nettime on Tue, 21 Apr 1998 06:26:21 +0200 (MET DST) |
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<nettime> Class Warfare in the Information Age - A New Book |
[Headers edited; this came to nettime by way of Jagdish Parikh <jagdish@igc.org> and a nettime roving correspondent. St. Mar- tins, 1998, ISBN 0312177585. -T] Michael Perelman's new book, Class Warfare in the Information Age has come to hand. It fills an important need as a corrective to the now almost universal Net-hype. Net-hype ranges a broad spectrum from the pompous (and often vacuous) theorising of Manuel Castells (Tony Blair's favourite philosopher) -- to the Wired hysterias of Kevin Kelly -- to the imbecile moral panics (net-crime, net-gambling, net-pedophilia, net-surveillance) which the mass media manage to mix with uncritical enthusiasm (the Net as the future of post-human, genetically-enhanced humankind, immortalised in virtual worlds; the Net as improbable panacea for Third World poverty; the Net facilitating Athenian-style direct democracy; the future as a permabulation through virtual malls, etc.) Net-hype even extends to Net-Insurrectionaries, Harry Cleaver's espousal of sub-comandante's virtual Zap revolution being a prime example. All this hype needed a god debunking. So it is useful to be reminded, as Perelman does, that 'the reality of the information age falls considerably short of the futuristic vision of the information age. In fact, the imaginary dystopias of science fiction seem to be closer to the truth than the fantasies of the champions of the coming information age.' His critique does not stop there. There has been much recent research to suggest that informatics has not exactly been the productivity boon the corporations had expected. Nor has labour fared any better: the much-heralded workless society has coincided with speed-up, longer hours, casualisation and the three-job anti-social family. So what is going on? What's behind the hype? Perelman wants 'to make sense of this welter of conflicting claims and accusations in the context of the information revolution.' His conclusions: that the information revolution is 'overblown', that in any case we are not educating people to make sense of it, that most new employment is not connected with it, and that its most useful attribute is to perfect capitalism's command and control. According to Perelman, what informatics really creates is the Panopticon society, after Bentham's notion of the perfect prison. The real subordination of labour to capital is the true name of the game, even when it comes at the expense of the massive glitches and crashes which the emphasis on command-and-control instead of decentred networking often entails. A major theme of Perelman's book is the privatisation of society's knowledge-base which, like DNA and even the carbon in the atmosphere, is one of the last great commons capitalism has left to enclose. What the information age will bring may actually be a lack of information. Knowledge will still be power, and access to it will be strictly controlled. Information will be commoditised, regulated and rendered much less accessible. All this will surely be true to some degree, despite the generalised promise of the Net and of things like Project Gutenberg. Yes, it will bring an ocean of culture, books, art, knowledge and as bandwidth grows, moving images, into everyone's lives, as television once did and movable type before that. But the apparent plethora will conceal a drastic diminution of opportunity, a reduction in the democracy of knowledge which robber barons like Dale Carnegie once tried to extend to the masses. The really important things will be more inaccessible than ever, shut away behind strong cryptography, archived on orbital satellites beyond the ken of governments. Class Warfare in the Information Age is more extended essay that kilometric, Castells-style exposition. It is portable. But as a tour d'horizon it's as good as they come. Perelman's strength is that his overview is historical as well as social. Frances Yates' great book, The Art of Memory, described how the invention of alphabets and writing in antiquity, displaced an attribute of civilised discourse which had taken generations to develop. It thereby privileged the masses against the leisured class which had time to develop such skills, expressed in phenomenal memory-feats by poets and orators from Homer to Cicero -- and even Shakespeare. Non-coincidentally, these were mostly cultural conservatives. Perelman reminds of this but his conclusion is not the obvious one that the Information Age presents similar subversive possibilities to writing. Conservatives from Plato to TS Eliot were fearful of the consequences of massifying knowledge, objectifying it and making it available to the unscrupulous masses. According to Perelman, they would be less fearful of the 'information revolution' which may have the opposite effect, making knowledge (as opposed to information) less accessible, reinforcing authority and hierarchy. The meat of Perelman's extended essay is his discussion of corporate strategies for privatising the gold in people's minds. Quoting Kenneth Arrow: 'embedded information... [as] capital depends on slow mobility of information-rich labor', he reminds us of the infamous treatment meted out to researcher Petr Taborsky, who invented, in his own time, a form of sewage-purification of potential value to his employer, utility holding company Florida Progress. Taborsky patented his ideas and was rewarded by being convicted (in 1990) of grand theft of trade secrets, for which he was sentenced to a year's house arrest, a suspended prison term of 3 1/2 years, probation, 500 hours community service .. and when he continued to insist on his right to his own ideas, Taborsky was assigned to a chain gang for two months. Be warned, knowledge-workers, you are the feudal servitors of the Information Age. Mark Jones --- # distributed via nettime-l : no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a closed moderated mailinglist for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@desk.nl and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # URL: http://www.desk.nl/~nettime/ contact: nettime-owner@desk.nl