Internet can be understood as a kind of anthropogenic iteration of a naturally oc-

curring phenomenon. This notion is complicated by an entanglement with issues of power and

control, as capitalists endeavour to inscribe this new medium into a new style of productive

labour (as described in Chapter Three). In this sense, advanced capitalism can be said to interact

not with the individual node, who is “simply too coarse and rigid to be more than a by-product of

emergence” (123), but rather the dynamic activity of the network as whole. 

Terranova concludes by pointing out that this capitalist model for understanding popula-

tions is built upon Richard Dawkins’ notion of “the selfish gene”. Dawkins posits that all human

behaviour is essentially a survival strategy of an iteration of an impersonal genetic code, whose

primary objective is to sustain its own existence in an environment of limited resources. In this

sense, the individual subject is essentially a vessel for a genetic code that exists, competitively, in

a network of other genetic codes. Crucially, these codes are not “alive” in the thermodynamic

sense (i.e., they don’t decay over time, they simply stop existing when they fail to replicate), such

that their existence is dependant upon their interactivity within the network as a whole. While

this notion of “selfishness” might be useful for justifying the posthuman capitalist model of popu-

lation management, it problematically juxtaposes two very different planes of existence: namely,

the informational network of genetic codes and a “Protestant-capitalist apparatus of subjectifica-

tion” (126). As Terranova points out, “[t]he unit of code that we know as the gene has been re-

turned to individuality so that it might assume the attributes of selfishness and altruism, competi-

tion and collaboration” (126). That is to say, the metaphor of selfishness is fundamentally incom-

patible with the informational network of genetic code, because genes have no sense of self, and

therefore no sense of selfishness. To posit that selfishness is a hard-coded genetic impulse is

largely a fiction perpetuated to justify irrationally self-interested capitalist ideology. Reality tele-

vision shows in which “real people” are pitted against each other to win an exclusive reward

reenforce this notion, and in doing so, function primarily as mechanisms of soft control, influ-

encing networks toward economically beneficial goals.