Geert Lovink on Sun, 5 Jan 97 11:35 MET |
[Date Prev] [Date Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Date Index] [Thread Index]
nettime: Hari Kunzru/Rewiring Technoculture |
Date: Sun, 5 Jan 1997 20:16:20 +0000 To: geert@xs4all.nl From: hari@dircon.co.uk (Hari Kunzru) Rewiring Technoculture By Hari Kunzru "I mean, you read Wired magazine and it pretends to be very hip and trendy and radical, but it's basically arguing for all the unemployed to hav their welfare benefits removed, to starve to death because it's good for them." [Richard Barbrook, Arena Magazine November 1996] Where is technoculture going? The theoretical debate around issues concerning the impact of technology on society and politics seems to be becoming increasingly rigid in its terms. Orthodoxies, tendencies and schools of thought are emerging to segment a once-smooth landscape. A notable feature of this rapid organisation of the field has been the emergence of Wired as a symbol of a certain sort of orthodoxy. A backlash against the magazine was probably inevitable. Its rapid success and the adoption of aspects of its rhetoric by the cultural mainstream have turned it, in the space of a few years, from an underground publication into a sizeable organisation with a certain amount of political and cultural clout, especially in America. I once went to a promotional event at an advertising agency in London where Wired-type slogans were flashed on giant screens and guests were handed canapes in the shape of the Hotwired logo. Futurism as vacuous spectacle, offered up on a plate. The fact that the design and editorial sloganeering of Wired have lent themselves to this kind of activity (in this case a bland rationalisation of the activities of the agency's 'new media'section) means that it's only right the magazine should become the object of critique. It also probably means that the magazine no longer has to present the world in such simple terms (computers good, no computers bad) in order to make the effects of technology on society obvious to a general audience. Declaration of bias: I'm Associate Editor of the UK edition of Wired. It's a magazine with a significantly different editorial line to that of the US mag, which is what people are usually talking about when they critique Wired. I'm not particularly bothered by the criticisms, since I like arguments and I know I'm not a digital cowboy hellbent on killing the unemployed and crowning Newt Gingrich God Emperor of Creation However a climate in which Richard Barbrook can make a statement to a fashion magazine like the supremely silly one quoted above, is not particularly healthy for debate. I think that if at this stage critical thought about technoculture descends into meaningless sniping, it bodes very ill for the future. So the following comments are not intended as a defence of Wired. They're my views, not the views of the magazine which pays my salary - though since I sit in editorial meetings you can safely infer they're one of the elements of Wired UK's identity. They're also not intended to demonstrate that I'm in any way more hip, trendy, or radical than Richard Barbrook, although of course I am. A Second Look at The Market: The Market is the issue on which most of the To-Wired or not-to-Wired argument seems to turn. The unapologetic free-market libertarianism of Louis Rossetto, Kevin Kelly and the other Wired founders sounds very unpleasantly in the ears of Europeans and those on the American left who are accustomed to 'the free market' being used as a buzzword by proponents of a right-wing oligarchy who care little for anyone's freedom but their own and define it solely as the right to accumulate capital. I don't think that's what Wired has ever advocated, although I have problems with the brand of free-market thinking which has become the trademark of Wired US. I find it simplistic and believe it elides complex social and political issues in favour of the (journalistic) end of presenting politics in the Nineties as a straightforward 'out with the old and in with the new' scenario. I also don't believe there is such a thing as a 'free market' in the quasi-transcendental sense used by some libertarian idealogues. The vision of a 'level playing field', in the interesting public-school sporting metaphor used by British libertarian conservatives, is a misleading one, implying that if certain obstacles were removed (usually government regulation) the market would self-organise into an optimal form which would work for the benefit of everybody. This notion of freedom is skewed, not because markets don't self organise - they do, and hence are far more responsive to real conditions than state-centric command structures - but because the definition of what constitutes an obstacle to self-organisation, and the explicitly theological notion of 'perfect competition', the infinitely far-off point towards which the removal of obstacles is aimed, are not fixed, but deployed in fuzzy and dubious way to suit a ragbag of political ends. Nevertheless, regardless of the frettings of social scientists who like to keep mathematics and politics safely separated, the global economy is a complex non-linear dynamical system - a self-reinforcing system which has numerous emergent properties. This means, not that it is some transcendental entity to which we are all asked to submit - as Richard Barbrook, for example, misleadingly likes to contend (he does much the same thing with the idea of the meme, and is wrong for much the same reasons) - but is the total expression of the unimaginable number of economic decisions which we, singly and in groups, make every day. It's worth spelling out some common misconceptions which arise concerning the meaning of the word 'market' in this context. Perhaps, so as not to produce a misleading idea of homogeneity and unity, it is better to think of the global economy not as a singular thing, but as an assemblage, a cluster or colony of systems. It is not a smoothly functioning efficient machine, but a vast jumble of processes, actions and decisions, which effect each other in unimaginably complex (but not in principle unknowable) ways. Listening to certain cultural theorists, you get the impression they believe the world operates according to a duality - the market (capitalism), and the not-market (defined usually as state capital directed according to ethical dictates). This is simply untrue. To mangle Derrida, 'il n'y a pas de hors-marche'. Economic decisions, whether they originate inside or outside a State machine, feed into and out of the global complex market system. They constitute part of that aggregate. Nor is 'the economy' some transcendental realm separate from or dictating to other aspects of the global complex system of people, materials and ideas. It is a concept abstracted for functional reasons from the global process - which, with tongue only slightly in cheek, you could define as everything which happens everywhere all the time. There is a level on which everything is thinkable in terms of the movement of matter and energy. It's what Deleuze and Guattari spent their lifetimes theorising, what Delanda calls 'learning from lava', and what Barbrook, Mark Dery and others mistake for a crude scientific determinism that negates the possibility of political action. Government in the 1990's, more or less explicitly in the States which collectively identify as 'the West', is largely concerned with attempts to produce certain outcomes within the global economic system. You could think of this as a non-linear control problem - actions taken to influence the economy can produce results which vary enormously with minimal variation in those actions. That is to say, putting 0.5% or 1.5% on the rate of UK income tax may have an effect disproportionate to the 1% variation in those inputs. States, significant actors within the global economy, try and manipulate it to get what they want - low inflation, low unemployment, prosperity for their citizens, confusion to their enemies. This is routinely presented to the populace as a traditional control problem - as if the State was outside the system it was controlling, had a perfect (or at least good) overall view of it, and the tools to do what it was promising to do - as if it knew what would happen to all variables when it put 1% on the income tax rate. States do control enough capital (and have other tools, like regulation, national borders and guns) to create big waves in the global economic pond. They are powerful and highly specialised economic actors. Yet they are still located within the global system. They have crude tools to manipulate the economy within the physical space they control (money supply, public sector borrowing, and so on). However, as recent events in Europe concerning various EU nations' attempts to stay within the terms of the ERM (European Exchange Rate Mechanism) have shown, such top-down control, even over important economic variables like relative currency values, is impossible to maintain. What does this mean? Bluntly, that you can't expect State systems to do things which are impossible to do, even when governments themselves swear blind to their voters that they are able to do those things, and even when we desperately wish for a mechanism to ensure that ethical imperatives drive politics, rather than the messy, sometimes callous pragmatism of market structures. Economic control (whether attempted for ethical reasons, or for reasons of profit) is restricted by the existence of all economic actors within a vast complex system. Even the biggest government on earth cannot rationally distribute wealth for the good of all. Soviet State Communism was the largest experiment in top-down control and rational planning ever. It seems fairly uncontentious to say it was a manifest failure. So, we must accept that, in these terms, we all live within 'the market'. It is a phenomenon more like the weather than a giant oligarchic conspiracy to oppress the people . Compelling though the narrative is of a definable group of villains maintaining their social position at the expense of the majority, it's not (except perhaps in particular local situations) a story which reflects the real nature of events. How many people would you have to shoot, come the Revolution, for complicity in global capitalism? All stock brokers? Everyone who works in a bank? Everyone who goes shopping? Effete academic distaste for those working in the so-called 'private sector' does not constitute an adequate analysis. Social theorists on the Left must start to take a far more sophisticated view of market economics if their work is to be more than a kind of intellectual wish-fulfilment fantasy. This does not mean we must immediately abandon any attempt to regulate companies or set up social welfare programmes, or that we must consider politics as no more than a subset of economics. It does mean that the cliched opposition between state capital (rationally disbursed by a notionally democratic system) and market capital (selfishly co-opted by men with cigars in top hats) which seems to govern much technocultural debate, needs to be refined if we are to analyse the real situation in which we find ourselves. This requires more than an appeal to a notion of a 'mixed economy' where State and public sectors control different areas, with the State being appealed to as an economic moral agent ( a kind of bureaucratic angel) whenever things go wrong. We need to reconceptualise the creaky old left/right socialist/capitalist axis around which politics has been conducted for much of this century. It no longer makes any sense. My instinct is that the libertarian - communitarian opposition conveys a lot more information about the current worldwide political landscape. These might be considered 'negative' reasons for looking at market-oriented solutions to social problems. However it's not simply a case of accepting some element of market economics because there's a limit to what the State can achieve. Top-down command and bottom up emergence are polar opposites. The latter approach - which is the only one which seems to make sense when dealing with any complex system like an economy - demands that control be exercised heuristically - that is to say, in terms of a local, pragmatic response to immediate situations. Hard and fast positions which propose to dictate courses of action under any and all circumstances - ideologies in the old nineteenth and twentieth century mode - are redundant in the face of a constantly mutating complex system to which the would-be controller is immanent rather than transcendent. So neither a Marxist teleology nor some supposedly 'Californian' vision of transcendental freedom are appropriate. Both fall into the trap of proposing a type of totalising prediction and control which it is not possible to exercise. Political economy at the end of the millennium is best thought of as an engineering problem - of controlling economies by allowing them to optimise themselves through self-organisation, of nudging them off sub-optimal attractors when they become trapped there, indeed of learning the craft of steering paths through the global economy without perfect knowledge, long term predictive capability or total control over outcomes. This is not a denial of politics. It is simply a set of heuristics by which politics should proceed. Technology and Efficiency When Wired is criticised for its optimism about technology, a counter-vision is usually proposed of a nightmarish workplace world where information technology is used to police the minutiae of daily life, where privacy is ended, where individuality and human rhythms count for nothing and people are no more than circuits in a giant machine. It's essentially a modernist trope, derived from the mid-century debates about mass culture, production-line manufacturing