|
|
Chapter 1 (Part 2)
Information Highway vs. Media-Net
The prophet-hypesters of the information highway, from President Bill Clinton, USA, to President Bill Gates, Microsoft, proclaim a revolution to a higher level of bourgeois consciousness. The highway is the utopia of the possessive individual: the possessive individual now resides in technotopia.
This is how the higher level of bourgeois consciousness comes to be in grades of perfection. Firstly, we enter an information highway which promises the "individual" access to "information" from the universal archive instantly and about anything. The capacity of the Net to hold information is virtually infinite and, with the inevitable advances in microprocessors, its capacities to gather, combine, and relay information will be equal to any demand for access. Are you curious about anything? The answer is right at your fingertips. More seriously, do you need to know something? A touch of a button will get you what you need and eventually your brain waves alone (telekinesis fantasy) will do it. Here is the world as information completely at the beck and call of the possessive individual (the individual, that is, who is possessed by information). Here, everyone is a god who, if they are not omniscient all at once, can at least entertain whatever information that they wish to have at any time they wish to have it. Information is not the kind of thing that has to be shared. If everyone all at once wanted to know who won the Stanley Cup in 1968 they could have the information simultaneously: cyberspace as the site of Unamuno's panarchy, where each one is king.
At the next grade of perfection, the highway not only provides access to that which is already given, but allows the "individual" to "interact" with other "individuals," to create a society in cyber-space. The freedom to access information will be matched by the freedom to access individuals anywhere and at any time, since eventually everyone will be wired. The hybridization of television, telephone, and computer will produce every possible refinement of mediated presence, allowing interactors an unprecedented range of options for finely adjusting the distance of their relations. Through the use of profiles, data banks, and bulletin boards people will be able to connect with exactly those who will give them the most satisfaction, with whom they share interests, opinions, projects, and sexual preferences, and for whom they have need. Just as "individuals" wilt be able to access the realm of "information" (anything from their financial and insurance records to any movie ever made), they will also be able to access the domain of "human" communicators to find the ones who are best suited to them. As Bill Gates of Microsoft puts it: "The opportunity for people to reach out and share is amazing." [1]
The information highway as technotopia is the place where "individuals" command information for whatever purposes they entertain and find others with whom to combine to pursue those purposes. As Gates puts it, it is empowering stuff." Technotopia is the seduction by which the flesh is drawn into the Net. What seduces is the fantasy of "empowerment," the center of the contemporary possessive individualist complex. By having whatever information one wants instantly and without effort, and by being linked to appropriate associates one saves an immense amount of time and energy, and is more likely to make better decisions for oneself. Who can complain about having more information, especially if it can be accessed easily and appropriately by a system of selectors that gives you what you ask for and nothing else, or even better, that knows you so well that it gives you what you really want (need?) (is good for you?), but did not even realize that you wanted?
The information highway means the death of the (human) agent and the triumph of the expert program, the wisdom that the greatest specialist would give you. Expert programs to diagnose you. Medical tests performed at home while you are hooked up to a computer that are interpreted by an expert program. In order to serve you, the "highway" will demand information from you. The selector systems will have to get to know you, scan you, monitor you, give you periodic tests. The expert program will be the new center for pastoral power. This is, of course, still enacted under capitalism. You will have to pay for information with money and there will be plenty of restrictions on its accessibility. Leave that as a contradiction of the virtual class between the capitalist organization of the highway and its technotopian vision: a contradiction within possessive individualism. More importantly, you will pay for information with information; indeed, you will be information.
The highway becomes the Net. What appears as empowerment is a trompe l'oeil, a seduction, an entrapment in a Baudrillardian loop in which the Net elicits information from the "user" and gives it back in what the selectors say is an appropriate form for that user. The great agent of possibility becomes the master tool of normalization, now a micro-normalization with high specificity... perhaps uniqueness! Each "individual" has a unique disciplinary solution to hold them fast to the Net, where they are dumped for image processing and image reception. The information highway is the way by which bodies are drawn into cyber-space through the seduction of empowerment.
Bourgeois masculinity has always been pre-pubescent: the thoughts of little boys thinking about what they would do if they controlled the world, but now the world is cyber-space. The dream of being the god of cyber-space - public ideology as the fantasy of pre-pubescent mates: a regression from sex to an autistic power drive.
Against the Virtual Class
The virtual class holds on to its worldview with cynicism or with vicious naiveté. It is a compound of late nineteenth-century Darwinian capitalism (retro-industrial Darwinism) and tech-hype. After what has happened so far in the twentieth-century and is still going on in the way of technological carnage, it is amusing to realize that there are still technofetishists filled with enthusiasm about how technology is going to fulfill their pre-pubescent dream, which they assume unthinkingly that everyone inevitably shares with them. Why? Is it so clear that technology cannot serve anything else than the last man as the pre-pubescent boy who would like nothing else but to play video games forever?
The retro-child. The virtual class is in its utopian visionary phase, filled with cyber-worlds to conquer. What will it be in its consolidation phase when we are fully entrapped in the Net and it starts tightening around us? Normalization will come here too. Radically empowering computer land is the utopia of a rising class identifying its peculiar occupational psychosis with (a wired) "humanity." When we are immersed in the Net the fiction of the "possessive individual" will be discarded from the virtual class's ideology in favor of some sort of defense of cyber-slavery, in which the virtual class affirms its own slavery, along with that of all the rest, to the Net. This will be the culminating moment of the ascetic priests (Nietzsche). One can only think of Jonestown. The virtual class ushers itself and everyone else into the Net to serve it as image/information resources and as image/information receptors. Wired into the command functions at work and wired into the sensibility functions when off work: the body as a function of cyber-space.
Panic Information Highway
Organizations are in a panic stampede to get on the "information highway," to be players in cyber-space. Everyone wants in on the exploitation of the new frontier and even more they don't want to be killed in the real world, which will be managed ever-increasingly from cyber-space; not to mention the efficiencies of the Net. For the moment the advantages of the Net are not that obvious once you get on, but that is only a temporary situation. The Net is filling up fast with everything imaginable and it's indefinitely expandable.
There is another kind of panic in process about the "information highway." This one from the concerned liberals who are afraid of the power of those who will determine the configuration of the highway. In his report on Bill Gates, John Seabrook provides an enlightening glimpse of Gates's character along with cautionary warnings. We are concerned with the latter, with a specimen of the liberal ideology which counts as the major ideological resistance to cyber tech-hype.
Seabrook frames his warnings within a bit of short-range futurology. There is a new kind of computer on the way that will change our lives in incalculable ways: "The new machine will be a communications device that connects people to the information highway. It will penetrate far beyond the fifteen per cent of American households that now own a computer, and it wilt control, or absorb, other communications machines now in people's homes - the phone, the fax, the television. It will sit in the living room, not in the study." [2] The cyber command-machine: the entrance to the highway: the lip of the Net.
Seabrook notes that Bill Gates's current ambition is to have Microsoft be the source of "the standard operating-system software for the information-highway machine, just as it now supplies the standard operating-system software, called Windows, for the personal computer." [3] The standard operating-system will be the program that makes possible specific uses of the Net, all across the Net. Seabrook believes that by supplying the standard operating-system software for the "information-highway machine" Gates would gain great power: "If Gates does succeed in providing the operating system for the new machine, he will have tremendous influence over the way people communicate with one another: he, more than anyone else, will determine what it is like to use the information highway." [4]
Seabrook shows a misunderstanding here of the "influence" of the virtual class. What is the "influence" of a standard operating-system? Would there be major differences among possible alternative competing operating-systems for the information-highway machine that would alter significantly "the way people communicate with each other?" Or, as with the phone system, is the object simply to facilitate entry into the Net? If the latter is so, no power in any conventional sense accrues to the organizational leader who wins the competition to supply the system. Gates understands this. He wrote to Seabrook that "the digital revolution is all about facilitation-creating tools to make things easy." [5] This is the gospel of the last man, not of the "technology-oriented dictator" that one of his competitors is afraid that Gates might become. There is greater power, of a wholly different kind than the conventional power to order people around, in ushering people into the Net, in being the agent of technological dependency. This is the power of silent seduction, of giving accessibility to cyber-space. Bill Gates is not Zeus, casting thunderbolts, but Charon, taking us across the electronic Styx into virtuality. Seabrook, the techno-humanist liberal on a diversionary mission, is concerned with what goes into cyber-space. He accepts the techno-hype and is afraid of a techno-fascism that he refuses to acknowledge has already been instituted. Gates only cares that we all get into cyber-space: the seducer as great facilitator.
Gates, indeed, has no interest in the conventional politics of the communication revolution. As much as Seabrook tried to get him to acknowledge the question of power, Gates would resist. He made his position plain in commenting that the highway would have some "secondary effects that people will worry about." That is not his problem, however: "We are involved in creating a new media but it is not up to us to be the censors or referees of this media - it is up to public policy to make those decisions." [6]
"Public policy" is what goes on to get the flesh to adjust to the Net. The greater project is beyond policy, transcendent to it - that is the project of wiring bodies to the Net. That everyone will be wired to the information-highway machine is an historical inevitability that puts politics in its place as a local clean-up activity around the Net. This is technotopianism in its purest and most cynical form. Compare it to that other computer entrepreneur, the retro-fascist Ross Perot, who uses the wealth he has gained from the information industry to finance his appeal to a nationalistic policy. The technotopian has no such leanings, but with vicious naiveté depends on liberal-fascist allies in government to protect the Net. Gates has identified himself with Technology, the greater power, the one that will finally be decisive. Through the silent seduction of the operating-system.
|
|
