Uncle Databanks and the Information Monopoly

'The Cultural Logic of Computation, Golumbia's work, makes some key points that I find extremely refreshing in the face of the overwhelming optimism felt about Web 2.0 and the potentially liberating methods of information technology. The internet specifically and computation in general are granted the seemingly miraculous power to permit the flow of 'information' as if it were a pure substance, some sort of Platonic ideal 'thought matter' that simply flows, unimpeded, sorted and analyzed but somehow essentially unaltered by the processes that transmit, parse and collect it. The heavily Marxist critique leveled by Golumbia is not without considerable merit: what could better display the shift from Commodity-Money-Commodity to Money-Commodity-Money than the transformation of the interior 'Commodity' into a non-material fragment of information? Materiality does not disappear, but it is made substitutable and therefor rendered invisible. The 'infinite space of possibility' produced by digital space is sustained by material realities that, through their processing by data-mining algorithms, become subject to the abstraction of information capital.
The matter of proprietary tools seems to emerge as the central problem in this dynamic, the remarkable fact that, even as information increases in volume and the methods to parse it become more powerful and focused, the tools for parsing and the access to the information is held firmly in the hands of a select few. Monopolization is the demon here, a demon that is even harder to notice because it operates in the opacity that the supposed 'magical' properties of the internet produce. The result is panoptic, to borrow Foucaldian terminology. We are subjects of the gaze of a structuring knowledge that we cannot ourselves return, and our complacency is bought through convenience.
The hope that I would hold out rests in those methods of information production and distribution that are successful but seem unable to produce profit. Monopolization of data mining techniques is maintained only if it is seen as relevant to the creation of monetary gain. Community sites, maintained due to dedication and contribution, possess a far greater chance ot realizing at least some of the utopic dreams Golumbia so effective critiques. That these sites may well survive because of expendable income and time from comfortably middle-class capitalist/consumer subjects is something to be taken carefully into account.
However, the remarkable reproducibility of data structures means that proprietary information technology is can fall victim to the methods of distribution that it relies upon to operate. It would be crazy to try expect an independent consumer to acquire and analyze the mechanical means of production of a large company. However, it would be possible to copy and distribute propriety software; it's just made very difficult thanks to legal protections and corporate security. Add onto this the fact that it would require extensive knowledge of code to comprehend the reproduced system, and enormous corporate holdings to employ it properly, it at least makes possible the means by which to at least perceive the structure of the game you are forced to play. The plague contains its own cure, as is so often the case, but it is dependent on a comprehension of code itself, something more extensively dealt with in the other readings.