Geert Lovink on Sun, 5 Jan 97 11:35 MET


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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