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Title: Deserting the Digital Utopia
Author: CrimethInc.
Date: 4th October 2013
Language: en
Topics: digital, computers, technology, utopia
Source: Retrieved on 9th September 2020 from https://crimethinc.com/2013/10/04/feature-deserting-the-digital-utopia

CrimethInc.

Deserting the Digital Utopia

There is an invisible world connected at the handle to every tool—use

the tool as it is intended, and it fits you to the mold of all who do

the same; disconnect the tool from that world, and you can set out to

chart others.”

–Hunter/Gatherer

The ideal capitalist product would derive its value from the ceaseless

unpaid labor of the entire human race. We would be dispensable; it would

be indispensable. It would integrate all human activity into a single

unified terrain, accessible only via additional corporate products, in

which sweatshop and marketplace merged. It would accomplish all this

under the banner of autonomy and decentralization, perhaps even of

“direct democracy.”

Surely, were such a product invented, some well-meaning anti-capitalists

would proclaim that the kingdom of heaven was nigh—it only remained to

subtract capitalism from the equation. The anthem of the lotus-eaters.

It would not be the first time dissidents have extrapolated their utopia

from the infrastructure of the ruling order. Remember the enthusiasm

Karl Marx and Ayn Rand shared for railroads! By contrast, we believe

that the technology produced by capitalist competition tends to

incarnate and impose its logic; if we wish to escape this order, we

should never take its tools for granted. When we use tools, they use us

back.

Here follows our attempt to identify the ideology built into digital

technology and to frame some hypotheses about how to engage with it.

The Net Closes

In our age, domination is not just imposed by commands issued from

rulers to ruled, but by algorithms that systematically produce and

constantly recalibrate power differentials. The algorithm is the

fundamental mechanism perpetuating today’s hierarchies; it determines

the possibilities in advance, while offering an illusion of freedom as

choice. The digital reduces the infinite possibilities of life to a

lattice of interconnecting algorithms—to choices between zeros and ones.

The world is whittled down to representation, and representation expands

to fill the world; the irreducible disappears. That which does not

compute does not exist. The digital can present a breathtaking array of

choices—of possible combinations of ones and zeros—but the terms of each

choice are set in advance.

A computer is a machine that performs algorithms. The term originally

designated a human being who followed orders as rigidly as a machine.

Alan Turing, the patriarch of computer science, named the digital

computer as a metaphorical extension of the most impersonal form of

human labor: “The idea behind digital computers may be explained by

saying that these machines are intended to carry out any operations

which could be done by a human computer.” In the fifty years since, we

have seen this metaphor inverted and inverted again, as human and

machine become increasingly indivisible. “The human computer is supposed

to be following fixed rules,” Turing continued; “he has no authority to

deviate from them in any detail.”

Just as timesaving technologies have only made us busier, giving the

busywork of number crunching to computers has not freed us from

busywork—it has made computing integral to every facet of our lives. In

post-Soviet Russia, numbers crunch you.

Since the beginning, the object of digital development has been the

convergence of human potential and algorithmic control. There are places

where this project is already complete. The iPhone “Retina display” is

so dense that an unaided human eye cannot tell it is comprised of

pixels. There are still gaps between the screens, but they grow smaller

by the day.

The Net that closes the space between us closes the spaces within us. It

encloses commons that previously resisted commodification, commons such

as social networks that we can only recognize as such now that they are

being mapped for enclosure. As it grows to encompass our whole lives, we

have to become small enough to fit into its equations. Total immersion.

The Digital Divides

“We were once told that the airplane had ‘abolished frontiers’;

actually, it is only since the airplane became a serious weapon that

frontiers have become definitely impassable.”

–George Orwell, “You and the Atomic Bomb”

Well-intentioned liberals are concerned that there are entire

communities not yet integrated into the global digital network. Hence

free laptops for the “developing world,” hundred-dollar tablets for

schoolchildren. They can only imagine the one of digital access or the

zero of digital exclusion. Given this binary, digital access is

preferable—but the binary itself is a product of the process that

produces exclusion, not a solution to it.

The project of computerizing the masses recapitulates and extends the

unification of humanity under capitalism. No project of integration has

ever extended as widely or penetrated as deeply as capitalism, and the

digital will soon fill its entire space. “The poor don’t have our

products yet!”—that’s the rallying cry of Henry Ford. Amazon.com sells

tablets below cost, too, but they acknowledge it as a business

investment. Individual workers depreciate without digital access; but

being available at a single click, compelled to compete

intercontinentally in real time, will not make the total market value of

the working class appreciate. Capitalist globalization has already shown

this. More mobility for individuals does not ensure more parity across

the board.

To integrate is not necessarily to equalize: the leash, the rein, and

the whip are also connective. Even where it connects, the digital

divides.

Like capitalism, the digital divides haves from have-nots. But a

computer is not what the has-not lacks. The has-not lacks power, which

is not apportioned equally by digitization. Rather than a binary of

capitalists and proletarians, a universal market is emerging in which

each person will be ceaselessly evaluated and ranked. Digital technology

can impose power differentials more thoroughly and efficiently than any

caste system in history.

Already, your ability to engage in social and economic relations of all

kinds is determined by the quality of your processor. At the lower end

of the economic spectrum, the unemployed person with the smartphone

snaps up the cheaper ride on Craigslist (where hitchhiking used to be

equal opportunity). At the upper end, the high-frequency trader profits

directly on the processing power of his computers (making old-fashioned

stockbroking look fair by comparison), as does the Bitcoin miner.

It is unthinkable that digital equality could be built on such an uneven

terrain. The gap between rich and poor has not closed in the nations at

the forefront of digitization. The more widespread digital access

becomes, the more we will see social and economic polarization

accelerate. Capitalism produces and circulates new innovations faster

than any previous system, but alongside them it produces ever-increasing

disparities: where equestrians once ruled over pedestrians, stealth

bombers now sail over motorists.[1] And the problem is not just that

capitalism is an unfair competition, but that it imposes this

competition on every sphere of life. Digitization makes it possible to

incorporate the most intimate aspects of our relations into its logic.

The digital divide doesn’t just run between individuals and

demographics; it runs through each of us. In an era of precarity, when

everyone simultaneously occupies multiple shifting social and economic

positions, digital technologies selectively empower us according to the

ways we are privileged while concealing the ways we are marginalized.

The grad student who owes fifty thousand dollars communicates with other

debtors through social media, but they are more likely to share their

résumés or rate restaurants than to organize a debt strike.

Only when we understand the protagonists of our society as networks

rather than freestanding individuals can the gravity of this hit home:

digital collectivity is premised on market success, whereas we all

experience failure in isolation. In the social networks of the

future—which advertisers, credit agencies, employers, landlords, and

police will monitor in a single matrix of control—we may only encounter

each other insofar as we affirm the market and our value on it.

The System Updates

Competition and market expansion have always stabilized capitalism by

offering new social mobility, giving the poor a stake in the game just

when they had no more reason to play along. But now that the entire

world is integrated into a single market and capital is concentrating in

the hands of a shrinking elite, what could forestall a new wave of

revolt?

The aforementioned Henry Ford was one of the innovators who responded to

the last major crisis that threatened capitalism. Raising salaries and

increasing mass-production and credit, he expanded the market for his

products—undercutting the revolutionary demands of the labor movement by

turning producers into consumers. This encouraged even the most

precarious workers to aspire to inclusion rather than revolution.

The following generation’s struggles erupted on a new terrain, as

consumers reprised producers’ demand for self-determination in the

marketplace: first as a demand for individuality, and then, when that

was granted, for autonomy. This culminated with the classic imperative

of the do-it-yourself counterculture—“Become the media”—just as the

global telecommunications infrastructure was miniaturized to make

individual workers as flexible as national economies.

We have become the media, and our demand for autonomy has been

granted—but this has not rendered us free. Just as the struggles of

producers were defused by turning them into consumers, the demands of

consumers have been defused by turning them into producers: where the

old media had been top-down and unidirectional, the new media derive

their value from user-created content. Meanwhile, globalization and

automation eroded the compromise Ford had brokered between capitalists

and a privileged subset of the working class, producing a redundant and

precarious population.

In this volatile context, new corporations like Google are updating the

Fordist compromise via free labor and free distribution. Ford offered

workers greater participation in capitalism via mass consumption; Google

gives everything away for free by making everything into an unpaid job.

In offering credit, Ford enabled workers to become consumers by selling

their future as well as present labor; Google has dissolved the

distinction between production, consumption, and surveillance, making it

possible to capitalize on those who may never have anything to spend at

all.

Attention itself is supplementing financial capital as the determinant

currency in our society. It is a new consolation prize for which the

precarious may compete—those who will never be millionaires can still

dream of a million youtube views—and a new incentive to drive the

constant innovation capitalism necessitates. As in the financial market,

corporations and individuals alike may try their luck, but those who

control the structures through which attention circulates wield the

greatest power. Google’s ascendancy does not derive from advertising

revenue or product sales but from the ways it shapes the flows of

information.

Looking ahead down this road, we can imagine a digital feudalism in

which finance capital and attention have both been consolidated in the

hands of an elite, and a benevolent dictatorship of computers (human and

otherwise) maintains the Internet as a playpen for a superfluous

population. Individual programs and programmers will be replaceable—the

more internal mobility a hierarchical structure offers, the more robust

and resilient it is—but the structure itself will be nonnegotiable. We

can even imagine the rest of the population participating on an

apparently horizontal and voluntary basis in refining the

programming—within certain parameters, of course, as in all algorithms.

Digital feudalism could arrive under the banner of direct democracy,

proclaiming that everyone has the right to citizenship and

participation, presenting itself as a solution to the excesses of

capitalism. Those who dream of a guaranteed basic income, or who wish to

be compensated for the online harvesting of their “personal data,” must

understand that these demands would only be realized by an all-seeing

surveillance state—and that such demands legitimize state power and

surveillance even if they are never granted. Statists will use the

rhetoric of digital citizenship to justify mapping everyone in new

cartographies of control, fixing each of us to a single online identity

in order to fulfill their vision of a society subject to total

regulation and enforcement. “Smart cities” will impose algorithmic order

on the offline world, replacing the unsustainable growth imperative of

contemporary capitalism with new imperatives: surveillance, resilience,

and management.[2]

In this dystopian projection, the digital project of reducing the world

to representation converges with the program of electoral democracy, in

which only representatives acting through the prescribed channels may

exercise power. Both set themselves against all that is incomputable and

irreducible, fitting humanity to a Procrustean bed. Fused as electronic

democracy, they would present the opportunity to vote on a vast array of

minutia, while rendering the infrastructure itself unquestionable—the

more participatory a system is, the more “legitimate.” Yet every notion

of citizenship implies an excluded party; every notion of political

legitimacy implies a zone of illegitimacy.

Genuine freedom means being able to determine our lives and relations

from the ground up. We must be able to define our own conceptual

frameworks, to formulate the questions as well as the answers. This is

not the same as obtaining better representation or more participation in

the prevailing order. Championing digital inclusivity and “democratic”

state stewardship equips those who hold power to legitimize the

structures through which they wield it.

It is a mistake to think that the tools built to rule us would serve us

if only we could depose our masters. That’s the same mistake every

previous revolution has made about police, courts, and prisons. The

tools of liberation must be forged in the struggle to achieve it.

The Social Networks

We contemplate a future in which digital systems will meet our every

need, as long as we ask only for the present order delivered instantly.

Tracing the trajectory of our digital imaginary, we will soon be always

voting, always working, always shopping, always in jail. Even fantasies

that separate the soul from the body to travel inside the computer leave

the liberal subject intact: every post-humanism we have been offered has

been a neoliberalism, every one.

Liberal gradualists fighting for online privacy and net neutrality

figure the subalterns they are defending as individuals. But as long as

we operate according to the paradigm of “human rights,” our attempts to

organize against systems of digital control will only reproduce their

logic. The regime of constitutions and charters that is presently coming

to an end didn’t just protect the liberal subject, the individual—it

invented it. Each of the rights of the liberal subject implies a lattice

of institutional violence to ensure its functional atomization—the

partitioning of private property, the privacy of voting booths and

prison cells.

If nothing else, the ostentatious networking of daily life underscores

the fragility of liberal individuality. Where does “I” begin and end,

when my knowledge is derived from search engines and my thoughts are

triggered and directed by online updates? Countering this, we are

encouraged to shore up our fragile individualism by constructing and

disseminating autobiographical propaganda. The online profile is a

reactionary form that attempts to preserve the last flickering ember of

the liberal subjectivity by selling it. Say, “identity economy.”

But the object of exploitation is a network, and so is the subject in

revolt. Neither have ever resembled the liberal individual for very

long. The slave galley and the slave uprising are both networks composed

of some aspects of many people. Their difference consists not in

different types of people, but different principles of networking. Every

body contains multiple hearts. The perspective that digital

representation provides on our own activity enables us to clarify that

we are pursuing a conflict between rival organizational principles, not

between specific networks or individuals.

The networks produced and concealed by liberalism are inevitably

hierarchical. Liberalism seeks to stabilize the pyramid of inequality by

forever widening its base. Our desire is to level pyramids, to abolish

the indignities of domination and submission. We do not demand that the

rich give to the poor; we seek to cut down the fences. We cannot say

that the digital is essentially hierarchical, because we know nothing of

“essences”; we only know that the digital is fundamentally hierarchical,

in that it is built upon the same foundation as liberalism. If a

different digital is possible, it will only emerge on a different

foundation.

We don’t need better iterations of existing technology; we need a better

premise for our relations. New technologies are useless except insofar

as they help us to establish and defend new relations.

Social networks preexist the internet; different social practices

network us according to different logics. Understanding our relations in

terms of circulation rather than static identity—in terms of

trajectories rather than locations, of forces rather than objects—we can

set aside the question of individual rights and set out to create new

collectivities outside the logic that produced the digital and its

divides.

The Force Quits

For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Integration

creates new exclusions; the atomized seek each other. Every new form of

control creates another site of rebellion. Policing and security

infrastructure have increased exponentially over the past two decades,

but this has not produced a more pacified world—on the contrary, the

greater the coercion, the more instability and unrest. The project of

controlling populations by digitizing their interactions and

environments is itself a coping strategy to forestall the upheavals that

are bound to follow the economic polarization, social degradation, and

ecological devastation wrought by capitalism.

The wave of uprisings that has swept the globe since 2010—from Tunisia

and Egypt through Spain and Greece to the worldwide Occupy movement, and

most recently Turkey and Brazil—has largely been understood as a product

of the new digital networks. Yet it is also a reaction against

digitization and the disparities it reinforces. News of Occupy

encampments spread via the Internet, but those who populated them were

there because they were unsatisfied with the merely virtual—or because,

being poor or homeless, they had no access to it at all. Before 2011,

who could have imagined that the Internet would produce a worldwide

movement premised on permanent presence in shared physical space?

This is only a foretaste of the backlash that will ensue as more and

more of life is fitted to the digital grid. The results are not

foreordained, but we can be sure there will be new opportunities for

people to come together outside and against the logic of capitalism and

state control. As we witness the emergence of digital citizenship and

the identity market, let us begin by asking what technologies the

digitally excluded non-citizen will need. The tools employed during the

fight for Gezi Park in Istanbul in summer 2013 could present a humble

starting place. How can we extrapolate from protest mapping to the tools

that will be necessary for insurrection and survival, especially where

the two become one and the same? Looking to Egypt, we can see the need

for tools that could coordinate the sharing of food—or disable the

military.

Understanding the expansion of the digital as an enclosure of our

potential doesn’t mean ceasing to use digital technology. Rather, it

means changing the logic with which we approach it. Any positive vision

of a digital future will be appropriated to perpetuate and abet the

ruling order; the reason to engage on the terrain of the digital is to

destabilize the disparities it imposes. Instead of establishing digital

projects intended to prefigure the world we wish to see, we can pursue

digital practices that disrupt control. Rather than setting out to

defend the rights of a new digital class—or to incorporate everyone into

such a class via universal citizenship—we can follow the example of the

disenfranchised, beginning from contemporary uprisings that radically

redistribute power.

Understood as a class, programmers occupy the same position today that

the bourgeoisie did in 1848, wielding social and economic power

disproportionate to their political leverage. In the revolutions of

1848, the bourgeoisie sentenced humanity to two more centuries of

misfortune by ultimately siding with law and order against poor workers.

Programmers enthralled by the Internet revolution could do even worse

today: they could become digital Bolsheviks whose attempt to create a

democratic utopia produces the ultimate totalitarianism.

On the other hand, if a critical mass of programmers shifts their

allegiances to the real struggles of the excluded, the future will be up

for grabs once more. But that would mean abolishing the digital as we

know it—and with it, themselves as a class. Desert the digital utopia.

[1] You can use a 3D printer to make a gun, but the NSA can make

computer worms that seize control of entire industrial systems.

[2] Smart cities will not be based on greener buildings, but on the

surveillance and control of our personal possessions: Walmart is already

using RFID chips, the same chips used in US passports, to track the

flows of its commodities across the globe.