[iDC] The Internet and control
Brian Holmes
brian.holmes at wanadoo.fr
Wed May 31 20:49:13 EDT 2006
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
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