Brian Holmes: [iDC] The Internet and control
David Golumbia wrote:
The rise of many recent sophisticated quasi-authoritarian regimes is coterminous with the rise of the Internet and mass computerization. From a historical perspective, then, a plausible thesis is that /computerization walks hand-in-hand with a kind of state fascism, which sees owning the means of production and the means of interpretation as primary means of social control/.
This is a bit of a simplification, no? Since when have we not been living under regimes of social control?
According to the historian Hobsbawm, after the Cuban Missile Crisis there was no more danger of nuclear conflagration, the two superpowers having established failsafe communications allowing them to resolve any dispute before it escalated. However, the US, unlike the USSR, continued to terrorize its population with bomb shelters, drills, anti-communist propaganda and the like, why? Because it was an electoral expedient to justify continued expansion of the US army around the world, via military adventures like Vietnam. Nuclear terror was a form of social control for the democratic West, but a non-issue in the East where there were no elections to manipulate. So are we more brainwashed now than then? Or maybe about the same, but differently?
As awful and power-mongering as Cheney is, as closely connected to the military-industrial complex as he is, I am not sure he is any more grotesque than McNamara (successively CEO of Ford Motors, Secretary of Defense during the Vietnam war, then President of the World Bank). The US has been compromised as a democracy ever since it became a powerful force in the world; since WWII it has been deeply compromised. Yet it remains a capitalist democracy, and not a totalitarian regime where the state is the single, all-powerful actor.
The Internet is an ambiguous phenomenon within state capitalism, and it is very interesting because of its ambiguities. On the control side it is the latest in a long series of information technologies which have accompanied corporate industrial expansion, allowing for logistical coordination, for the establishment of markets, and for the delivery of advertising. On the state side of the state-capitalism equation, you can add the spread of propaganda and the effectuation of surveillance. Together these functions form a regime of control, or if you prefer, of social programming. Like the printing press, mail systems, newspapers, telegraph, telephone, radio and television, the net has been used to program economic and social processes, using the word "program" in the sense of James Beniger (in an impressive book called "The Control Revolution").
To program, in this sense, means to set up and then exploit the complex conditions under which the reciprocal flow of information between individuals and organizations accomplishes the overarching goal of facilitating economic circulation, in such a way that industrial expansion (and therefore capital expansion) can continue. These conditions are established mainly through a process of trial and error (albeit an increasingly sophisticated one) by capitalist firms, whose production and marketing innovations are then stabilized by state regulation and support. Socio-economic planning is attempted through coordination between the state and the biggest industrial and financial players; but the "steering" or governance of industrial expansion and commodity circulation is delivishly complex. In the US, the main programming instruments under governemnt control are monetary policy, military research budgets, and commercial law (including IP law, which recently has become one of the crucial legal instruments of our time). The Internet as a technology grows mainly out of steering through military budgets (DARPA); but IP law represents an attempt to steer its uses.
The point of all this is that the Internet is not essentially about authoritarianism. Rather, it is a classically liberal extension of communicational freedoms, in the strong sense of liberalism as a political-economic philosophy dating back to the seventeenth century, a philosophy that organizes "freedom" to serve the values and aims of free markets. Liberal societies have always been rather tumultuous, because in them, the principle goal (capitalist growth) can only be realized by the maintenance of freedoms that allow all kinds of debate and bottom-up organization in pursuit of other goals. The Internet has been an amazing episode in this sense. Since its massification in the 90s, it has made the world infinitely more interesting, and also, more unpredictable.
However, that doesn't mean that a Bush-style regime cannot follow in Mussolini's footsteps and decide to inject capitalist society with high doses of nationalist propaganda as a strategy to regain control amidst a crisis, like the one we are living through now. (But do these control crises ever end? or do they just mutate into others?). Authoritarian regimes can also add high levels of surveillance to balance out the liberal freedoms, which they did in the thirties and are doing again today. This happens particularly when capitalism starts to produce its own opposition, through unemployment crises, ecological disasters or cultural clashes. For capitalism, authoritarian regimes are a worst-case scenario.
On a deeper level, liberal societies can seek to standardize cultural values, slowly eliminating conflict by making different values and goals unimaginable. The current version of this long-term, large-scale strategy is what we call "globalization." In short, Mickey for everyone. Or more precisely, Mickey with broadband.
The Internet, despite its quite amazing openness, can be used for all these control strategies. Thus it is fundamentally ambiguous, just like the other communications technologies deployed in the name of economic liberalism. But even more so, because it has been developed for a wider variety of functions than previous technologies: it supports multimedia; send as well as receive; one-to-one and one-to-many communication; all in the same technology. Most importantly, the Internet works through reprogrammable computers: it introduces the possibility of counter-programming into the information society. For these reasons, the Internet is a democratic joker in the works of social control. At the same time as it fits into a pattern of information use to control industrial processing, structure markets and encourage consumption, it also feeds conflicts about whether industrial growth and economic circulation are really the only values around which society should be structured. The Internet is not a fascist or totalitarian plot, but it is a result of highly complex socio-economic planning which typically contains (and in some cases founders on) its own contradictions.
That said, those who want to explain how the world works only in terms of the Internet, or the television, or advertising, or whatever single phenomenon, are really wasting their time. Social relations, economic developments and power struggles involve much more than a single technology!
best, Brian
The rise of many recent sophisticated quasi-authoritarian regimes is coterminous with the rise of the Internet and mass computerization. From a historical perspective, then, a plausible thesis is that /computerization walks hand-in-hand with a kind of state fascism, which sees owning the means of production and the means of interpretation as primary means of social control/.
This is a bit of a simplification, no? Since when have we not been living under regimes of social control?
According to the historian Hobsbawm, after the Cuban Missile Crisis there was no more danger of nuclear conflagration, the two superpowers having established failsafe communications allowing them to resolve any dispute before it escalated. However, the US, unlike the USSR, continued to terrorize its population with bomb shelters, drills, anti-communist propaganda and the like, why? Because it was an electoral expedient to justify continued expansion of the US army around the world, via military adventures like Vietnam. Nuclear terror was a form of social control for the democratic West, but a non-issue in the East where there were no elections to manipulate. So are we more brainwashed now than then? Or maybe about the same, but differently?
As awful and power-mongering as Cheney is, as closely connected to the military-industrial complex as he is, I am not sure he is any more grotesque than McNamara (successively CEO of Ford Motors, Secretary of Defense during the Vietnam war, then President of the World Bank). The US has been compromised as a democracy ever since it became a powerful force in the world; since WWII it has been deeply compromised. Yet it remains a capitalist democracy, and not a totalitarian regime where the state is the single, all-powerful actor.
The Internet is an ambiguous phenomenon within state capitalism, and it is very interesting because of its ambiguities. On the control side it is the latest in a long series of information technologies which have accompanied corporate industrial expansion, allowing for logistical coordination, for the establishment of markets, and for the delivery of advertising. On the state side of the state-capitalism equation, you can add the spread of propaganda and the effectuation of surveillance. Together these functions form a regime of control, or if you prefer, of social programming. Like the printing press, mail systems, newspapers, telegraph, telephone, radio and television, the net has been used to program economic and social processes, using the word "program" in the sense of James Beniger (in an impressive book called "The Control Revolution").
To program, in this sense, means to set up and then exploit the complex conditions under which the reciprocal flow of information between individuals and organizations accomplishes the overarching goal of facilitating economic circulation, in such a way that industrial expansion (and therefore capital expansion) can continue. These conditions are established mainly through a process of trial and error (albeit an increasingly sophisticated one) by capitalist firms, whose production and marketing innovations are then stabilized by state regulation and support. Socio-economic planning is attempted through coordination between the state and the biggest industrial and financial players; but the "steering" or governance of industrial expansion and commodity circulation is delivishly complex. In the US, the main programming instruments under governemnt control are monetary policy, military research budgets, and commercial law (including IP law, which recently has become one of the crucial legal instruments of our time). The Internet as a technology grows mainly out of steering through military budgets (DARPA); but IP law represents an attempt to steer its uses.
The point of all this is that the Internet is not essentially about authoritarianism. Rather, it is a classically liberal extension of communicational freedoms, in the strong sense of liberalism as a political-economic philosophy dating back to the seventeenth century, a philosophy that organizes "freedom" to serve the values and aims of free markets. Liberal societies have always been rather tumultuous, because in them, the principle goal (capitalist growth) can only be realized by the maintenance of freedoms that allow all kinds of debate and bottom-up organization in pursuit of other goals. The Internet has been an amazing episode in this sense. Since its massification in the 90s, it has made the world infinitely more interesting, and also, more unpredictable.
However, that doesn't mean that a Bush-style regime cannot follow in Mussolini's footsteps and decide to inject capitalist society with high doses of nationalist propaganda as a strategy to regain control amidst a crisis, like the one we are living through now. (But do these control crises ever end? or do they just mutate into others?). Authoritarian regimes can also add high levels of surveillance to balance out the liberal freedoms, which they did in the thirties and are doing again today. This happens particularly when capitalism starts to produce its own opposition, through unemployment crises, ecological disasters or cultural clashes. For capitalism, authoritarian regimes are a worst-case scenario.
On a deeper level, liberal societies can seek to standardize cultural values, slowly eliminating conflict by making different values and goals unimaginable. The current version of this long-term, large-scale strategy is what we call "globalization." In short, Mickey for everyone. Or more precisely, Mickey with broadband.
The Internet, despite its quite amazing openness, can be used for all these control strategies. Thus it is fundamentally ambiguous, just like the other communications technologies deployed in the name of economic liberalism. But even more so, because it has been developed for a wider variety of functions than previous technologies: it supports multimedia; send as well as receive; one-to-one and one-to-many communication; all in the same technology. Most importantly, the Internet works through reprogrammable computers: it introduces the possibility of counter-programming into the information society. For these reasons, the Internet is a democratic joker in the works of social control. At the same time as it fits into a pattern of information use to control industrial processing, structure markets and encourage consumption, it also feeds conflicts about whether industrial growth and economic circulation are really the only values around which society should be structured. The Internet is not a fascist or totalitarian plot, but it is a result of highly complex socio-economic planning which typically contains (and in some cases founders on) its own contradictions.
That said, those who want to explain how the world works only in terms of the Internet, or the television, or advertising, or whatever single phenomenon, are really wasting their time. Social relations, economic developments and power struggles involve much more than a single technology!
best, Brian
posted by alcramer at
3:18 AM
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