There’s a thought provoking review of Richard Barbrook’s new book Imaginary Futures: From Thinking Machines to the Global Village at Mute magazine. I came across it via bookforum.com, and my curiosity was piqued because I received a flyer for Imaginary Futures enclosed with another book I recently ordered from Pluto Books in the UK (whom I wholeheartedly endorse for customer service btw - not only did they deliver a book I needed from Britain within a week, but I got an email telling me about it from an actual person as opposed to an Amazonbot).
Ian A. Boal asks some interesting questions - how did we get from seeing the computer as an instrument of dehumanisation (think HAL in 2001 and other such fictional and filmic representations of the 60s and 70s) to seeing it as a utopian saviour of humanity? How can we understand the history of “digital utopianism” and what of the interests and social positions of those who spruiked it?
Here’s the publisher’s blurb for Barbrook’s work:
Richard Barbrook argues that, at the height of the Cold War, the Americans invented a truly revolutionary tool: the Internet. Yet, for all of its libertarian potential, hi-tech science soon became a tool of geopolitical dominance. The rest of the world was expected to follow America’s path into the networked future.
Today, we’re still told that the Net is creating the information society. Barbrook shows how we can reclaim its revolutionary purpose: how the DIY ethic of the internet can help people shape information technologies in their own interest and reinvent their own, improved visions of the future.
It may well be that the story is more complex than that, and I’m sure that Barbrook tells a more complex story. But it’s interesting to read Boal’s review and read slogans like this one - from the London based 90s tech boom refusenik that Barbrook was (co-manifested with Pip Schultz):
We are the digital artisans. We celebrate the Promethean power of our labour and imagination to shape the virtual world. By hacking, coding, designing and mixing, we build the wired future … We are the only subjects of history.
I guess manifestoes lend themselves to hyperbole. As Boal notes, it’s kinda the mirror image of the boosterism coming out of Silicon Valley at the time. I also suspect utopias work better without self-proclaimed “subjects of history”. But whether Boal’s world-weary post-Frankfurt School economism does justice to the subject is another question. I’m not a huge fan of Retort - the collective of which he is a member, which has produced some rather predictable radical analyses of the Iraq War which really do read as if authored by a committee and probably do a dis-service to the phrase “radical analyses”. Quasi-Lacanian psycho-babble after the manner of Zizek might be more accurate.
He is of course, spot on, about the weird liberal-cum-Marxist genealogy of the techutopians. There’s a real sense in which Marxist theoreticians get a certain buzz out of watching capital conquer new frontiers, particularly if they themselves are on the cutting edge of the vanguard, auto-critiquing the machine from within. And certainly the much hyped new economy talk is a species of the denial of the realities of old-fashioned things like the business cycle, and the materiality of production - a conjuring trick it should be easy to see through.
But Boal raises an interesting question about the complicity of the wired workforce of the new economy with the imperatives of those who after all, pay for all this symbolic manipulation. Google, Yahoo and China might be a useful shorthand for this debate. But jargon like this doesn’t give me much confidence that Boal has his finger on the nub of the problem:
What then of the internet as an instrument of general emancipation, if, as it now seems, the technics of the virtual conduce to the production of monstrous subjects who are incomplete, lacking, overwhelmed inside. The corollary is a politics of resentment, and a paranoia that flourishes on the cusp of a plenitude always under threat of social death and incorporation into the machine.
My own much humbler and less world-historical take is that the intertubes have liberatory potential, but only potential. And some obvious uses for domination and reinforcing established power hierarchies. That’s not to say that technology is neutral - a critique where Boal and I are in agreement. But I tend to see the intertubes as only an accentuation of patterns which existed long before their envisioning. Distributed knowledge is powerful, but it’s not new. Any utopia needs a goal not just an instrument. And being a tech-slave and being a wage-slave aren’t all that different - contradictory and potentially malleable positions, to be sure, but no more the revolutionary agent of transformation than the Marxist conception of the working class (or Hegel’s bureacrats of the Weltgeist for that matter).
Still, in less sociological mode, it would be an interesting exercise to take stock of some of the claims - overblown and otherwise - made for the internets a decade ago.
And I was kinda chuffed to see Boal cite the Whole Earth Catalogue as a kind of proto-internet. My aunt used to have a copy and I used to be uber-fascinated by it when we went round to visit my Grandma when I was a little kid.
Some of the most hard-core geeks I know can get surprisingly poetic about the world-shattering power of the technologies at their disposal. And, granted, some of what they can do is very impressive, not to mention useful to the state-industrial-military complex.
They also tend to giggle a bit too much, talk into their sleeves a lot, and sometimes wear pants that are two sizes too large. Collectively, they demonstrate the co-operative instincts of a herd of cats, open-source projects notwithstanding.
I speak of them with affection, but they are not the stuff of revolutionary armies, methinks.
Maybe not the stuff of armies.
But enough to scare the pants off some ppl.
Scientology comes to mind.
Perhaps the change in attitude to computers came at the end of the Cold War and the introduction of the PC. Both events perhaps suggested that computers were capable of being used for good, not error-prone destruction.
Nowadays, (except possibly when it comes to China and North Korea) people don’t really think of the implications of a surveollance society in the West, but I gather the Internet has made that possible. That is one aspect of the Intertube etc Revolution we ignore at our peril.
btw, it is a lot easier to communicate with fellow socialists and incite revolution all around rhe world.
“how did we get from seeing the computer as an instrument of dehumanisation …?”
Easy. Miniaturisation!
As a SciFi reader, in the early 70s I knew where computers were heading - to ever bigger, ever more controlling machines. One of the last books I read before a happy SciGeek brought me news of miniaturised computers, was “This Perfect Day” (?Ira Levin). Not much later, I read “I have no mouth but I must scream” (no longer sure of exact wording), and couldn’t wait to get to work for a good old table-thumper with the pseudo-geeks. SciFi’s giant thinking, controlling techno-monsters would, only a few years later (as I might have posted before), become the home-made desktops kids cobbled together with Radio Shack parts & old B&W TV monitors. BIG, BAAAD!!! Small, good! Of course, as board members will argue, both types of computers exist in the netted world: zillions of small computers linked through Internet to one another via networks of supercomputers / servers.
My initial reservation about computers was their uni-logic, although those TechnoGeeks argued that this was countered by fuzzy-logic’s possibilities (I’m still not convinced). Whilst I just love the educational possibilities (oh to have had “Time Team” in my AncHist teaching days) I’m frightened by networked-computers potential for indoctrination, control and beyond “I can remember it for you wholesale” mind-manipulation. CCTV & webcam are well beyond “1984″, yet still of it. The “convergence” of CogSci & cybertech creates scenarios that make me glad I won’t be around to see if they’re right.
I could, at this point, launch into “you-name-it, I’ll try it” analytical/ critical paradigms; but as one taught the difference between “history” & “historiography” by a UNE wonderful faculty - and able to draw parallels between criticism of the evils of printing machines (and attempts to put the Chinese / Gutenberg genie back in the bottle) and similar efforts today - I won’t. Thank goodness I retired before I had to hold forth for 3,000 to 10,000 words on this round of Counter-CultureWars & New Dominicans.
I remember reading (in the ?early 70s, just after the publication of the first Club of Rome tome) that we were losing faith in progress, in the ability of our species to solve problems, in the belief that we could make our world a better place. I still haven’t.
(NOTE: Hope my aged brain didn’t confuse SciFi works this time.)
DeeCee - It was ‘I have no mouth AND I must scream’ by Harlan Ellison. A visual tribute to it was paid in The Matrix when Agent Smith melt’s Neo’s mouth closed (what a shame that particular alteration to Keanu’s anatomy wasn’t permanent…)
The Matrix truly was an insipid pastiche of such sci-fi geekdom references. Not that I would know *cough*.
DeeCee is on to something with miniaturization, not to mention the affordability of one’s one computer, but there’s another obvious point.
At the time, lots of people thought something like HAL was a realistic possibility in the near future. As it turns out, we have made virtually no progress towards making HAL, or anything resembling it.
Mind you, as a technologist I find data mining combined with increasingly linked-up databases just as scary, but nobody’s written the definitive data mining dystopia movie yet so it hasn’t penetrated into the consciousness of the general population yet.
Ah … the “Whole Earth Catalogue” … an absolute treasure-trove. I wish I knew what happened to mine. Probably lost in a house move in the early 70s.
Robert Merkel wrote:
Weeeellll. I still don’t think computers are affordable in the sense that a television is affordable. Us middle class types might think that the home PC is something of a ubiquity having grown up in suburbs full of Commodore 64s in the 1980s, but even in 2008 some 30 years after the Apple II, there are plenty of low income households who, even if given a free computer, struggle to make it work with the internet. A lot of people still rely on schools, libraries and internet cafes to get online. Computers are still overly complex, relatively expensive devices prone to viral infection and hardware failure.
I thought, back when I started playing with computers, that they would become so ubiquitous that they’d practically be free. It never happened, mostly because the “killer app” that is the internet changes so frequently that a 10 year old PC is virtually unusable on the modern web. It’s this reason that truly cheap hardware never takes off - WebTV, JavaStations, X Terminals etc and etc have all been failures and pretty much always will be until the technology settles down. It shows no signs of doing so - it isn’t regulated like Television and therefore will never be pinned down to a particular set of frozen standards like TV.
I was thinking about this in another context recently. It seems to me that it wouldn’t be unfair to say that the blogosphere and comments threads are overwhelmingly middle class and educated. That may have something more to to with certain protocols and practices of discussion which are classed, but it must also have something to do with access - let’s not forget also a lot of jobs don’t enable people to spend part of their working day on the net. There may also be a generation effect - the “digital natives” thing - though I’m still sceptical as to whether those “digital natives” aren’t mainly middle class kids.
That’s one of the reasons I found the use of the language of class (and essentially Marxist terminology) in Barbrook’s stuff interesting.
Mark, I think the blogosphere is skewed toward the educated middle class, but mostly due to our interests. There are plenty of corners of the web (discussion forums, mailing lists etc) that are heavily populated with different groups - the people who like to talk about old Jeeps for example are very different to the crowd here, and very different again to the group who like to talk about old Alfa’s.
I suspect that the old style mailing list actually appeals to a different participant set because it’s old-tech and works better with ancient hand-me-down PC’s, whereas Wordpress has turned into a beast. However, I’d also like to venture the idea that self-selecting groups tend to make for better discussions and having a couple of hurdles to participation is no bad thing.
I think there’s something in that, David, in that “public” fora like some of the News Ltd “blogs” have a strong tendency to become bulletin board style “I think x” rather than any sort of interchange or discussion. Anyway, food for thought, but gotta dash to see the doc and get rid of this flu thing.
Thanks, Mercurius; I no longer have a copy. And it should be “WE can remember it for you wholesale” which I’ve just located in a very battered copy of “Nebula Award Stories 2″ (”WE can remember …” only rated a “Roll of Honour” mention).
BTW, I’ve been trying to remember the story that switched my green genes on to climate change. New York is drowning … A girl with a cat called HausMaus (in German, I think) is part of the same memory, but I’m probably wrong. I read it in the 1970s (probably c1975). ???Ballard’s “Drowned World”??