Re: <nettime> Technopolitics of the future

[Felix Stalder <felix@openflows.com>]

On 20.10.22 23:18, Brian Holmes wrote:

> 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.

I don't think the conclusion was that 'history is over'. Rather the
venture-capital, consumer-facing, attention-economy model which
organized an important part of the innovative capacity over the last 40+
years, had exhausted itself. Indeed, innovation in in Silicon Valley has 
almost come to a stand still. Our phones, laptops, social media apps etc 
are more or less the same than five years ago. In response, lots of 
VC-capital is funding blockchain technologies, which, so far, have 
proven completely useless. A real dead-end.

It seems that the computing infrastructure that has been built out over
the last 30 years -- global connectivity and data centers -- is turning
into commodity services for other enterprises. Much like manufacturing
in the 1980s and 1990s. On a global scale, it kept growing, yet it
turned into a flexible, on-demand infrastructure. In this line, Google
is moving closer to the model of Foxconn, as a commodity provider of AI
and data analytic services. Hugely profitable, but the social direction
of the use of its capacities is determined by others.

The pandemic showed that quite clearly. Silicon Valley firms profited
substantially by providing commodity infrastructure but little
innovation. Zoom, which saw its stock price rise 5-fold during the
pandemic, is now back to pre-pandemic levels. The innovation that would
have embodied the logic of consumer-data focused Silicon Valley the
most, contact tracing via smart phones, failed completely, due to poor
data and modelling (turns out, epidemiological-relevant proximity is
hard to measure and model) and popular resistance (surveillance!).

On the other hand, as Brian notes, the most significant techno-political
event was the development of the mRNA vaccines. First, because it
provided the single-most effective social response to the pandemic (e.g.
compared to China's Zero-Covid approach). Second, because it embodied a
new techno-political model (large-scale, publicly-funded, basic
research, public investment and coordination, extremely profitable
private enterprises), and a new set of conflicts, both within the 
countries at the center of the development (anti-vaxxers in the US and 
Europe) and geopolitically (neo-colonial distribution based on patents &
manufacturing/logistical capacity).

Does this provide a blue-print for a somewhat social-democratic Green
capitalism, as Brian seems to suggest? I'm not so sure. Mainly for four
reasons.

First, so far, all of this has been debt-financed, which works obviously
better in a low-interest environment. Unless a Piketty-style taxation of
wealth can be instituted, a key component of a new technopolitical
paradigm is missing (I think the US Democrats know this, but can
implement only the tiniest of steps, the European social-democrats
(outside Spain) don't even try it).

Second, the vaccines provide a somewhat unusual case of technopolitical
innovation, because there were no incumbents that had already sunk
trillions into soon-to-be outdated infrastructures that they wanted to
profit from a few decades longer. There is a war in Europe disrupting
energy supplies, and Germany does not even manage to institute a speed
limit on its Autobahn (despite popular support). Thus, the question is,
to what degree are democratic institutions still capable of expressing
"the will of the people"?

Third, there is this point that Amitav Gosh raised in the interview I
posted earlier:

> The Left – and here I’m also talking about the Greens – made the
> decision some time ago to move towards a technocratic centre. They
> started doing all this wonkery and addressing policy to establish
> their credentials as serious politicians and administrators. Of
> course, it’s necessary to be serious about administration and
> governance. But the problem appears when you leave out the political
> impulse. The danger of technocracy is that you cannot tap into the
> general discontent with the political class because you are
> completely identified with the political class.

https://www.greeneuropeanjournal.eu/the-colonial-roots-of-present-crises/

I think this helps to explain the anti-vaxxers. If vaccines -- a simple, 
drop-in, no-need-to-make-any-changes-in-your-personal-life solution 
provided for free -- cannot be sold on a technocratic argument, then 
what can? On a larger scale, in Italy, as Alex Foti noted, after every 
technocratic government, the far right won the next election, to the 
point that you have now prime minister who traces her political line 
directly back to fascism.

Forth, the geopolitical distribution of costs are extremely uneven. The 
nationalistic right is absolutely clear about this and welcomes 
neo-colonialism. I think it was Musk who said that the US always invaded 
countries if it needed its resources and that it would (and should) do 
the same with respect to Lithium.

I agree with Brian, that social democratic green new deal, for all its 
internal contradictions and short-comings, is the only available 
paradigm within which such questions can even be raised as problems. 
Authoritarian approaches would call this simple "reality" that needs to 
be managed in an us-vs-them, zero-sum logic.

None of this is written in stone. As far as "we" -- ie cultural 
producers -- are concerned, the third point I raised, the poverty of the 
technocratic approach, is the most immediately relevant, and amendable, 
one.

After all, I agree with Brian that there is nothing less at stake than 
to determine what the "pervasive artificialization of the environment" 
actually entails. In the first instance, it indicates, in my view, that 
there is now a collective awareness of the reality of the Anthropocene. 
And this is a massive shift on collective awareness over a very short 
period. It makes a wide-range of previously unthinkable  politics possible.


all the best. Felix



--
| |||||||||||||||| http://felix.openflows.com |
| for secure communication, please use signal |
#  distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
#  <nettime>  is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject: