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Politics by Default
Instead of replacing or dismissing the importance of ideological and textual critiques of capitalism, hegemony, governmentality, and consumer culture, in this book I have attempted to highlight the manner in which individuals have become an integral part of the reproduction of consumer markets—through mediated texts in cyberspace and through everyday consumer purchases, queries, rentals, and exchanges. As a consequence, consumer behavior, lifestyles, choices, likes, and dislikes all inform the subsequent production, advertisement, marketing, promotion, and sales of products and services. This cycle of reproduction integrates the consumer within the spheres of production, marketing, and sales, but it rationalizes these spheres and attempts to minimize risks through consumer profiling.
Although sites of solicitation are widespread and topographically dispersed (taking into considering the aforementioned habit, or ‘‘habitus’’), they nevertheless provide a single technique (or exchange) on which to focus a diagrammatic politics. Whether at a point of sale or at a click on another hypertextual link, the attempt to accumulate information from individuals often relies on a default or otherwise coercive system of automation—the aforementioned rewards and punishments. Computer users, for instance, receive (or download) their browser applications with their cookies activated by default. The economy of personal information on the Web is subsequently governed by an implicitly affirmative technology that by default collects information, tracks the online behavior of users, and punishes those who attempt to maintain control over their personal information and browsing history. Many other computerized consumer exchanges also require individuals to give important demographic information (mainly zip codes or telephone numbers) to make a purchase. Such exchanges, again, are built on technological systems that by default require consumers to provide personal information. In addition, mail-order businesses that offer free teasers (such as the CDs and tapes that BMG Music gives away) in exchange for contractual obligations to purchase a number of goods at a relatively high cost also send and bill for products that the consumer has not ordered. BMG’s default setting (to buy in absence of an explicit ‘‘no thank you’’) requires consumers to inform the business when they do not want a product.
Such default settings are common in a culture that needs to regulate and prioritize a seemingly infinite number of choices, products, and services. However, what consumers, citizens, community groups, and other political organizations need to acknowledge is that under the guise of limiting choices to the easiest, most widely understood, and most ‘‘user-friendly’’ options, default settings serve distinct interests. Computer software giant Microsoft, for example, has captured a sizable portion of the Internet browser market (providing the graphic representation of cyberspace) by merely setting their Explorer browser as the default Internet gateway in Windows and in Apple’s computer operating systems. In other words, Microsoft has used its PC operating system (Windows) monopoly to ‘‘encode’’ its own browser as a default choice.
Facilitated by default settings, such ‘‘genetic monopolies’’ and other automated ‘‘choices’’—particularly those that integrate the collection of personal information—have not gone unchallenged by their detractors. The recent antitrust cases brought by the Federal Trade Commission against both Microsoft and Intel are good examples of possible political interventions in a computerized default market that automates and encodes preferred choices for its users.[8]
[http://dailynews.yahoo.com/headlines/ap/technology/ storyl?s=v/ap/19990625/tc/microsoft_charges_2l.>
