PhD Research Project:

Karmic Assemblages and the Network Society

Nicolas Mendoza
January 20, 2013

***

1 The Old Settlement

This research proposes to examine and compare social practices that occur
within realms that are informed, at least to a certain degree, by the term
karma. Because the initial emphasis lies in the presence of the term itself (i.e.
karma), the set of relevant objects of study encompasses both traditional
Buddhist practices and digital phenomena (e. g. ICT mediated communities,
video game worlds) where the term is present. The motivation for focusing on
this set of objects is to make available in-depth knowledge about collaborative
practices that is present in Buddhist worlds to New Media theorists and
developers.
The project will develop case studies of real world Buddhist practices
that result in collaboration. However, it will also examine cases originated
outside the Buddhist world, cases from the world of New Media. By including
in this project a critical survey of the instances in which karma has already
been deployed in ICT, it will be possible to map the successes, potential and
pitfalls that notions of karma so far convey for ICT mediated collaboration.
This will also enable the assessment of these digital karma phenomena in
terms of their ability (or inability), and its potential, to express and embody
notions of karma as originally proposed by Buddhism.
The existence of a growing list of instances of the use of the term karma
in the field of software reveals an intuition among ICT developers (especially
in P2P) about the need for higher degree indexes, configurations, or perhaps,
as Deleuze might put it, diagrams, that make altruism the greener pasture
for participants. This need can be expressed in an utilitarian way: Users
who join a peer-to-peer network have, in general, incorrect incentives to contribute to the network, because of the externalities that exist between them.
The result is an inefficient network: The overall levels of contribution are
less than would be the case if each peer acted in the interests of the entire
network.(Antoniadis et al., 2004, 1)
1

The key term, in the above formulation is incentives, a term that perhaps
needs to be read critically as the observation of practice shows that P2P
arrangements tend to exceed the realm of utilitarianism. The characteristics
inherent to distributed computation enable broad kinds of information to
shape sociality:
In sociological and economic thought, the historical distinction
between values and value split the non- or at least less-easilycalculable with the seemingly cold and objective world of calculation and universal commensurability. This old settlement, which
never really held, nevertheless helped demarcate the economic from
the social. But the intensification and extension of computational
procedures, which is manifested most clearly in the rise of big
data, has lead to a proliferation of bottom-up procedures to formalise (social) values, rendering them easily calculable and lending order to the decentralised world of peers, but without necessarily replicating capitalistic calculations of value. Order in this
sense is iterative, recursive and topological. In place of managerial commands and bureaucratic hierarchies we have Karma
points and the long-tail logic of networks. Tkacz et al. (2012)
The split, endemic to the old settlement above is, however, fairly recent. A
modern invention, if not the pumping heart of modernity. Wherever the grip
of the moderns thins, older settlements operate. As bottom-up procedures
to formalise (social) values proliferate and become increasingly necessary
through ICT, understanding older settlements (i.e., remembering) becomes
a crucial task.

2 Reverse Flow
Perhaps the notion of karma is not alone among non-modern notions that
result in altruistic social diagrams. However, it is unique for two reasons
in addition to the remarkable embrace from the field of ICT noted above.
First, it is a fundamental part of the Buddhist ontology, a system unrelentlessly geared towards consolidating the collective practice of collaboration,
altruism, and generosity. In Buddhism, these practices are the instruments
through which the erradication of suffering in this life and Nibbana, its ultimate goal, is achieved. Deep understanding of this ontology is for this reason
2

a key source of insight in this research project. Second, the notion of karma
as a social driver of real-world communities, while non-modern, is certainly
not the past. Buddhism enjoys widespread vitality among a large percentage of humanity, a group that is mainly geographically located in Asia, a
region of remarkable economic and technological activity.
A key aspect of this project comes to light when described in terms of
the sequence: old arrangement > debilitation of the old arrangement > inspection of an even older arrangement. Here knowledge flows in an unusual
direction. Old and southern (as in Global South) knowledge, the sciences
of the South, is usually relegated to museums, discursively subjugated to
lesser realms, presented, discussed, and respectfully dismissed as ancient
delusion. This is largely because capitalism, colonialism and modernity depend on the cult of innovation. Therefore the only accepted direction of
knowledge is forward: tradition, the past, is something one must get rid of.
The term karma is here considered a valid epistemic category, not a cultural artefact relatively weak in power to describe reality. This signals a
conscious political position that will be developed throughout the thesis, a
political position based on a critique of colonialist discourses about knowledge. Namely, that substantial knowledge about reality lies beyond the grasp
of Western categories, methods and terminology1 , knowledge that can only
be rightfully approached by discussing it in its own terms, and that subjugation of countless insights from the colonised worlds is at the roots of
centralised global power. In this sense, to fully legitimise Buddhist language
and insights is an essentially subversive project in itself one of many such
subversions that need to take place in the road towards a truly multipolar
and deeply diverse2 world.
1

For instance: where does one start to make assertions about a society where the
most valuable product (merit) is immaterial, that celebrates those who would seem to
be material free riders (the monks), and where the means of production (of merit, the
most coveted commodity) lie within personal volition thus making them inalienable? The
West, simply, has not developed an economic theory that can cope with that. Yet the
important idea here is that this lack is a non-issue because the goal of this project is,
precisely, to find and comprehend a new (i.e. old) vocabulary that is suitable to foster a
radically different arrangement. Note: A section devoted to exploring the limits of Western
knowledge through examples, which I have been making a list of, can be written at some
point.
2
The idea of deep diversity (my term) also seems worthy of further exploration.

3 Das Karma
The objects to be observed are social practices informed by the term karma.
These practices will be called karmic assemblages. By qualifying the term
assemblages with the term karmic, a set of relevant objects is delimited.
The term assemblages is important because it connects the project to the
ontological insights, methodological approaches, knowledge theory (via Science Studies), and even the macro-political views developed by Latour and
other participants of the Actor-Network Theory field.3 As a starting point
I propose the following definition of the karmic assemblage, my object of
study:
A karmic assemblage is an alliance 4 between humans and non-humans
with the objective of improving karma.
It is worth noting that this definition informs more about the method than
about the object. The meaning of the objective of improving karma, as well
as an understanding of the strategies, tactics and techniques deployed in the
pursuit of this objective, largely constitute the corpus this project aspires
to construct. Due to the generic quality of this definition, a very similar
definition could be proposed, for example, for a capitalist assemblage: A
capitalist assemblage is an alliance between humans and non-humans with
the objective of accumulating capital. According to such definition, one could
say that an analysis of capitalist assemblages is what Marx did. In this
sense, perhaps this project could be titled Das Karma, with the caveat
that understanding such a radically different category (karma, rather than
capital) would need to be done through equally different methods, and it
would lead to differently shaped results, than Marxs.
In the simplest possible terms, then, the question that sets in motion this
research project is:
What can the P2P movement 5 learn from the collaborative practices of
Buddhism?
3

Connections of ANT with the project are abundant and their detailed discussion
exceeds the reach this introductory text.
4
At this stage, it is erm alliance expresses how one of the strategies of karmic assemblages is to allow the non-human express their intrinsic tendency to align with the
objective of improving karma. This idea will be developed
5
From previous writing of mine: the term P2P movement is used as a general term
that encompasses all current phenomena which favours or enacts production through P2P
processes. In the seminal essay The Political Economy of Peer Production Michel Bauwens
defines P2P in the following terms: P2P specifically designates those processes that aim to

increase the most widespread participation by equipotential participants (Bauwens 2005,

p.1). P2P here is defined as a particular arrangement of processes. According to this
definition, phenomena as diverse and independent as Anonymous, the Arduino platform,
CouchSurfing, the Creative Commons license or the Egyptian revolution can be said to
participate of the P2P movement.
The term movement might wrongly be understood as implying the existence of deliberate or centralised coordination of these phenomena; however, the preceding term (P2P)
proposes a redefinition of coordination itself. Movement suggests a collective displacement that is akin to Virnos Exodus discussed above, while P2P qualifies the distributed
nature of power in this movement. It is because of this distributed ethos that it is fitting
for the movement to exist without the necessity of central authorities or a unified manifesto or project. Thus, when we think of the P2P movement, we think of an overarching
phenomenon at the crossroads between spontaneous trend, transformation in the global
imaginary, and loosely coordinated endeavour of engaged participants.
It is important to note how the concept of P2P is not tied at its fundamental level
to technology, but to equipotentiality as the defining power structure. Thus, while the
definition accommodates diverse manifestations it is clear that it is essentially at odds
with governmentality and capital.

Bibliography
Antoniadis, P., Courcoubetis, C., & Mason, R. 2004. Comparing Economic
Incentives in Peer-to-Peer Networks. Special Issue on Network Economics,
Computer Networks, Elsevier, 45(1), 133146.
Tkacz, Nathaniel, Mendoza, Nicolas, & Musiani, Francesca. 2012. Value and
Currency in Peer Production CfP. http://peerproduction.net/value-andcurrency-in-peer-production/.