On networks and control I received my first computer in 1978 from my parent. That means that I have been in front of a screen for 32 years as of this writing.
And I've had it. Or at least I'm having severe problems with this practice. You see, I'm a digital native, or at least a technological one, with Star Trek before my eyes (the ORIGINAL ONE) before kindergarten, and electronics in my hand before puberty. I have been before a computer screen, or a television screen all of my life, but I am not alone. Let me begin that I feel like a unit of livestock in a Web 2.0, or (3.0, or 4.0 by now) carrel, tethered by instrumental fear and social panopticism and workplace Taylorism, as well as seductive playbourism to keep me immobile. The Building of the Borg-machine Marshall McLuhan wrote on privacy in the electric networks regarding ubiquitous interpersonal involvement - “Electronic media bring us in touch with everyone, everywhere, instantaneously. Whereas the book extended the eye, electronic circuitry extends the central nervous system.. Constant contact with the world becomes a daily reality. All-at-oneness is our state of being. Closed human systems no longer exist. For us, the first postliterate generation, privacy is either a luxury or a curse of the past. The planet is like a general store where nosy people keep track of everyone else’s business – a twelve-party line or a “Dear Abby” column writ large. “The new tribalism is one where everyone’s business is everyone else’s and where we are all somewhat testy”. [] The key phrase here is “Constant contact with the world becomes a daily reality.” I believe that McLuhan was dealing with more of the Orwell/Huxley milieu of constant broadcast to a passive audience as a measure of pacification and control, but this is not the case of the fin de millennium culture. The individual is in constant contact with the world, the virtual, and all of its inhabitants. Facebook has over 500 Million subscribers[], constituting 1 in every 12 people alive. Add Twitter, academia.edu, Google Wave, LinkedIn, Friendster, Ning, Second Life, and you have a milieu what beckons for the individual to go online, work at the computer, shop at the computer, play at the computer, and fall asleep while the computer plays your favorite music or plays your favorite news. In many ways, this echoes the utopian ideals of 1960's futuristic ephemeral videos of the “House of the Future” Control Paul Virilio, in his essay, “The Third Interval” described the lack of differentiation between the technologically accelerated disabled body, and the technologically accelerated able body. His assertion is that the one becomes accelerated in its ability to engage in the discourse of the able in virtual space while the able becomes paralyzed in its enmeshing in the virtual. In short, under virtual acceleration, the body becomes inert and the virtual gesture takes on lines of flight. The paralysis is the problem. As in Postman's Technopoly, the tool becomes a platform which becomes a societal underpinning, then becomes its own mythology. The shape of society becomes such that the indivdual is chaped to fit the machine. Although this may sound like Englebart's ideas of human-computer coevolution in which the development of the computer drives the human to adapt and then build the next improvement, this is not so. It is the shaping of the individual by the nation-state in its complicity with the corporate oligarchy to create desiring-machines and labor-generators in service to the cybernetic systems of control of the increasing Fordist/Taylorist regime of First World capital. In many ways, social media are almost akin to Temple Grandin's approach to slaughterhouses in which she has designed devices that calm the cattle by giving them a gentle squeeze, or her colleague Wendy Jacobs' squeeze chair. This calming effect of the squeeze is the feeling of togetherness the Facebook user feels to see their friends or the receipt of a heart of smiley on Skype. The reality is that this is not a hug, or a kiss, or anything of the sort – it is an empty signifier of breath and flesh. And embodied socialization. Secondly, the network is a conduit of information that can be quantified and tracked. The networked individual is placing the keystroke and lexial quantum into he net, where the governmental/military/corporate superstructure that runs the Internet can track our movements, our consumptions, our desires. In the age of the Global economic crisis, there is the implication of the loss of ability to support oneself for lack of employment or for that matter, productivity. The fear of falling behind in any technological proficiency is replaced by the fear of not being available when an opportunity appears. This can be anything from a potential employer or client. Or, there is also the existential terror of the potential family member, friend, or lover in distress. It is almost as the broadcast insurance ads goad us into purchasing their product - “What if you weren't there to help them?” It is widely known that advertising is driven by fear and desire, and this is the constant ratcheting of the machinic enslavement to the screen. In the grip of machinic enslavement, the body becomes assimilated into the collective mass of labor, fear and desire, much like the hive like organisms called The Borg from the television series, “Star Trek: The Next Generation” These are fragmentary being who have been literally woven into a collective whole of a cybernetic milieu and drained of all individuality. In the neo-McLuhanist network, the individuality is intact but the continuous interlock to the machine remains. One response is merely to get out of the cubicle and get on one's feet. Tethering The transparent evil of the electric net is that walking away is no longer enough. Our mobile devices, iPhones, and iPads still engage in the act of machinic enslavement in terms of the net-corp apparatus by merely miniaturizing the cubicle and having us hold it before us in our hands. Amazon.com still beckons, our friends tweet us and Facebook us (don't you think that Facebook can be a verb?); everything is open season. These are the invisible silver cords that ties us to the net.collective, not the human network that would be far more beneficial. But the individual is torn between the possibility of the contact that can reverse the pull of control through resistive communication and the enslavement of being beholden to it if they use the net.corp system. Solution? In writing this tirade against the screen behind I and so many have been enslaved, I am resolved to, I am challenged to provide strategies for resistance, a revolt against the network. Unfortunately, all I can do is offer an ambivalence, as this is my work, this is my milieu, this is my home. The best I have been able to do is to go to places on the earth where there have been little contact with the Grid, such as the Western Aleutian Islands. We cannot, as Postman suggests in a future post-Technopolic society, abandon all technology to return to a Classical education. This is akin to us simply trying to unhook and go to a pre-technological way of life, or even the technologically-enabled protoindustrial net of communes outlined in the Invisible Committee’s “The Coming Insurrection”. Unless we are truly prepared to abandon the superstructure and ride horseback on the post-Capital apocalyptic landscape, we have the tendrils of techne grown into us like a planter's wart. So we are driven to resistance through intentionality and perhaps developing an aloofness to the network. Develop strategies in which one only uses it for necessary functions, for information, to organize resistance against it, and to facilitate the embodied presence that is necessary to human existence. My problem is, I have been woven into the Matrix, and even when I am removed from it, I realize it is still my home and my point of resistance and cannot totally remove myself from it. Therefore, I have to either attack it discursively, stand aloof physically, or drop the carrier completely at times. I can no longer live with it, nor can I live without it. I an a reluctant symbiote of the electric net. _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list [email protected] http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
