Brian Holmes on Thu, 10 Feb 2011 09:28:22 +0100 (CET) |
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Re: <nettime> The beginning of the end? |
On 02/09/2011 09:02 AM, Felix Stalder wrote: > rather than seeing this as the peak of the [informational] paradigm, it's the very paradigm triumphing yet again over the previous, obsolete one. Felix, your view is the intuitive one, which sees the hoped-for collapse of the Mubarak regime as a consequence, more or less, of the freedom to communicate: in a situation made tense by rising food prices, liberal informationalism finally exerts its effects. I don't have any argument with that as far as it goes, but my counter-intuitive view looks into the future and asks, What could this springtime of the Arab world mean for geopolitical alignments based on the hegemonic role of the US, not only as a military power but as the society which has defined the current "information era"? Responding to my post, Charles Turner makes the point that "fortunately, the people of Egypt don't have to assimilate all of this to know what to do." Still, everyone including the Egyptians will have to assimilate a basic change in the geopolitical order, equivalent in magnitude to the one that took place after 1989, if such a change does in fact occur. That's what seems so fascinating to me in the present! I do disagree when you say that "informationalism is a particular organizational paradigm that enables to combine flexibility and scale at previously unmanageable levels of complexity, based high-speed, high-volume information flows. It does not relate to a particular political or economic program." The reason I disagree is simple path-dependency: that organizational paradigm DID relate to a particular political and economic program, which responded to an historically particular kind of crisis, namely the one of the 1970s. Eactly this is what gives a specific character to a period. In addition to the general decline in corporate profitability, the key factors of the crisis of the seventies were the self-assertion of resource-providing "third world" countries (such as Vietnam, the OPEC group, Iran); the uncertainties brought by floating exchange rates after the breakdown of Bretton-Woods; and domestic pressure for a more open, less repressive and materialistic society. The response ultimately produced a characteristic set of relations between financialization, just-in-time production and what's usually called "the revolution in military affairs." Now, I am not trying to say that information technology can't be used for other things (global civil society among them). But I am trying to say that a certain form of stability and order, however repressive and environmentally damaging, has been characteristic of the age in which information technology became the mainstay of the world economy, and I really think that is what should be called informationalism. Funny enough, this is exactly the way Manuel Castells sees it in what I think is his best book, The Informational City (1989). He defines informationalism not just as an organizational paradigm but as a full-fledged and specific mode of development: "Modes of development emerge from the interaction between scientific and technological discovery and the organizational integration of such discoveries in the processes of production and management... The transition between modes of development is not independent of the historical context; it relies heavily on the social matrix initially framing the transition, as well as on the social conflicts and interests that shape the transformation of that matrix. Therefore, the informational mode of development will emerge from the interaction between its technological and organizational components, and the historically determined process of the restructuring of capitalism." For Castells, this emergence of informationalism as part of economic restructuring clearly occurred under US hegemony. He goes on to talk about the shift from the "urban welfare state" to the "suburban warfare state," detailing Reagan's historic increase in defense budgets devoted to information technologies (Star Wars). In his analysis, military investment became the driver of ICT development in the eighties. Quite interestingly, the USA's first joint military production project with Israel was in the mid-eighties, and it was for a tactical drone, which the Israelis had started working on after the Yom Kippur War. With real insight into what was going on, Castells writes: "The political crisis suffered by the American state both domestically (Watergate) and internationally (Vietnam; Iran; the erosion of its political control in Africa and Central America; increasing economic and technological competition from new powers, particularly Japan; strategic parity achieved by the Soviet Union in the arms race) called for a state of emergency in which the greatest power on earth would flex its muscles to show, in a responsible yet determined manner, that it was ready and willing to engage in sharp confrontations to preserve its status and power. Business interests, both in the US and internationally, redeploying themselves on a planetary scale in the aftermath of the crisis, welcomed this newfound resolution in the leader of the free world, both for its symbolic value and for its global practical concerns." Castells must have often thought of this sentence while the great coalition for the first Gulf War was being assembled in 1990, in the immediate wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. He was right: America was definitely making a bid to guarantee the stability and security of the world-system for the tremendous period of capitalist expansion that was to follow. And it was doing so with smart bombs and laser-guided missiles in the Middle East. The historical relation between financialization and the spread of networked technologies seems obvious to me: not only in the tech boom of the 1990s, when capital was raised and allocated by the financial markets for the cabling of the entire planet; and not only in the tremendous expansion of the financial markets that this global installation of IT allowed, till the point where by mid-2008 you had a notional $683 trillion of derivatives contracts circulating around in a seemingly infinite electronic financial sphere. Finance also mattered culturally: the dematerialization of labor, the slosh of funny money in the job markets and the expressivity allowed by a personalized media system absorbed most of the lingering middle-class complaints about the repressiveness of American society, at least for a while. In addition to that, the really amazing thing has been the development of just-in-time production (originally used by Toyota for automobiles) into a modus operandi for globalized industry and distribution, under the new name of "global supply chain management." The biggest corporate database is now Wal-Mart's (70 terabytes). Global supply chain management is what allowed the almost complete delocalization of the US low- and medium-tech manufacturing sector, through the creation of the mysterious bicontinent "Chimerica," or what's also called "Wal-Mart world" (and of course I agree with Joseph Rabbi, this was done by Western corporate elites who are the real yellow peril). Now, all that forms a densely interrelated complex of capital expansion, a "mode of development" as Castells would say. The question is, what's gonna happen as that mode of development goes into crisis? The financial meltdown is a serious contradiction, because it was the networked financial system (first currency futures, then through a vast panoply of derivatives) that made global just-in-time production possible, by offering insurance against the fluctuation of exchange rates in the post-Bretton Woods currency system. The dates on this are very precise: the Reuters Monitor, which is the first networked trading platform, came out in 1973, and networked finance has grown exponentially ever since, all the way to today's high-frequency trading. Nothing serious has been changed in this system since the meltdown, so its wild gyrations will continue to throw the whole globalized economy into danger. Another, even more extreme contradiction is climate change, intensified by massive industrial development of just-in-time globalization: that's a central factor in the current spike of food prices, and it will get worse, creating havoc in a world where food production is totally commodified and everyone depends on the global market to eat. Then, a third contradiction is that with the transnationalization of US hegemony, the formerly "domestic" resistance to oppressive practices goes global as well, facilitated by IT. The combination of all this instability produces an outright geopolitical crisis: a potential change in the whole structure of US military alliances in the Middle East. Are we not looking at a possible transmutation of the military-informatic-financial mode of development that emerged in the US in the 1980s, and then went on to play the central structuring role in the post-1989 world system? The US has thrown in its stake with repressive Arab regimes (Egypt, Jordan, Saudi etc) because they apppear to guarantee the flow of oil while accepting to coexist with the great American ally in electronic warfare, Israel. The military fear is now destabilization of the region, refusal to stand idly by at the next Israeli invasion of Gaza or Lebanon, and possible war on a large scale. But America loves to focus on this kind of military fear, because that is how it has built up its linchpin role in globalization. What actually seems more likely to me is a democratization of the region, spurred by the demands of people who have been cut out of global development, with attempts to overcome some of the inequalities and allow people to engage in more productive activity. Yet to the extent that the US goes on supporting Israel and Saudi, it clearly cannot shape this transition. What you see in Latin America, East Asia and now the Arab world, is a serious decline of hegemonic influence. This can only bring a deep reconfiguration of social relations, including the relations to information technology and its associated organizational forms. By 1989, Castells, Harvey and others were able to explain in detail the shift from the Keynesian Fordist industrial economy to Neoliberal Informationalism. Good for them. What's more difficult is to try to look from a position within the current crisis and see the beginning of the end of the technopolitical paradigm of Informationalism. I think it's worth trying to do this, because it's almost sure that the generations growing up in these tumultuous years are going to be part of deep technological, social, cultural, geopolitical and ecological change. In short, they will face the conditions of a paradigm shift. Hopefully they will be able to guide it in a more positive way than the last time around, where the hopeful and generous revolutions of 68 ultimately helped produce neoliberalism and financialization (but some other good things too: the global civil society you mentioned). When you look at it from a world perspective, these years since the financial crisis of 2008 have been incredibly agitated, and this is only the beginning. Big things will happen and great things can be achieved. May the Egyptian people -- including the young leftists who helped spark this revolution -- find fulfillment on their path to a more just and more egalitarian society. utopistically yours, Brian # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org