Re: <nettime> Shoshana Zuboff > The Secrets of Surveillance

[Brian Holmes <bhcontinentaldrift@gmail.com>]

On 03/17/2016 09:14 PM, dan@geer.org wrote:

> What I see is way,
> way too much private money looking at way, way too few differentiated
> ideas.

Dan, your thoughts are really interesting and I like the specifics of 
"the mid-space between investment capital and government programs."

It seems to me that the hard thing about understanding social change is 
that there are so many things to see. Felix sees lots of solar panels on 
rooftops and no market. You see a whole lotta government-oriented 
security technology getting lots of private investment. John sees 
effusive middle-class idealists driving Priuses and talking fooolishly 
about French wine. I see a huge gap between the people who used to live 
in my decaying neighborhood and those who are moving in. We are all 
catching something about society right now. And yet the many things it 
will become under the pressure of what is happening right now seem to 
escape us. This is the real difficulty of social theory. The beast in 
the cage is too damn big. You might think you were seeing the whole 
animal, then that turns out to be just the foot and it's stomping you.

There is a lot of money out there to invest in security in the same way 
there is a lot of money to invest in real estate, or high end craft beer 
in my Chicago neightborhood, for that matter. The 1% is fat and scared. 
It was ever thus. One of the big problems Roosevelt's team had during 
the Depression was convincing the people in the cities that it was even 
happening. The big urban centers were doing fine, if you had a job at 
least, and many did. The famous photos of the Farm Security 
Administration had the task of showing people what they could not 
spontaneously see. The photographers were supposed to prove to the 
urbanites that something dramatic was happening to people very unlike 
them: people who used to be farmers, and were now on the road with 
almost nothing, looking for a way to find some new existence and not 
finding it. All those former farmers with no money to buy anything were 
the reason that all those new factories in the city couldn't quite take 
the next big step and change the world in their image.

What don't we see right now, when we only look for security?

My point is that what we don't see is probably the kind of social 
conditions - the social sequence - that will allow the next game changer 
to emerge. Security does the opposite. It's what tries to keep 
everything the same. That's why there are not so tremendously many ideas 
about it. However, unlike solar panels, there is an overwhelming market 
for security, because people in general are scared shitless right now, 
and governments even more so. All the security in the world, however, 
will not deliver what capitalism wants, which is growth, more people 
taking up some new invention and becoming more productive with it. So I 
would say, as long as the market in security is the big thing, society 
won't change much in the capitalistic sense.

Now, that's not necessarily bad, by the way. Maybe without any big 
change in the capitalistic sense, we would have time to realize that a 
more fundamental kind of security can be had by installing solar panels, 
wind turbines, waves generators, plus better electric grids to 
distribute all that. I thought Felix's post in this thread was 
brilliant, because he says that's the important thing - do something 
different than in the past. But the problem is, security is what tends 
to drive us on, not to reflection about how life could be better, but to 
the unreflected practice of how it gets worse, ie war. Over the past 
century, and over the last four centuries if you believe Wallerstein and 
co, war has been a crucial part of game-changing social sequences.

In the 1940s, the most technologically violent war ever known to 
humankind was followed by a the largest growth wave ever known to 
capitalism.

In the 1990s, the largest interenational coalition ever assembled waged 
a relatively small war, the so-called "First Gulf War," which led on to 
a very significant growth wave known as globalization. That growth wave 
is often remembered for having laid fiber optic cables across the entire 
earth. How did it come to pass? It took the fall of the Soviet Union and 
the security coalition of the Gulf War to make the world safe for 
investing in the internet. Security seems to precede prosperity.

I reckon capitalism has one of more of those up its sleeve. One more 
growth wave I mean. To qualify as such, it has to be something both 
productive and profitable.  In the Fifites, factories, cars, suburban 
houses, TVs and washing machines were definitely profitable. Vast 
numbers of people could use those products, and the use of the products 
propelled them - literally, at 70 mph on the freeway - toward producer 
equipment where more of such products were made. That constituted a 
growth wave.

The Nineties and early 2000s were different, and yet somehow similar. It 
was about PCs, internet connections, phones, apps, and a job in some 
foreign city. The PC was something you bought, a prestige item; but it 
was also something you worked with. You hooked it up to an immense piece 
of producer technology: the Internet. You got a job using the net to 
extend the net, somewhere, to someone, who would use it to extend it to 
someone else. All of that was new: new technology, new business 
processes, new professions, new consumer behaviors. It constituted a 
growth wave. Countries as vast as China and India got caught up with the 
West overnight. The beast is so big that people in a largely parochial 
country like America don't even realize how vastly the world has changed 
over the last twenty years.

Will such a process occur again? That's the economic and sociological 
question I was asking in this series of exchanges. Should it occur 
again? That is the philosophical and ethical question Felix was asking. 
Is humanity too ignorant and self-satisfied to know or even to care what 
happens next? That's the cynical and realist question John was asking. 
And you, Dan seem to be joining Shoshana Zuboff in asking: Isn't what's 
already happening right now just about to get much more intense?

Well, it could, for sure it could. With all that globalized financial 
weath circulating around in the stratosphere, you'd think that a little 
could come down to earth and invest itself in a techno-securitarian lid 
to clamp down on top of the boiling pot of disgruntled humanity. That's 
wouldn't mark the triumph of Googlism, though, because you can't sell 
advertising to prisoners. However, Eric Schmidt and his CIA friend Jared 
Cohen would do all right in that world, I reckon. So there's an economy 
there for somebody.

I think capitalist society is a bigger animal, with more desires, more 
ideas, and yet mostly just as dumb as John suggests, and just as 
self-satisfied. War or no war, capitalist society is likely to break the 
bounds of the present cage and make even a bigger mess than ever in the 
past. As a theorist, one thinks: "If we could only see the whole thing, 
if we could only know who we are, right now, as a totality, then we 
could take the better path." Yet so many of us would have to care, to 
constitute that collective vision.

"We now return you to the regularly scheduled discussion of whether
the developed world has a future, already in progress."

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