New Enclosures; New Faults in the Walls:
Technology’s influence in spatial, temporal and social relations and its potential
as a tool for social change.
Andy Abbott
It’s not the technology that’s scary. It’s what it does to the relations between
people…that’s scary.1
Introduction
This essay intends to explore the relationship between technology, with emphasis on
‘new technologies’ including the Internet and telecommunications, and social relations
between humans. I hope to illustrate through both my own anecdotal experience and
existing socio-political theory that technology has greatly affected our perception and
understanding of ownership, space, time and motion and that this has led to a state of
disarray and confusion in the way in which we interact with one another and engage with
our environment. In the latter half of this essay I will develop this notion to highlight how
this same instability in perceived spatio-temporal relations may be harnessed as an
opportunity to subvert the trend of growing alienation that has characterised life under
capitalism.
Throughout the essay, and in order to respect space constrictions, I will be returning to
some key texts.2 The partiality displayed towards these writers is not there to suggest
that these are the original, or the only, contributions to a discussion around the social
consequences of changes in technology, but rather reflect a necessary selectivity in
reference material on my part.
The body of this essay will be divided into three main parts, each dealing with a
specific nuance of technology’s relationship to our social and environmental
engagement. These sections are structured to reflect my experience in a
personal routine encounter with technology – my train journey to work – which is
used as a structural and allegorical device.
1
Robert M Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, (London: Corgi Books, 1974),
p.148.
2
These include critiques of technology by John Zerzan and Paul Virilio, socio-spatial theory
provided by Lefebvre (in this instance read through David Harvey), and reference to the
overarching critiques of capitalism as a technological force outlined by Marx and later the
Situationist International (especially Guy Debord’s writing on ‘the spectacle’). The more optimistic
assessments of new technologies and their implications within capitalism come from Toni Negri
(through Nick Dyer-Witheford) and McKenzie Wark, with input and contextualisation from Retort.
1
Part 1
Enclosure
In order to ride the train to work I wake earlier than usual, rush out of the house to arrive
at the platform, which is three minutes walk from my house, on time. There I can expect
an obligatory two-minute delay before the train pulls up at the platform. There is a short,
anticipative pause before the door mechanism is illuminated, which the passenger
nearest the door will already have depressed, and the carriage doors slide open. A few
passengers, now arrived at their destination, exit the train, allowing the rest of us to push
and cram our way into the carriage. Then the doors shut and we are safely and securely
inside.
Many writers have chosen to begin critiques of the mechanisms and experiences of life
under capitalism with descriptions of train journeys to work.3 The engine-powered, metalbox enclosures we willingly enter daily at least serve some poetic purpose. There are a
greater number of words written, however, about the broader social enclosures we enter
daily, and which it is suggested we do so unknowingly.
In ‘Society of the Spectacle’, Guy Debord’s critique of the covert and not-so-covert
apparatus of capitalist production, urbanism itself is described as the ‘technology of
separation.’ The way in which our cities are planned, and the experiences that are
manufactured within them ready for us to consume, are tools of the state employed to
keep us enclosed in a suit of conventional behaviours, and docile enough not to question
this penning. In the same manner in which the spectacle is ‘not a collection of images’
but a ‘social relation between people mediated by images’4 so too we can see the
spectacle as both a technology and the implementation of this technology. The relations
enforced by modern urbanism (a technology) delineate a space, or an ideological cage,
that we cannot escape, nor realise we are entrapped in,
Nothing outside the cage had any importance, because nothing else existed
anymore. They stayed in the cage estranged from everything except the
cage, without even a flicker of desire for anything outside the bars.5
Marx noted that in earlier, more transparent times - where the mechanisms of
domination had a more visible quality - the attempts to escape the chains of capital had
often realised themselves in direct assaults against technology,
They (the proletariat) direct their attacks not against the bourgeois conditions
of production, but against the instruments of production themselves; they
destroy imported wares that compete with their labour, they smash to pieces
3
Most memorable for me is Raoul Vaneigem’s physical description in ‘The Decline and Fall of
Work’ outlining the early morning crush and jostle endured before being ejected into any one of a
number of interchangeable, characterless stations, Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday
Life (London: Left Bank Books and Rebel Press, 1983), p.37.
4
Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, trans Ken Knabb (London: Rebel Press, 2005), p.7.
5
Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life (London: Left Bank Books and Rebel Press,
1983), p.25.
2
machinery, they set factories ablaze, they seek to restore by force the
vanished status of the workman of the Middle Ages.6
Similarly literature from this era of burgeoning mass industrialisation, and accounts of
actual events including the Luddite uprisings, are peppered with what we might term
anti-technological or at the very least technologically-sceptical concepts. The awareness
of technology’s capacity to both replace and dominate its makers is best expressed in
Samuel Butler’s Utopian (or distopian) novel ‘Erewhon’ first published in 1872 which
outlines, and astutely predicts, the submissive relationship between man and machine
characterising technologically-determined societies, ‘how many men at this hour are
living in a state of bondage to the machines? How many spend their whole lives from the
cradle to the grave, in tending them by night and day?’7
French artist and ‘thinker in information technology and global media’, Paul Virilio, is one
of the writers working to encompass this historical precedent in evaluations of the social
impact of new technologies,
Unless we are deliberately forgetting the invention of the shipwreck in the
invention of the ship or the rail accident in the advent of the train, we need to
examine the hidden face of new technologies, before that face reveals itself
in spite of us.8
I will return to Virilio’s specific ideas later in the essay but for now it is worth taking note
of his warning and description of technology as having a ‘hidden face’. Often, the
unwanted side effects of technology and the use of technology are so often ignored or
buried that, like a life beyond capitalism, we are incapable of thinking outside of the
enclosure it creates. John Zerzan takes this point of view to its radical conclusion in his
anarcho-primitivist critiques of civilization and the various technologies that have
ensured its dominance in human life.
One of the technologies outlined by Zerzan that acts as a useful entrance point into his
thinking is his critique of language. Zerzan describes language as a tool, or a form of
technology, that, whilst allowing the reification of our ability to communicate with one
another, has done so at the expense of genuine engagement in the world.9
Like ideology, language creates false separations and objectifications
through its symbolising power. This falsification is made possible by
6
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Communist Manifesto: A Modern Edition (London: Verso,
1998), pp.44-45.
7
Butler, Samuel, Erewhon (London: Jonathan Cape, 1933), p.200.
8
Paul Virilio, Open Sky (London: Verso, 2008), p.40. (first published in 1997)
9
Like Debord’s spectacle, language is a set of symbols, or images, that mediate our social
relations. The sacrifice we make by employing the use of this mediating technology is explained
by Zerzan in reference to Adorno and Horkheimer’s quote that ‘all reification is forgetting.’
Additionally Zerzan states that ‘language enables accumulated knowledge to be transmitted
forward, allowing us to profit from other’s experience as though it were our own’.* Following this
line of thought we can expand on language (written and spoken) as a form of dispossession
where the author/orator sacrifices his/her real experience to reify an experience to be mediated in
an inferior form to the reader/receiver.
* John Zerzan, Elements of Refusal Columbia: C.A.L Press/Paleo editions, 1999), p.35.
3
concealing, and ultimately vitiating, the participation of the subject in the
physical world.10
In terms of language’s ability to enclose and entrap Zerzan also notes that humans are
at the mercy of language as much as the masters of it as, once internalised, one is
unable to think outside of the language that to which you have been exposed; ‘to use
language is to limit oneself to the modes of perception already inherent in that
language.’11
The bulk of Zerzan’s critique of language, which for the purposes of this essay it is
inappropriate to go much deeper than a surface review, are mostly concerned not with
the enclosures created by language but branches of this imposition in human relations;
namely division, separation and isolation.
In light of the congruence of language and ideology, it is also evident that as
soon as a human spoke, he or she was separated. This rupture is the
moment of the dissolution of the original unity between humanity and nature;
it coincides with the initiation of division of labor.12
Accepting Zerzan’s critique of language as actively separating or distancing its wielders
from both one another, and their experience with their environment, expands the earlier
notions of technology as instrumental in the deprivation of our working or urbanised lives
to an irksome force present in practically the whole of lived experience. Language, one
of the most basic technologies, degrades the intimacy we could share by a symbolic
distancing. Under the guise of a technology that allows us to share experience and
communicate freely, in reality it isolates and dislodges those who employ it. In a preemptive echo of Debord’s torrent against consumer goods and the technologies that
produce them, the thing that apparently brings us closest together keeps us forever
apart,
The reigning economic system is a vicious circle of isolation. Its technologies
are based on isolation, and they contribute to that same isolation. From
automobiles to televisions, the goods that the spectacular system chooses to
produce also serve it as weapons for constantly reinforcing the conditions
that engender “lonely crowds”.13
10
John Zerzan, Elements of Refusal Columbia: C.A.L Press/Paleo editions, 1999), p.32.
ibid, p.33.
12
ibid, p.37.
13
Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (London: Rebel Press, 2005), p.15.
11
4
Part 2
Alienation (In Four Sections)
a) Property
Now safely enclosed in the train it is my time to quickly try and find an unoccupied seat
or, failing that, a suitably sized vertical space to stand in for the journey. It is important
that I am sat or positioned in such a way that I am able to purchase a ticket from the
wandering conductor so that, once paid for, I feel justified in utilising the space I have
around me to its fullest capacity, maybe by stretching my legs out, telling someone to
turn down their personal stereo or by reading an oversized newspaper.
Issues surrounding property, or more rightly private property, take a prominent position
in the battle against the isolation and alienation outlined in the previous section and
characteristic of capitalist, market-based social relations. Whilst property itself may seem
to relate only tenuously to technology, the ownership of technology, the space in which
to make use of it, and the ownership of the produce created by utilising technology are
central to our evaluation of new technologies’ potential as a tool for social change.
The distinguishing feature of communism is not the abolition of property
generally, but the abolition of bourgeois property (…) In this sense, the
theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence:
Abolition of private property.14
Marx’s statement quoted above from ‘The Communist Manifesto’ draws the distinction
between two potential readings of ‘property’. One, private property, generally meaning
something someone owns that no-one else can have, a resource one has exclusive
rights of access to; and the reading with more social connotations which might be
interpreted as ownership - a form of property that everyone feels equal access to without
exclusion. In this way you can feel ownership of something without actually owning it.
I have hinted already at the dominating aspect of the things that we own (as the saying
goes ‘they end up owning you’), and how this applies to technology; that although it is
intended for instrumental purposes it becomes enslaving. This is a phenomena
characteristic of private property as described by Marx and helps us understand capital’s
insatiable need to forever-expand.15 It is a form of production based on dispossession
and scarcity of resources. In the current era of new technologies however these
resources are changing shape,
Just as the development of land as a productive resource creates the
historical advances for its abstraction in the form of capital, so too does the
development of capital provide the historical advances for the further
abstraction of information, in the form of “intellectual property” (…) This
14
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Communist Manifesto: A Modern Edition (London: Verso,
1998), p.52.
15
for a detailed critique see David Harvey’s writings on accumulation by dispossession in ‘Neoliberalism and the restoration of class power’ in Spaces of Global Capitalism: Towards a Theory
of Uneven Geographical Development (London: Verso, 2006), pp.7-68.
5
universal abstract form encompasses first land, then capital, now
information.16
The form property takes in the era of creative industries and ‘cognitive capitalism’ is
information and it is only possible to control, or own, this resource through intellectual
copyright. It will be important to return to this notion of information as a controlled
resource at a later point, but for now it is enough to mention that intellectual copyright
signifies a new kind of enclosure in the development of capitalism and, if it is respected
as exclusively owned, the repercussions for social relations and communication are
myriad.17
b) Distance - spatial
Fortunately on this train journey I have managed to secure a seat. The train is incredibly
crowded though so we are packed in like sardines. The bays of seats are made to sit
three people a side but in reality they fit about two and a half, so we’re almost on each
other’s laps. It’s both uncomfortable and awkward. To alleviate some of the
embarrassment caused by this too-intimate early morning proximity the girl on my right
begins to listen to her i-Pod, whereas the business man to my left gets lost in the
business section of the Metro.
I have so far described technology as altering the space in which we interact with one
another in material terms. That is, making use of technology like a train, or the
technologies involved in capitalist production, literally draw people together into a
specifically designed space, be that a vehicle, a factory, an airport or a school.
Technology in this sense has us experiencing life in closer spatial proximity to one
another. The cities, where technology permeates more of life, are more crowded than
the countryside. There is another side also to which we can understand this enforced
proximity by technologies effect of compressing space. ‘The world is a smaller place
than it once was’ we hear. Technology has compressed spatial distance through
innovations in transport, more importantly though, and maybe more difficult to fully
comprehend, is the shrinking of the globe that has occurred through communicative
technology.
At this point though I would like to focus on the spatialising qualities technology has
brought to everyday life. If we expand our definition of space from ‘absolute’ or ‘material’
space, as Lefebvre does18, it is possible to suggest that technology has helped open up
new frontiers of space. In an age of recorded music, transmitted television and radio
signals, even in printed words, no longer can it be said we are wholly rooted by material
space. ‘Psychic’ space, or ‘spaces of representation’, or ‘representational spaces’ are
16
Mackenzie Wark, A Hacker Manifesto (London: Harvard University Press, 2004), [018].
As an illustration of the resonance intellectual property has we can look to the growing trend in
visual expression and human communication of making use of and reconfiguring existing material
and information. This exists in the artworld through collage, Situationist detournement and
Bourriaud’s ‘postproduction but it could equally be suggested that language is a version of this
use of pre-existing material for expression and is as such a right who’s confiscation for
exploitative means would devastate social relations.
18
David Harvey, Spaces of Global Capitalism: Towards a Theory of Uneven Geographical
Development (London: Verso, 2006), p.130.
17
6
environments in which we are familiar with dwelling for extended periods, and the
invention and wide spread use of personal stereos, portable DVD players, mobile
phones has aided the visual delineation, and multiplied access points, into this space.
Of course, ‘psychic space’ or ‘spaces of representation’ existed long before i-pods;
people have always daydreamed. It is likely that even without any imposition of
technology the person sat next to you ’in absolute space’ may be distanced greatly ‘in
relational space’, as Harvey explains, you never know for definite ‘where people’s heads
are at’19. But technology accentuates this, or at least makes the relational spatial gap
between you more visibly apparent; a pair of headphones in the ears is infintley less
subtle than a far-away look in the eyes.
It would be reductive and erroneous however to provide a description of technology’s
impact on spatiality as a purely liberating one, despite that being the tact taken by
producers of such technology. By returning to Virilio’s analysis of new technologies and
our perception of distance, we get an entirely different picture. Rather than building upon
our understanding of spatiality Virilio understands tele-technology as obliterating the
Quattrocento perspective of the Renaissance to be replaced by ‘an electronic
perspective: that or real-time emission and instantaneous reception of audio-visual
signals’20.
This is the perspective adopted by a human experienced in being in two places
simultaneously through mobile phone technology, satellite TV images, webcams and so
on, or by conversing and seeing in a real-time that destroys previous conceptions of
distance and time. It is important to reassert that, like Zerzan’s description of language,
this new perspective brought on by technological development has come at the cost of
an deeper engagement with our environment. This emancipation from absolute space,
which we can never divorce ourselves from fully, has turned that space into an
enclosure.
With the real-time transmitting and receiving power of the various signals
alienating the nature of time distances, the active optics of electromagnetic
waves exploits the depth of field, the very reality of our own world to the point
of reducing it to nothing, or next to nothing, thereby leading to a catastrophic
sense of incarceration now that humanity is literally deprived of horizon.21
To expand on, or better illustrate, this notion of Virilio’s we can consider the mental
picture that new technologies have allowed us to create. This is a concept of the world in
its entirety, as a map perhaps, that is both traversable and knowable. Similarly we are
coerced into thinking there is potential, through technologies like the Internet, to contact
or converse with anyone from any corner of this relatively small space, in real-time. What
Virilio justly points out, though, is that this concept of real-time, and the collapsing of
space it incurs, is a false one; as false as the image-world of the spectacle.
Virilio explains that there is always a ‘limit-speed’ or ‘interval’ to these communications
which present themselves as both instantaneous and unmediated. The interval and limitspeed are those of the speed of light travelling down a fibre-optic line, or radio waves
19
ibid, p.127.
Paul Virilio, Open Sky (London: Verso, 2008), p.36.
21
ibid, pp.40-41.
20
7
transmitted through the air, leaving us with an overlooked, but no less present, distance
in time and space, ‘when extreme spatial distancing suddenly gives way to the extreme
proximity of the real time exchange, there still remains an irreducible gap.’22
This inconsistency between the homogenising influence of technology on our spatial
understanding, where we understand the world as part of a whole and fully within reach
in an instant, and yet fractured and out of synch at the most intimate level is what I would
like to elucidate on further by discussing time and motion.
c) Separation – temporal
The train is running a little late after a pause at some signals and there is a shared
sense of frustration between the majority of the passengers. Some look impatiently,
almost longingly at their watches, as if to stop the minutes they’ll be late for work ticking
by, whilst others even tut and raise their eyebrows in exasperation following an
announcement by the guard excusing the delay. I however am fully relaxed and don’t
care, today the line manager is away and ten minutes either way isn’t going to make any
difference.
Technology has altered our understanding of time to a point where time itself, or our
conception of it, has become an enclosure. In the last section I had begun to broach the
complexities of separating out a conversation about spatio-temporal relations into
‘space’ and ‘time’. But before looking at the two together it is worth working through this
notion of time as a form of technology that controls our experience of the world.
Zerzan suggests that the technologically infused conception of time predates our
technologically determined perception of space as ‘the measured space of perspective
followed the measured time of the clocks.’23 He also treats time to a similar critique to
that of language whereby through historical and philosophical accounts it is argued that
time is a construct wielded to exploit the many for the good of the few.
The step from participation to religion, from communion with the world to
externalized deities for worship, is a part of the alienation process of
emerging time…the first modern mechanical clock, symbol of a qualitatively
new era of confinement now dawning as temporal associations became
completely separate from nature.24
Similarly the drive of Zerzan’s argument, revealing industrialised time as a debilitating
ideology dressed up as a natural occurrence, is that it encloses its subjects, through
isolation from real lived experience.25 Our concept of homogenised time is a mediator
that presents itself as all-pervasive and organic when in fact it is an invisible wedge
between us and a true intimacy or understanding of the world.
22
ibid, p.38.
John Zerzan, Elements of Refusal Columbia: C.A.L Press/Paleo editions, 1999), p.22.
24
ibid, p.19.
25
For further theorising on the qualitative change in our conception of time under capitalist
production, industrialisation or urbanisation, see Debord in Society of Spectacle. ‘Pseudo-cyclical
time is a time that has been transformed by industry. The time based on commodity production is
itself a consumable commodity…’ Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (London: Rebel Press,
2005), p.88.
23
8
a qualitative sense of time, of lived experience or durée, requires a
resistance to formalized, spatialized time.26
There is still, like space, a relational aspect to time. Despite the homogenisation of
standardized time, and the imperative for the commercial, technological and social
worlds for this to be synchronised, individuals experience time passing in the same
manner in which we can experience a space beyond our material conditions. Einstein’s
theory of relativity applies as much to quantum physics as it does to the scorn caused by
the late arrival to a meeting.
The resonance here though is that this plastic conceptualised time at the heart of human
experience has been artificially plastered over and enclosed through standardized time.
New technologies too have had the effect of freezing separate moments in time into a
digestible mass (demonstrated by web-based forum discussions, or Facebook wall
conversations), literally joining disparate elements of time into a unified whole. There still
remains throughout, though, Virilio’s ‘irreducible gap’, here present as an ‘always-out-ofsynch’, that stops short the possibility of total unification.
d) Velocity
For a short while I ponder the speed that train is moving at. It’s going pretty fast and I
begin to think how wonderful it is that I can move across the countryside and city at such
phenomenal rates whilst sitting absolutely still.
If technology has altered our perception of space to one that is unified by the limit speed
of light, but has an inherent contradiction in the materiality and unequal development of
space; and that time is similarly paradoxical, both standardized and relative; then surely
the greatest illusion we live under is that of moving whilst static.
Internet technologies have accelerated and exploded this notion leading theorists on the
subject including Toni Negri and Paul Virilio to comment that the current condition of
man is approaching that of a full body synthesis with technology. In Cyberspace man is
able to move at light speed through an infinite universe of information. Virilio’s take on
this empowerment however is that, in the material world, it leaves us practically disabled,
The body of the able bodied person, equipped to the eyeballs with interactive
prostheses, who is now modelled on the disabled person equipped to control
his environment without physically shifting.27
Of course, under shifting social conditions it could be argued that physical movement is
not as fundamental to ‘genuine engagement’ as it was before the invention of transspatial communicative technologies. However it is in this slippage between ‘going
somewhere’ and ‘being still’ that another potential enclosure reveals itself.28 As Virilio
26
John Zerzan, Elements of Refusal Columbia: C.A.L Press/Paleo editions, 1999), p.26.
Paul Virilio, Open Sky (London: Verso, 2008), p.33.
28
It is worth noting here that Virilio also describes Cyberspace itself as a restrictive enclosure,
‘Just as the astronaut broke free of the reality of his native world in landing on the moon, the
cybernaut momentarily leaves the reality of mundane space-time and inserts himself into the
cybernetic straitjacket of the virtual reality environment control programme.’ Paul Virilio, Open Sky
(London: Verso, 2008), p.131.
27
9
illustrates the mental condition and perceptive faculties in a body moving through a
space, rather than sitting and contemplating, are wholly different. Put another way, if you
are only focused on the destination you miss out on the scenery;
Gradually to break down all resistance, all dependence on the local, to wear
down the opposition of duration and of extension, not only with regard to the
terrestrial horizon but also to the circumterrestrial altitude of our natural
satellite: the goal of science and technology has indeed now been attained.
… But at what cost? Surely at the cost of making pitiful, pitiful for all time, not
only all those countries crossed in near total indifference, but the world, the
space-world.29
This applies now not just to our experience of technologically aided travel, but
technologically determined social relations through communication. The discrepancy
between conceptual proximity and material distance reveals itself as a failure to fully
comprehend our position and velocity. The ‘irreducible’ interval still exists just the same
as there are an infinite variety of speeds that each of us are moving at, falsely
homogenised by the illusion that everything is consistent. This discrepancy, which, it
could be argued, is felt but not seen, reifies itself as isolation from lived experience. As
Virilio asks, ‘how can we really live if there is no more here and everything is now?’30
Pessimistically then we can only look at new technologies as an enclosure, but worse an
invisible enclosure of the sort described earlier by Vaneigem, where the door is open but
we know nothing of the outside of the cage to delineate its barriers. We are not only
trapped in this cage but we are under the impression that we are freely moving, at hyper
speed, and conversing across continents in what might best be visualised in popular
culture by the distopian scenario of farmed humans in the Matrix films. This uncanny
situation, and the contradictory nature of our spatio-temporal perceptions and relations
keep us instable enough to remain unquestioningly unsure and docile enough to be
exploited by the machinery of capital.
That said, however, I would like in the next part of the essay to show that this unsure
footing and vulnerability is far from exclusive to the individuals that might be exploited by
capital, as it equally, if not better, applies to those structures that attempt to enclose in
the service of market-forces. As such there are weaknesses in the defences of capital.
29
30
Paul Virilio, Open Sky (London: Verso, 2008), p.119.
ibid, p.37.
10
Part 3
Moments and Areas of vulnerability (in Three Sections)
a) Work
I, like most people on the train around me, am going to work. I get around to thinking that
I’d rather be working from home today so I could get up when I want and not have to
endure this claustrophobic train ride but then, at least it gets me out of the house. And its
better than working in the local textiles mill.
New technologies have made work better, so they say. I’m much less likely to be killed
or suffer a substantial injury at the desk of a computer than I would have a hundred
years ago working at a Spinning Jenny. Work presently is also purpoted to be easier due
to technological advancement for those in the fortunate, mainly Western, position to
benefit from such progress. But there are also a number of writers concerned with
worker-health and technological displacement that would argue otherwise.31
For the purposes of this discussion however I would like to concentrate on the potential
benefits and ‘subversive possibilities’ new technologies in the world of work have
created. Toni Negri wrote extensively on the autonomy of the worker and is quoted as
having upheld the notion that,
it was precisely at capital’s ‘highest’, most technologically and
organizationally advanced point that its perennial opponent, labor, would be
most dangerously reincarnated.32
Negri’s earlier writings, summarised by Nick-Dyer-Witherford, point towards a protechnological standpoint that has developed into an appraisal of the speed and rate of
change as conducive to the emancipation of the worker from the bonds of the capitalist
mode of production. It is because of, not despite, these tumultuous conditions that the
Internet offers the momentum for sustained change.
The brief, fast history of the Internet can be seen as an intensively
compressed and accelerated ‘cycle of struggles’…33
Indeed, as have other theorists writing around the increasingly dematerialized form
labour and its produce have taken under the knowledge economy, Negri understands
the slippery, or shape-shifting quality of the new resource of ‘creativity’ specific to the
latest stage in capitalist development, as signalling a weakening in capital’s grip on the
worker. ‘Capital tries to capture the intellectual capacity of the labor force in the forms of
information’. In fact, the only way in which labour based around new technologies can
31
Sadly there is neither time nor space to go into these in any detail in this essay but for
reference see Jeremy Rifkin’s The End of Work: The Decline of the Global Labor Force and the
Dawn of the Post-Market Era (New York: Tarcher/Putnam, 1995)
32
Nick Dyer-Witherford ‘Cyber-Negri: General Intellect and Immaterial Labor’ in Timothy S
Murphy, and Abdul-Karim Mustapha, The Philosophy of Antonio Negri: Resistance in Practice
(London: Pluto Press, 2005), p.139.
33
ibid, p.143.
11
become materialised is through its transformation into information subject to intellectual
copyright.
As McKenzie Wark has highlighted in his Hacker manifesto this state of affairs affords
the cyber-worker a great deal more control over their output, as compared to an
automoton production-line factory worker allowing ‘Hackers (to) use their knowledge and
their wits to maintain their autonomy.’ More importantly the resource that this modern
new technologies proletariat is employed to produce for the ‘vectoralist class’ is, unlike
fossil fuels or material goods, in unlimited supply. As such it is much harder to exploit, as
exploitation has historically rested on the foundation of scarcity,
By its very nature, the act of hacking overcomes the limits property imposes
on it … The immaterial aspect of the nature of information means that
possession by one of information need not deprive another of it.34
It is easy to overestimate the weight of the change in the nature of work the era of new
technologies has brought. For the majority of the world’s population the benefits of the
‘hacker class’, although admittedly still emerging, are far from being seen. 35 What a
study of work under the conditions of intellectual labour and the ‘potlach or gift economy’
that arises from the ‘zero time, zero cost’ features of the Internet reveal though, is that
the lack of scarcity and willingness to share information as a resource outside of work36
shows ‘the anthropology of cyberspace is really a recognition of the new human
condition’37.
In a pragmatic and everyday way, they are ‘engaged in the slow process of
superseding capitalism’.38
b) Communication
As the train begins to pull into the station I notice that a lively conversation that had
sparked up between four women in the seats across the aisle from where I am sat, will
be forced to draw to an abrupt close. They appear to not know one another that well and
I attempt to watch inconspicuously to see if they will swap phone numbers or email
addresses to carry on their conversation about each other’s children’s traumas.
34
Mackenzie Wark, A Hacker Manifesto (London: Harvard University Press, 2004), [080]-[081].
However criticisms of Negri outlined in the text are his romaticised view of ‘creative industries’
ignoring the fact that there is a very material aspect to this kind of labour and the number of
workers who do exist in the democratic zone are far outweighed by those workers having to put
components together or dig in mines for materials. Negri’s response to this criticism is that he has
outlined a trend rather than a current situation. Nick Dyer-Witherford ‘Cyber-Negri: General
Intellect and Immaterial Labor’ in Timothy S Murphy, and Abdul-Karim Mustapha, The Philosophy
of Antonio Negri: Resistance in Practice (London: Pluto Press, 2005), pp,148-149.
36
For instance issues arising in these work or industry-based relations are finding their true
expression in the social relations mediated in cyberspace through file sharing and peer to peer
technologies.
37
Nick Dyer-Witherford ‘Cyber-Negri: General Intellect and Immaterial Labor’ in Timothy S
Murphy, and Abdul-Karim Mustapha, The Philosophy of Antonio Negri: Resistance in Practice
(London: Pluto Press, 2005), p.150.
38
ibid, p.146.
35
12
A problematic in describing the world brought into being by new technologies as an
enclosure is the sheer number of paths out of it; the Internet itself being described as an
information super-highway. The rhetoric surrounding new technologies consists mostly
of ‘connections’, ‘keeping in touch’, ‘always available’. Clearly this is not unfounded, and
it has been suggested that the power to break the enclosures of capital is along these
inroads,
Negri and his collaborators had emphasized that the crucial capacity of this
productive subject, the very quality that capital must expropriate, is its
communicative power … communication networks, especially digital
networks, are the contemporary equivalent of Roman roads, the connective
lifelines of power traversing the domain of the new world order.39
The ‘global community’ that the Internet puts within its user’s reach has been the catalyst
for countless formations of independent and self-organised groups which puts in mind
Marx’s description of the proletarian movement as the ‘self-concious, independent
movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority’. This global
web of contacts and its potential as the basis for direct social change should not be
underestimated and will be addressed in the following section.
Before doing so though it may provide some insight to address the nature of the
communication particular to new technologies, particularly in cyberspace. As discussed
earlier in relation to spatio-temporal relations, the discrepancy between the real and
virtual, the near and far, and the homogenising yet always-fractal nature of proximity
through fibre-optics and radio-waves is detrimental to full engagement or a sense of
belonging. In communication form this reveals itself as compressed shorthand that
substitutes informational details and personality with preset time and space restrictions
and emoticon symbols.
Because of this web-based and SMS shorthand and the reductive readings and
interpretations that flow from it the argument against this would be the form of
communication is inherently flawed. A crucial point in this however, and when looking at
new technologies as a tool towards social change, is that it is this very obvious and
visible nature of this flaw that produces its transformative potential.
If we take Zerzan, alongside poststructualist theorists, writers and artists who have made
it their goal to reveal the inherently blemished nature of language, as a point of
departure then we can begin to interpret the communication style of new technologies as
highlighting the fault-lines in existing language which up until now have been so very
well hidden. The communicational devices offered by the Internet and SMS are so
clearly insufficient that the sustained use of them may provoke a wider critical analysis of
language forms. In this sense, the communicative tools emerging from new technologies
fit the description of the kind of language sought by the Situationist International,
For us, every use of the permitted forms of communication has therefore to
both be and not be a refusal of this communication (...) Communication will
now contain its own critique.40
39
ibid, p.151.
Raoul Vaneigem in ‘Priority Communication’ in Tom McDonough, ed., Guy Debord and the
Situationist International: Texts and Documents (Massachusetts and London: MIT, 2004)
40
13
Certainly the clearly differentiated style of communication appropriate to, or at least
used, in web chat, SMS texting and even mobile phone conversations helps delineate
the borders between mediated forms and ‘real life’ conversations or material writing. The
risk however is that the familiarity with these tools of new technologies will reach a point
where it begins to seep into, or contaminate, our everyday social relations; the positive
aspect of this phenomena of materialisation is the subject of discussion in the next and
final section.
c) Exit
The train pulls into my destination station and I manage to manoeuvre myself towards
and out of the carriage doors where a number of passengers are already waiting to fill
the seats we have just vacated. As I walk along the platform I feel a light drizzle on my
face and begin the slow process of erasing the journey from my memory. This I do in the
hope I’ll able to get on with the rest of my day unaffected and be refreshed and prepared
for the return journey at rush hour that evening.
It can be suggested that a key issue in evaluating new technologies’, and the spatiotemporal social relationships’ resulting from their employment, capacity for social change
lies in the materialisation of what happens in this ‘virtual’, ‘psychic’, ‘representational’ or
‘cyber’ space into physically experienced transformations of the lived world. To reduce
the question to a fault; does Internet communication, and activity, remain in its own
relatively safe environment or is it the catalyst towards direct action and real change?
Firstly, we can address the question by citing examples of behaviours and ideologies of
new technologies that are applicable to other activities that may find expression in the
material world. This is best exemplified by Wark’s expansion of ‘hacking’ from a process
specific to computer technology to a behaviour, or an approach applicable to many
disciplines and situations in everyday and professional life,
Any domain of nature may yield the virtual. By abstracting from nature,
hacking produces the possibility of another nature, a second nature, a third
nature, natures to infinity, doubling and redoubling… This applies as much in
physics as in sexuality, in biology as in politics, in computing as in art or
philosophy. The nature of any and every domain may be hacked.41
Similarly we can return to the example provided earlier in this essay regarding an
unknowing internalisation of behaviours that are antagonistic to the operations of
capitalism but are commonplace etiquette in the virtual or digital domain illustrated by
the use of peer-to-peer information sharing programmes. This covert politicised edge to
everyday activities such as surfing the internet or creating a blog is highlighted by Steve
Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft when he describes the Internet as coming ‘organically from
the earth. And it has the characteristics of communism that people love so very much
about it. That is, it’s free.’42
This innocent, unintentional materialisation of activity initiated through new technologies
has resonance with the process of social change Negri identified as springing from the
41
42
Mackenzie Wark, A Hacker Manifesto (London: Harvard University Press, 2004), [075]
ibid, introductory page quotes.
14
change in working conditions. Rather than a drastic and immediate change it would
instead by a slow revolution that cam into being in an almost natural way,
Negri and other Futur Antérieur writers often suggested that ‘immaterial
labor’ will emancipate itself from capital not by insurrection but by ‘exodus’ –
an oblique process of subtraction, withdrawal or defection which both refuses
the existing social order and constructs another one.43
Here though it could be suggested that critics who have lauded Negri’s romanticism and
unwarranted faith in the unaided power of cyber technology would find a suitable target
for their criticisms. Accordingly, for the remainder of this section I would like to provide a
few examples of proactive attempts to consolidate people-power initiated through new
technologies, and briefly include some comments by socio-political writers that have
identified where, when and how, this has, and can, take place.
Wark’s Hacker Manifesto is for the most part a call to arms for the formation and
mobilisation of a new Hacker Class, echoing Marx’s Communist Manifesto, which
portrays the information capitalists, ‘vectoralist’ class, as currently standing on unsteady
ground in part due to the false scarcity of the resource they need to control in order to
create and profit from the surplus value requisite of capitalist mechanisms,
The time is past due when hackers must come together with workers and
farmers – with all of the producers of the world – to liberate productivity and
inventive resources from the myth of scarcity.44
Beyond this cyber-worker specific rally though, there are many more concrete examples
of calls to arms that have relied on the information sharing and communicative tools of
new technologies. Those demonstrations and interventions that have required the ability
to communicate independently, or to be in numerous places simultaneously, such as the
anti WTO demonstrations in Seattle 1999, the mass-scale street occupations of June
18th ‘Reclaim the Streets’ actions in London, and more recently artistic ‘Flash Mobbing’,
have made ample use of the self-organising and ‘bottom-up’ structuring and decision
made more straightforward by new technologies.45 The spontaneity, and subversive
potentials, afforded by these technologies haven’t gone unnoticed and, it could be
proposed, are a factor in the tightening of laws regarding the gathering of people in
public spaces and the justification for censorship.
In wider terms this ‘bottom-up’ organisation, so fitting to, and optimistically internalised
through the use of, user-guided and user-generated processes on the Internet, is a
move towards the destabilisation of the accepted top-down, promote-receive
mechanisms of spectacle. As the author’s of socio-political art publication Retort
commented on the Iraq war demonstrations of February 2003,
43
Nick Dyer-Witherford ‘Cyber-Negri: General Intellect and Immaterial Labor’ in
Timothy S Murphy, and Abdul-Karim Mustapha, The Philosophy of Antonio Negri:
Resistance in Practice (London: Pluto Press, 2005), p.146.
44
ibid, [023]
45
Please refer to Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey Sinclair, Five Days that Shook the World:
Seattle and Beyond (London: Verso, 2000).
15
Here at last was the multitude taking shape in the public sphere, already in
possession of its own apparatus, by the look of it, its own spatiality, its own
style; and perhaps what we saw as the days unfolded was a premonition of
politics to come.46
Retort are similarly keen to highlight the uncertain ground that spectacle now rests on in
an age of democratised entertainment and the ability to produce as well as receive
images. Now that the target-populace are becoming empowered to be able to create,
manipulate and remove at will those images we once passively consumed or
internalised, the rules of the game of spectacular confinement have been, hopefully
irrevocably, altered,47
At the level of the image ... the state is vulnerable; and that level is now fully
part of, necessary to, the state’s apparatus of self-reproduction.48
To tie this optimism back in with the critique of the distancing and separating qualities
present in the social relations created and mediated by new technologies, we need to
bear in mind that the only way in which this action can be healthy at root and sustainable
so as not jeopardise a larger, global project, is through an awareness of the irreducible
spatial and temporal gap between people. Such unawareness would lead to the
acceptance of the false ‘even sheen’ of appearances created by new technologies and
the reductive and potentially harmful detached social and environmental interactions that
stem from it.
The same communication systems that constitute the general intellect of netcapital can be transformed into a revolutionary ‘social brain’, but only if such
a project is constantly vigilant against replicating the very divisive logic
against which it contends.49
46
Retort (Iain Boal, T.J. Clark, Joseph Matthews, Michael Watts), Afflicted Powers: Capital and
Spectacle in a New Age of War (London: Verso, 2005), p.4.
47
also see the pamphlet ..
48
Retort (Iain Boal, T.J. Clark, Joseph Matthews, Michael Watts), Afflicted Powers: Capital and
Spectacle in a New Age of War (London: Verso, 2005), pp.27-28.
49
Nick Dyer-Witherford ‘Cyber-Negri: General Intellect and Immaterial Labor’ in Timothy S
Murphy, and Abdul-Karim Mustapha, The Philosophy of Antonio Negri: Resistance in Practice
(London: Pluto Press, 2005), p.159.
16
Conclusion
Through this essay I hope to have illustrated, on the one hand, the separating, isolating
effects of technology in both the hands of exploiters (through Debord’s spectacle, Marx’s
writing on alienated labour and the writers that have added to this body of work) but also
as a seemingly inherent quality in our perception of distance and spatio-temporal
relations when mediated through new technologies. On the other, I hope to have
presented some examples of how this unsteadiness is also characteristic of cognitive
capitalism, and the current state that seeks to sustain it. The scenario we are living
through then is one where the first ‘team’ to learn how to wield the technology, and the
relations sprung from it, adeptly can either affect social upheaval or the reinforcement of
the way things are and the barriers that are in place, dependent on their preference.
We need an education in how the present isn’t the present, and in the irreducible gap
that exists even at the closest proximity. This becomes the appreciation of differences
that might help lead to the ‘informed’ and non-reductive unification of individuals, ‘the
multitude’ and the ‘hacker class’ that can take advantage of the weaknesses in the
defence of capital created by the infinite abundance of its latest resource, information
and human creativity.
The world already dreams of such a time. In order to actually live it, it only
needs to become fully conscious of it.50
I hope it’s been made plain that the real evil isn’t the objects of technology
but the tendency of technology to isolate people into lonely attitudes of
objectivity. It’s the objectivity, the dualistic way of looking at things underlying
technology, that produces the evil.51
50
Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, trans Ken Knabb (London: Rebel Press, 2005), p.92.
Robert M Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, (London: Corgi Books, 1974),
pp.350-351.
51
17
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