Review: Cyberfutures, Culture and Politics on the Information Superhighway ed. by Ziauddin Sardar and Jerome R. Ravitz, NYU Pr, Washington Square, NY: 1996. ISBN: 0-8147-8058-X (paper); 0-8147-8059-8 (cloth).

 

 

Cyberia or Cyburbia?

 

 

“Desktop Supersystems” Now everyone can afford today’s 200 MHZ 6x86 and Pentium supersystems! Prices $2,599 to $3,788. (PC Computing, Nov. 1996)

 

 

The most fundamental questions we can ask ourselves are questions that contain personal pronouns. Who am I? Who are we? Who are they? Who is anyone other than those we mean by “we” and “they”? And the most universal of such pronouns: who do we include in “everyone”? Is it really all? Rarely. Some then, certainly, but not all. And who we include and exclude provides answers that first question as well.

 

The number of people living in absolute poverty is increasing by nearly 25 million a year. This calculation is based on the World Bank and the United Nations definition of absolute poverty: those people whose incomes are no more than $370 a year. The number of people currently living in absolute poverty is roughly 1.3 billion. 67,000 people each day “join the ranks of the world’s poor” (making less than a dollar a day); 19,917,149 since Jan 17, 1996.            —http://www.cityvote.org/millennium/g2000r/poverty.html

 

Not these. These are other than “we,” the “everyone” who can afford $3,000 for a new, but soon to be obsolete, computer. These poorpeople,  a single word being necessary for their poverty is a permanent condition, are not everyone, just as this pronoun is a single word, not every one, and certainly not every one of us. Who then? Not these, not those even poorer. Not those poorpeople in Zaire. Despite the fact that Zaire is a wealthy country, it is full of poorpeople. It is rich in deposits of cobalt, copper, and diamonds and rich in its agricultural lands, clean water, and inexpensive electric power. But the World Bank in 1992 ranked it as the world's 12th poorest country, with income of $220 per capita. This, of course, before the civil war that has further impoverished the population, making more than a million people homeless, with no income at all. Not these. These are not part of “everyone.”

What about the readers of the magazine, PC Computing? According to the latest census data, the median income of households in 1995 was $34,076. Are these the “everyone” who can afford to dispose of ten percent of their gross income for not just a super system but a “supersystem”? Is the language used to hype the computer (not to sell it since this statement is not from a sales brochure but from an information magazine), is this language the same as the language that once meant what it said: “Everyone is created equal...” and “We the people...”? Again, obviously not. But what then? Who is this “everyone”? It is the everyone of the Web. It is the same everyone created by the computer industry, not the computer makers but the industry, not the supersystems industry but the super-structure industry, the ideological industry of all the computer enthusiasts who do not, and perhaps cannot, see that their language has been taken over by the machine.

Cyberfutures, Culture and Politics on the Information Superhighway ed. by Ziauddin Sardar and Jerome R. Ravitz attempts to answer some of the most important questions raised by the creation of computerized online communication. The editors and contributors begin a conversation, but the beginning is unlikely to turn into a dialogue because those who are able to engage them are not inclined to do so or are unable to do so, and such a conversation that is not also a dialogue is no conversation at all.

From their Introduction they state that “We are now getting a first taste of ‘Cyberia’—the new civilization emerging through human-computer interface and mediation” (1). That word “interface,” our language, the very heart of social organization, has been given over to the computer. In spite of these authors’ critical awareness of the threat the computer poses to social organization, their language is the machine’s. One of the striking features of any technology is that it is necessary to use the tools of that technology to critique it, and by the time such a critique is made, let alone heeded, the technology has triumphed. We can only critique the destructive effects of writing through writing, the computer through the tools of the computer. And the language of the computer infects the language used to critique it. All technologies are thus viral.

George Spencer in the chapter “Microcybernetics as the Meta-Technology of Pure Control” cites an expert on cybernetics to reenforce his point about the difference between computer technology and past technologies; his sub-chapter title is “Why ‘Control’ is a Meta-Technology without Discernible Limits.” He cites H.A.Simon from a 1980 article: “The computer is a device endowed with powers of utmost generality for processing symbols...” (67). This processing ability is not new, however. Spencer ignores the fact that this generality is exactly the quality that gave alphabetic writing the advantage (for commercial enterprise) over syllabaries, pictographic and ideographic languages. What we need to look at is the difference, the essential difference, between the computer and literacy not the qualities they both share. But to continue with the language of this introduction.

“Civilization.” And the civilization is not new, nor is it particularly civil. And the name, “Cyberia,” the association suggesting “Siberia” is not accurate or appropriate. It is not the Gulag that the computer world should be compared with, for this newly formed social space is not a labor camp but a laborless camp, not a forced choice made for individuals but a choice individuals freely make, at least initially, at least a choice made under the illusion of choice, perhaps a simulation of choice, but a choice nevertheless and one made with a vengeance. “Cyberia” is at once too harsh and not harsh enough in evoking an analogy that characterizes this new inhabitation, which is not an inhibited space, an inhibitation, which is one of the main reasons for the choice to join, to a part of this Web connecting one of “everyone” to other “everyones,” no limits, no inhibitions. The online computer inhabitation is a voluntary servitude, a place of simulated pleasure, an environment where living people are replaced with walking talking dead ones, a place where human values, all that is messy and alive and vibrantly human, are replaced with sterile, orderly lifeless ones, all conforming to an elaborate and detailed scale of consumer-based ideals of what it means to be human, where those others, those poorpeople do not inhabit. Instead of Cyberia, it is a universal Levittown of the simulated soul, a place where “The Revenge of the Nerds” is the secret untold story that isn’t told because it is lived,  the story of universal revenge upon the unwashed, a place where white upperclass males, boys with toys ever so fastandpowerful, play and play at being involved and important. It is not Cyberia, but something more mundane and becoming more universal and more frighteningly mind altering; it is Cyburbia.

The authors are aware of the change in thinking that the computer revolution has forced (seduction is a force), upon not only its users but also by those who it ostensively serves:

For this new technology only starts by transferring the way we communicate with each other, play, receive information and learn. Our ideas of human interactions, even of our relationships with our bodies (and indeed with those of others) are bound to be transformed. How we see and value ourselves as persons, in relation to others and to society through ‘work’, and also up for drastic change. (1)

 

Fragmentation of culture. Alienation of individuals. Fracturing of social organization, community existing only as a form of nostalgia. The developing of multiple personalities out of the ability developed from a technology that makes possible communication outside of immediate space and time constraints. Attention directed away from wisdom to wish fulfillment. The denigration of lived experience in favor of simulated novelty. “Make it new,” the sign not just of the avante-garde but of every industry: cultural, critical, or credit. There is nothing in the authors’ statement that hasn’t been said of the effects of literacy; in many ways this is the same old alarmist rhetoric recorded many times throughout the centuries from Plato to Augustine to the past generation’s teeth gnashing about the effects of television (while all the time clicking their way through the channels and making TV Guide the nation’s real Bible). But if the computer is “only” effecting a change similar to that made on humankind by literacy, how is it any different? If there is alarm, what is the cause for it? The cause must relate to the essential difference between literacy which produced the book and the literacy of the Net. And the difference is Speed and Power and Control.

The book, unlike the computer, is inherently democratic. The book is not only the most permanent storage and transmission technology yet devised, it is also the one requiring the least capital to produce and distribute and consume. But the computer? It is capital intensive and, equally as importantly, unendingly capital intensive, making both production and consumption dependent on Big Capital. And the effects are inherently anti-social, anti-community, fragmentary to the point of atomization, and leading inevitably to a re-enforcing and exaggeration of the class structure.

Ziauddin Sandar in Chapter One, “Cyberspace as the Darker Side of the West,” compares the conquest of cyberspace with the conquest of the New World inaugurated by Christopher Columbus, but it is a false analogy, though a compelling one. This new technology has enacted not an imperial conquest but a self-conquest. The result is not an ignoble assault on culture or a noble resistance. The result is more akin to the scene in frontier America where the culturally devastated and impoverished Indians would gather outside the gates of the forts begging for handouts. Only this time the power is Bill Gates. The analogy is stretched, the pun forced. But sense is there.

 Sandar is critical of right-wingers like Alvin Toffler, Newt’s boy (or is Newt Toffler’s?), but he misses the point. Follow the puns: NEW + NET= NEWT. The Net / Newt is inherently elitist, class biased, and culturally skewed in favor of wealth and privilege and control. The distinction between left and right mean little. Clinton and Gore (on)line up with Dole and Gingrich promoting the Net just as they did with the selling of GATT and NAFTA.

Sandar compares Cyberia to the Gulf War, Nintendo to safe bombs, the simulated and sanitized television war, a kind of anti-Vietnam War, the turning of the Vietnam Syndrome into a universal video game. But his critique is typically liberal; he makes comparison about the  allocation of resources such as: “One can feed a family of four in Bangladesh for a whole year for that sort of money [upgrades to keep computer ‘current’] (23). An average North American college student’s beer budget can do the same. This critique doesn’t strike at the heart (operating system, micro-chip, mother board) of the matter (virtual matter, of course).

At the heart of the friendly virtual beast is desire, maximum desire for minimum size: nano-technology. First the micro-chip, then the realization of every social transformer’s dream, the New Man:

Beyond that lies the possibility of a whole new breed of ‘human’: in the first instance it will be more like Digital Man than Hologram Man. Once the processor circuitry miniaturizes enough, it could be put inside a tiny rice-shaped piece of biocompatible material and placed under the skin. This is happening now to identify lost cats and dogs. Soon, criminals may be tagged like that. Then children—so that those kidnaped can be traced. Then everyone. (37)

 

When I read this passage about this easily attained extension of existing technology, I thought of an article handed to me by a couple prisoners in the English class I teach at a nearby federal penitentiary. They wanted me to research the veracity of the article’s claim that prisoners were being used by IBM to test its chip implants that would not only regulate aggressive behavior but would also record the subject’s interaction with others, leaving a recoverable data trail of the person’s contacts with other people, the ultimate (and very inexpensive) way to control convicts and the natural electronic extension of the logic of the penal system: the foolproof snitch.

I told them I would try to distinguish the truth from the justifiable paranoia; after all, they were more aware than I of the experiments done on prisoners by scientists here and in Nazi Germany. I told them that there are all too many examples of science in the service of economic expediency. And I also told them about how easily human values are surrendered to ideological ones, making all of us uneasy when thinking about how likely it is true that such experiments on prisoners are more frequent and more insidious than those mentioned on the memo purported to be leaked from IBM. I mentioned an incident reported from a newspaper I had just read:

One SOA [School of the Americas] Panama graduate said on camera that he was taught torture techniques using homeless people rounded up on Panama’s streets. He said homeless people were brought to the class as human guinea pigs to test techniques for obtaining maximum information—through electric shock and other methods—without causing death.

— “Pentagon admits use of torture manuals” National Catholic Reporter, Oct. 4/96, p.3.

Street kids in Brazil used as target practice by the city police. Helicopters in Guatemala using the bright colors of the costumes of the Indians to sight their machine guns upon. The death squads in El Salvador furnished with the latest computers and the latest torture equipment, provided free by the USA. These prisoners needed no lesson from me on the lack of rights of the helpless and vulnerable. What baffled them, though, and what baffles me still, is what working definition of “everyone” makes it possible for these abuses to continue? Is the definition used by the torturers and the mad scientists significantly different from the definition used by the mad enthusiasts for PC Computing?

The computer has been sold as a “paperless office.” What is more appropriate is its true aim, creating a “peopleless office.” The computer has displaced many thousands, millions, of workers, so much so that a more accurate definition, or at least a working definition, of a disposable person is one not computer savoy enough to be positioned at least one skill in advance of the next software upgrade or, more simply, one not connected to the Net.

Some social critics and political reactionaries worry that people might become more and more like machines. No worry. We are already cyborgs. To some real degree we became machines when we used any device that extended our abilities beyond the reach of the human body, our seeing, our voice. But until now we had been able to keep these machines under some kind of human control. But the commercial value of the computer is that it is not limited by human value, which is the only value that will keep the machine from exacting complete control for Capital.

In chapter three, “Microcybernetics as the Meta-Technology of Pure Control,” George Spencer deals briefly with the most noted commercial feature of the computer: planned obsolescence. The computer industry is so highly developed in its need for new and faster and more powerful processing that it has taken the decision-making out of the hands of individuals and, like all other human values, reduced choice to an inevitable consequence of the technology itself. A computer without such self-generating desire is not a computer. And the benefits of such desire? The claim is for increased productivity. If such a claim were true, or truly based on human value, then why do we not now have a twenty-hour work week? Remember the Haymarket Martyrs. It’s been over a hundred years since they swung by the neck until dead for fighting for an eight hour work day. Why in an age of unprecedented increases in productivity is their an increase in child labor? In convict labor? But more importantly for the purposes of this examination of the seduction of the computer, why when everyone is aware of how the computer has displaced factory workers, service workers, do educators, artists, writers, entertainers, who will certainly be next on the list of those soon to be made obsolete, why do they so readily embrace the very technology that will make them an anachronism?

Much has been made of the value of the computer for education, especially the Net, Clinton’s campaign promise to “wire” the nation’s schools being the most public one. Mirroring the enthusiasm of Business, using the computer to increase productivity and thereby reduce human cost (labor, the number of people working), it is Education, the Education Industry, that has given the Net its biggest reason for being viewed favorably even by people who are mystified by every advertiser’s “dot com” reference. Education is being used the way it was used to get the public to turn the numbers racket into the lotteries. Any technology purchase is justifiable for “the kids.” But aside from Education providing Apple computers with their market entry strategy, the computer and especially the Net are an extension, and an acceleration, of the basic advantage the computer offers to managers: reduction of cost by reduction of human labor. If one teacher can teach a dozen students through distant learning, that same teacher can teach a million. All that is required is enough minimum wage assistants, who can be located anywhere in the world, to sort, arrange, grade the outcome assessments, quantified for easy evaluation. When real opportunity has failed to motivate students, reflection, weighing future options, and motivation for citizenship and community and individual enhancement, whether monetary or personal, are replaced by seduction. And the most powerful seduction remains variations on the Horatio Alger story, with the promise that everyone and anyone with a faster computer can start a small business that will one day replace Disney, CNN, Microsoft.

The best writing in the book, most politically directed to the implications of the Net,  is chapter seven, “Is There a New Political Paradigm Lurking in Cyberspace?” by Jay Kinney. Kinney hones in on one of the chief engines of desire evoked by the computer, the promotion and the promise of individuality. As Kinney sees it, this individualism is no more real than anything else on the Net:

Cyberspace is full of armchair mavericks and eccentric ideologues. But whatever the gyrations of political differences and originality among them, the onrushing logic of the integration of the world economy and world politics into a single unified whole may overshadow those distinctions, just as the boundaries between nations are becoming anachronistic in the face of the ‘global marketplace’. (144)

The people who control information and the wealth and power have no interest in and have the ultimate tolerance for virtual individuality. And access to information that makes such individuality appear unique is equally of no interest because it is of no threat:

No matter how much legislative information is available online, it is basically superfluous if you don’t have the time or desire to access it, digest it and weigh your options. Unfortunately the network-induced collapse of time doesn’t deliver more time—it takes it away by speeding everything up. This quickening is grand for those who are poised to leap on each new innovation and exploit it profitably, but it doesn’t help much in building a new politics which goes beyond blowing off steam in alt.conspiracy. (149)

 

What Kinney does not seem to realize, or perhaps is unwilling to face up to, are the consequences of Cyburbia, they being as hard to accept as it would have been for someone emersed within an oral culture contacted by explorers fully equipped with their maps, Bible, and rifles, not to mention those smallpox infected blankets and firewater. There are ways to resist Cyberia, but there is no effective defense against Cyburbia. Hackers become consultants, at play in the fields of Microsoft. And the initial enthusiasm of free access becomes a distant memory of a golden age that is used by the former major players to keep the system rolling along:

The whole thrust of the major players, video-on-demand, totally wired, multimedia, content-provider blitzkrieg is an entertainment-saturated environment that leaves little time or space for debate and studied thought about ‘issues’. The increasingly complex decisions required by a global civilization will likely be left t the policy wonks, CEOs and the institutional minions who keep the whole ball rolling anyway. Choices like “more” or “less” government become obsolete when the technocratic, quasi-parental, service-marked colossus reduces your decision-making capacity to the level of ‘would you like milk or sugar with your Prozac?’ (152)

 

Literacy is necessary to critique and overcome some of the limits of literacy (hence the appeal of the global village, having lost the real one). While the computer is necessary to critique the computer (Wendell Berry’s manual typewriter being the equivalent of a Randy Weaver’ double ought six?), is it possible that it can overcome its limits when all transactions are computer based?

If the Web makes for one world, virtual or real, then are not Clinton and Gingrich accelerating Marx’s prophecies for the eventual triumph of communism? Aside from the fact than almost no one thinks in these terms let alone talks this way, the computer makes it certain that the light at the end of the tunnel announcing the final triumph of the demise of capitalism is the searchlight of the prison tower. All the electronic media are biased toward perpetuating themselves in the service of mega-capitalism, making desire not exterior (needing the Hollywood apparatus to drive it) but intimate to its very functioning (the software demanding more RAM, more gigabytes of drive). And bringing the computer online only accelerates the desire. Serving wealth, the increasing concentration of wealth, Bill Gates being not a real person at all but nothing more than the shadow cast by the prison searchlight, the computer skews all communication toward itself and away from criticism. Critics become not wrong but boring, not subject to logic and reasoned discourse but ridicule; thought, unless linked to a flashing mobile phrase or icon, is not perceived let alone considered worth the time to take seriously.

Some human values have served to place wealth on notice that too much concentration and corruption and abuse have consequences. The people will eventually revolt. The castle will be stormed. The rascals thrown out. The fortresses leveled. Now the revolt will be measured in nano-seconds. Witness the brief bad image of CEOs who had their fifteen minutes of infamy when the press reported the mega-salaries they received for laying off thousands of workers and for the increase of the ever increasing gap in their salaries compared to the average employee. Equality, liberty, fraternity are not even a memory, for there is no memory in Cyburbia except random access measured in gigabytes.

Who is left to protest the concentration of power the computer serves? The Zapatistas, now attacked by the US military and the Mexican bankers, all under the guise of a war on drugs? Are these the last of the revolutionaries? The last of the warriors on Capital, barely literate, non-technological peasants? Or are they only props for performances by Rage Against the Machine? The Sixties taught us how easily revolution turns to fashion. (Though there are still some aging boomers who believe that rock & roll is protest music.) Again the puns point out the process: Fashion Ate Me, Fascinate me, fashion to fascism. And the Idea of revolt has been placed in service of Nintendo.

Social change based on human value, agitated for the perceived betterment of all people, for the real “everyone,” has been based on hope, on a perceived need for sacrifice of some of the present for the future. In a culture of no future, the light at the end of the tunnel becomes the blinking Javanimation of a big zero, an O that indicates the end of not only your bank account but the end of the imagination capable of confronting the online web of computer infomercial-nation.