<nettime> Technopolitics of the future

For years on nettime, the much-regretted Armin Medosch, myself, Felix Stalder and a number of others developed a theory of technopolitical paradigm shifts: a grand narrative to explain social change in industrial societies. Well, even if you don't like grand narratives, you may have noticed that a tremendous shift is indeed now taking place, real time, global scale, involving every level of entrepreneurial and governmental organization and every aspect of social reproduction. It's sudden, it's violent and it obviously has consequences. Shall we talk about it?

I recall speculation on the list about whether a new technopolitical paradigm would ever take form. Would there be economic growth again? Would innovation return? Could global capitalism really develop new forms of self-regulation? Or is it stalked by entropy and decline? I think the discussion suffered from too much emphasis on computers and finance as the drivers of change - leading to the conclusion that, if Silicon Valley has already done its thing, if Meta is no more than The Matrix Reloaded, then history must be over. But it turns out that the decisive factors in technopolitical paradigm shifts are neither economic, nor even technological. The decisive factors are instead political, in the broad sense of politics that runs from individual agency, through collectivities of all kinds, into national and international relations. Political conflict is what brings societies into crisis. When the overarching cultural/economic/military order - what the international relations theorists call world order - is shaken by an integral crisis, then, and only then, can a paradigmatic figure of capitalism begin to transform at all levels, including institutions and ideologies as well as money, machines and relations of production.

Does anyone else think a major crisis - what Gramsci would call an "organic crisis" - has taken hold since the outset of the pandemic? Leftists have often cried wolf over financial crises, but with climate change, plague, ideological upheaval, industrial restructuring and war, what we are living through today looks a lot like the turning-point crises of the 19th and 20th centuries. Turning points entail both institutional breakdown and renewal. On the breakdown side, take for example the abandonment of two former pillars of neoliberal international relations, namely the German "Wandel durch Handel" policy of cheap resource extraction from Russia, and the American just-in-time strategy of outsourced production from China. Both these began as opportunistic statecraft during the major crisis of the early Seventies, and both subsequently became foundational components of the neoliberal world order. It took the attack on Ukraine to expose Europe's gas hypocrisy, while in the US, it took Trumpian populism to state the bitterly obvious: The outsourcing of labor is a social crime, just like the endless oil wars. Of course US progressives think the same, and have better policies to address it, but it's a real shame that mainstream Democrats stifled progressive populism, so we got the anti-imperial message from the right instead. Doesn't matter. The question now is what to do. How to diagnose and respond to the crisis?

This is the renewal side: Social democrats in both the EU and the US are attempting to use the upheaval for transformative ends. Europe is being forced into an energy transition at top speed, and the "Repower EU" project builds on the national Recovery and Resilience plans developed during the pandemic. All those plans drew the consequences of the Anthropocene: they aimed to use deficit funding to rebuild employment by investing in alternative energies. It just took a war in Europe to make them real. Even more surprisingly in the US, the same kind of stalled recovery program is suddenly moving ahead fast, with carefully targeted research, industrial stimulus and federal infrastructure investments. Even though its dollar figures were reduced, the Inflation Reduction Act (aka Build Back Better) is a genuine plan for technological system change. It's interesting that to dramatize the need for this planning in the eyes of the population, the US has had to elevate the threat of war with China (which itself is a bit of a stand-in for the threat of civil war at home). So again, the drivers are war and climate change. The fact is that the US has long experience with this kind of system reset, from the age of the great corporate mergers in the late 1890s, to the consolidation of the corporate state during WWII, and then again, the development of microelectronics and the transition to financially driven globalization in the Reagan era. A decade after that, Clinton, Blair and Schroeder finished the regulation of the last big reset, with terrible consequences for social democracy, because in reality, the current problems are of their creation. Since the Ukraine war broke out, it has finally become clear to the "extreme center" (Tariq Ali's phrase) that they must carry out a new system reset, and above all, sell it to their populations during elections, because only a successful economic/environmental fix can hold back the advancing tide of fascism. So whaddaya know, it's socialism or barbarism, as usual! For all these reasons it's really starting to happen, that crazy thing we talked about for a decade: a technopolitical paradigm shift.

Concerning the techno part, in my view the development of Moderna's mRNA vaccines was really stunning, the biggest and swiftest scientific breakthrough I've ever seen. It presages the future industrial development of the life sciences, under exactly the kind of national innovation regime that people like Mariana Mazzucato talk about. Now, the concept of "national innovation regime" is foundational for the technopolitical thinking that interested Armin Medosch and myself. The concept comes mainly from Chris Freeman at the Science Policy Research Unit (SPRU) at Sussex University in the UK. A national innovation regime brings together the universities, the corporations and the military, under government guidance with significant public funding. Its goal is to jump start economic growth with technological innovation, particularly in the wake of a major economic crisis when state-led investment can be justified. The national innovation regime is a well-studied feature of large capitalist states since the 1930s, although of course, it has become somewhat more complex with transnationalization. Both Repower EU and Build Back Better are dependent on this kind of industrial stimulus planning. What I expect to see emerging from these crucibles over the next 20 years are AI-assisted research programs for industrial-scale responses to the basic environmental/metabolic problems of the Anthropocene. To put it another way: If capitalism is going to survive, it is finally going to have to internalize the costs of social/ecological reproduction, or at least some of them. This is comparable, but not identical, to the way that Fordism internalized consumption as part of the production regime in the mid-twentieth century - under the threats of war and revolution, for sure.

AI was crucial in mRNA vaccine development, and the entire project was underpinned by years of federal science funding to make exactly this kind of breakthrough possible. For sure, I'm also aware of the shocking injustice and arrogance with which the Pfizer/Biontech and Moderna vaccines were restricted to paying customers, essentially in the Global North, and only parts of it. That's why I see the mRNA story as the nutshell of a future development model in which the full spectrum of the life sciences - extending to earth system science - will play a crucial biopolitical role, with the inclusion/exclusion routines that are characteristic of democratic biopolitics. It's like this: The social-democratic mission of Green Capitalism will be to mitigate the effects of onrushing global ecological change - and for better and worse, they're gonna mitigate. Not just with new energy sources, but with new science and technology from the cellular to the atmospheric levels: the genetic redesign of Sloterdijk's "human park," as well as huge new "air conditioning" endeavors, meaning a pervasive artificialization of the environment. In short, there is a direct line between vaccine development and geoengineering - and that lifeline of capitalism is called the national innovation regime. The externalities and undesired consequences of whatever new paradigm finally emerges will fall in radically unequal measures along geographic, class, race and gender divides - IF in fact it does emerge, IF we don't just sink into entropic conflict and collapse. But if a paradigm shift does occur, resistance to inequality and racism will be a tremendous influence on whatever new regime of social regulation might take form. And a new regulatory regime, too, is already under construction in fits and starts, as one can see in the US since the pandemic and the George Floyd uprising. The reexamination of colonialism that currently occupies many intellectuals (cf Amitav Ghosh) is, to my mind, an extremely valuable contribution in this regard.

So the point of this whole discussion is not to celebrate a possible technopolitical paradigm shift, but instead, to get ready to deal with the many new problems it will bring. Because my sense is that a paradigm shift is going to happen, and that it will be much worse if better ideas are not rapidly brought into play - and into production. Neoliberalism has left progressive intellectuals long on utopia, and short on praxis. That really has to change. Otherwise the miserable ideas of the right will get built out into reality.

Marx was right when he said that we make history, but not under conditions of our choosing. I'm afraid that all of you who don't want to live through Green Capitalism are going to be very disappointed (I will be too). Far from entropic breakdown, what we are about to witness and take part in will be yet another wild acceleration, on the back of great collective machines, with no steering wheel, destination unknown. And that's exactly what "technopolitical paradigm shift" really means. A crisis of capitalism takes you somewhere terrifyingly new. The steering process has to be invented in mid-flight. And the journey has already begun.

Thoughts about it?

Brian