Last week I attended a very interesting event entitled Closing Net, organised by an intriguing group of young writers and activists, Future Human For me, it crystallised some issues around technocracy, computers and the Internet that, amongst the many debates in the politics of technology, are amongst the trickiest for Luddites to deal with.
The straightforward aspect of the meeting was the many examples given that anything you do on the internet can be easily tracked by governments, criminals (and of course, big business, although little was said about that). There is no security from the growing army of hackers turned computer security consultants, if you’re doing something annoying enough to their masters. As one such, Daniel Cuthbert, put it simply, “If I was doing something illegal I would use pen and paper”, a point reluctantly echoed by Samuel Carlisle, founder of Sukey, the iPhone app designed to help demonstrators avoid being kettled, now heavily involved in Occupy LSX. Last Thursday’s news of the conviction of EDF executives for hacking Greenpeace staff only drives the point home further. As Daniel Cuthbert pointed out, the powers that be own the whole infrastructure of the internet, of course they’re going to use it to surveil us. For every example of revolutions supposedly dependent on Twitter, and of governments who try to suppress them by blocking sites or the whole net, there is another government in the same position using Facebook as the Syrian government has done, to spread black propaganda and surveil activists.
But wait, I hear you say, ‘You Luddites always want to blame technology. But the real problem is the social and economic structures. Computers are just tools, we can use them for good or bad purposes.’ We have been hearing the same arguments from GM food scientists for the last 15 years and my answer is, sorry, that’s just not good enough; and it’s not good enough in a very particular way, a liberal way.
To understand that, we need to take a look at where computers come from. It all got off to a great start with the granddaddies of computing, IBM (International Business Machines, for those of you who’ve forgotten), and their empowering of the Nazi death machine. The next great leap forward was Allan Turing and his much-idolised code-breaking achievements, as part of the British war effort. In the 1950’s, cybernetics really got going properly. My light bulb moment at the meeting was when Agnes Callamard, the director of Article 19, a quintessentially liberal human rights organisation, casually used the expression ‘cyber-freedom’. Wait a minute, I thought, there’s a wonderful piece of doublethink. For cybernetics is the science of control, the control of complex systems. What kind of freedom is that? (For answer, see below.)
In the 1960s and 70s, and most of the 1980s, everyone (not just radical technology critics) knew that computers were instruments of control, used by the military, state bureaucracies, and multinational corporations to extend their power over the world by integrating and managing vast amounts of information and people. As Adam Curtis showed in his recent documentary series, All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, this gave rise in America to the liberal technocratic hope that computers could be used to manage the instability and conflict in the world (i.e. to dispense with politics), allowing individuals to flourish in freedom and plenty. This ‘Californian ideology’, as it became known, was heavily promoted by the founders of Silicon Valley, and by the young Alan Greenspan, later the Chair of the US Federal Reserve and manager of the world’s finances.
So ‘cyber-freedom’ is the same kind of freedom that liberals have hoped for since the inception of our Scientific Capitalist civilisation, in the Scientific Revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries. The ‘natural philosophers’ of that period were completely clear that the function of science was to control nature, to penetrate its female secrets and subdue its unpredictable wanton energies. Ever since, the control of nature has been seen as key to creating progress and profit, as well as the ability to control society through what Foucault called biopower. In this world, freedom is defined as freedom from the constraints imposed upon humans by being part of nature and subject to its diseases, death and disaster. Such a civilisation must inevitably develop cybernetics and the computer, and associate it, paradoxically, with freedom.
In the 1960s, the US military developed the protocols that led to the internet, but its real value, and the reason it exists now as it does, is the value it has for transnational corporations and financial speculators. By allowing corporations to communicate rapidly between their headquarters and their many outposts, a potentially unstable entity can be integrated into a single system controllable from the centre. Real globalisation, the integration of the entire world into a single system, becomes possible.
None of this means that we cannot use computers for good purposes, and I certainly think it’s much more possible with computers than with GM. People often find a way to put corporate technology to good uses – of course that’s what I’m trying to do by posting this blog on the Internet. But what it does point to is the need to be mindful of the pitfalls of liberal technocracy and the need to be conscious of the dangers of the tools we are using. Though it’s probably unfair to pick on Samuel Carlisle in this respect, I’m going to because some of his comments illustrated perfectly the dangers for radical politics of this approach.
Carlisle had a lot to say about how Sukey works and how they’re doing exciting things with computers at Occupy LSX. But the alarm bells really started ringing when he strayed into the areas I know something about. In response to the question about ‘biohacking’ and the use of genome sequence data, he blithely advised us to go to a meeting of biohackers in London, where they’re experimenting with creating algal biofuels. If he knew any biology, the first thing he would have said is that organisms are simply not programmable like computers. The whole system is different from a computer and our understanding of it is still in its infancy. We can do without biohackers in this situation, the corporations are bad enough. To find out more about the dangers of biofuels, a classic technical fix, look here. Carlisle followed this by waxing lyrical about some software he found on the internet which helped him to grow his veggies by scientifically classifying his soil, climate etc, and how this could be used by African farmers. This is not the place for a lecture about the history of well-meaning efforts by Western scientists to help Third World farmers, try Vandana Shiva on ‘The Violence of the Green Revolution’.
What his remarks on biology reminded me is that the technofix mindset always wears a smiling face, and is tremendously seductive with its messages of hope, because its devotees sincerely believe they’re doing good. Liberals, who tend to unquestioningly equate technology and the control of nature with progress, are tremendously vulnerable to such technofixes. But we mustn’t let that mindset take over radical politics, and there is a real danger that it can. Technocracy is not just a system of power but a whole set of cultural values, which have become more and more pervasive over the last twenty years as our lives have become saturated with computers and digital gadgets. I recently picked up an Occupy LSX leaflet that consisted of a quote from Gandhi followed by six, count them, six Occupy urls. There is a rich irony in this, since Gandhi, as was recently pointed out in the magnificent special issue of The Land on the Luddites 200th anniversary, was the world’s most successful Luddite. “What I object to is the ‘craze’ for machinery, not machinery as such…. Nehru wants industrialisation if it is socialised it would be free from the evils of capitalism. My own view is that the evils are inherent in industrialism, and no amount of socialisation can eradicate them.”
For all its virtues, Sukey is also a technical fix, and I suspect the police will soon find a way to outflank it, in the next step in the technological arms race. Do we really want to get into such an arms race? I think we won’t beat the forces of capitalist technocracy by devising better, ‘smarter’ systems to outwit their systems, especially since they own the infrastructure i.e. the playing field. ‘Hacktivism’, despite its glamour is not the future of radical politics.
Unfortunately, computers are not just innocent tools that we can use any way we like: the capitalist social relations that gave rise to them are built into them, and to a considerable degree they force us to do things their way. The Luddites, in a way, had it easy, because the way the shearing frames and power looms forced people to work to their rhythms, and the way they represented the interests of the bosses was obvious for all to see. Computers are much more seductive and sexy, and the way we are manipulated through them is harder to put your finger on, which is why we have to be all the more vigilant. But they are still capital, and one of their tendencies is to turn us all into little capitalist technocrats, just as Margaret Thatcher wanted.
One of the meanings of the word Commonality that the Luddites used to reject the machines of the Industrial Revolution is of human interactiveness and sociability, our power to create common bonds and solidarity. In 1812 their communities were being destroyed by the combination of free-market capitalism and machinery; is it so different today? It’s true that computers and the Internet allow you to communicate with many more people, but do they really create community, or do they further the tendency to atomise society so that we all become dependent upon the market? This is critical for any radical politics that seeks to reverse these tendencies and build real communities of resistance, as the Luddites did. In my view you only build real solidarity face to face, so my advice is this: get off your computer and onto the streets! And when you get down to your local Occupy, do yourself and the movement a favour: don’t get back on your computer, talk to a person instead! Or, as the Greens used to say, ‘Think global, act local.’
