Abstract
In The Value System, Strangelove argues that in addition to governments and corporations, ordinary individuals, over 4 billion Internet users who produce media content and have the power to radically change the global civilization, are the pre-eminent actors of communication networks worldwide. The Internet has empowered these users with growing communicative, productive, and distributive capabilities, but at the same time, they are involuntarily trapped in a multitude of social, economic, and political problems, such as the deterioration of environment conditions, the rise of financial crisis, and the threat to democracy. Therefore, it becomes essential to ask whether the Internet will overall provide us with a better future. This book answers this question by specifically looking at how the Internet increases the possibilities of changing the central value system that operates as a system of social control and as a determining force to alter the social order. Such an analysis includes a close examination of several core concepts, including domination, inequality, struggle, freedom, and radical change, as well as an adoption of historical and comparative perspectives by connecting the future to the past and present circumstances.
Strangelove points out that capitalism, in collusion with the state, actively serves as a value system, in which media and market produce belief and action in accordance with the market principle that promotes efficiency and effectiveness but less addresses equality and justice. This value system has successfully constructed a network system that links local economies to global consumer culture based on ‘exploitation and destructive growth’ (p. 5). For example, as a consequence of global consumer culture, climate change has caused serious biodiversity loss and accelerating extinction rates of animal species, both of which are part of the systemic crisis of capitalism, indicating its ‘seismic break with nature, its perpetuation of inequality, and its toxicity to the human body and spirit’ (p. 11). Climate change also clearly reveals the problems of the central value system shaped by the co-evolution of capitalism and the state.
Furthermore, Strangelove scrutinizes the challenge to the control of dominant social systems when Internet users are empowered to create and distribute cultural content that carries certain meanings and values online. This empowerment is important because cultural production and distribution processes are used to be dominated by restrictive institutions such as states and markets, and currently, this form of domination is disrupted when individuals are increasingly engaging themselves in producing and distributing songs, stories, movies, art, autobiographies, and so on. In other words, when Internet users take up digital tools to produce and distribute their own cultural products, the democratization process of cultural production and distribution has formed cultural renaissance that fundamentally contests existing political and economic constraints and relationships.
In addition, the book helps us better understand the ways in which the Internet could act as a determining force to alter the social order, thus leading to social change: Change can occur in one or more areas of a society or across the entire social system. A minor change can make its way through a social system and generate a chain reaction that totally transforms all the elements of a society. (p. 13)
According to Strangelove, both the loss of control by the state and the market and the rising power of individuals, in tandem with the rapid development of the Internet, open up the possibilities of social, political, and cultural changes. Even in China where the Internet censorship is the tightest of the world, the state fails to control every expression and collective action of Internet users and the rise of an unconstrained communication system is evident. In the case of the grass-mud horse song, many music videos, comics, documentaries, and cartoons are created and massively distributed on the Internet to raise social awareness of scholars, intellectuals, state authorities, and the general public. These cultural production and distribution processes represent the value of the Internet users who bravely and tactically show their dissent to the state when it attempts to censor political speech and regulate online activities. The grass-mud horse song has eventually reached a large audience who would be potential social activists to challenge the legitimacy of dominant systems of control and bring about social change.
Strangelove also recognizes several limitations of this book, for example, the exclusion of post-modern theory in his analysis of media and social change. But in his view, post-modern theory ‘is just one of numerous approaches that fall outside the limits imposed on this work by the constraints of time and space’ (p. 7). However, I would suggest that Strangelove further justify his optimism about the role of the Internet as an agent of radical change in a time of crisis and incorporate more solid and recent evidence into his analysis.
To be specific, when he studies how Internet users actively participate in online communication, cultural production, and collective action either on Sina Weibo or Wechat, Strangelove concludes that ‘within a comprehensive censorship regime’, users of Sina Weibo or Wechat ‘do not completely acquiesce to control’ (p. 115) and their expanded communicative capabilities remain a significant countervailing force to dominant institutions and elite privilege. From the statements above, it is not difficult to sense his optimistic standpoint along with the critique of pessimistic Marxist theory. Contrary to what Strangelove has conceived, one could easily spot that in China, the practice of deleting user’s online blogs and comments, either manually or automatically by computers through identifying sensitive key words, becomes so common that there is barely no voice subversive to what the state has approved and propagandized. Sina Weibo and Wechat are not exceptions. Besides, millions of shuijun (Internet Water Army, a group of Internet ghostwrites paid to post online comments with particular content) and qiangshou (Paid Posters, netizens hired to leave fake comments and delete genuine ones) recruited by governments at all levels fill the cyberspace with a unanimous voice serving the interest of the party-state in the guise of ‘creating a harmonious society’. As such, there seems no likelihood of any radical structural change in the Chinese political system, the coercive government force still remains powerful and ubiquitous in the virtual world, and whether the Internet will become ‘new terrains of contention’ (p. 214) is unknown. In this sense, I do not think Strangelove’s optimism is well packaged. His statement that ‘there are better alternatives to the world that capitalism has created’, and these alternatives would ‘arise out of freedoms and capabilities that have been denied to us by capitalism and its destructive value system’ (p. 8) sounds ambitious but unrealistic, unless concrete measures or actions involved are fully elaborated.