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From: [log in to unmask]
Date: July 9, 2007 8:01:54 AM PDT
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: <nettime> Virtual Dreams, Real Politics
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Virtual Dreams, Real Politics

http://www.imaginaryfutures.net/
http://www.opendemocracy.net/globalisation/visions_reflections/virtual_politics

?What are we fighting Communism for? We are the most Communist people
in world history.?
- Marshall McLuhan, 1969.

In 1961, at its 22nd Congress, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
formally adopted the goal of spreading the benefits of computerisation
across the whole economy. Over the next two decades, the information
technologies being developed within the Russia?s research laboratories
were going to create a socialist paradise. Ever since the 1917
Revolution, totalitarian Communists with a big C had drawn ideological
sustenance from their self-proclaimed role as the vanguard of
proletarian communism with a small c. Under Stalin, the horrors of
forced industrialisation were sold to the Russian population as
premonitions of the promised land of socialism. Ironically, it was the
successful completion of this task which posed a potentially fatal
existential dilemma for the totalitarian system. Having successfully
identified communism with the factory, the Communist Party was now
making itself obsolete. According to its reformist faction, the
vanguard had to move on to tackling the tasks of the next stage of its
world-historical mission: building the ?Unified Information Network?.
Computers should be placed in every factory, office, shop and
educational institution. In this Russian vision of the Net, two-way
feedback between producers and consumers would calculate the correct
distribution of labour and resources which most efficiently satisfied
all of the different needs of society. Even better, this technological
revolution also promised to democratise an undemocratic society. In
his leader?s speech at the 22nd Congress, Khrushchev assured his
audience that - after decades of purges, wars, corruption and
austerity - the promised land was within sight. By the 1980s at the
latest, the inhabitants of the Russian empire would be enjoying all
the wonders of cybernetic communism.

Across the Atlantic, the CIA had watched the rise to power of the
post-industrial reformers in the East with growing concern. Embracing
their opponents? analysis, its analysts warned the US government that
the technological race to develop the Net was becoming the key contest
which would decide which superpower would lead humanity into the
future. Back in 1957, America had suffered a major setback in the
propaganda struggle when its Cold War enemy succeeded in launching the
first satellite into space. Determined to prevent any repetition of
this humiliation, the US government had quickly set up ARPA: the
Advanced Research Projects Agency. Next time, America was going to win
the hi-tech race. Responding to the CIA?s briefings, the Kennedy
administration sent ARPA into battle against the cybernetic Communist
enemy. Bringing together the top scientists in the field, the agency
coordinated and funded an ambitious programme of research into
computer-mediated-communications. In 1969, overtaking the Russian
opposition, its team created the appropriately-named first-ever
iteration of the Net: ARPANET.

From the outset, the US government was convinced that this contest
was much more than a test of scientific virility. The two superpowers
were competing not only to develop new technologies, but also, more
importantly, to decide which side had the most advanced social system.
In 1964, a multi-disciplinary team of intellectuals led by Daniel Bell
was given a large grant to invent the Anti-Communist vision of the
non-communist future: The Commission on the Year 2000. Luckily, these
experts were able to find exactly what they were looking for in
Marshall McLuhan?s bestselling book Understanding Media. Just like
Marx, this prophet had also foreseen that the next stage of modernity
would sweep away the most disagreeable manifestations of capitalism:
national rivalries, industrial exploitation and social alienation. As
in proletarian communism with a small c, peace, prosperity and harmony
would reign in the global village. What made McLuhan so much more
attractive than Marx was that the knowledge elite ? not the
proletariat - was the maker of history.

In 1966, three years before its first hosts were connected, the Bell
commission persuaded itself that the arrival of the Net utopia was
imminent. Just as McLuhan had foreseen, the limitations of
industrialism were about to be overcome by the wondrous technologies
of the information society. Best of all, 1960s America was already
entering into this post-capitalist future. J.C.R. Licklider ? the
founder of ARPA?s project to build the Net - had long been arguing
that the primary purpose of computer-mediated-communications was
facilitating the idiosyncratic working methods of the scientific
community. Instead of trading information with each other like the
overwhelming majority of cultural producers, academics collaborate by
sharing knowledge. Promotion and prestige depends upon contributing
articles to journals, presenting papers at conferences and
distributing findings for peer review. Although deeply enmeshed with
the state and corporate hierarchies of the USA, this communistic
method of advancing knowledge had proved its worth in both the natural
and social sciences. Thanks to the American taxpayer, Licklider now
had the money to sponsor the emergence of a virtual social space
emancipated from both the market and the factory. Inside this hi-tech
gift economy, proprietary hardware and software were technical
obstacles to the most efficient ways of working. The people who built
the Net were the ones who ran it. In a bizarre twist, at the height of
the Cold War, the US military was funding the invention of cybernetic
communism.

Even more ironically, it was the Russian elite which lacked the
self-confidence to sponsor even ARPA-style small-scale experiments in
networked socialism. The reformers had offered a rejuvenation of the
world-historic mission of the vanguard party. However, for their
conservative opponents, the advantages of owning the imaginary future
were by far outweighed by the threat which the Net posed to their
power and authority. When the Czechoslovak reformers? theoretical
manifesto Civilisation at the Crossroads celebrated the Unified
Information Network as the demiurge of participatory democracy, the
subversive image of this cybernetic technology was confirmed for these
conservative bureaucrats. In 1968, the Russian government sent in its
tanks to put an end to the Prague Spring. The perpetuation of
totalitarian Communism depended upon the prevention of cybernetic
communism.

Back in the 1930s, Stalinist state planning had been at the
cutting-edge of economic modernity. But, by holding on to its
ideological monopoly, the Communist Party had deprived itself of the
information which it needed to deliver the goods. In 1980, the Polish
workers rebelled when they were once again called upon to pay for the
mistakes of the economic planners. The disintegration of
totalitarianism in one country started a chain-reaction of events
which within a decade brought down the entire Russian empire.
Communism with a big C was the future which had failed. In his 1992
neo-conservative bestseller The End of History and the Last Man,
Francis Fukuyama proudly announced that the whole world had become
American. With all alternatives now discredited, there was only one
path to modernity.
.
Back in the mid-1960s, McLuhanism had been invented as a credo of the
mildly reformist Democratic Party. Over the next four decades, its
meaning had moved steadily rightwards. In 1983, Ithiel de Sola Pool ?
a Bell commission member ? codified this neo-liberal appropriation of
McLuhanism in his masterpiece: Technologies of Freedom. From software
to soap operas, all forms of information would soon be traded as
commodities over the Net. For the first time, everybody could be a
media entrepreneur. By the end of the 1980s, this conservative remix
had become the dominant form of American McLuhanism. George Gilder ? a
Republican Party activist ? proclaimed the computer companies of
northern California as the harbingers of a free market paradise. Not
only Stalinist central planning, but also Social Democratic welfare
provision were relics from the Fordist past. Looking at Silicon
Valley, the neo-liberal prophets were convinced that the factory and
the campus were synergising into a superior entity: the hi-tech
entrepreneurial firm.

By the time that the 1990s dotcom boom took off, McLuhanist
technological determinism had become an unapologetic celebration of
?out of control? capitalism. In his New Rules for the New Economy,
Kevin Kelly explained how technologies which were prototyped within
the hi-tech gift economy could be successfully spun off into
commercial products. Like the Stalinist elite, the music majors had
found out to their cost that it was futile trying to resist the onrush
of the McLuhanist future. In contrast, dotcom companies had shown how
to transform user generated content and on-line communities into
profitable enterprises. The phenomenal growth of MySpace, Bebo and
YouTube demonstrates that successful businesses can be built upon
Kelly?s dictum of following the free. Clever managers know how to make
cybernetic communism serve establishment goals.

Like their Stalinist predecessors, these 1990s proponents of
McLuhanism saw themselves as the vanguard of the hi-tech utopia. As
the early-adopters and beta-testers of the dotcom future, this
privileged group was prefiguring today what the general public would
be doing tomorrow. When everyone had access to the Net, participatory
democracy and cooperative creativity would be the order of the day.
But, until this happy moment arrived, humanity required the guidance
of the cybernetic elite to reach the promised land. Ironically, in the
2000s, the boosters of the information society - like the Stalinists
before them - are unexpectedly faced with the problem of living within
their own future. Confounding the McLuhanist credo, the advent of the
Net hasn?t marked the birth of a new humanistic and equalitarian
civilisation. For more than four decades, the knowledge elite have
asserted its control over space through ownership of time. Now, in the
early-twenty-first century, the imaginary future of the information
society is materialising in the present. What the McLuhanists have to
explain is why utopia has been delayed.

When the users of the Net are both consumers and producers of media,
the vanguard has lost its ideological monopoly. Yet, at the same time,
the arrival of the information society hasn?t precipitated a wider
social transformation. Cybernetic communism is quite compatible with
dotcom capitalism. Contrary to the tenets of McLuhanism, the
convergence of media, telecommunications and computing has not ? and
never will ? liberate humanity. The Net is a useful tool not a
mechanical saviour. In the 2000s, ordinary people have taken control
of sophisticated information technologies to improve their everyday
lives and their social conditions. Freed from the preordained futures
of McLuhanism, this emancipatory achievement can provide inspiration
for new anticipations of the shape of things to come. Cooperative
creativity and participatory democracy need to be extended from the
virtual world into all areas of life. Rather than disciplining the
present, our futurist visions should be open-ended and flexible. We
are the inventors of our own technologies. We can intervene in history
to realise our own interests. Our utopias provide the direction for
the path of human progress. Let?s be hopeful and courageous when we
imagine the better futures of libertarian social democracy.

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