Brian, > That's where the ambiguities lie. On > my view, the radical experiments of the Sixties and Seventies were > not misguided, yet they were partially absorbed into the new hegemony > of neoliberalism. That's why you have to be careful what you wish > for. Today it's time for more rebellion, society has to change again. > This time, the absorption of radical experiments will be our direct > responsibility.
� What you write is not only true for the radical experiments of the 60s and 70s, but also for those of the 90s and 2000s of which this list has historically been a part - critically, but nevertheless. If we only take Free Software/Open Source, Wikipedia, crypto activism, peer-to-peer file sharing, hacker� media� activism at large, then they all were driven by the same odd coalitions of the social left and right-wing libertarianism (in the U.S.: Ayn Randianism) that also characterized 60s counterculture. In more recent projects, for example crypto currencies, Randianism even seems to have taken the upper hand, serving as trailblazers for panoptical society of control technologies (blockchain) that are quickly adopted by big enterprises. These odd coalitions even characterized the Occupy movement, at least as I witnessed it in its initial weeks in NYC. But here's an obvious question: > The double punch of automation and > global supply chains has decimated the industrial working classes > without in any way abolishing work, and computer algorithms combined > with speech-recognition technologies are doing the same for the > middle-class professions. This perspective seems to have its historical origins in Keynes' 1930 essay "Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren" and its prediction of a 15-hour� work week thanks to automation; for the sake of completeness (for people reading this on Nettime), I'd also mention its influence on post-WWII Marxist sociologists like Henri Lefebvre, subsequently for the Parisian part of the Situationist International and its expection of a"leisure society". The thread was taken up by radical thinkers like Bob Black with his book "The Abolition of Work" in 1985, and now is on the table again with Graeber's and Srnicek/Williams' last books. > "Full automation" and "the end of work" are also naive ideas, both because capitalists have always used automation to� > disempower the working classes, On top of that, they are naive because they are (a) one-sidedly Western and (b) overoptimistic regarding the actual possibilities oftechnology and constraints of natural resources. The jobs that were abolished through automation - computing and robotics - have been replaced by the large-scale sweatshop and slave labor in Asia (hardware manufacturing) and Africa (natural resource mining). Without this labor, computers wouldn't be affordable enough to be mass commodities, without this resource exploitation, such as mining of rare metals, much of the electronics wouldn't even work. Through the news (and propaganda), we only see the spectacular successes and progress of robotics and artificial intelligence. We do not see what they can't do, where they fail, where deployment is labor-intensive on a maintenance level and therefore not economical. (One example: Google is currently dumping its spectacular AI robotics division Boston Dynamics Inc. because it hasn't been able to develop marketable products, never mind the fact that the Boston Dynamics YouTube videos have become standard demos for the today's advancement of robotics.) Too few people question prophecies like the "Singularity", too few activists ever got their hands dirty with hardware and software development - and manufacturing - to really grasp their complications. There is hardly a system that is more dependent on efficiency-optimized global supply chains, high investments into manufacturing capacities, economics of scale and, well, the neoliberal economic system as computer electronics. So far, their mainstream story is that of Hegelian progress. We lack informed critical cultural analysis of how frail these systems are, how quick technologies collapse, along with their associated research and know-how, when only one of their critical components (suc as: mass market demand, or natural resource supply, or cheap manufacturing) is removed. (An example with which many media creators will be familiar is the collapse of Kodak and analog film.) On top of that, we have gone through a period of what I would call "naive automation" in the last three decades - where critical infrastructures are run on critically flawed systems. Not only is the hardware resourcing, manufacturing and supply frail, but so is software engineering. We already live in a nightmare of buggy and insecure systems running on accumulated code cruft that nobody can properly maintain: not just PC software and mobile operating systems, but more importantly, such infrastructural systems as banking (last week, SWIFT has been hacked, this week, it has been revealed that practically all ATMs are insecure), insurances, power grids (including nuclear power - with the Stuxnet case showing only the tip of the iceberg), flood prevention systems (I've heard scary details about the network infrastructure of the Dutch national flood protection system...). Linda Hilfling is writing her PhD research on the patchy maintenance of 1970s Cobol code used by practically all Western banks for their core systems through ten thousands of programmers in India working for companies specialized on these jobs. Hardly "the end of work". The naive belief is that these technologies are still immature, so problems will solve themselves over time thanks to technological progress. This, of course, the standard answer and the very business model of the IT industry. The solution for broken code always has been more code to fix and patch up older code. But simple logic tells that the more code there is, the more complex and hence unpredictable a system becomes. - Stanislaw Lem beautifully illustrated this in 'The Futurological Congress' where people use psycho drugs called Mascons to mask physical flaws yet their side effects require to use another layer of Mascons to mask those side-effects, and so on. This exactly is happening with software and automation today. An informed conclusion would be that you should never automate critical infrastructures because, to quote Wendy Chun, new media/computational systems are inherently "leaky". Critical thinkers in the hacker community, like Rop Gonggrijp, addressed this years ago when they campaigned against the use of voting computers. The more automation there will be, the more the attribute "smart" will get prefixed to yet another (social or technological) system, the greater this nightmare. Aside from that, the utopia of automation seems to be ignorant of the hardware and resource costs. There seems to be a naive Hegelian belief in Moore's Law - which recently ended, and never was a law in the first place - and technological progress as matters of self-evidence. Here exactly lies the problem that the mistakes of the 1960s and 1990s are repeated in the 2010s: namely, in an uncritical alliance of radical post-work theories/activism with people like Rifkin - whose "Zero Marginal Cost Society" is a techno-Hegelian scenario that willfully ignores social, ecological and technological realities, the machine rooms and fuel cells of so-called information society. You write: > This requires both a knowledge of machines and a refusal of domination, including the domination of humanity over� > what are called "natural resources." The problem, of course,� being that increased automation does not spare natural resources, but means more use of them (energy, water, metals etc.). Which brings us back to Rifkin and his partial overlaps with Srnicek/Willliams: > What Rifkin sells, as a growth package for a future investment wave, is the model of a "Third Industrial Revolution" centered� > on solar power and computerized micro-manufacturing. His first insight is that localized electric power generated by wind� > mills and solar panels on everyone's property or rented roof is only practical when it is hooked up to a centrally� > managed smart power grid that can channel the surplus wherever it is needed. And this vision completely ignores the environmental and labor affordances of manufacturing (and maintaining/replacing) solar panels that are plagued with the same issues as other electronics manufacturing - and have already turned into the same sweatshop labor. It also ignores the great risk of so-called smart grids because they create a mutual dependency between energy and the Internet. (In a so-called smart grid, there is no energy supply without an Internet connection, and there is no Internet connection without energy, to describe the issue on its most simple level. The German book 'Offline' by Thomas Grüter devotes a whole chapter to this issue/risk.) And even if we leave these issues aside assuming, as we did since the introduction of nuclear energy, that technological progress will somehow fix them, the estimated 10% of CO2 toll of solar energy vs. conventional (gas/coal) energy amounts to nothing if these wins are eaten up by the data centers and electronic devices needed for global automation. > More importantly, Rifkin's strategic aim in calling for an investment wave centered on solar power, micro-manufacturing and smart grids is to undo the hegemony of the giant corporations, particularly the oil companies which are directly responsible for climate change and which also constitute the civilian component of military imperialism.� But here, Srnicek/Williams and accelerationism at large take the opposite stance to Rifkin, in their critique of "Folk Politics" of decentralization and localization. For me, this the strongest part of their book. The flaw in Rifkin, the Maker movement, co-ops and similar post-1960s economic visions is that they mix up decentralization with environmentalism. The hard truth is that, for example, a modern big furniture factory is significantly more environmentally and resource-friendly than a FabLab; and of course, a modern data center centrally hosting several thousand or million websites is environmentally more friendly than thousand or million micro servers in individual homes. There are questions whether organic farming really makes a large-scale ecological difference to conventional farming; while it involves less environmental pollution, it also has lower yield and therefore requires larger surfaces to be turned into agricultural land.� Maybe a first step to cut the unholy alliances of the 60s and 90s is to radically question "Folk Politics".� Florian
# distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
