Living with Cyberspace: Technology & Society in the 21st Century
JOHN ARMITAGE JOANNE ROBERTS, Editors
Continuum
L I V I N G W I T H C Y B E R S PA C E
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L I V I N G W I T H C Y B E R S PA C E
TECHNOLOGY & SOCIETY IN THE 21S T C E N T U R Y
EDITED BY
J O H N A R M I TA G E AND JOANNE ROBERTS
Continuum The Tower Building, 11 York Road, London, SE1 7NX 370 Lexington Avenue, New York, NY 10017–6503 First published 2002 © Editorial material and arrangement copyright John Armitage and Joanne Roberts; individual chapters copyright their contributors, 2002 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, or transmitted in any form, or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 0–8264–6035–6 (hardback) 0–8264–6036–4 (paperback) Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk Printed and bound in Great Britain by MPG Books Ltd, Bodmin, Cornwall
This book is dedicated to the memory of Nicholas Zurbrugg (1947–2001), a fine cyber theorist and a good friend
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CONTENTS
Acknowledgements
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Living with Cyberspace: An Introduction to Technology & Society in the 21st Century John Armitage and Joanne Roberts
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PART I: CYBER SOCIETY Introduction
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1 Cyberspace: Beyond the Information Society? David Lyon
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2 Cybernetic Life: Limits to Choice Frank Webster
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3 Chronotopia John Armitage and Joanne Roberts
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PART II: CYBER CULTURE Introduction
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4 Cyberspace as Battlespace: The New Virtual Alliance of the Military, the Media and the Entertainment Industry James Der Derian
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5 Codework: From Cyberspace to Biospace, from Neuromancer to GATTACA McKenzie Wark
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6 A is for Animatics (Automata, Androids and Animats) Cathryn Vasseleu
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CONTENTS
PART III: CYBER POLITICS Introduction 7 E-Democracy: A Case Study of Web-Orchestrated Cyberadvocacy William H. Dutton and Wan-Ying Lin
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8 Mediating Practices: Women With/in Cyberspace Saskia Sassen
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9 Technopower and its Cyberfutures Tim Jordan
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PART IV: CYBER ECONOMICS Introduction
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10 Towards the Cybereconomy: Making a Business Out of Cyberspace Ian Miles
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11 Women-Cybercitizens Verena Andermatt Conley
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12 Space and Cyberspace: On the Enclosure of Consciousness Phil Graham
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Notes and References
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Suggestions for Further Reading
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Notes on Contributors
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Index
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Living with Cyberspace: Technology & Society in the 21st Century would have been an altogether different book without a number of institutional, editorial and intellectual influences that have been constant from its inception. Professor Philip Garrahan’s encouragement and support proved indispensable in arranging the Exploring Cyber Society conference in July 1999 at the University of Northumbria, UK, which gave rise to the initial idea for this volume. A University of Northumbria Small Grant for Research during 2001/2 helped free some time for John in the final preparation of the book and for that he is particularly grateful. Thank you also to Tristan Palmer, who provided continued and constructive editorial guidance, first at Athlone and later at Continuum. However, as editors, our deepest intellectual appreciation goes to our twelve co-contributors for their readiness to write about and to reflect with us on a variety of debates highlighted within this volume and to offer sympathetic criticisms of each other’s work. Without the help of the institutions and people listed above, what follows would not have been possible. John Armitage and Joanne Roberts
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L I V I N G W I T H C Y B E R S PA C E
AN INTRODUCTION TO TECHNOLOGY & SOCIETY IN THE 21
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C E N T U RY
John Armitage and Joanne Roberts
Living with Cyberspace: Technology & Society in the 21st Century presents an extensive appreciation of the chief concepts and issues in ‘cyber theory’ (i.e. in the critical theorization and empirical study of the contemporary questions of cybernetics and everyday life, technology and society, culture, politics and economics). The book embraces consideration of a number of threats and opportunities that currently govern the social and cultural, political and economic debates over cyberspace. Broadly, such threats and opportunities are discussed within the context of a multidisciplinary approach to sociology and cultural studies, political science and political economy. However, the key contribution of these conceptual and practical deliberations on cyber theory is the discovery that to live with cyberspace is to live with technological risk in the context of the ‘social imaginary’ of contemporary everyday life and its significations.1 Thus the principal ideas and problems of cyber theory in the twenty-first century, cyberspace, ‘battlespace’, ‘E(electronic)-democracy’ and the ‘cybereconomy’, are primarily concerned with the reappraisal of the ‘information society’ and the mapping of new cybernetic territories such as the ‘military– industrial–media–entertainment network’, ‘cyberadvocacy’ and electronic commerce. The impulse to edit this volume arose from our increasing sense of the sheer theoretical scale and empirical scope of the challenge of living with cyberspace today. For example, there are as yet no authoritative conceptual approaches to contemporary technology and society that are not permanently exposed to continuous scrutiny and criticism, extension and reinterpretation. Accordingly, ‘critical’ and ‘poststructuralist’ cyber theories are examined and interrogated from within but simultaneously expanded to become ‘hypermodernity’.2 At the
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same time, political science, critical political and feminist sociology, neoclassical economics and radical political economy, conventions of political, social and economic theory that have been out of favour with some, are currently exercising a constructive critical influence on new multidisciplinary cyber theories such as ‘cyberfeminism’.3 Certainly the extent of these advances in cyber theory are both bewildering and bewitching for scholars and students alike. What, for instance, can information society theory offer us in the age of cyberspace, in the age of seemingly endless consumer choice, acceleration and spatialization? Yet, regardless of the dimensions of such conceptual questions, their practical repercussions are fascinating not only for academics in debate but also for all those interested in examining the contemporary mechanisms of development in cybernetic society. Of equal importance are the spectacular transformations taking place in the contemporary culture, politics and economics of cyberspace. Cultural transformations, for example, include the increasing integration of the military and the mass media, the advent of ‘codework’, ‘biospace’ and ‘animatics’. Meanwhile, in the political sphere, the growth of interest in E-democracy has been accompanied by the rise of concern about ‘mediating practices’ and an upsurge of debates associated with the experience of women in cyberspace and related questions involving ‘technopower’ and ‘cyberfutures’. Likewise, economic shifts imply the emergence of the cybereconomy, the potential transformation of women into ‘cybercitizens’ and issues surrounding the connection between cyberspace and the enframing of human consciousness. Given such cyber theoretical and empirical threats and opportunities there is an urgent demand for a continuing multidisciplinary exploration of the sometimes insecure yet often reassuringly real and imaginary borders between cyberspace and everyday life, between technology and its social significations. Living with Cyberspace: Technology & Society in the 21st Century constitutes an effort to supply the demand for conceptual re-evaluation and realistic road-maps through the provision of twelve specially commissioned chapters written by fourteen of the most celebrated and cosmopolitan cyber theorists writing today. To aid the reader, each of the four parts of the book – Cyber Society, Cyber Culture, Cyber Politics and Cyber Economics – opens with an Introduction written by the editors that outlines the cyber theoretical hazards and possibilities investigated in the three chapters that make up each individual part and, in some cases, makes links to chapters and important concepts found elsewhere in the volume. A detailed set of notes and references for each introduction and chapter can be found at the end of the book, together with specific suggestions for further reading, and notes on the contributors. Consequently, Living with Cyberspace: Technology & Society in the 21st Century is a collection of provocative theoretical reflections on and inspired applications of contemporary cyber theory. In what follows, we aim to provide the reader with the necessary background to a critical appreciation of cyber society, cyber culture, cyber politics and cyber economics. By briefly introducing the key cyber theories, threats and
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opportunities examined in the separate chapters, we delineate the particular theoretical motifs and empirical traditions that motivate the contributors to the volume as a whole. We begin with a survey of Part I before attending to a review of the debates within Parts II, III, and IV. PA R T I :
CYBER SOCIETY
Among the burgeoning conceptual issues that engage contemporary cyber theorists, perhaps of most significance is that of the relationship between cyberspace and the information society. The questions concerning the analysis and development of cyberspace and the information society are far-reaching. For instance, a number of the fundamental questions that are presently appearing incorporate the configurations through which cyberspace can be conceived of as the information society of the twenty-first century. Other questions include how cyberspace characterizes itself in terms of ambivalence or the contradictions between it and the social development of information and communications technologies (ICTs) and what David Lyon in Chapter 1 calls ‘cybersociality’. Here, the technological investments that cyberspatial proponents of the information society have in the shift from industrial goods production to ‘post-industrial’ information services provision are important. So too is the consequent anxiety that cyberspace and the information society generate about the comprehension of contemporary occupational change and the increasing pre-eminence of the professional and technical social classes. Although Daniel Bell had established the concept of the ‘post-industrial society’ in the 1970s, it was not until the 1980s that United States (US) sociologists including Bell began to examine the connection between cyberspace and the information society.4 The task of challenging the information society thesis was of course central to neo-Marxist and related critical theories of ICTs throughout the 1980s.5 However, it was the appearance of alternative critical cyber theories associated with ‘postmodernism’, ‘flexible specialization’ and ‘the informational mode of development’ that shook both information society theorists and the neo-Marxist academy to their foundations. Adopting and adapting the work of Marshall McLuhan, Alfred Marshall and Daniel Bell, a variety of prominent cultural theorists, political and economic commentators began to reappraise the bonds between technology and space, information and society.6 Particularly significant here are the post-industrial and postmodern perspectives of Bell, Jean Baudrillard, Mark Poster, Michael Piore, Charles Sabel and Manuel Castells.7 Such critics focus their concerns on the nature of cyberspace and information and on the evolution of industrial to post-industrial society. For these theorists, then, there has been a sea change in the informational character of contemporary cultural politics and a remarkable shift in the advanced countries from the production of goods to the provision of services and the creation of knowledge. Indeed, it is this transformation that leads Castells, for example, to connect the emergence of ‘flexible’ informational capital and labour to the ‘space of flows’ in the ‘informational city’.8
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Critical cyber theory, and particularly Zygmunt Bauman’s theory, is another pivotal contribution to the postmodern task of questioning cyberspace and the information society.9 The use of Bauman’s theory by critical commentators on cyberspace such as Lyon thus challenges the liberal position of information society theorists like Bell. In so doing, and by deploying Bauman’s notion of ambivalence, the link between any assertions that the world of cyberspace might function in an efficient and orderly manner or with a leaning towards a kind of informational or social liberation are treated with profound scepticism. So too are any claims that if it were not for cybersociality behaving in such a far from ideal and contradictory way, the mono-directional cyber spatial imaginary of modernity – technological progress – would be realized. While critical cyber theory now figures prominently in post-industrial and postmodern perspectives on cyberspace and the information society, of equal importance is its influence on questions related to the potential of cyberspace for the enhancement of social life. In the work of Frank Webster, for instance, critical cyber theory is concerned with re-examining the informational, cultural and social manifestations through which knowledge represents the postmodern sphere of identity.10 Thanks to critical cyber theory, sociologists such as Webster are able to survey, interrogate and probe the forces governing contemporary social life. Significant here is the chasm between the constraints of information capitalism and the unlimited fantasies of self-creation at work in contemporary cybernetic culture. As Webster’s study in Chapter 2 makes clear, the dynamics of ‘techno-capitalism’ often severely curtail cybernetic desire and celebratory sensibilities directed toward individual liberation. It is here that debates over techno-capitalist constraint are highly significant, as are presentday anxieties about how such constraints may be augmenting other restrictions on human action in the twenty-first century. Critical cyber theory has also had an important influence on the development of ‘hypermodern’ theory and investigations into ‘speed-space’.11 Generally, critical cyber theory has been taken up by ‘hypermodernists’ not as a replacement of modernity but as disputing it, as including the risk of an alternative method of comprehending the ‘excesses’ of speed and space. In European critical cyber theory, for example, and especially in the writings of thinkers such as Bauman and Paul Virilio, hypermodern social theory confronts both modern and postmodern social theory. Sketching the horizon of ‘chronotopia’ (i.e. the utopia of speed) inhabited by the ‘global kinetic elite’ in Chapter 3, our contribution deploys Virilio’s conception of the ‘landscape of events’ to analyse the topography of the future.12 Moreover, in this critical cyber theoretical environment, speed and space in particular are seen as manifestations of ‘chronodystopia’ or the ‘grey zone of disengagement’.13 What Bauman calls ‘liquid modernity’, then, we label hypermodernity, a social theory that investigates new ways of understanding speed and space.14
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C Y B E R C U LT U R E
In recent decades, enthralled by the debates over poststructuralism, critical cyber cultural theory has been fascinated with celebrating the irreducible excesses of cybernetic and spatial language, by conceptions of a different form of cyber cultural theory from that associated with the language and meaning of structuralism. Arising from such deliberations on psychoanalysis and linguistics, ‘semiology’ (the science of signs), and ‘anti-humanism’ is the idea that there is a variety of significant differences between the languages of structuralism and poststructuralism. Poststructuralist cyber cultural theory is distinguished from structuralist approaches, for instance, by its fluid cultural methodology not only in political theory and cultural studies, but also in aspects of cyberfeminism.15 In these approaches, poststructuralist cyber cultural theory is characteristically a consideration of anything from cyberspace and the military–industrial complex to the mass media and the encoded values of cybernetic and corporeal spaces as well as the literature and cinema of a given socio-political order, its animated desires and automated limits. Poststructuralist cyber cultural theory, then, designates a shift of perspective with regard to the position of the human subject, cybernetic cultural processes of spatial displacement, language and meaning. Initially, of course, a confusing array of poststructuralist and feminist theorists from Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida to Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, Jean-François Lyotard and Jean Baudrillard proposed an equally perplexing variety of critical concepts. Subsequently, ‘Lacanian psychoanalysis’ and ‘deconstruction’, ‘power/knowledge’, ‘desire’, ‘feminine writing’ and ‘simulation’ were applied by poststructuralist cyber cultural theorists to signal a departure from structuralism, to proclaim a divergence from previous standpoints, and to embrace what Lyotard called the decline of historical sensemaking and the ‘meta-narratives’ of modern progress.16 All three cyber cultural theorists in Part II, James Der Derian, McKenzie Wark and Cathryn Vasseleu, individually outline how poststructuralist and associated cyber cultural and feminist theories can be applied to cultural forms characteristic of contemporary cybernetic spaces. For these cyber cultural theorists, therefore, poststructuralism has provided a sort of ‘post-enlightenment’ awareness. And yet the lines of communication between poststructuralist and structuralist cyber cultural theory remain open. As Roland Barthes suggested many years ago, there is fluctuation, movement, idiosyncrasy, intertextual allusion and irony at work in both poststructuralism and structuralism.17 The theoretical context for this claim is, after Barthes’ assertion, poststructuralism as structuralism without orthodox methodological commitment. The poststructuralist approach to cyber culture thus acknowledges the ephemeral and disputed character of contemporary ‘mythology’, and openly incorporates cybernetic conflict, signifying systems, psychoanalytic models of the unconscious and radical conceptions of the cultural scene. Consequently, poststructuralist and structuralist cyber cultural theories are often indistinguishable. Often the focus is on linguistic
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structures and meaning but equally often it can include ‘deconstructive’ or ‘post-binary’ readings of the mass media, literature and cinema where conceptions of language are extended far beyond that of binary oppositions such as male/female, black/white, and so on. There is also a number of open and sometimes confusing lines of communication that are detectable within poststructuralist cyber cultural theory. A contemporary cyber cultural theorist such as Virilio, for example, is sometimes characterized as a poststructuralist thinker. He is thus viewed as having rejected the study of the binary oppositions between life and death, and the like, as reactivated forms of the philosophical dualism to be found in Descartes’ analytical splitting of mind and body in the eighteenth century. In short, Virilio is seen as having initiated novel concepts and ideas aimed at overturning semiology. Even so, when questioned about such matters, it becomes evident that Virilio’s cyber cultural theory has little in common with poststructuralist cultural theory and politics.18 As a result, Living with Cyberspace: Technology & Society in the 21st Century presents fresh approaches to the work of cyber cultural theorists such as Virilio as well as to his relations with others, inclusive of poststructuralist cyber cultural theorists. There is of course not merely a number of perspectives on poststructuralist cyber cultural theory but also a variety of common threads that are woven through the works of poststructuralist cyber cultural theorists. The questioning of contemporary notions of language, human consciousness and subjectivity as well as the theoretical displacement and analysis of cyberspace is a particularly significant thread, for example. Additionally, there is the reflective disruption of the cultural logic of militarization and the technological realm of virtual identity. The creation and erasure of linguistic and subject positions, genealogies of technological knowledge, truth and power as spaces for disciplinary cybernetic techniques, modes of corporeal surveillance and control are also important. Such questions break with the manageable concepts and values of humanism and are crucial to the development of poststructuralist cyber cultural theory. The remarkable emphases these themes are given in the writings of cyber cultural theorists as distinct as Virilio, Deleuze, Guattari and Baudrillard are examined and developed in Chapters 4 and 5. One of the foundations for the development of poststructuralist cyber cultural theory outlined above is linked to animatics (the machinery of animation), automata and, to some extent, Donna Haraway’s cultural and techno-scientific philosophy of cyberfeminism.19 Haraway, always at the forefront of developments in feminist perspectives on nature and technoscience, proposes a cyber cultural theory that aims to examine the influence of cybernetics on culture and subjectivity. Her feminist enquiries tend to focus on the need to question conventional ideas of nature as the place of origin and female identity. Nevertheless, there are currently several examples of animated and automated struggles over cyberspace that involve issues relating to technological control and network communications. Sensing such emphases in the sphere of automata and the virtual environments of intelligent ‘agents’ and information systems
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within the art of animation is also illustrative of a number of current perspectives on poststructuralist cyber cultural and feminist theory. Friedrich Kittler, for example, has considered the mechanisms and processes of control in gramophones and film, typewriters and computerized machines.20 Likewise, Virilio argues that automated thought is now cyberspatial in reach, linking these occurrences to ‘the violence revealed by the explosion of the information bomb’.21 In this reading, cyberspace is a frightening detonation, simultaneously producing the blast that catapults humanity into real time and transforms its experience of perception. In the poststructuralist cyber cultural framework where animated and life activities develop, a key facet of cyberspace is its contemporary hold over the cultural imaginary. According to Virilio, however, such animated pursuits and hypermodern experiences are little more than human conditioning by machinery. Indeed, women and men are presently enmeshed in the neverending yet seductive circuits of ‘cybersexuality’ and oppression, enchanted by the enframing qualities of technology, fixated by the numbing of emotion and the increasing appeal of ‘the machine god’.22 Contemporary discussions about the impact of animated human life in the realm of cyberspace are introducing a multitude of cyber cultural perspectives, as Vasseleu in Chapter 6 indicates. Artist–animators such as Jeffrey Ventrella, for instance, propose that the new animatic systems are almost overtaking the capacities of all previous forms of animation. The outcome is a novel animated experience in which the traditional distinctions between autonomy and control, between freedom of movement and reaction and between unscripted and pre-prepared animation are lost as real-time technological environments are established. In such examples virtual and ecological life is worryingly yet persuasively modelled, kinetic, aquatic and programmed. Fashioning cyber cultural life in such a manner, artist-animators like Ventrella are eager to explore these new animatic environments and adaptive behavioural principles. Problematic in a variety of respects, this kind of artwork has little to do with threatening conventional biological research programmes; rather, it is deeply concerned with the investigation of movement in traditional and contemporary animation or, in other words, with poststructuralist cyber cultural theory and practice. CYBER POLITICS
Cyber theory is aware of the techno-political and spatial realms in which it functions in the sense that it is primarily an investigation into the spaces in which power moves, into the key cybernetic and political mutations of cyberspace. Political science, along with critical political and feminist-inflected sociology is having a deep and lasting impact on twenty-first-century cyber theory. Living with Cyberspace: Technology & Society in the 21st Century attempts to survey and demonstrate a number of these influences through the writings of William H. Dutton and Wan-Ying Lin, Saskia Sassen and Tim Jordan. Profound shifts are occurring in the nature of cyber politics and political
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science. The political scientists of the American Annenberg School such as Dutton and Wan-Ying Lin aim to develop political science as a broad empirical approach to contemporary cyber politics through a description of the actual relationships between E-democracy and cyberadvocacy as well as the case study method. A significant example of the changing nature of cyberadvocacy in the USA is Dutton and Wan-Ying Lin’s case study of the ‘Stop the Overlay Campaign’ that aimed to resist the introduction of a new telephone area code. So too is their data on the electronic political geography of area codes in Los Angeles. The Annenberg School is also developing a more complex perspective on the forces of web-orchestrated cyberadvocacy and the remodelling of the ecology of games.23 These reappraisals of political science are producing an elaborate and extensive body of cyber theory that, for instance, persists to some extent in the writings of Sassen and Jordan. Cyber politics is also guided by findings relating to the ‘mediating practices’ of women within cyberspace. Such findings have led critical political and feminist-inspired sociologists like Sassen to examine the ‘cybersegmentations’ of women, their ‘cyberpresence’, and their understanding of ‘cyberopportunities’. Sassen’s lasting interest in women’s local struggles in cyberspace is developed in Chapter 8 through her theoretical interpretation and empirical analysis of cyberfeminist literature and associated political and sociological evidence. Here, she fixes her gaze on the importance of feminism for women within cyberspace and the significance of feminist views of inclusion and exclusion with respect to cybernetic technologies. Sassen’s enduring interest in the subjects of globalization, women’s rights, citizenship and community can also be linked to the work of other feminist sociologists such as Judy Wajcman, whose Feminism Confronts Technology has come to have an extended relevance to the comprehension of gender and technology-related issues.24 The uncovering of women’s issues in cyberspace has provided a sociological vantage point for the development of Sassen’s growing interest in the political and feminist sociology of young women in cyberspace, an issue which is also critical for the further development, for instance, of the sociology of Wajcman.25 This work is currently being joined by that on cyberspatial public policy, which, in the example of political science, writers such as Brian Loader are developing through studies of the cyberspace divide and especially the inequality of agency in the information age.26 Cyber politics is therefore coming to have an important influence on political science and public policy, on sociological work on gender and technology and on contemporary political theory and research. These developments in political science are especially significant in Britain where Jordan is broadening and deepening his approach to contemporary technopower through a critical perspective on the politics of cyberfuturism. Recent transformations have witnessed significant shifts in cyberspace, and some cyber theorists have become ever more critical with regard to the contemporary map of power. This critical stance toward the forces that are presently reconfiguring the cyber politics of cyber society has come to mark the outlook of some political scientists and sociologists. In his analysis of individuals, identity and
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hierarchy, for example, Jordan attempts to go beyond mainstream political science and sociology. The emergence of cyberpower in the 1990s confirmed the feeling of disaffection from organized forms of power (political parties, and so on) that started with the contemporary generation of youth’s reaction to the almost simultaneous invasion of cyberspace by collective corporate power and individualist political movements. However, given that official forms of power do not seem to present any answers to questions relating to cyberfuturism, the assumed benefits of political science as cyber political theory are now a source of lively debate. Moreover, with the publication of his Cyberpower in 1999, Jordan captured the emerging sense of disillusion, if not outright disaffection, from both power and political science, and this feeling of dissatisfaction has encouraged cyber theorists like Jordan to turn to notions such as the ‘technopower spiral’ and ‘information overload’.27 Today, the mood of twenty-first-century cyber politics is one in which the continuing reappraisal of political science is not only taken for granted but articulated through concepts such as Jordan’s technopower or, alternatively, ‘technopolitics’.28 Yet, such reappraisals of political science, while obviously timely, remain sensitive to the fact that the discipline can still offer significant and theoretically informed empirical accounts of cyber politics. Combining readily with the sociology of technology and feminism, political science supplies a much-needed critical insight into the fundamental aspects of cyber politics. Jordan’s commentary on grassroots activities and digital elites in Chapter 9 is but one clear example. As Living with Cyberspace: Technology & Society in the 21st Century illustrates, it is difficult to make sense of twenty-first-century cyber society, culture and economics without some comprehension of cyber politics. Political science is, for instance, making a significant contribution to the development of Jordan’s concept of cyberpower. And it looks set to remain significant not least because it provides a method of linking cybernetic and spatial analysis to cultural politics, and because it challenges the techno-political forces that condition and constrain such analyses. In all these ways, and as long as it remains the case that cyberspace cannot be perceived as the answer to all of the technospatial questions of the twenty-first century, there is every reason to believe that the further development of cyber politics and political science rests secure. CYBER ECONOMICS
Apart from cyber society, culture and politics, one of the most important subjects concerning contemporary cyber theorists is the interrogation of the cybereconomy. The concepts and issues involved in the examination and analysis of the business of cyberspace are of profound significance. Among the central concerns that are being formulated in the present period are the methods, allocation and forms by and through which cyberspatial resources are constructed as production. How the repercussions and inconsistencies of cybernetic distribution demarcate themselves as a revolutionary effect of this allocation and distribution is also important, as are the commercial and gendered
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investments that cyberspace has in the apparent superabundance of technological means to achieve given economic ends. Of equal importance is the erection of electronic frontiers, a development that perhaps signifies a coming to terms with the reality of the cybereconomy. However, it is worth remembering that it was only a short time ago, in the 1990s, that cyber theorists first began to sense that cyber economic theory and practice might require more detailed and critical consideration. Of course, the task of demystifying the technology of the liberal capitalist economy has been crucial to radical political economists for a century or more. Yet the recent advent of innovative if diffuse perspectives on the cybernetic functioning of the neo-liberal economy challenges not only radical political economy but also its chief rival, neo-classical economics.29 As a result, and usually standing on the shoulders of either Adam Smith or Karl Marx, among others, numerous contemporary cyber theorists began to study anew the links between information, technology and global capitalism or cyber economics. Here, broadly within the arena of neo-classical economics, the views of Robert Solow, Castells and Robin Mansell are crucial.30 These economists and sociologists, as indicated by Ian Miles in Chapter 10, have developed an interest in the cybernetic qualities of today’s economy. Considering the business of cyberspace, its constructed characteristics and its cyberspatiality as well as the economic dynamics of the technological revolution, such commentators, and Miles in particular, have begun to focus on the recently erected ‘fences’ and ‘electronic frontiers’ of the cybereconomy. Cyberfeminist theory, by contrast, and specifically Verena Andermatt Conley’s analysis of the work of Haraway and other theorists in Chapter 11, is crucial to the feminist task of unravelling the symbolic mysteries of the ‘economic’. For, as Conley’s contribution makes plain, Haraway’s cyberfeminism recasts the connections between cybernetics and socialist–feminist political economy. Women seeking to critique the art of economic representation can therefore deploy cyberfeminism. In particular, cyberfeminists scrutinize the art of economic realism before opposing it through conceptions of imaginary kinds of writing and by exposing the links between realism and concealed relations of power. Warning against the utopian fantasies guiding the bourgeois mechanism of exchange, cyberfeminists seek to question and perhaps someday overturn its symbolic economy. It should come as no surprise by now to find that cyberfeminism is presently an influential contributor not merely to the discourse of feminist political economy but also to cultural theory, cyber politics and radical political economy. In the work of Conley, for example, cyberfeminism is deployed to analyse the simulated cultural forms through which cyberspace represents the political and economic spheres. Utilizing such frameworks, Conley is able to acknowledge, explore and criticize the symbolic and largely imaginary arrangement of the simulated and virtual world of the cybereconomy. Of crucial significance here is the struggle between patriarchal conceptions of technology and politics and feminist notions of cyber citizenship. The idea that women must engage
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with and struggle against the techno-political and economic force of ‘neoimperialism’ is critical to Conley’s chapter included in this book and is critically linked to what Haraway calls the ‘informatics of domination’.31 At this point, the debate over living with cyberspace is particularly significant, as is Conley’s current involvement with how women, technology and political economy may be aiding new ways of understanding cyber economic experience in the twenty-first century. As it is in cyberfeminism, the emergence of cyber economics is also impacting on the development of radical political economy. Broadly, cyber economics is being adopted by radical political economists as an approach to the spaces of cyberspace, to examinations of their extent and flow, but, above all, as an alternative perspective on the associations between cybernetics and the enclosure of human consciousness. In Australian radical political economy, and explicitly in the writings of Phil Graham, cyber economic critical thought connects with Marxian and post-Marxian theory to attend to the spatial enframing of ‘electrospace’ within the context of cyberspace. Graham places specific stress on the historical importance of spatial signification. In so doing, he builds on the pioneering approach of Dallas Smythe to the political economy of communication.32 More remarkably, in this cyber political and economic context, Graham views electrospace and cyber economics as inherently humanrelated activities. For Graham, the power of social space to harness human consciousness is pervasive. Indeed, it is so strong that it is increasingly difficult to register the economic investment that the cybereconomy has in the production and circulation of ‘consciousness commodities’.33 What might be called ‘new media political economy’ therefore investigates unorthodox methods of accounting for value relations and spatial consciousness while seeking to uncover the latent radical potentiality of the extraterrestrial materiality of cyberspace. Graham’s original contribution to these discussions in cyber economics and radical political economy is presented in Chapter 12. THE SELECTION
As the editors and in thinking through and trying to choose the important concepts and significant issues that should be included or excluded from Living with Cyberspace: Technology & Society in the 21st Century, our purpose has always remained the same. It has been to provide a balanced depiction of various cyber theoretical and empirical disciplines and traditions of thought from around the world. In our description of cyber society, for instance, it is obvious that cyber theory now encompasses a whole host of threats and opportunities that presently provide the impetus for social debates over cyberspace in Canada and Britain. These threats and opportunities, moreover, are reflected in the multidisciplinary approach to cyberspace and the information society in the social sciences in these and other advanced societies. We have also endeavoured to present illustrations of both US and Australian cyber culture. It is an attempt to identify those elements of the poststructuralist traditions of US international
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relations theory and Australian cultural studies that has contributed so much to its development. Another aspiration has been to effect some equilibrium in our choice from cyber politics and, in particular, between US and British political science and critical political and feminist sociology. We have also made it a priority to try and appreciate that disciplines such as cyber economics are now truly global in scope. It is for this reason that the cyber economic concepts and issues we present in this book are those that are currently contributing significant advances to neo-classical economics, cyberfeminist and radical political economy in Britain, the US and Australia. The key guiding principle driving the present collection forward, though, has been that the concepts and issues of cyber theory included must in some way be linked to the revelation that today, living with cyberspace is at once a technological risk and a leap of social faith. In setting out to investigate the notions and critical issues related to cyber theory, we have uncovered numerous important ideas and examples that are influencing the examination of cyber society, cyber culture, cyber politics and cyber economics, certainly enough to take us well into the twentyfirst century. We have sought to resist the obvious lures of cyberspace, its potential for utopian fantasies, and so on, while still retaining our effort to portray it as it is today. The concepts and issues incorporated in Living with Cyberspace: Technology & Society in the 21st Century are crucially involved with the re-evaluation of the information society at the beginning of the twenty-first century and the cartography of new cybernetic horizons that we believe are likely to be influential at its end. CONCLUSION
The twelve chapters included in this volume illustrate that cyber theory is not merely proliferating but also suggestive for the variety of empirical challenges associated with living with cyberspace today. Such evocations are emanating from critical theory and poststructuralism as well as hypermodernism, political science, critical political and feminist sociology, neo-classical economics, radical political economy and cyberfeminism. Encouraging new ways of thinking about the sometimes-confusing development of cyber theory, these are the leading social, cultural, political and economic perspectives on contemporary cyber theory. Receptive to every warning and possibility, cyber theory considers the call for a continuing multidisciplinary investigation of the actual and virtual frontier separating cyberspace from everyday life as a call to what might be termed the space of hope. To be sure, in our reading, the urgency of interest in theoretical proliferation and practical expression in contemporary cyber theory arises from conceptual re-evaluation, from the ever-changing empirical terrain of the globalization of cyber theory. Even so, a cyber theory aware of the shifting character of society and culture must also be founded on politics and economics. Such awareness obviously necessitates an introduction to the cyber threats and participation in the cyber opportunities as well as a familiarization with their important conceptualizations and realizations.
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Living with Cyberspace: Technology & Society in the 21st Century is our contribution to the cybernetic space of hope. It is our sincere wish that it be a useful guidebook for all those interested in contemporary cyber theory, in its leading cartographers and contributors, its theoretical territories and contemporary technological and social applications.
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PA R T I CYBER SOCIETY
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INTRODUCTION
Issues of the relationship between cybernetic technologies and society are at the core of contemporary intellectual investigation in a variety of subjects, from sociology and business studies to cultural politics. The three chapters in Part I are discrete in the technological and social standpoints they embrace, the intentions behind their contribution and in their explanations. The chapters are all involved with matters such as the importance of cyberspace for debates over ‘post-industrial society’ or the ‘information society’, the significance of cybernetic technologies and their function in expanding or contracting ‘lifestyle choices’ today, and for what and for whom ‘chronotopian’ or ‘speed-spaces’ are constructed. The original cyber society was the post-industrial society pictured in the writings of a number of leading modern sociologists. The most well known and authoritative of these is Daniel Bell, a US sociologist and forecaster also known for the ‘end of ideology’ hypothesis – the alleged decline of apocalyptic beliefs in Western industrial societies – a premise which he and other US sociologists first proposed in the 1950s. Bell coined the term and sketched an outline of post-industrial society in a succession of works from the 1970s onwards, the most accomplished of which is The Coming of Post-Industrial Society.1 Bell is strongly committed to the idea that a ‘new social structure’ is emerging and to the notion that advanced industrial societies in the twenty-first century are centred on knowledge. Indeed, what Bell labels the ‘axial principle’ of postindustrial society is ‘the centrality of theoretical knowledge as the source of innovation and of policy formation for the society’.2 Thoughtful criticisms of Bell’s post-industrial thesis are included in David Lyon’s fascinating discussion of The Information Society3 and Frank Webster’s admirable theoretical analysis of similar themes proposed by US and other sociologists, Theories of the Information Society.4 Bell’s conception of post-industrial society broadly coincided with the crucial development of the late twentieth-century information and communication technology (ICT) ‘revolution’ in the advanced countries and, as a consequence, has been taken up by various philosophers, economists and sociologists. In some recent instances the idea of post-industrial society has been adapted from Bell’s initial presentation, the most renowned example being ‘postmodern society’, a concept introduced by Jean-François Lyotard in The Postmodern Condition.5 However, Bell’s terms are recognizable to most cyber
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society theorists in the guise of the putative economic shift from a manufacturing to a service economy. Moreover, at the occupational level, some economists and sociologists believe that Bell’s work provides a method through which they can come to terms with the growing pre-eminence of the professional and technical or ‘knowledge classes’. For these social scientists it is clear that, for the foreseeable future, decision-making will be the preserve of the technical elite, the creators and controllers of what Bell calls a new ‘intellectual technology’. Bell is one of the most debated sociologists within the multidisciplinary field of cyber society. The eminent Spanish sociologist Manuel Castells, for instance, makes a critique of Bell’s concept of the ‘post-industrial economy’ in his The Rise of the Network Society.6 As evidenced in the writings of Lyon, Webster and Castells noted above, critiques of Bell’s work routinely incorporate two charges. First, the failure of his attempt to escape the accusation of ‘technological determinism’, the assumption that technological development has a relentless logic of its own, separate from human agency, and, second, the indictment that Bell’s post-industrial conception overemphasizes social change while under-appreciating its continuities. One of the most esteemed interpreters of Bell’s post-industrial vision and the information society is David Lyon. Lyon’s recent sociological writings on cyber society include, for example, Surveillance Society.7 In his chapter that opens Part I Lyon considers the effects that the concept of cyberspace is having upon ideas such as post-industrial society, perspectives on information and modes of social explanation. Lyon’s basic contention arises from his belief that the ‘career of the concept of cyberspace is a significant one’. Yet he suggests that new ‘cyberspatial’ experiences and ‘programmes of positive change’ should supply more than a redefinition of the post-industrial society and the information society concepts of the 1970s and 1980s. Such terms, Lyon proposes, have served sociology well but left only contested outcomes. His alternative approach to such ideas, inclusive of cyberspace, is to explore what ‘they tell us about current social–cultural transformations’ and it is this perspective that is presented in Lyon’s contribution on cyber society. Foremost of these transformations are ‘dangerous’ ideas and the sense that much ‘may be learned about contemporary social realities’ by reflecting on the development of the concept of cyberspace. This chapter considers how dangerous ideas are generated through the ‘misapprehension’ of ‘novel social formations’ in the era of the ICT revolution. Lyon’s contribution thus challenges the fundamental premises not only of the so-called ‘paperless society’ but also of some of the more fanciful ‘cyberspatial preoccupations’ that often pass for common sense in ‘cybersociology’. Chapter 1 therefore re-presents the way cyberspace might be seen from a multidisciplinary social perspective. In addition to being a component of the rising consciousness presently circulating within the discipline of sociology of the shortcomings of the post-industrial society and information society concepts, Lyon’s contribution is also likely to impact upon the imaginary construction of cyberspace in any future studies. Partially as a consequence of Lyon’s
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work, concepts like cyberspace can begin to be ‘stripped of promotional hype’ and ‘wishful thinking’. Correspondingly, Chapter 1 can perhaps be perceived as one of the forerunners to the rediscovery of cyberspace by sociologists seeking answers to the socio-political, moral and cultural questions raised by its origins and consequences. In Chapter 2 the British sociologist Frank Webster looks for a solution to the biotechnological and socio-economic problems posed by the emergence and repercussions of cyberspace. Investigating the contradictions, biological and political, implicated in the self-creation and maintenance of the unauthenticated ‘good life’ in the twenty-first century, Webster questions the apparently widespread belief that there is ‘no alternative but to conform to the ways of the world’. The upheavals that Webster explores through his examination of the good life function as an important admonition of the perils of self-creation and contradiction through the constantly changing global market system. Cybernetic life is typically viewed as a distinctive symbol of contemporary intellectual reflection, taken to signify the functioning of the contradictions described above, evoking the possibilities of self-creation, and what Webster calls the ‘untenability of any fixed way of behaviour’ and the ‘new-style capitalism’. Even so, the advent and development of global capitalism can be contested, as specified by Webster at the beginning of the chapter. Webster, who proceeds from his own interpretation of the contemporary social thought of Zygmunt Bauman and Anthony Giddens, among others, links that aspect of social theory concerned with ‘cyberculture’ with the way ICTs communicate a feeling of celebration that mirrors only the ‘possibilities of self-invention’. He additionally connects this to an abandonment of those ‘dimensions of techno-capitalism which constrain – and even determine – how people live today’. In the final chapter of Part I, the social significance of speed and its spaces is examined. John Armitage and Joanne Roberts present a novel analysis of the utopia of speed and its temporal spaces as delineated in the ‘social imaginary’ of popular contemporary business, techno-social and political literature on cyberspace and social theory. In a contribution that evokes a number of anxieties underlined by Webster, these authors deplore the proliferating uniformity of chronotopia in the social imaginary. For Armitage and Roberts, the acceleration of ‘hypermodern’ spatial ‘excesses’ can result only in cybernetic exclusion and social suppression as the ‘global kinetic elite’ seek a world free from noise. Armitage and Roberts go on to warn that, despite efforts to reach chronotopia, imperfections will persist on the road to hypermodernity. Drawing on Paul Virilio’s phenomenological essays on the alarming contemporary chaotic experience of speed-space and surplus, A Landscape of Events, and Bauman’s The Individualized Society, Armitage and Roberts identify a hypermodern or excessive individually experienced ‘chronodystopia’.8 They conclude with an elaboration of the notion of the ‘grey zone of disengagement’ which they propose as an
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alternative response to the generalized emergency of the landscape of events in which speed rules over space. Chapter 3, like the other contributions to Part I, thus seeks to show that cyber society is a much more uncertain society than the extant business and other literature on cyberspace would have us believe.
1 C Y B E R S PA C E
B E Y O N D T H E I N F O R M AT I O N SOCIETY?
D a v i d Ly o n
The career of the concept of cyberspace is a significant one. What William Gibson imagined in his essentially dystopian portrayal of cyberspace (in the novel Neuromancer) is today more commonly understood in utopian terms. Much is made of the newness of cyberspatial experience, its dependence on flashy, heavily promoted high technology products, and its capacity to erode former boundaries and thus to create fresh realms of freedom. In countries as far apart as Finland and Malaysia these features of cyberspace are coupled with programmes of positive social change. But does cyberspace really take us beyond the ‘information society’ which until a few years ago was the favoured concept? The terms ‘industrial society’ or ‘capitalist society’ served sociologists well for several decades of the twentieth century even though they are, like any other social science concepts, contested. In the 1980s the idea of an ‘information society’ caught on, and spawned some conceptual cousins such as ‘knowledgebased economies’ and ‘network societies’ in the 1990s.1 Today the very idea of a defining concept for contemporary societies seems to be fraught with difficulties; however, this has not daunted numerous theorists from offering more candidates and the more recent ones often include reference to the postmodern, the global, or the cyber-something condition. For those sociologists who still aspire to provide empirically informed explanations of current social change these later terms may seem even woollier and weaker than the already strained concepts of the information society that preceded them. But there is another way of looking at this. I suggest that, rather than dismissing the latter range of concepts – cyberspace in particular – they be explored for what they tell us about current social–cultural transformations. True, a lot of fanciful if not pernicious nonsense about cyberspace is available. But ideas do not appear in a social or political economic vacuum, and
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– paradoxically – much may be learned about contemporary social realities by considering the career of this concept. The biggest danger attending the use of concepts such as the information society and cyberspace is the misapprehension that novel social formations, patterns of consumption, or political practices can somehow be read off technological innovation. The Internet revolution! But the promised paperless society generates more, not less paper consumption, global communications encourage more, not less travel, and – to every true believer’s chagrin – supposedly laboursaving devices exist in a world suffused with work-related stresses. Similarly, cyberspatial preoccupations may mislead us into imagining that the messy materiality of everyday may somehow be escaped, evaded or transcended in some realm of electronic ethereality. Science and fiction form new alliances and, apparently, colonize common sense on a large scale. Cyberspace, like the information society, is a construct, a product of imagination, that is used to try to grasp some significant features of today’s world. These concepts cannot simply be stripped of promotional hype or wishful thinking and harnessed for sociological ends. No, the role of promotional hype and wishful thinking themselves requires explanation. For this, sociological understanding is needed that will not only indicate the social origins as well as the social consequences of communication and information technologies, but also point to the political, moral and cultural questions that are raised, profoundly, by the information society and by cyberspace.2 T H E U N F O L D I N G I N F O R M AT I O N S O C I E T Y S T O RY
It is significant that the idea of an ‘information society’ emerged first from enthusiastic claims about an ‘information technology revolution’. The development of microcomputing and its dovetailing with telecommunications was thought to herald certain social, economic and political changes comparable to those often attributed to the diffusion of machine technologies in the nineteenth century. If the Industrial Revolution bequeathed an industrial society, so the information (technology) revolution promised an information society.3 Numerous difficulties occur with ‘technology’-oriented definitions, not least that of technological determinism, which suggests that technological potential is social destiny. That said, part of the significance of that ‘information society’ thesis lies in the fact that it is precisely through the deepened human involvement with technology – and above all communication and information technologies – that the descriptor of ‘cyberspace’ has come to gain such popularity and prominence. As we shall see, it is no accident that ideas about cyberspace resonate with people whose daily exchanges and interactions are increasingly mediated by electronic means. Questions of ‘technology and society’ are indeed central to what it means to ‘live with cyberspace’. But none of these issues can be satisfactorily addressed while the concepts in question are, as it were, not in question.
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All too frequently, different ways of understanding ‘information society’ depend upon unquestioned concepts of ‘information’, ‘technology’ and ‘society’. Frank Webster helpfully distinguishes five ways of thinking about the information society: technological, economic, occupational, spatial and cultural.4 Each of these is found wanting in several ways, but particularly with regard to taking for granted the meaning of one or more concepts of ‘information’, ‘technology’ and ‘society’, or for assuming that one may be discussed without the other. For example, Webster rightly complains that there is something inconsistent about accounts of the information society that talk of technology in terms of mere artefacts or tools that have no social constitution and yet claim that they have extensive social impacts. Economic definitions of information society point to the huge increases in information production and thus to the increasing centrality of information as a ‘factor of production’ but they tend, among other things, to ignore difficulties involved in measuring information. The rather basic question of what information is, seldom gets asked. By default, definitions of information often fall back on that offered within the dominant school of so-called information theory. But that definition – relating to its quantifiability – is itself the product of a struggle that took place in the ‘Macy conferences’ that occurred just after the Second World War. The struggle was between the American school, led by Claude Shannon, that sought a calculable definition, cut free from the contexts in which it is embedded, and the British school, led by Donald MacKay, who insisted that an item only counts as information within contexts of meaning.5 It is the former approach that lies behind those prognostications about information society that claim at once a ‘neutral’ concept of information and its simultaneous profound ‘social’ impacts. Studies of changing occupational structures are generally more sophisticated, as they construe the information society as a product of a decisive tilt towards information handling as a workforce category. This indeed would have to be one axis along which one might be able to comment sociologically on mutating patterns of social existence. Daniel Bell’s well-known ‘venture in social forecasting’6 was an ambitious attempt to chart the appearance of a novel social formation from the relocation of employment activities in the information realm. But even if the categorizations were accurate – is a computer repair technician an information worker? – this approach tells us little about which groups of information workers have the power to influence and to manage other groups. Bell’s own suggestion, that university workers would be recognized for their strategic centrality in information societies, seems more than a little off the mark at the start of the twenty-first century! A number of theorists who could be said to have had more success in defining the information society have introduced a spatial component into their analyses. Notable among these is Manuel Castells, whose magisterial work on the ‘network society’ acknowledges the changing occupational structures, but focuses much more on the flows of information within the networks and nodes of societies based on information infrastructures.7 Without trying to measure
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the rate of information consumption, a preoccupation of some Japanese analysts,8 Castells argues that the connection between ‘flows’ and ‘places’ is vital for understanding how power, privilege and life-chances are distributed in a world of accelerating global information traffic. Castells places a lot of emphasis on the new technologies, and does not always open the ‘black box’ to explore their inner, social meanings, but his work has the huge advantage of indicating how questions of the meanings and purposes of their diffusion must be asked if we are to obtain anything like a sociological handle on the information society. Each of the above dimensions of information society is significant, even if each has also been misconstrued or depends on tacit understandings derived from unopened black boxes. There are some very telling consequences of the widespread adoption of computing and communications technologies, of massively augmented and accelerated information flows, and of the relative strengths of certain nodes and networks that together constitute what might be called the information society. One of them may be stated quite simply: everyday life is increasingly dependent upon those machines, those networks and those flows. Whether at work or at home, in entertainment, commerce or travel, the information infrastructure is a largely invisible, taken-for-granted and indispensable support framework. Hence the dire warnings and widespread anxieties that attended the turn of the twenty-first century in the entirely artificial – but no less real for its participants – crisis of the ‘Y2K bug’. That everyday experience of computer-mediated interaction and communication is also behind the growth of interest in questions of ‘cyberspace’. It is the experiential dimension, rather than the statistical, occupational or commercial analysis, of the information society that has given rise to speculation about and exploration of the possibilities of cyberspace. To inhabit what some have called the information society is at an everyday level to live with cyberspace. This has generated the current flood of cultural studies of information-saturated societies, often centred on or at least referring to ‘cyberspace’. One of the relatively straightforward definitions of cyberspace offered by William Gibson, is to be ‘wrapped in media’ and this expresses a vital aspect of the phenomenon. This definition is not limited to considerations of e-mail, the Internet or the World Wide Web, but rather points to the centrality of mediated interactions. It also allows us to discuss the new technologies in social terms, rooted in the real world. T H E A M B I VA L E N C E O F C Y B E R S PA C E
Cyberspace is rife with ambiguity, paradox and contradiction. Several of these features may be traced back to debates over the information society, even though they now appear in more cultural and experiential guise. Cyberspace, after all, is the product not merely of some ‘new technologies’ but of the broader context – to which it also contributes – of postmodernity. In this light, let us look at some typical ambiguities of cyberspace. Information society theories start with a putative ‘technological revolution’
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and move from there through analyses of changing occupational structure to an exploration of ‘flows’ of information, technology, finance, and so on. Cyberspace studies start at this latter point, with the question of flows. The spatial dimension is evident from the word cyberspace itself, and much has been made of the ‘virtuality’ of space in the cyber realm. If I can bank over the Internet while overseas or if I can teleconference with others in more than one remote site then what does this do for my ‘pre-electronic’ experiences of being ‘here’ rather than ‘there’? Whatever the answer, it is crucial to recall that cyberspace can be experienced only by embodied persons positioned in locales. Cyberspace and virtuality do not just operate through and across space, they are irreducibly spatial phenomena.9 Modernity itself may be construed at one level as successive attempts to control spaces, to organize territory. But electronically enabled flows take this further, eroding the old markers of temporal distance and physical boundaries. As Paul Virilio suggests, ‘With the interfacing of computer terminals and video monitors, distinctions of here and there no longer mean anything.’10 Of course, Virilio would be the first to acknowledge that those distinctions are only erased – or, better, obscured – for some people and not for others.11 I can only bank at ‘home’ while I am ‘away’ because I have a bank account and access to the means of electronic communication and I can only teleconference because I am a relatively privileged member of the academic world, again, with a high degree of connectivity. In today’s world the rising speed of communication disconnects certain groups as fast as it connects others.12 It produces polarization, not a homogeneous global village. The palpable contribution of communication and information technologies to globalization turns in part on the ‘death of distance’ theorem but this too is ambiguous. Castells, among others, points out that the ‘spaces of flows’ tend to dominate the ‘spaces of places’. In the City of London, UK, and the nearby Docklands area, can be found one of the most dense nodes of the ‘network society’ with very high levels of signal traffic in faxes, e-mails, phone calls and other electronic media. It is a physical site laden with the infrastructure enabling efficient flows. Right next to this area, however, are districts of relatively low connectivity, mobility and, of course, income. In Tower Hamlets and Newham, little experience of the spaces of flows exists. The globalization experienced in the City and in Docklands is matched by the reinforcement of localism and of place in geographically adjacent areas. Experiences of the relative proximity of ‘here’ and ‘there’ vary considerably in information societies and in cyberspace. Those associated with the informational elites – the ‘globals’ as Bauman dubs them – may experience cyberspace as a realm of relative freedom. In the later 1980s and 1990s, the liberatory potentials of cyberspace were frequently stressed. It is not merely the rather obvious but banal convenience of contacting distant colleagues and commercial partners without worrying about different time zones, but the freedom to transcend the petty squabbles of local life, and even the limitations of the body. Cyberspace provides for out-of-body
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experiences, it is said, that are unfettered by flesh. Electronic communities, for visionaries like Howard Rheingold, are ‘places’ in which freedom may be found, beyond the body. Having been involved since the mid-1980s in several ‘electronic communities’ he enthuses over what he sees as the possibilities for identities to interact, independent of local time or location. He believes that this is merely a hint of what is to come; one day, most people will be involved in such identity-merging communities.13 Astonishingly, some feminists also find freedom in cyberspace, giving them the chance not only to ‘open spaces for existing women within an already existing culture [of patriarchal control]’ but also to undermine the ‘world view and material reality’ of that culture.14 Without denying for a moment that the new efficiencies and conveniences of cyberspace create some forms for freedom to engage in certain kinds of experiences, it is hard to refrain from scepticism about the broader emancipatory potential of cyberspace – or of any other new technology. Here again one perceives the dangers of thinking of new technologies as neutral tools, capable of ‘good’ uses, or ‘ill’. Informational societies and their cyberspatial experiences derive from technologies first developed in military contexts for their utility in creating cultures of command. Granted, the Internet was intended to provide a nuclear-proof network – it thus works in some respects against boundaries – but its contribution to an overall ‘control revolution’15 was never in doubt. And, granted again, new technologies frequently display features unintended by their creators. But all purposes of information technologies relate to the various instrumental control motifs of modernity, and freedom from these is hard to conceive, at least for people whose lives are touched, directly or indirectly by those technologies. Looked at from the perspective of control, computer and communication technologies have much to offer, much indeed, that is at least potentially positive. No one would desire chaos in international airline scheduling or internal taxation administration. Computers help hold things together effectively and efficiently, yet they cannot but do so without at least a tinge of threat. Personal data must be collected, stored, manipulated, retrieved and shared in order to obtain the system benefits, and this creates as many risks, especially to dignity or democracy, as it contains. There can be little doubt that, by their very constitution, information societies are surveillance societies.16 What is true of so-called information societies is no less true, indeed, it is more so, of cyberspace. For all the hype about the Internet as a realm of freedom it must also be acknowledged that, internally and externally, this medium has also become characterized by the control motif and by surveillance. Externally, Internet service providers and national governments, especially in South East Asian countries such as Singapore, regulate the flows for moral and political purposes. International systems such as those run by the American National Security Agency trace and track ordinary everyday messages constantly, filtering them for content through massive ‘dictionaries’ that automatically pick out key words and phrases. Internally, the Internet and the World Wide Web have become vehicles for intensive surveillance, especially since their widespread
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commercialization in the mid-1990s. Such routine surveillance does not necessarily constrain human activity, but it does contribute to the reinforcing of differences and the channelling of choice through the categorization of consumers as targets for customized advertising.17 A third ambiguity follows from this: cyberspace, like the information society, bespeaks both utopia and dystopia. Those who use the term most freely and most positively – in the pages of Wired magazine for instance – seem seldom to consider that its original use was dystopian. This descriptor of a desirable future society started life as a concept with decidedly negative connotations, where to be ‘wrapped in media’ was not thereby to be privileged. Of course, Gibson also portrays cyberspace as a ‘consensual hallucination’, thus hinting at mindwandering dreams and disordered perceptions that may be, as it were, consciously shared by consenting adults. However, there is one notable difference between information society and cyberspatial dreams and nightmares. With the exception of cyber-community discussions, cyberspace tends to be considered, positively and negatively, in much more individualistic if not solipsistic terms than information society theories. Utopian and dystopian treatments of the social aspects of new technologies are important. There is no doubting that noble visions, for instance of democratic communication, can and do attend particular applications. At the same time, ‘Orwellian’ warnings about the dire direction of present trends are, in some contexts, well taken. The mistake is to assume that the new technologies may themselves be relied upon to bring about the wished-for world, or feared as the inevitable harbingers of horror. At best, utopian and dystopian accounts serve to raise ethical, political and cultural questions about new technology developments, and to work against technological determinism by stressing the role of reflexive, purposive action within those developments. The fourth area of ambiguity to which I want to draw attention is the question of cyberspace and (un)reality. If in many information society scenarios bold claims were made about the dreams of yesterday becoming the realities of today, the world of cyberspace seems for some to invert that. The reality of yesterday is supplanted by the simulations, the hyperreal and the dreams of today. Of course, the phenomenon of media-induced (un)reality is not merely a product of cyberspace in a narrow sense. The Gulf War in the early 1990s was a key locus for debate over ‘reality’, especially following Jean Baudrillard’s notorious comments about the war ‘not taking place’.18 His point was that the theatre of war was more television screens around the world than the physical location in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. It parallels the comments by US Chief of Staff General William C. Westmoreland in 1969 to the effect that ‘As the battlefield becomes more automated, the battle itself becomes more like a war game.’19 For Baudrillard, the simulation of war had supplanted the ‘real’ war. What was ‘live’ on television screens was the mise-en-scène or media-framed ‘virtual’ war whose success or failure was monitored and measured entirely within the media. Hyperreality has no place for the real. In cyberspace, different kinds of (un)reality present themselves. One is that
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found in games, such as Multi-User Dimensions (MUDs) where virtual relationships emerge in the process of play. Some players can become quite deeply involved, though, as this outburst indicates: ‘I don’t care how much people say they are, muds are not just games, they are *real*!!! My mud friends are my best friends, they are the people who like me most in the entire world. Maybe the only people who do.’20 Such stories are multiplied today (probably much more than is warranted by the evidence) and must be taken seriously both as accounts of situations defined as real and for the social malaise that they reveal. They also invite consideration as the outcome of an accelerating rise in computer-mediated communications that has been occurring since the 1990s. Another kind of (un)reality is found in ‘virtual reality’ of cyberspace where users are so immersed in the media that a sense of being at a new ‘frontier’ is induced. As Gibson originally depicted it, this is ‘unthinkable complexity, lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights receding.’21 Beyond the contracting space of a ‘global village’ are the networks, the spaces of flows where things happen, rather like the Gulf War (but also like National Security Agency surveillance or venture capital transactions). But Gibson himself never lost his grip on the ‘real’ world as he described this. As he later said, ‘With cyberspace as I describe it you can literally wrap yourself in media and not have to see what’s really going on round you.’22 While some of the foregoing may read like science fiction (some of it began there after all), earnest arguments may also be found for virtual organization and virtual government. Public agencies may enhance their capacity for decision-making with intelligent processing and graphic capacities. The effect would be ‘virtualization’ in public administration with a new logic, not of bureaucratic organizing and steering but one of informing and communicating. In this new order, reality would be the ‘unintended result of decisions, increasingly taken by machines’ while politics would become ‘an aesthetic of styles, to be enacted in various fragments of public and private life’.23 Not surprisingly, some see such pronouncements as reductionistic. While these powerful tools do indeed ‘affect all our senses’, says Ravetz, they also ‘blur further the boundary between real reality and constructed reality’.24 But what is the real reality asserted by critics of virtual reality? Mark Slouka, for example, argues for ‘essentialism’ as an antidote to ‘unreality’. To him, claims made for cyberspace appear to offer a free-market utopia but omit to mention that ‘abstracting our lives may be bad for us’. Will cyberspace produce a new kind of exile, ‘an electronic wanderer wired to the world but separated from much that matters in human life’?25 Cyberspace, he asserts, is a grand distraction from actual communities, real friends and neighbours, and the significance and value of our physical rather than our virtual environments. Cyberspace turns out to be little more than an ‘electronic theme park’26 with a glut of ‘information’ and, one might add, with similar limits on diversity and democracy. Slouka wants his readers to return to ‘essential’ things that we can experience directly, without technological mediation.
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One difficulty of this, despite its inherent attractiveness for those weary of high-tech hype and hard sell informarketers, is that ‘essential’ real reality has actually been beleaguered for some considerable time. This is not a new departure, but one that dates back at least to the Cartesian disengagement from the world and from the body27 and was paradoxically encouraged in the West by certain theological approaches that underplayed the significance of the physical created world.28 To argue for the reality and importance of bodies and places, of experience and of locality, is to engage a cultural conflict that is endemic to modernity, and that simply reaches an extreme point in today’s struggle – as Slouka sees it – between cyberspace and everyday existence. A further difficulty, which we look at below, is that Slouka’s evidence appears to be somewhat skewed. Could not cyberspace enhance as well as erode ‘real’ relationships? F R O M I N F O R M AT I O N S O C I E T Y T O C Y B E R S O C I A L I T Y
Cyberspace reflects some of the ambiguities already visible in information society discourses. It also represents a move away from what was assumed about the social aspect of information ‘society’. The debate over information society had its roots in a period of doing sociology that still took for granted the idea of ‘society’ as more or less equivalent to ‘nation-state’ and relating to a ‘problem of order’.29 By the start of the twenty-first century, this idea is much more questionable because the power of nation-states is in some respects weakening and their boundedness is less clear. As Anthony Giddens argues, rather than highlighting ‘order’ it makes more sense to ask how different social systems organize time and space to connect presence and absence.30 Towards the end of the twentieth century it became very clear that computing and communications technologies were playing a key role in the ways that time and space are organized, enabling as they do an unprecedented stretching of social relationships across time and space. That stretching of connections is experienced as a pulling together of contacts that were previously harder to maintain over distance, or ‘time-space compression’ as David Harvey calls it.31 Such time-space compression is evident above all in the ‘spaces of flows’ that are associated with cyberspace. How patterns and practices of social relationship mutate when mediated by electronic technologies is a key question of what might be termed cybersociality. The huge changes that have occurred in patterns of communication since the beginning of the nineteenth century should not be underestimated. Until very recently, the overwhelming proportion of human contacts, exchanges and interaction was face to face, and most relationships were ones that involved unmediated contacts. People were available to each other on a face-to-face basis and were able to shake hands, look each other in the eye and pick up bodylanguage cues about most things from mood through approval stakes to social status. Some relationships, such as those with nobility or the royal court were more distant, but for most events and processes of daily life it was co-present relationships that had most significance for loyalty, life-chances, and so on.
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Dialogue is important to such relationships as well, in the sense that all participants both initiate and respond to conversation.32 Mere co-presence does not make for significant relationships, of course, otherwise we would have to assume that rush-hour Tokyo commuters, professionally loaded onto subway trains, feel emotionally as well as physically close to their fellow-passengers.33 But relationships carried on at a distance, mediated by some means or another, have a different quality from face-to-face ones of copresence. In this second type of relationship, of ‘mediated interaction’, some technical medium such as pens and paper or a telephone or a computer modem ‘enables information or symbolic content to be transmitted to individuals who are remote in space or time or in both’.34 The range of cues available to participants is narrowed in mediated interaction. If you cannot see the face of the other you miss expressions and gestures and build a repertoire of compensatory cues suitable for that medium. The chances of ambiguity rise with mediated communications and interpreting messages becomes harder for the recipient. But interactions of this kind seldom if ever take place in a social vacuum. The phone call, the e-mail message, the letter, are forms of interaction that take place in some sorts of relationship where expectations already exist, and where there is some kind of connection if not integration between participants. Kinship relations provide obvious examples that are most frequently based on faceto-face interaction, but even when calling the doctor’s office or the taxation department, levels of integration exist between those participating in the interaction. Those latter relationships, however, are integrated in part by the agencies and organizations in which they are embedded. The government department or the corporation help to bind people together in time and space beyond what can be achieved in any face-to-face setting and this normally requires mediated interactions. For several centuries, writing provided the main means of mediated interactions and technical limits meant that for most of the time embodied co-presence still provided the predominant patterns of interaction. The mechanization of writing through the printing press, and then, later, the invention of the telegraph made possible a whole new range of relationships. All sorts of ‘quasi interactions’ developed – such as newspapers, then television – in which full communication is not evident but where there is more than mere transmission of symbolic content from producers to passive recipients.35 But in terms of integration, communications may occur where neither face-to-face co-presence nor some intermediate agency are the salient features of the social relation.36 Again, this does not mean that face-to-face interactions or even agency-extended interactions are replaced or diminish in number; rather, new relations are superimposed upon them. Writing, along with other disembodied communication, lends itself to more wide-ranging, depersonalized and abstract modes of governing, and simultaneously de-emphasizes face-to-face situations.37 At this point it is worth noting that another level of relations, quaternary, may also be discerned within electronically mediated communications. These occur beyond the attention or awareness of at least one party in the
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communication.38 They relate to surveillance and occur when some sociotechnical system monitors people’s actions or words and turns these into messages, regardless of the intentions of the persons concerned. But even these disembodied communications that may actually take place between machines should be traced back to ‘real-world’ power relations. In what ways can the analyses of face-to-face, mediated, quasi-mediated and quaternary relationships be extended into the realm of cyberspace, in particular to Internet interactions? Face-to-face interactions are still significant because they are interlaced with on-line interactions in ways that may be missed if all the focus is on the ‘cyberspatial’ communications. Members of the same household, for example, may use e-mail for some purposes even though they see each other every day, and e-mail may be used as a way of arranging face-to-face meetings. In these ways the disembodied interaction may merely be an adjunct to the face to face.39 While many Internet interactions are between individuals, public, many-tomany dialogical domains are also opened up online, for instance in Internet relay chat channels. Thus the repertoire of possibilities for mediated interactions is enlarged in cyberspace. Similarly, mediated quasi-interaction also finds new potential online, for instance through the creation of web pages, and also in the new multimedia possibilities of the Internet, where text, sound, video and image produce a wider range of symbolic cues. The idea of ‘repertoires of possibilities’ refers to what people actually do in different contexts offered by online communications.40 For example, users may be in separate, remote locales, or in the same locales (using intranets, for instance), or may have relationships with non-users of the Internet. A further significant area is surveillance, where quaternary relations are common. These are often based on risk communications that refer to personal data and turn them into messages, but of whose existence let alone significance the persons concerned may remain unaware. Surveillance today is far from restricted to organizational sites and contexts. The forms of online communication produced by surveillance are proliferating, and though many of them become automated data traffic within the spaces of flows, they do nevertheless have consequences for the forms of social integration and for the daily lifechances of the individuals and groups concerned.41 They organize time and space, connecting absence and presence in novel ways, and rely on biopower, now augmented by communication and information technologies, which ‘makes up’ people and groups in ways that are as yet only dimly perceived. The assumption that we can talk in relatively fixed terms about ‘information societies’ is thus challenged by the numerous ways in which time and space are being reorganized at the start of the twenty-first century. The massive growth of electronically mediated communications of many different kinds is a key means of introducing such liquidity and fluidity into social relationships. Forms of what might be called cybersociality are emerging among those who have a high degree of connectivity, although their patterns and meanings are not yet well understood.
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C Y B E R S PA C E : L I V I N G W I T H T E C H N O L O G Y
The reason why Gibson’s first definition of cyberspace, wrapped in media, is so useful is that it serves as a reminder of the unprecedented ways in which so much of contemporary life is immersed in technology. It makes little sense today to think of computers and telecommunications systems as ‘tools’. Rather they are part of the context in which life is lived. The infrastructure that they represent is so basic that daily life is almost unimaginable without it. In technologically advanced societies ‘technology’ is not a separate item or a separate moment; it is part of what constitutes our sociality. Time and space are so deeply organized by artificial means to connect presence and absence that it is more appropriate to think of technology as activity and environment than as ‘tool’. This does not, however, license free imagination in considering the social realms of cyberspatial relationships. As we have seen, because of the other, ‘consensual hallucination’ aspect of cyberspace, online technologies are frequently fetishized and become the topics of commercial, utopian and academic hype. In response, counter-attacks are made on the ‘cult of information’ and the faked and faulty world of virtual reality. But both causes are often limited by the relative lack of empirical demonstration. Does the reorganization of the office using e-mail and intranets really produce less hierarchical relationships? Do all uses of e-mail and chatlines tend towards depersonalized, disembodied and abstract relationships and the further fragmentation of cultural identities? These are empirical questions, and the answers to them yield strong clues about how to answer the question about whether or not cyberspace is beyond information society. There can be little question that, unless the planet succumbs to some unimaginable disaster, communication and information technologies will continue to be imbricated with everyday life, that speed of connection will continue to be crucially important (even if the rate of acceleration slows down), that major corporations and governments will continue to press for the adoption of these new technologies even if their social, economic and political benefits are undemonstrated, and that the gap will likely continue to grow between those who are able to take advantage of the new technologies and those whose access to them is restricted. These things are clear regarding the future of the so-called information society. But these are generalizations and as such are particularly prone to critique. What is really needed is not more speculation about the future of information society but more knowledge about what is actually happening in different countries, different sectors, and so on, and more acknowledgement of the fact that the key questions have to do not so much with ‘technology’ as with morality, politics and culture. The notion of cyberspace, as we have seen, focuses attention on the experience of living with electronic technologies, and thus it represents a key area for serious social analysis. It may be replaced with other terms, as might the ‘information society’, but the questions raised by cyberspace will not quickly go away. How cyberspace is understood varies from place to place, by gender, region,
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ethnicity, class, and so on. The spaces of flows affect the spaces of places and of cultural landscapes in widely different ways. The rise of the Internet and the World Wide Web has enabled a fashionable flood of studies based upon and drawing data from online resources. To read some such studies one could be forgiven for imagining that the majority of the population is engrossed in MUDs for a large proportion of their waking time! Online studies of online life are important, of course, but the more difficult, time-consuming ethnographies that show how everyday offline life is woven together with online life are worth more sociologically and in the long term. The kinds of studies that will help us gauge the future of the information society are ones that pick up on classical sociological concerns to dig below the surface to find out what really nourishes and retards the growth of certain kinds of relationship, and to show how private troubles should be translated into public issues. For instance, in her study of an Internet café, Nina Wakeford shows how gender relations are constructed and reconstructed in the course of daily interactions. So far from showing that computer use in such contexts perpetrates masculinist or patriarchal relations in a simple way, Wakeford indicates that alliances for gender are both forged and interrupted in ways that depend as much on ‘local cultures of place and space as much as . . . on the landscapes of computing.42 In another very helpful study, Daniel Miller and Don Slater show how everyday Internet use in Trinidad also meshes with already existing social relations. So far from eroding older familial relationships, for instance, in many cases the opportunities to use the Internet for reinforcing kinship ties – especially when attenuated by migration into the ‘Trini’ diaspora – are grasped with some eagerness. A careful ethnographic approach yields results that should be sobering to those tempted to believe cyberspatial hype. As they say, ‘Perhaps ironically, if the Internet is not generally virtual when it comes to personal life (which is where most of the Internet literature presumes that it will be), it really is virtual in the political economy (which is where the same literature would argue that hardheaded commercialism undermines virtuality)’.43 So this is a plea for continued sociological studies, to help us discern what ‘living with cyberspace’ and its emerging forms of sociality entail. Sociology has increasingly come to accept that technology must be theorized as part of the social fabric. In the twenty-first century we all live in technological environments even though the meaning of this varies tremendously from place to place. Cyberspace is all about the experience of multiple, mediated interactions, which, remember, is still the preserve of a small minority of the world’s population. Powerful forces contribute to its shaping and rather familiar social divisions are frequently reinforced through it. But none of this is inevitable. Its ongoing development is a socio-technical process, relating on the one hand to technical capacities and on the other to those powerful forces but also to shared visions and social practices. Ethics and politics are crucial components. But exactly which capacities, whose visions and whose practices will prevail, are in the end empirical questions.
2 CYBERNETIC LIFE
LIMITS TO CHOICE
F r a n k We b s t e r
My concern here is with three contradictory (yet connected) phenomena: the perception that nowadays one can make of life what one will, the assurance that there are no foundations on which one may build the ‘good life’, and the conviction that there is no alternative but to conform to the ways of the world. On the one hand, there is an ethos which proclaims the possibilities of changing even what were once thought to be the least tractable elements of life – one’s sexuality, one’s body, one’s very psyche. On the other hand, there is no clarity as to what constitutes desirable change. On the third hand (it is in keeping with the Zeitgeist that we should underline the possibilities of life today), there is resignation to the principle that there is no opting out of the global market system. At one and the same time everything can change, no one can say authoritatively how things ought to change, and yet global capitalism is deemed to be unchallengeable. I explore these dissonances in what follows by examining notions of the ‘cybernetic life’. These are central motifs in a good deal of intellectual reflection nowadays and they are resonant of each of the three features noted above – readily evoking the possibilities of creation, the untenability of any fixed way of behaviour, and the new-style capitalism with which we must come to terms. So readers may know where I stand, let me at the outset state my view: too much contemporary thought, especially that element concerned with ‘cyberculture’ and new technologies, celebrates the possibilities of self-invention, while turning aside from the dimensions of techno-capitalism which constrain, and even determine, how people live today. THE POSSIBILITIES OF THE CYBERNETIC LIFE
Today everything changes, nothing is permanent. It is to be expected that some will find this disconcerting, and I will have more to say about this reaction, but for now I would spotlight those who proclaim that the ride is a heady and even
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an exhilarating one. For instance, Nicholas Negroponte envisages the ‘information superhighway . . . creating a totally new global social fabric’1 which will turn everything upside down, but empower and improve things nonetheless. With this sort of thinking there is an enormous emphasis placed upon new technologies – information and communication technologies (ICTs), genetic engineering, biotechnology or a combination of all three figure recurrently – and today this finds a particular accord with postmodern reflection.2 Baudrillardian enthusiasm for the boundless opportunities digital technologies present to re-create realities, to reconstitute places, bodies and even selves, runs rife in positive commentaries on the impermanence and artificiality of life today.3 ‘Cyberfeminist’ Sadie Plant, for instance, is delighted that ‘[t]here is turbulence at so many scales that reality itself seems suddenly on edge’, believing women are especially suited to benefit from the normal turmoil and turbulence of cybersociety.4 This emphasis on the possibilities of life co-exists with acknowledgement of the impossibility of any and all forms of foundationalism. That is, people may now be free to be whatever they want to be, but no one can say what they ought to be, since to do so is to make claims for a rock-solid morality (or human nature, or organization, or social relationship) which conflicts with the premise that everything changes precisely because everything is humanly constructed and is thereby subject to reconstruction. A corollary of this way of thinking is that, though the world around and even within us is malleable to an unprecedented degree, any goals which might guide reconstruction are incapable of justification on ultimate grounds. The world can be made and remade, but it cannot be justified on any solid grounds. Consider, for instance, the matter of sexuality and the body. It is increasingly the case that what were once thought of as naturally bequeathed are now regarded as largely matters of human choice.5 Relatedly, there is by now a good deal of literature which details the malleability of the body, a subject which is worked upon by exercise and health regimes, adjusted by technologies (from hip replacements to new hearts, implanted corneal lenses to electronic pacemakers, dental treatment to plastic surgery), so much so that we have witnessed already the advent of the ‘cyborg’.6 So we find ourselves today in a situation where one’s sexuality and body form is by and large an issue of choice. Yet it is because this choice comes from our capability of intervention in one’s sexuality and the body itself that just what one’s body and sexuality might be is so agonizingly problematical. Look where one will, one comes across this paradox. Relationships, with neighbours, partners or colleagues are, increasingly, matters of choice rather than compulsion. Yet this freedom has been accompanied by recognition that there are no longer clear bases for forming relationships – and still less for sustaining them – now that penalties for leaving have been radically reduced, something which makes the issue of relationships fraught in hitherto unprecedented ways. Anthony Giddens goes so far as to suggest that we inhabit a ‘posttraditional’ world, one in which all received judgements and arrangements are
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subject to challenge. Whatever one decides to consider – moral codes, gender roles, how to treat animals, even the purposes of education – this seems to be borne out. All such cannot be justified in any foundational sense, there simply is no ‘right way’. But though these things can be reconstructed, potentially at least, in any number of ways, there can be no firm basis for this reconstruction, and a consequence is, unavoidably, consternation. Empirical developments continuously undermine one-time sureties, demonstrating time and again the ongoing reconstruction that marks human activity, and accordingly throw doubt in our way by compelling us to realize that there is no clear direction that we should be taking. Reflect for a moment on what has been called de-industrialization. What we have seen, over the space of little more than a generation, is the destruction of heavy industry in most advanced countries. Coal, steel and shipbuilding industries have pretty much gone, distinctive landscapes – the spoil heaps, the belching smoke, the colliery villages – have disappeared, as have ways of life, ways which entailed distinctive and deeply felt moral codes, notions of masculinity and femininity, daily routines and habits. This transformation, from male-centred manual occupations and organization to feminized and contingent labour forces, is remarkable testimony to the human capacity to re-create the environment. But at the same time no one can say how we should construct our conditions, precisely because we are acutely aware how readily things may be changed. KNOWLEDGE, POSTMODERNISM AND IDENTITY
Knowledge is crucial to these developments. It has been increased knowledge that has enabled the assault on all ‘traditions’, since analysis, examination and comparison quickly lead to calls for reform, whether it be in production techniques, political arrangements or marital relationships. The enormous expansion of media, and the resultant exposure to larger audiences and for greater periods of time, has been an inestimable factor in bringing home to a wide public that its own ways of life, however established they may be, are socially constructed. However, there has been a paradoxical corollary of this trend. One premise of the Enlightenment was that knowledge would give control over the environment and over ourselves – and this it has done with a vengeance; but another premise was that knowledge would bring certainty about what to do – and this it assuredly has not delivered. Quite the contrary, the more knowledge there has been generated and disseminated, the more has there been induced a profound and often incapacitating scepticism as regards how we might best arrange our affairs. It is recognized that these can, and indeed that they will, be rearranged, but confidence about how they ought to be constructed has evaporated. Zygmunt Bauman has written extensively on the ambivalences, ambiguities, even chaos of these postmodern times. To Bauman, modernity’s driving impulse was towards certainty, towards the ‘one best way’ of doing things,
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which manifested itself in an imperative to organize, to arrange, to repress dissent and unruliness, all to ensure maximum conformity to assured ends.7 Modernist politicians, intellectuals and a host of corporate and especially state agencies strove to achieve stability and integration amongst their subjects, disciplining and schooling people in how to behave, what to think, even how to think of themselves (as citizens of a particular nation, with a particular history and culture and associated attitudes and ways of life). To be sure, modernist politicians differed as regards goals, most obviously in terms of the debate between collectivism and individualism, yet opponents shared a mentality of confidence in their alternative futures. Postmodernism represents the breakdown of this ethos and its practices. The postmodern era is characterized by doubt, scepticism, hesitancy and even unruliness. The days of control by way of state machinery, socialization into conformity by complaisant media, or acquiescence to authoritative intellectuals, are gone. Nowadays people are left largely to their own devices, choosing their lifestyles by consumption in whatever they happen to prefer, only the ‘seduction’ of the marketplace sustaining any (shaky) order postmodernism maintains. Bauman identifies in postmodernism a radical removal of constraint, so much so that today freedom is an overriding priority and there is reluctance to admit any attempt to limit individuals from fulfilling their self-directed desires. Indeed, nowadays people are expected to choose for themselves how they wish to behave. Collective moral constraints have been radically reduced, and freedom to choose has become a hallmark of the postmodern world. The downside is that the removal of constraints has generated and exacerbated a nagging sense of insecurity. If one is not to be constrained by the national interest, nor even by a need to conform to the norms of one’s neighbours, then how is one to live? Worst of all, as Bauman underlines, the question is no longer answerable by looking to an external reference point in hope of identifying foundations, be it in religion, politics, aesthetics or even close neighbours. This poses especial dilemmas for identity. Whereas in the past, identity was largely a received matter, something developed by a combination of family relationships, class, community, regional and national factors which were encultured in the individual, today, postmodern identity is crucially about the individual choosing his or her identity, choosing this freely – but choosing alone and without guidance.8 The downgrading of one-time identity providers such as the nation, work and even family role leads to there being what Bauman has called today’s ‘orphaned self’,9 one thrown entirely onto its own devices to make itself. There is now a widespread perception that even the self is subject to invention and re-invention, that you can ‘be anything you want to be’. There is validity in Anthony Giddens’ argument that the key reference point for the self is what he terms self-reflexivity.10 As such, identity is created and sustained by ongoing reflection on one’s biography, by making continuous choices, large and small (this hairstyle rather than that one, this job rather than another, this body shape rather than that one, a child now or never), and identity is cohered –
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if at all – by an inchoate (and slippery) notion of being ‘true to oneself’. The self, in short, is inescapably a matter of invention, with all the uncertainty, choice and lack of guidance this entails. T H E I M P E R AT I V E O F S O C I A B I L I T Y
We find ourselves in a world of infinite possibilities, but one which is unaccompanied by confidence about what we may want to create. Everything is possible, yet the value of anything we might create is doubted. Most people find disconcerting a ‘cybernetic life’ which lacks criteria for being. It appears to me that ‘communitarianism’, in one or other of its guises, addresses this concern. The movement associated with Amitai Etzioni11 in the USA is but the most direct expression of a continuum of views which share a conviction that people must have a sense of belonging to a wider group in order to live satisfactorily. Emile Durkheim long ago insisted that, without absorption into the values of the group, individuals experience anomie with costs paid in terms of social dislocation and personal unhappiness (crime, suicide, depression, and so forth) that were formidable. Etzioni, updating Durkheim, proclaims a need for society to take precedence over individual desires. This is offered in large part as a defence of social stability, but communitarianism is also motivated by the conviction that a fulfilled life can be experienced only in a context of meaningful social relationships, that it is only in our attachments to others that we may experience a genuine sense of self and self-fulfilment. Easily criticized as hubristic and conservative, still I am reluctant to dismiss communitarianism out of hand, because it draws attention to a crucial issue. This is that life cannot be lived alone, that it is in sociability where we find our identities, and where we may forge our ways of life. No matter how individualistic and even fragmented may be our sense of identity, it remains the case that we know ourselves in relation to other people and organizations. Furthermore, sociability requires, at a minimum, some shared, even if unarticulated, conception of the rights and obligations of fellow human beings. After all, the ideal of equality between citizens, which undergirds all democratic politics and which acknowledges the worthiness of each individual, was nurtured in one undeveloped yet vital form of communitarianism – the nation-state. It seems to me that the need for some communal bonds such as civility, neighbourliness and acknowledgement of fellow citizens is a requisite of all human life. This is so even in the most individualistic of societies, the USA. The insightful ethnography provided by Robert Bellah and his colleagues testifies to this need: although a ‘first order language’ in the US is one of insular individualism, close behind is a complicated and inadequately articulated ‘second order language’ which draws upon biblical and republican traditions to stress friendship, voluntary commitments, and the worthiness of neighbours and colleagues. This is so because individualism, while it is ‘theoretically imaginable [is] performatively impossible’.12 Manuel Castells’ focus on collective identities, forged in social movements such
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as feminism and environmental concerns, points also to what I would call the imperative of sociability.13 Other than for the most privileged elites14 – and perhaps even they are not exempt – the reflexive self, individually directed and conceived, is infeasible. While Giddens observes that reflexivity involves social relationships, there is in his concept a prioritization of an autonomous and selfengrossed individual which underestimates the contribution of wider groups to one’s identity. This does not mean that self-identity is reducible to that of the collectivity, but rather it reminds us that it is in engagement with others that one creates a meaningful life, and that the terms of this engagement require some commonality of bonds. THE CONSTRAINTS OF THE CONSTRUCTED
If we can establish that sociability, and with this some communal bonds and behaviour, are requisite of identity, then we are left with the question of the content of identity, and even what might be the arrangement of the wider society, at a time when anything is possible but nothing is foundationally justifiable. Anthony Giddens has been noticeably positive about this, stressing that the capability of overcoming all absolutes has presented the opportunity – and even necessity in a ‘cybernetic society’ – of making active choices about much that once had to be accepted because it presented itself as a ‘fact of life’ (or of nature, destiny or fate). Everywhere now, life has become ‘disembedded’ and as such it is increasingly recognized as something that is designed and chosen.15 Giddens has emphasized the potential of ‘dialogistic democracy’, where actors may decide, through discussion and debate, appropriate balances of autonomy and social solidarity (or self and society, or localism and cosmopolitanism) in creating the lifestyles and identities they might wish to have. Such a position acknowledges that there can be no return, for example, to a ‘my country right or wrong’ ethic which required people to resign themselves to a particular national identity. We are too self-knowing neither to recognize that this is infeasible in a multicultural society, nor to be ignorant of the fact that the old nationalism was a flawed and fabricated phenomenon. But we can appreciate that the nation still has resonance, not least because it helps give shape to important elements of ourselves and it mitigates against excessive fragmentation. The task is, then, to construct a notion of the nation which may come to terms with a heightened cosmopolitanism, yet which may also allow diverse members to feel that they belong, even inside a country which is highly disparate, and even frictional, in terms of cultural composition.16 A good deal of this argument is persuasive. It is, of course, at the heart of today’s ‘third way’ politics that prioritize the ongoing negotiation of arrangements, and thereby the possibilities of political action being significant.17 I am personally much in sympathy with this position. But I do want to make an important qualification to a ready consequence of anti-foundationalist thinking, which has it that, everything being constructed, then anything can be reconstructed. But what this ignores are the inhibitions to change, and the
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pressures to conform, that can accompany particular arrangements. This is, in my view, manifestly the situation as regards much of the ‘cybernetic society’. For instance, the financial networks that have been established around the globe are undoubtedly socially designed and maintained day to day by human actions, but the prospects of radically changing them are severely restricted, not least because, were that to begin in a given region, currency outflows would be massive and immediate and, as such, enormously constraining on those with ambitions to remake relationships. Instances of the exercise of these constraints have been a regular occurrence throughout the 1990s and beyond. The triumph of capitalism and the increased imbrication of world markets, while it has induced enormous instability, has ushered change overwhelmingly in one direction – towards the intensification of capitalist practices. As such it has massively denuded the capacity of governments to shape their national economies other than in ways which appease business confidence. The extension of capitalism throughout the world places prodigious limits on the actions of even large states. This, of course, does not mean that all national endeavours are ineffective, but it does acknowledge that, in the words of historian Eric Hobsbawm, by the end of the millennium ‘[t]he world economy was an increasingly powerful and uncontrolled engine’18 which demands conformity to its strictures. Anthony Giddens himself concedes that ‘[n]o-one any longer has any alternative to capitalism’.19 Amongst these constraints, whatever variations capitalism may be willing to tolerate, is a profound intolerance of proposals for radically different ways of life,20 to which the destruction of the peasantry – throughout recorded history, and well into the twentieth century, by far the majority of the human race – over the span of a few score years bears testimony.21 Moreover, while capitalism imposes its preconditions on those places it encounters, it is simultaneously a system which exacerbates and accelerates change and upheaval. In this way it serves to unsettle and disturb, to instil a sense of transience and even of ‘creative chaos’ wherever it may operate.22 This observation, that capitalism though undeniably a human construct is a dynamic, even frenetic system, leads me to my final point. As we have seen, much is now made of the choices that allegedly stem from recognition that everything is socially constructed. However, it is the case that globalized capitalism imposes inestimable constraints on human action all over the world. Moreover, integral to this constraint is an insistence that people change in accordance with capital’s imperatives. Looked at in this light, the changeableness of life today looks much less a matter of human choices and much more the imposition of the imperatives of participation in capitalist relations. Conformity to the strictures of global capitalism is true for the affluent nations, but how much more compelling an experience for those – the vast majority of human beings – who inhabit the poorer regions of the planet. The ‘cybernetic life’ extends easily enough into areas such as India, China, Latin America and Africa. All are reached and touched in some way or another by the informational networks of global capitalism, such as satellite television
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programming, business organization from afar, economic analysts in New York or London, and so on. The key difference, however, is that, to adopt the terminology of Manuel Castells,23 these people are interacted upon rather than interacting in the information age. They are, in short, recipients of decisions made by those with access to and privileges of capital, education, knowledge and, of course, technology on the global networks. It is sobering to note that nowadays many nations may be regarded as marginal to global capitalism, perhaps only worth noticing when transnational media organizations arrive to report on the latest ‘natural disaster’, usually famine or internecine war, and to capture on video starving women and children or fleeing refugees. The peoples of sub-Saharan Africa, for example, have neither the resources to appeal as markets nor other qualities that might appeal to investors of capital.24 Other nations might have some attraction, perhaps to supply raw materials or to serve as cheap labour for corporations such as Nike or Adidas, but all are subject to decisions made for them by more powerful forces. Cees Hamelink,25 in a pertinent account of the ‘ethics of cyberspace’, details features of the ‘information age’ which are too easily ignored by cyberenthusiasts. These include the following: • A quarter of the world’s population does not benefit from economic growth. • Out of the present 174 UN member states, 89 are worse off than a decade ago. • The top 358 billionaires in the world are worth the combined income of 45 per cent of the world’s population. • The 25 per cent poorest people receive only 1.4 per cent of total world income while the top 25 per cent receive 83 per cent. • Some 1.3 billion people live on less than $1 dollar per day. • Over 1 billion people lack access to safe drinking water. • Almost 1 billion adults are illiterate. It is difficult to understand how such impoverished people may create their own futures when they are locked into subordinate roles by a ferociously effective and powerful global market system. CONCLUSION
It is now conventional in social theory to argue that nothing happens for foundational reasons, that everything is an outcome of human construction and choice. With this, analysts may rush to record the manifold choices people make as regards their body shape, sexuality, intimate relationships, cultural pleasures, and even their lifestyle politics. Heterogeneity and difference are the liberatory keynotes of such refrains. Up to a point, one can only agree with this current orthodoxy, but analysts ought also to be reminded that, as a result of complex but knowable processes, huge numbers of the world’s population, our fellow human beings, have no choice but to endure conditions hard to imagine
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by those of us inhabiting the affluent nations. The ‘cybernetic society’ undoubtedly brings options to a good many people, and this must bring some satisfaction to those unhappy with their physique, occupation or partners. Because things do not have to be the way they are, many nowadays can change their circumstances, and accordingly they do so. But I would also insist that this world that has been created, for the bulk of humanity, means subordination to the strictures of capital, to constraining and systemic forces that are vastly more pervasive – intensively and extensively – than any previous empire. Talk of choice in a ‘cybernetic society’ to the world’s majority is hollow.
3 CHRONOTOPIA
John Armitage and Joanne Roberts
And you’re alone on an island now tuning in. Did you think this was the way Your world would end?1
Chronotopia is a combination of the Greek concepts for speed and utopia. We introduce this idea to elucidate the fundamental correlation between speed and utopia that is manifest in the ‘social imaginary’ of popular contemporary business literature broadly centred on cyberspace and the particular social imaginary of the chronotopia found in cyber society.2 In the first part of the chapter we offer a speculation on the form of chronotopia distinguishing the social imaginary of this and related literature. In so doing, we identify a ‘hypermodern’ or ‘excessive’ individually experienced chronodystopia that has its roots in ‘the individualized society’ and its antennae in ‘the twilight of the grounds’ or ‘speedspace’.3 However, in the second part, we also identify a significant and specific kind of chronotopia emerging from a key social group, ‘the global kinetic elite’.4 This social group produces its own social imaginary and popular contemporary techno-social and political literature on cyberspace and social theory. Our supposition here, though, is that the chronotopia characterizing the social imaginary of this literature is one that seeks an existence free from ‘noise’. Yet, in the third part of the chapter, we argue that chronotopianism, as one of the leading discourses within cyber society, will have to contend with many imperfections on the undiscovered terrain that lies beyond. This argument conforms to our general deliberations concerning the highway to hypermodernity or the attempt to understand the present period in terms of intensification, acceleration and excess. Adopting Paul Virilio’s phrase ‘a landscape of events’ we delineate chronodystopia and advocate its relevance to an understanding of society at the speed of light in the era of hypermodernity.5 We would like to thank Zygmunt Bauman and Ryan Bishop for their useful comments on an earlier version of this chapter.
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As becomes evident by part four, the concept of chronotopia can be speculatively applied to the social imaginary of popular contemporary business literature as well as to the idea of hypermodernity. Even so, and equally importantly, the idea of chronotopia also demonstrates how the works of chronotopians are not only an expression of the landscape of events but also an emulation of what we label the ‘economies of excess’.6 Thus the notion of chronotopia proposes a way of explaining the excessive events and individualized experience of chronodystopia in the individualized society. Nevertheless, it is the concept of the ‘grey zone of disengagement’ that suggests itself as an alternative approach to the generalized emergency in which speed commandeers the space of ‘atmospheric zero’, the space of speed itself.7 CHRONOTOPIA
The concept of chronotopia is derived from the Greek meaning ‘time’ (khronos) or, as in our definition, ‘speed’ (takhos) and ‘utopia’ or ‘good place’ (eu topos). This definition, we believe, is in keeping with Stan Davis and Christopher Mayer’s recent work on speed and space in Blur, one of a growing number of important ‘chronotopian’ texts in the international business studies tradition.8 Other similar works include Jonas Ridderstråle and Kjell Nordström’s Funky Business and Bill Gates’s The Road Ahead and Business @ The Speed of Thought.9 Chronotopia therefore designates the basic connections between speed and utopia that are apparent in what we, following Cornelius Castoriadis, call the social imaginary of popular contemporary business literature. Castoriadis’ innovative perspective is founded on the ‘institutions’ of society that are comprised of socially imaginary ‘significations’. While socially constructed, institutional significations are also ‘imaginary’ because they are not a ‘true’ or ‘rational’ reflection of society. Rather, significations are the matrix that binds together a variety of, sometimes-distorted, social discourses or projects that overlap with each other across the social field of dreams. But what is the chronotopian social imaginary of the popular contemporary business literature on cyberspace? How might we characterize this important if enigmatic tradition from the standpoint of social theory and investigation? Broadly, this literature describes the speed-spaces, social desires and organizational concerns of today’s ‘celebrity’ entrepreneurs like Bill Gates. Of course, it is also associated with the discoveries, use and application of cybernetic or techno-industrial techniques, information, communications and technoscientific systems and methods such as the Internet. It would be relatively easy to replace our conception of the popular contemporary business literature on cyberspace by a derogatory one such as Arthur Kroker and Michael A. Weinstein’s ‘the virtual class’, a term that considers such literature as that of the stratum whose ‘historical interests are linked to hyperspace’.10 Kroker and Weinstein’s interpretation links the sought-after ‘prophet-hypesters of the information superhighway’, such as Gates, with the seductive hardware and software manufactured by ‘pan’ or ‘virtual’ capitalism for cyberspatial con-
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sumption.11 However, this kind of literature is not homogeneous. To be sure, the most socially and financially successful of the popular contemporary business literature on cyberspace has been produced by a small number of people, such as Davis and Mayer, who are associated with the business elite in the USA and Europe. Yet, another fashionable strand of this literature, such as Ridderstråle and Nordström’s Funky Business, characterizes itself as the representative of the new sort of business and produces its texts for the future minded. Certainly, illustrations of this more (pseudo)‘radical’ kind of literature now appear regularly in the sphere of international business studies. Here, the new generation of business gurus imagine themselves as the leaders of ‘the third knowledge revolution’ that is the ‘key to all or futures’ in the ‘new world order’ of ‘successful companies’ where ‘difference’ is all.12 It is at this juncture that we want to present our tentative hypothesis concerning the type of chronotopia characterizing the social imaginary of books such as Blur and Funky Business. Still, it is useful to begin by differentiating between the socio-institutional significations articulated by these texts in order to speak of the socially constructed progression of institutional significations or events and the ‘imaginary’ of such events. The imaginary is the arrangement of the fabricated yet collectively assembled string of institutional significations into a generally groundless if purportedly intelligible image to which a social impulse or prime mover can be imputed. For instance, in the line of institutional signification, the chain that combines to form Blur is ‘the speed of change in the connected economy’, whereas for the authors of Funky Business it is that ‘talent makes capital dance’.13 In order to appreciate this kind of ‘funky’ social discourse, particularly in the wake of the acceleration of transformation in the cybernetic economic system and all singing, all dancing capital, ‘talent’ needs not only to be truly ‘part of the revolution and the blur’ but also to be aware that ‘business as usual is uninspired and that’s no longer good enough; talent doesn’t want to work there; customers don’t want to buy there’.14 Even so, what is striking and interests us most about the construction of the social imaginary in Blur and Funky Business, as well as literally dozens of other similar texts, is the evocation of the speed of change in the connected economy as a place where ‘ideas happen and exciting products happen faster’ or, in other words, as chronotopia.15 As implied above, the social imaginary of volumes such as Blur and Funky Business also appears to crave for the services of what we call ‘social imagineers’. ‘Visionary’ thinkers like the authors of Blur or Funky Business, for example, advise ‘leading and fast-growing companies around the world’, write ‘best sellers’ on the future, direct ‘Centres of Business Innovation’ and apply ‘complexity theory to business’.16 Espousing an intellectual perspective that urges their audience of apparently eager readers to forget ‘dry theories’ and introduce ‘ideas that work’, such visionaries want to make ‘things happen’ while scanning the ‘future more creatively’ with the aim of assembling ever-more ‘dynamic and workable strategies and organizational solutions’.17 Other chronotopian works making ‘things happen’ in the futuristic world of go-getting popular contemporary business literature are Gates’s The Road
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Ahead and Business @ The Speed of Thought, texts that we associate not merely with the conspicuous appearance and enduring reality of Microsoft and the Internet but, crucially, with twenty-first-century hypermodern excess. In critical contemporary and theoretical debates, Gates’s tomes are viewed by many theorists such as Arthur and Marilouise Kroker as delineating and promoting the stimulus for accelerated and utopian conceptions of power and capitalist profitability.18 With respect to chronotopia, the clear insinuation of The Road Ahead is that there is no alternative. In chronotopia, for example, ‘the Internet’ is transforming ‘not just Microsoft but everything else too – and at a faster pace’ than even Gates had envisioned.19 Indeed, in the book, Gates explores the consequences of a world connected by interactive computer networks. As an elaborately contrived text, then, The Road Ahead purports to address the key contemporary questions concerning speed and cyberspace, change, the economy, privacy, educational opportunity and, above all, preparations for the future. At its most self-evident, though, even the title The Road Ahead opposes modern conceptions of history and ‘progress’ against critical notions of space and speed in the era of hypermodernity. Moreover, Arthur and Marilouise Kroker argue that Gates’s Business @ The Speed of Thought promotes a ‘politics of digital excess’ and can be portrayed as a reflection of an economic system that is out of control.20 The hypermodern rule of excessive behaviour has therefore eclipsed the modern rule of moderation as hypercapitalist consumption takes command. However, in the next section, we suggest that mapping the contours of chronotopia is only possible by initially specifying the particular chronotopia emanating from the global kinetic elite. MEET THE GLOBAL KINETIC ELITE
We utilize the concept of the global kinetic elite to delineate hypermodernity’s leading techno-social, political and entrepreneurial groups and organizations. This social group makes its bid for the social imaginary on the premise that its high-minded quasi-religious ‘technological materialism’ and its commitment to a society underpinned by ‘radical’ political solemnity and meritocracy and wealth creation can be substantiated.21 This project is carried forward through the production of various privileged yet popular contemporary techno-social and political texts on cyberspace and social theory. Indeed, such texts are currently viewed by many as personifying the ‘true’ characteristics of a global society of movement that aims to articulate comprehensively admired technological and, above all, ‘radical’ yet ‘enlightened’ social and political principles. Here the chronotopian stress is laid on what can only be described as technosocial and political pilot studies of the future, as in Manuel Castells’s influential The Rise of the Network Society and The Internet Galaxy or Anthony Giddens’s equally lauded Beyond Left and Right and The Third Way.22 The global kinetic elite, like the Blur revolutionaries Davis and Meyer, and the future-minded Ridderstråle and Nordström, can therefore be distinguished as a group of social imagineers. This social group is also linked with the business and political elite
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in the USA and elsewhere. However, fashionable theorists such as Castells and Giddens characterize themselves as the trailblazers of a novel sort of technosocial and political imaginary that is resolutely opposed both to revolutionary and reformist socialism and to unfettered neo-liberalism. Currently, then, the global kinetic elite seeks to achieve its purpose for the future-minded by presenting its social imaginary as a touchstone for the comprehension of the developing relationship between the ‘network’ and ‘society’ and between the future of the left and the future of the right of the political spectrum. As the arbiter of the nature of the ‘information age’ as well as its techno-social and political forces, the global kinetic elite has labelled its techno-social imaginary the ‘spirit of informationalism’ while its political controls are set for the heart of the ‘radical centre’.23 In short, what the ‘radical centre’ offers is a putative explanation of the techno-social imaginary of the contemporary scene and a set of ‘ideas that work’ with respect to the management of global capitalism in the context of making ‘things happen’ such as greater political equity and freedom. However, the global kinetic elite can only achieve its social imaginary and supremacy by contrasting its, so obviously ‘correct’, explanation with those of the ‘old style’ revolutionary or reformist socialism presented by the left and the neo-liberalism advocated by the right. On the one hand, then, Castells’s and Giddens’s best-seller textbooks are aimed at the next generation of the global kinetic elite. But, on the other, their institutional significations are also projected mostly towards a small number of specialist yet authoritative technosocial ‘think-tanks’ and political speed-spaces in which it can expound on its latest assessment of cyber society or its political orientation to other like-minded social imagineers. Recent instances of such global kinetic elite appraisals incorporate Castells’s largely uncritical endorsement of the idea of a ‘techno-meritocratic culture’ based in the connected economy of academia, science and politics. Giddens has similarly affirmed the notion of capital making talent dance or ‘limited meritocracy’.24 Additionally, in British cyber society, the ‘New’ Labour Party, particularly influenced by Giddens in the task allotted to it by Prime Minister Tony Blair, has wholeheartedly embraced the ‘radical centre’ social imaginary assigned to elite ‘political imagineers’. Ostensibly, the global kinetic elite seeks to alleviate such inequalities as the techno-social and political disparities of Internet access (the so-called ‘digital divide’) as well as those of wealth and income. But although content to acknowledge the techno-social and ethnic aspects of the digital divide in The Internet Galaxy, Castells’s comments can also be interpreted as the protection of the global kinetic elite by other means. It is, for instance, surely a great disappointment that no sooner have the digitally dispossessed become ‘part of the blur’ by overcoming one form of inequality, social access to the Internet, (just in time?) ‘another one emerges: differential access to high-speed broadband service’.25 Likewise, Giddens’s The Third Way wants to rid the world of politics as usual, by eliminating inequalities of wealth and income. Yet, he aims to secure this by the ‘radical’ replacement of the concept of equality with that of
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‘inclusion’. Thus, the proponent of The Third Way, although theoretically in favour of curtailing the ‘voluntary exclusion of the elites’ as ‘being central to creating a more inclusive society at the bottom’, still aims in the way of elites everywhere to imagineer a new society.26 The only problem is that the hallmark of this new social imaginary is Giddens’s support for an ‘inclusiveness’ that is utterly consonant with the continuation of existing political inequalities and exclusionary policies. Interestingly, and while the global kinetic elite is relatively easy to recognize within cyber society, one noticeable feature of the work of Castells and Giddens is the absence of the usual cavalcade of cyber celebrity elites such as the ‘cyberpunk’ author and inventor of the term cyberspace, William Gibson. Rather, the global kinetic elite coalesces around the apex of the techno-social and political ‘dotcom’ aristocracy of cyber society, that is, around the very top of the speed-spaces of our contemporary world, inclusive of its technological and industrial group representatives, organizational power brokers and entrepreneurs. Of the latter, entrepreneurs such as Bill Gates are clearly the most high profile of the global kinetic elite. Nevertheless, we suggest that it would be unwise to exclude social imagineers like Castells and Giddens from this social group. For both are crucially connected to the acceleration of change in the connected economy, that place where ideas happen and exciting meetings happen faster or, in short, in chronotopia. Certainly, few other social imagineers are associated, as is the case with Castells, with membership of the ‘European Commission’s High Level Expert Group on the Information Society’ or, in the case of Giddens, with the presentation of ‘White House seminars’.27 Even so, our argument is that the chronotopia distinguishing the social imaginary of the global kinetic elite, unlike that of the authors of, say, Blur or Funky Business, is one that, obvious generational differences apart, aims to remove the blur, to remove the noise. To be sure, the global kinetic elite wants to remove any intellectual impediments or walls between its transmission of (and others receiving) the techno-social and political imaginary of wealth creation the meritocratic way. Castells’s and Giddens’s texts both explicitly dispense with ‘dry theories’ and implicitly pose various types of noise problems. Techno-social and political noise, for instance, can be designated as any misrepresentation of ‘ideas that work’, or make ‘things happen’, or that denigrate the significance of the ‘radically’ ‘enlightened’ techno-social and political future imaginary. Any social imaginary transpiring in alternative pilot studies of the future and which is not planned, sanctioned or recognized by the dynamic technological and workable political strategy of the global kinetic elite is also sidelined. Techno-social and political noise thus has a malign influence on the acceptance of the road ahead being pioneered by the global kinetic elite. For noise distorts the clarity of the global kinetic elite’s social imaginary – that any proposed questioning of the Internet or any return to or resurgence of techno-socialist ideals or unqualified support for the neo-liberal political agenda – should be jammed. This sort of noise or impedance can of course also be characterized in terms of numerous linguistic and individual, mental and social
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codes. In the chronotopia of the global kinetic elite, for example, ‘the Net’ is always upbeat or ‘yours’, your own personal speed fantasy, a ‘galaxy’ of power. It is a psychological yet privatized and profitable space that lies somewhere in chronotopia, along ‘the third way’, ‘beyond’ the screen and the ‘old’ social imaginary of ‘equality’, the imaginary of left and right. In other words, chronotopia is ‘beyond’ any kind of speed-space someone like ‘you’, the ‘(s)lower classes’ of the interactive world, could possibly imagine.28 INTO THE LANDSCAPE OF EVENTS
Yet, we propose that chronotopianism, as one of the leading discourses within cyber society will have no option but to face up to a number of problematical techno-social and political shifts in the unexplored territory that is the freeway to the future. Our proposal is consistent with our broader conception of hypermodernity and our effort to comprehend the contemporary social imaginary under the signs of escalation, speed-up and excess. Moreover, our development of Virilio’s landscape of events and the theory of hypermodernity is founded on a critical and excessive social standpoint from which contemporary hypermodernity and processes of intensification and excessive acceleration can be transformed into the study of the event landscape. Thus we favour a critical notion of human reason that appreciates a speculative and excessive approach to social thought while questioning the rationalist discourse of the Enlightenment. ‘Post-postmodern’ hypermodern theory, then, is linked particularly with the post-Marxian and post-Nietzschean contemporary work on speed-space and ‘dromology’ (the study of the compulsive logic of speed) of Virilio.29 It is a theoretically dystopian and excessive social perspective that is employed in the understanding of the history and future of repetition. Moreover, it is a vantage point that represents neither the position of Gates in The Road Ahead or the position of the spatialized postmodern world depicted by Fredric Jameson.30 Whereas Jameson gives expression to a postmodern ‘daily life’ and ‘psychic experience’ that is ‘dominated by categories of space rather than by categories of time’, our hypermodern and ‘noisy’ perspective is one where psychic experience is overshadowed by types of speed rather than by notions of space.31 Our hypermodern position is, however, sympathetic to Zygmunt Bauman’s critical-theory-related conception of ‘liquid modernity’ that urges the description not of hypermodernity but of modernity in its ‘novel’ or ‘dystopian’ phase.32 For Bauman’s interpretation, like ours, is that this dystopian phase is hypermodern society’s ‘present-day situation’, a condition that has ‘emerged out of the radical melting of the fetters and manacles rightly or wrongly suspected of limiting the individual freedom to choose and to act’.33 More specifically, our conception of excess is developed from Georges Bataille’s study of The Accursed Share, ‘general economy’ and consumption.34 Such an approach is useful, we believe, because our notion of excess is derived from Bataille’s claim that living beings experience an excess of energy that no economic system can control and that ‘must necessarily be lost without profit;
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it must be spent, willingly or not, gloriously or catastrophically’. 35Bataillian interpretations of excess thus overturn the ‘restricted economy’ of classical liberal and Marxian political economy and can therefore be seen as the effort to comprehend an unstable ‘general economy’ of expenditure and loss without return. It is here, therefore, that we ascertain an individually experienced chronodystopia that originates in Bauman’s individualized society but lately exists in Virilio’s twilight of the grounds or speed-space. The individual experience distinguished by chronodystopia is thus the opposite of the social imaginary of chronotopia and hence it is an all too real social condition of accelerated deprivation, spatial desolation noise and excess. We use such concepts following Bauman’s description of that contemporary sense of ‘being orphaned’, the sense that, today, people are ‘deprived of guides and wardens and left with the vexingly inadequate maps in the pocket and tools in the private toolbox’.36 An expansive notion, our idea of chronodystopia, like chronotopia, is obtained from the Greek expression for speed and dystopia or ‘bad place’ (dys topos). However, and while we are sympathetic to Bauman’s conceptualization of the individualized society, we believe that the ideas of chronotopia and chronodystopia culminate not so much in our own Virilio-influenced speculations on speed-space but in the grey zone of disengagement, a notion designating hypermodernity’s emergency conditioned by the reign of speed disengaged from spatial reality, from ‘ground zero’ and social obligations. The landscape of events is thus a concept for understanding the chronodystopia that is taking hold today in the light of an increasing variety of important social occurrences. As such, the landscape of events is to be differentiated from collective notions of experience based on a historical view of the individual or the progressive development of humanity. Although Virilio introduced his speed-based hypermodern definition of the landscape of events in the 1980s, postmodern debates of the time were also characterized by Jean-François Lyotard’s similar concept of ‘the event’ (e.g., Auschwitz, May 1968) and his assertion that we should remain receptive to the event while rejecting Marxian historical materialism and other ‘meta-narratives’ of modernity.37 The excessive metamorphosis of the events of individualized experience is crucially concerned with cybernetic acceleration and social spatialization. For the acculturation of singular perception in hypermodernity leads to the chronodystopian assumption that speed is collapsing and therefore involved with the realm of acceleration and reversal, with the idea that, today, speed is a crossroads of simultaneous events. Space on the other hand is devoured by speed. The sphere of space is speed and its social relationship to the functions of speed decides its destiny and our desires. Thus the supremacy of short-term thinking over long-term thinking is established along with the social imaginary that the imperative of speed-space is an acceptable mode of individual experience in hypermodernity. However, the emergence of the rule of speed over space emphasizes not only the role of dromology but also the future of those abandoned by the global kinetic elite, the (s)lower classes that are fated to remain
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fixed to the spaces of locality. The analysis of the landscape of events is thus driven by an exegesis of the rule of militarily and technologically designated speed over socialized space and its associated repercussions. Hypermodernists accordingly apprehend the examination of the landscape of events as vital to the rejection either of the imperative of speed in which cybernetic acceleration and spatialization replaces corporeal temporal experience and space as a consequence of the politics of speed, or of the era in which the social imaginary of speed has actually eliminated space in favour of speed as a way of life. Virilio’s explication of the landscape of events has been carried out within the vista of contemporary individual experience and, particularly, across the ‘transhistoric land’ that is the ‘horizon of an eternal present’.38 Thus, a cardinal feature of Virilio’s recent writings on this topic is his careful investigation into and disruption of the structure and significance of what we have termed chronodystopia. Virilio’s introduction of an ‘atemporal perspective, in which before and after coexist’, for instance, brings to light the fact that, today, individualized experience must be characterized neither in historical nor futuristic terms, but, rather, in cinematic terms or, better, in terms of a seemingly endless film loop.39 Yet this individualized experience is not the everyday cinematic universe with an archetypal start and a reassuring finish but one where the cinematic arrangement ceaselessly holds ‘the beginning and the end in view’, a landscape ‘in which events suddenly take the place of relief’.40 In other words, the critique of chronotopia and the concept of chronodystopia highlight the new reality where what once was history or the future is now a landscape of events. Here, ‘the past and the future loom up together in all their simultaneity’.41 Indeed, this is ‘a place where nothing follows on from anything else anymore and yet where nothing ever ends, the lack of duration of the perpetual present circumscribing the cycle of history and its repetitions’.42 The importance of the idea of the landscape of events is therefore that it shifts attention away not only from Gates’s fixation on the road ahead, on future history and the discourse of progress but also from, say, Jameson’s postmodern privileged representation of space and towards hypermodern conceptions that privilege the excessive events of the individualized experience of chronodystopia. Virilio, for example, in his interpretation of the first attack on the World Trade Center in New York city 1993, ‘Delirious New York’, wrote provocatively of the (s)lower classes in their terrorist incarnation and their literally explosive reaction to hypermodernity. For Virilio, the attack was ‘not a matter of a simple remake of the film Towering Inferno, as the image-conscious media like to keep saying, but much more of a strategic event confirming for us all the change in the military order of this fin de siècle’.43 Virilio’s essay on the ongoing transformation of terror that shaped the failed effort to destroy the World Trade Center is thus a useful one because it questions accepted conceptions of speed and speed-space from the standpoint of ‘dromological’ and hypermodern theory. In so doing, Virilio introduces a noisy perspective into the study of the individualized society of hypermodernity.
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Virilio’s most recent discussion of the landscape of events, arising from the second attack on and ruin of the singularized and accelerated space of the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001, views the imperative of this particular speed-space as altering the landscape of events from ‘the evolution of war into chaos’.44After 11 September, Virilio argues, the chaos of events has changed dramatically once more to produce not the appearance of peace but the all too real event horizon of everyday war. Virilio thus aims to question such chaos and focuses on the ‘accidental’ everyday wars of contemporary individualized experience in the sometimes hard, sometimes soft, spaces of speed in which, today, ‘the enemy does not make himself known, remains anonymous and is suicidal to boot’.45 It is crucial therefore to take the inherently and often internally unstable or incoherent facts of chronotopian speed-spaces seriously. But it is equally important to analyse the complexity of the landscape of events as it presents itself, as an economy of excess, as the point of embarkation for the grey zone of disengagement. THE GREY ZONE OF DISENGAGEMENT
The overtly speculative idea of chronotopia is clearly a useful one for the understanding of the social imaginary of popular contemporary business literature on cyberspace. Additionally, chronotopia provides a mechanism for uncovering how the specific chronotopia of the global kinetic elite conjures up its preferred social imaginary through its texts concerning cyberspace and social and political theory. Aiming to dispense with the blur, the global kinetic elite proposes a particular form of ‘noiseless’ thought we call chronotopianism, a social imaginary of unfettered progression that flies in the face of the reality of the epoch of hypermodernity. Of course, like the notion of chronotopia, the concept of hypermodernity has so far preoccupied very few in the realms of the humanities and the social sciences where postmodernity still reigns. Yet, as we have suggested, hypermodernity has acquired a significant burst of plausibility and excessive thought through the adoption of hypermodern, accelerating and excessive postpostmodern ideas concerning the landscape of events. Our hypermodern conceptions of rationality, for instance, take an avowedly speculative approach to historical time, viewing it as neither static nor alterable but as contemporary society’s future destiny written not as a movement towards spatial utopia but towards speeding dystopia. Our presentation of hypermodernity thus draws on Virilio’s critical analysis of the archaeology of the future, the archaeology of cyclical repetition. It is this perspective that to a great degree prevails in our antipathy to both Gates’s The Road Ahead and Business @ The Speed of Thought as well as towards the spatialized postmodernism provided by Jameson. Ours, then, is a speeding and noisy hypermodern critique of catastrophe adopted and adapted in part from the truly socially imaginative work of writers such as Bauman. As Bauman puts it, ‘social disintegration’ today is
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as much a condition as it is the outcome of the new technique of power, using disengagement and the art of escape as its major tools. For power to be free to flow, the world must be free of fences, barriers, fortified borders and checkpoints. Any dense and tight network of social bonds, and particularly a territorially rooted tight network, is an obstacle to be cleared out of the way. Global powers are bent on dismantling such networks for the sake of their continuous and growing fluidity, that principal source of their strength and the warrant of their invincibility. And it is the falling apart, the friability, the brittleness, the transience, the until-furthernoticeness of human bonds and networks which allow these powers to do their job in the first place.46 As hypermodern social theorists, however, we want to explain the metamorphosis into the economies of excess somewhat divergently from Bauman. For us, the politics of digital excess, that contemporary absence of cybernetic rules and social control at the centre of works such as the business and related literature on cyberspace considered in this chapter is crucially connected to the individual experience of chronodystopia. For the idea of chronodystopia helps to elucidate the source of Bauman’s individualized society, a society in which the global kinetic elite to be sure tears down every border that stands in the way of its advancement but which at the same time erects new, if selectively porous, borders through which most capital but not all labour can pass. Consequently, we want to begin the journey to our conclusion by offering a few thoughts on the key aspects of Virilio’s twilight of the grounds, on contemporary speed-space. Much the same as Virilio, we perceive the hypermodern age as characterized by an abruptly changed appreciation of space. Thus, for us, in the era of modernity, space was viewed not merely as fixed to the productive landscapes of progress but also as tangible and tactile. Today, though, in the era of hypermodernity, space is seen as speed-space. The social imaginary of chronotopia can therefore be summed up as the demand to live in the space of speed. But the result is that individual experience is now not only tangible and tactile but also inexorably driven towards the horizon of speed-space. In this way, the widespread sense of chronodystopia that is a constituent feature of the individualized society is exacerbated since chronotopia is a promise of a temporal and spatial transcendence that can never be kept. Thus the transport of delight that is chronotopia is also the source of the tactile, tangible and truly chronic torment that is chronodystopia. Like Bauman, then, we are committed to an analysis of the dystopia of liquid (or hyper-) modernity. In the final analysis, however, and, extending Bauman’s work, we believe that the experience of being orphaned is more than the result of being deprived of the maps of liquid modernity. Indeed, we propose that the dystopia of the individualized society is truly a chronodystopia, particularly for the (s)lower classes, who are everywhere subject to the discourse of global speed while being imprisoned in local space. As Virilio asserts in ‘The Twilight of the Grounds’, the wasteland that is chronodystopia has no beginning or end. Here, then, where
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the ‘gradual dwarfing of the proportions of living space on earth’ results in the ‘acceleration of pathways’ we are currently faced with ‘the desertification of the world’.47 No longer a form of ‘technological and political “progress” intended to bring people and remote cultures closer’ but the reduction of ‘distances and time frames to nothing, or nearly nothing’.48 The speed-space that was the catastrophe of 11 September has therefore passed through the event horizon of the grey zone of disengagement. A world of speed detached from spatial reality and social responsibility, the grey zone is currently ushering in a new social reality of disengagement conditioned by the fact that emergency has become the rule.49 But for all the unforeseen events and sudden occurrences at ground zero, for all the new dangers demanding immediate remedy or action, the most important feature of the current emergency that has become the rule is that, from this point onwards, speed rules over space. Consequently, in the grey zone of disengagement, individual existence is presently dominated by the delirious experience of living in a landscape of events in which the rate of speed determines not only the nature of space but also the distance between the two extremes and the key elements of both. Thinking through the post-11 September grey zone of disengagement thus involves acknowledging that it is no longer possible to speak of ground zero in terms of the surface of the land where the World Trade Center once stood. Now it is only possible to speak of atmospheric zero or that isolated combination of the vectors of speed that forms our own personal launch pad into the crowded and uncertain global airspace of the grey zone of disengagement. In the grey zone of disengagement, then, the social reality of speed has finally engulfed space. But, in so doing, the social reality of speed has brought the landscape of events, with all its noise and propaganda, with all its moral ambivalence, complexity and loss, its terrorist attacks, accidentally and anonymously, but no less irrefutably, into all our worlds, into each and every temporalized individual and social space. Clearly, after setting out for chronotopia, for the utopia of speed, and after having considered and rejected the noiseless world of the global kinetic elite, we have passed through the landscape of events to arrive in the hypermodern arena of the economies of excess, in chronodystopia. Alone on the island that is the twilight of the grounds, tuning in to speed-space, is this the way our world will end, with the grey zone of disengagement enacting the emergency that becomes the rule, with the supremacy of speed over space, with the dominion of atmospheric zero over ground zero, with the terminal velocity of private and public space?
PA R T I I C Y B E R C U LT U R E
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INTRODUCTION
Today, the conventional boundaries between subjects and specialities such as cybernetics and cultural studies, political science, international relations, media studies and philosophy are progressively collapsing. Analyses of cybernetics and culture are undertaking more political and international, media-related and metaphysical shifts while long-established political specialities like international relations are starting to examine specifically cybernetic and cultural configurations. Part II unites three illustrations characteristic of this coalescence of concern and underlines the intensely involved connections between contemporary cybernetics and culture, everyday life, cyberspace, technology and society. However, any consideration of the connections between cybernetics, culture and the political, generally conceived, particularly in the context of living with cyberspace, requires the identification of numerous important themes. In the chapters that follow, such themes range initially from the effects of cultural development on cyberspace as ‘battlespace’ to the patterns of cultural transformation and their consequences for the US military, the media and the entertainment industry. Subsequently, changes in the cultural labour of ‘codework’ are observed and, in particular, the oscillations between the ‘cyberspatial’ and the ‘biospatial’ realms and the relationships between the literature and cinema of science fiction. Finally, there is the question concerning cybernetics and the culture of animation presented by the phenomenon of ‘animatics’ and the various philosophical approaches to the examination of ‘automata’, androids and ‘animats’. Chapter 4, the opening chapter in Part II, is by the American political scientist and international relations theorist James Der Derian who argues that the US ‘military is preparing for wars that will be fought in the same manner as they are electronically represented’: on ‘real-time networks . . . actually and virtually’. For Der Derian, then, the US military is involved with a ‘new form of . . . networked warfare’ arising from the emergence of what he calls ‘virtuous war’.1 Here, slaughter is ‘distant and discriminate, efficient and ethical’. Yet networked warfare is also related to the tie-ups between leading figures in the US military and the ‘virtual corporations’ of the American media and entertainment industry such as ‘Viacom-CBS-MTV-Paramount-Blockbuster-Iwon’. Such ‘hyphenated hydras’ Der Derian labels the ‘Military-Industrial-MediaEntertainment Network’ or MIME-NET for short and suggests that it is
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crucially concerned with the shift from ‘geopolitics’ to speed or ‘chronopolitics’ and therefore with the fundamental reconfiguration of space and power through the high-speed network politics presently taking shape in cyberspace. In his contribution to an understanding of chronopolitics, Der Derian asks the critical question of whether ‘human beings as relentless as the web’ is the ‘face – and the guts – of a virtual future?’ He answers in the affirmative here but does so cautiously through a careful consideration of the unveiling in Los Angeles of that ‘beta-network of virtuous war’, the newly formed Institute for Creative Technologies. Der Derian utilizes the example of the Institute for Creative Technologies because it is a ‘remarkable joint project’ whose aim is to ‘pool expertise, financial resources, and [the] tools of virtual reality for the production of state-of-the-art military simulations’. Chapter 4 is broadly illustrative of the poststructuralist perspective on cyber culture. As such, it is interested in how singular ‘events’ like the inauguration of the Institute for Creative Technologies exposes the ‘full spectral reach of virtuous war’ as well as the expanding collaborative links between the US media and entertainment industries, the armed forces and the university sector. Der Derian further suggests that the virtuous military warriors of MIME-NET are currently pursuing a variety of semi-comic yet darkly surreal projects previously characteristic of the media and entertainment fields. These projects include, for example, the display of ‘Steve’ at the Institute for Creative Technologies’ launch event, an ‘intelligent pedagogical agent’ apparently ‘engineered to operate in simulation-based training environments’. Der Derian portrays ‘Steve’ as looking like ‘ “Hans” from Saturday Night Live’ and sounding like ‘HAL from 2001’. Even so, according to Lieutenant-General Bob Springer formerly of the US Air Force, now retired, the creation of the Institute for Creative Technologies also represents another occurrence in the event landscape of military thinking. For the Institute is an acknowledgement that many of today’s young people in the armed forces have been raised on computers and the Internet and are, in Springer’s words, ‘readily adaptable to the technology of simulation’. This harnessing of what might be termed the ‘net generation’ to military projects is therefore representative of the movement of the armed forces from the technologies of ‘actual war’ to those of ‘virtuous war’. War games, for instance, have had many far-reaching repercussions for the US military’s top computer experts and for executives of both the media and the entertainment industry, some of which, most markedly intensified degrees of military and industrial cooperation, Der Derian skilfully summarizes in a significant contribution. Chapter 5 locates computer and other codes within the functioning of cyberspace and ‘biospace’. In this chapter, Australian media and cultural theorist McKenzie Wark is perturbed by the correspondences between William Gibson’s ‘cyberpunk’ science fiction novel Neuromancer2 and Andrew Niccol’s futuristic film GATTACA.3 In particular, Wark concentrates on the role of human ‘flesh’ within modes of ‘becoming’ and the influence these have had on our appearance and culture as well as on our ability to adapt to ‘the art of
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living with cyberspace’. The chapter is, nevertheless, mostly concerned with GATTACA and how the assimilation of genetically modified organisms into the artistic imaginary is producing new systems of cultural creativity concerning the human environment and animal ecology and their relationship to cyber culture. Wark’s contribution proposes and explains the significance of a development generally ignored in debates over the relationship between cyberspace and biospace: ‘the extension of cyberspace into the very fabric of biological being’. Instead of merely focusing on ‘Dolly’ the cloned sheep, Wark considers the examples of cyberspace and human cloning, showing that these are extremely substantial and influential artistic impulses moulding contemporary developments within the cultural arena of information and communications technologies. Chapter 5 thus makes use of the movie GATTACA to indicate how, like Neuromancer, it too is a work of art that has ‘intuited certain possibilities latent in biological phenomena’. Wark’s contribution is a cogent rebuke to those chronicles of the literature and cinema of science fiction that have neglected to appreciate the importance of their discovery of ‘the possibilities of the present’. This neglect is beginning to be considered by a proliferating collection of cinematic works such as GATTACA centring on the issues Wark highlights and which arise in part from his assertion that the makers of GATTACA see ‘what is hiding in the codes’. Wark’s reading of GATTACA as a classical work of art with a romantic heart full of possibilities is set to remain a compelling one in the sphere of what he calls ‘codework – the work of unravelling the possibilities caught in the code – and existing free of it’. Whereas Wark attends to questions concerning cyberspace and biospace, the Australian philosopher Cathryn Vasseleu in Chapter 6 offers a deliberation on animation or ‘the art of giving cartoon characters the illusion of life’. It commences with a narrative account of animation and the biological attempt to understand ‘new cultural configurations of life’. Like many contemporary biologists writing on the cybernetic and cultural implications of DNA or ‘the science of life’, Vasseleu initially considered linguistics and communications theory as ways of ‘decoding’ some of the more outlandish ideas associated with the latest discoveries of the biological sciences. But, for Vasseleu, this ‘new vocabulary’ bestows a specific sort of result on the ‘convergence of biology and cybernetics’ now being debated in disciplines as different as culture and art, engineering and computer science. The chapter proceeds in pursuit of an answer to what might be termed the question concerning animation. Thus, in her contribution, Vasseleu not only imparts why she focuses her philosophical concerns on the study of animation but also insists on the significance of not breathing ‘illusory motion into inanimate objects’. In this chapter, then, the value of approaching animation as a ‘method for modelling the complexity of life’ is emphasized, again through a focus on the convergence between cybernetics and biology. The text therefore considers animation as a ‘force of technological transformation’ that ‘works its way free of the frame of illusion’. Chapter 6 develops these insights by reminding us that in ‘order to extend the field of animation beyond its popular conception’ it is necessary to address
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this particular art form in terms of animatics. In a comparable technique to the analysis of cyberspace as battlespace in Chapter 4 and the examination of codework and biospace in Chapter 5, the investigation of the concept of animatics proceeds in a fashion that centres on the real ‘machinery’ of animation. The idea of the animatic can therefore be applied equally well to animation’s manual and mechanical, electronic and cybernetic machines. Chapter 6 tellingly recalls, for instance, that the animatic was linked with the spread of automation and was therefore central to the evolution of the cinema. Likewise, today, and in every sense of the term, animation is being revolutionized by the production and reproduction of automata such as ‘bots’ and robots, ‘digital avatars’, and artificial life experiments. In conclusion, it is important to recognize that living with cyberspace introduces elemental cybernetic and cultural issues, and it is these that all three authors broach in their contributions to Part II. Their central argument is that cyber culture invents new technological worlds and ways of life and death that outstrip the political, the narrowly imagined, the international, the literary and the cinematic, not to mention the emergent philosophy of animatics and automata, androids and animats.
4 C Y B E R S PA C E A S B AT T L E S PA C E
THE NEW VIRTUAL ALLIANCE OF T H E M I L I TA R Y, T H E M E D I A A N D T H E E N T E R TA I N M E N T I N D U S T R Y
James Der Derian
The US military is preparing for wars that will be fought in the same manner as they are electronically represented, on real-time networks and by live-feed videos, on the PC and the TV, actually and virtually. Global surveillance, precision munitions, computerized logistics and new humanitarian imperatives are producing a new form of high-tech, low-risk, networked warfare: ‘virtuous war’, where killing – if we are to believe the trailers for wars in the Gulf, Bosnia, and Kosovo – is distant and discriminate, efficient and ethical. These wars came to us by way of hyphenated hydras like Time-WarnerCNN-WB-AOL, ABC-Disney-Go, GE-NBC-MSNBC-Snap, and ViacomCBS-MTV-Paramount-Blockbuster-Iwon. The primetime networks merge, break up, form new alliances, create ‘virtual corporations’, spy on one another (‘a civic duty’ said the chairman of Oracle, Lawrence Ellison, after acknowledging that a detective agency they had hired got caught trying to buy Microsoft’s trash1), and sometimes they even go to war. After negotiations broke down between cable carrier Time Warner and the ABC network on 30 April 2000 – and ABC vanished in several major cities – the President of Disney, Robert Iger, said he was ‘reminded of the 1983 movie The Day After, in which Kansas City is hit by a nuclear missile’.2 Time Warner later apologized (to its customers) with a full-page ad in the New York Times, offering two days of credit for Basic Cable service, and promising to go back to the negotiating table with Disney-ABC.3 On the same day, in the same newspaper, Xdrive, an Internet storage and backup company, ran a full-page ad in response to the ‘Love Bug’ virus unleashed by a Filipino hacker (causing an estimated $10 billion in lost data and productivity). In bold letters it read:
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On May 4, 2000, a virus spread through the world, cleverly disguised as a love note. In a matter of hours, it began to wipe out attachments, documents and files on e-mail servers everywhere. It destroyed vital information. It shut down multinational corporations. It ruined futures. Perhaps careers. In the midst of all this destruction, there were a significant number of people who found their files totally unaffected. And their businesses and lives intact.4 The airwave absence of ABC and the effects of the ‘Love Bug’ virus barely lasted 24 hours; but on current networks, downtime is measured in seconds. As we move from geopolitics to chronopolitics, power is as much a function of time as space. The key coordinates of these networks are 60/60/24/7/365, numbers that stretch across the double-spread of a recent Intel advertisement in Fortune magazine. The numbers are projected on an eye the size of a room, hovering over row after row of flat-screened computers and transfixed operators, all bathed in a blue light and offset by a smaller caption: ‘finally, human beings as relentless as the web’. Is this the face – and the guts – of a virtual future? Humans as relentless as computers in business, politics and war?5 It would seem so, judging from the recent unveiling in Los Angeles of a beta-network of virtuous war that threatens to make primetime look like archaic pastime. The occasion was the opening of a new Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT) at the University of Southern California (USC). The innocuous title and placid setting concealed a remarkable joint project: to pool expertise, financial resources and tools of virtual reality for the production of state-of-the-art military simulations. Prominent political leaders, military officers and representatives from the computer and entertainment industries gathered for the event. On hand for the signing ceremony and press conference were Steven Sample, the President of USC; Louis Caldera, Secretary of the US Army; ‘Rocky’ Delgadillo, Deputy Mayor of Los Angeles; Rick Belluzzo, then Chief Executive of Silicon Graphics; and Jack Valenti, perpetual President and Chief Executive of the Motion Picture Association of America. Even Governor Gray Davis made an unannounced appearance, virtual and gargantuan on screen via satellite link from the Capitol in Sacramento. This singular event demonstrated the full spectral reach of virtuous war. The press was prepped with a variety of exhibits that had been set up to showcase the wizardry that would be the basis for the collaboration between the entertainment industry, the armed forces and the university. Artificial intelligence was getting a hard sell (as ever), but not proving to be very artificial or intelligent (as usual). ‘Virtual Helicopters’ offered a 3-D mission rehearsal in a desert terrain with intelligent agents in tanks and Apache helicopters. USC’s Center for Advanced Technology, Research and Education had ‘Steve’ on display, an ‘intelligent pedagogical agent’ engineered to operate in simulation-based training environments. Steve looked like ‘Hans’ from Saturday Night Live and sounded like HAL from 2001. A less intelligent dummy was lying down on a
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stretcher, with white-coated figures around him who spoke in such a heavily accented English that no one was quite sure what was going on. Things took an even stranger turn when CNN reporter Jennifer Auther attempted to conduct a stand-up interview with Bob Springer, a retired US Air Force lieutenant-general, and now President of NovaLogic, an entertainment industry that brought us ‘Iron Fist’ and the highly popular ‘F-16’ and ‘F-22’ simulations. As Springer was telling Auther what NovaLogic had to offer the Army, they were distracted by a monotone voice in the background. Steve was trying to join in; but with such an unscripted interlocutor, he was only managing to come up with a string of non sequiturs. A somewhat surreal conversation went like this: Springer: ‘Most of the young men and woman joining the military have been brought up on the computer and the Internet and are readily adaptable to the technology of simulation.’ Steve: ‘OK, I would press the function test button on the temperature monitor.’ Springer: ‘The mean age of our customers is 27 years old, so they know the difference between war and games.’ Steve: ‘We need to trigger the switches on the alarm sensors.’ At this point Auther interrupted: ‘We seem to have some competition.’ She then stopped the interview and asked the USC booth operator to shut down the program. Steve’s Boolean algorithms and database capacity were evidently not up to CNN talking-head standards. The press conference itself was much more conventional. The front rows of the auditorium were sprinkled with uniforms and suits, the military’s top computer wargamers swapping stories with executives from the entertainment industry. Towards the back of the room the major network and print media, including CNN, set up to broadcast this new alliance to the world. After some opening remarks, USC President Sample introduced the featured speaker, the Honourable Louis Caldera. Caldera mapped out the purpose and potential of a ‘very exciting partnership’ that seemed to include just about every major LA player in high-tech, higher education and high- as well as low-brow entertainment. He then went on to say: This 45 million dollar contract will fund joint modelling and simulation research and has high-value applications for the Army as well for the entertainment, media, videogame, film, destination theme park and information technology industries that are such a key part of the California economy . . . this partnership will leverage the US national defense and the enormous talent and creativity of the entertainment industry and their tremendous investment in cutting-edge applications of new technology.
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Having stroked the local powers, Caldera addressed the needs of his own constituency, in the now-common military language that makes Neuromancer sound like an out-of-date army field manual. ‘The ICT will significantly enhance complex interactive simulations for large-scale warfighting exercises and allow us to test new doctrines in synthetic environments that are populated with intelligent agents in future threat challenges.’ The speakers that followed parroted the press releases in simpler language. ‘Synergy’ and ‘verisimilitude’ popped up with cue-card frequency; everyone was keen to dance on the ‘cutting edge’. The ICT was the brainchild of Mike Macedonia, son of one of the Army’s best wargamers, graduate of West Point, and now chief scientist and technical director at STRICOM (Simulation, Training, and Instrumentation Command). Located in Orlando, just down the highway from Disney World, STRICOM is one of the newer military bases in the United States. Steel and glass corporate buildings, owned by Lockheed Martin, Silicon Graphics, Westinghouse, SAIC, and other defence industries, encircle the various headquarters of the Army, Navy, Marine Corps and the Air Force. Tasked to provide the US military with a ‘vision for the future’, STRICOM leads a combined military and industry effort to create ‘a distributed computerized warfare simulation system’, and to support ‘the twenty-first-century warfighter’s preparation for real world contingencies’. It’s motto is telling: All But War Is Simulation. Under the auspices of his boss, Michael Andrews, deputy assistant secretary of the Army for research and technology, Macedonia had brought STRICOM to LA after he realized that the commercial sector, in particular the film, computer and videogame industries, was outstripping the military in technological innovation. Where trickle-down from military research on mainframe computers once fuelled progress in the field, civilian programmers working on PCs could now design videogames and virtual environments that put military simulations to shame. Macedonia had come to Hollywood to find the tools and skills for simulating and, if necessary, fighting wars of the future. As the blood and iron of traditional war gave way to the bits and bytes of infowar, netwar and cyberwar, he saw the ICT as a vehicle for integrating the simulation and entertainment industries into the much-heralded ‘revolution in military affairs’. Having sold the ICT to the Pentagon, Hollywood, and now USC, he was presenting it for the first time to the public – with some anxiety. Judging from the questions and answers that followed the signing ceremony, he had no need to worry. The closest thing to criticism arose from the recent shootings at Colombine High School, with several questions fixing on the theme of videogame violence. One journalist did break ranks to ask whether there wasn’t a danger of repeating what happened during the Second World War, when the pairing of Hollywood and the Pentagon produced films that mixed training documentaries and actual footage, blurring entertainment and propaganda? Would there be any ethical checks and balances to assure that military simulations would not become a tool for public dissimulation? That something like Wag the Dog won’t be coming out of the ICT? President
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Sample hesitated, deadpanned a nervous look to the other side of the stage, and replied: ‘As Jack is coming up to respond to that . . .’. Earlier Sample had said that the ICT would develop ‘synthetic experiences so compelling that people will react as though they were real – a virtual reality of sensations and sights’. He responded to the question by making a deft analogy to Plato’s poor opinion of the poets, not actually using the word mimesis, but suggesting as much was going on at the ICT: by performing the classical function of poetry and theatre – artistically and dramatically mimicking reality for a higher purpose – it could not help but arouse anxieties about whose version of reality was the true one. Jack Valenti took this as his cue. He had opened his earlier presentation by correcting a remark by LA’s deputy mayor: ‘Los Angeles is not the “entertainment capital of the world” [pause]. Washington, DC, is the entertainment capital of the world [laughter].’ He now politely but pugnaciously informed his interrogator of another of their similarities. ‘I would like to illuminate a central truth to the gentleman – everything leaks, in Hollywood and in Washington. There’s no way you can keep a secret. You can’t fool the people for very long, the truth will come out.’ He paused, then declared that the journalist needed to correct his ‘Copernican complex’. Executing his trademark overkill, he contrasted the journalist’s question to the decision to drop the atomic bomb on the Japanese. Some might have seen that as a ‘heartless and terrible thing to do . . . but not the 150,000 young American boys whose lives would have been lost if we had invaded Japan. This is a lesson in Philosophy 101 that I am giving to you right now.’ Some might have come away with a different lesson from his playing of the Hiroshima card, but Valenti did have a point: what separates and elevates war above lesser (Copernican) conceits is its intimate relationship to death. The dead body – on the battlefield, in the tomb of the unknown soldier, in the collective memory, even on the cinema screen – is what gives war its special status, what trumps any lesser issues, such as those expressed in my question. This fact, the material facticity of the dead soldier, can be censored, hidden in a body bag, lost in cyberspace; but it provides, even in its erasure, the corporal gravitas of war. Valenti and his cohort at the ICT seemed unaware of their own potential role in the disappearance of the body, the aestheticizing of violence, the sanitization of war. Some history might prove more illuminating than Valenti’s ‘Philosophy 101’. The link between film and war goes back further than the Second World War, at least to the nineteenth century, when chemists experimenting with the same nitrocelluloids found in explosives created new emulsions that could fix images on film. Ever since, the military and the film industry have been in a technological relay race for seeing and killing the enemy while securing and seducing the citizen. Strategy and commerce merged in their goals to shrink distances, increase accuracy, accelerate delivery. The historical convergence of modes of representation and destruction has been vividly plotted by the French critic of technology, Paul Virilio. In War and Cinema, he tracks the dual development of weapons and cameras from the
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American Civil War to the First World War, revealing how the first hand-cranked machine gun and multi-chambered revolver inspired the ‘chrono-photographic rifle’ and the moving picture camera.6 In later works Virilio plots the modern necessities of war which gave rise to peacetime industries, from the development of radar (and television), to targeting systems (and mechanical computers), to encryption machines (and software codes). In these dual economies of sight and might, Virilio locates the very origins of modernity, a ‘logistics of perception’ where images war with another, becoming a substitute for reality itself.7 War has served as the aesthetic as well as technological laboratory of modern films, a fact highlighted particularly in the period between the First and Second World Wars (hereafter, the interwar period). German social critics, especially sensitive to the political use of film, have noted how the earliest film-makers, moving between the backlot and the battlefield, learned to give their films and propaganda a dose of verisimilitude by mixing the real and the fictional.8 The practice dates back to the origins of film-making. Consider one ‘father’ of modern cinema, D. W. Griffith. Already famous for his 1915 Birth of the Nation, a war-at-home film, he went to work for Lord Beaverbrook’s War Office Cinematograph Committee in the First World War. His 1918 Hearts of the World spliced together a love story with war footage, including scenes of Griffith actually (as opposed to Gump-ly) shaking hands with British Prime Minister Lloyd George. His highly creative cameraman Billy Bitzer applied techniques mastered while filming the Spanish–American War for the American Mutoscope Company, like attaching a camera to a moving train – and staging naval battles with toy boats in tubs of water. Hollywood might have been the first but not the last cinema to rely on the storyline of war. War films, especially post-Vietnam, have been as likely to challenge as to promote military values, often conveying in the same film the glory and honour as well as the agony and futility of war (think Tom Cruise in Top Gun and Born on the Fourth of July). But from the earliest war films a Hollywood template emerged which persists today. In war films like Griffith’s Hearts of the World or King Vidor’s The Big Parade (1925), ordinary men leave the girl behind; undergo a trial by combat; overcome deep fears and insecurities; bond with fellow soldiers through acts of heroic, stoic, or sometimes just senseless self-sacrifice; wander in no man’s land or some commensurable moral wasteland; seek and find private redemption: all of which provides a public catharsis. This soldier’s story, recycled with great success through the genres of cowboy, cop, and cyborg, became the meta-plot for Hollywood. Gun and camera took on a single calibration with the mobilization of Hollywood in the Second World War. At the start of the war, military-preparedness documentaries were quickly re-edited to produce quick-and-dirty propaganda movies like To the Shores of Tripoli. However, famous Hollywood directors soon joined the cause, contributing feature and training films like Howard Hawks’s Air Force (1943), John Huston’s The Battle of San Pietro (1945) and Frank Capra’s series Why We Fight. The war also proved to be something of a fillip to
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flagging careers, like that of Ronald Reagan, who starred in several Army Air Force training and re-enlistment films. The War Department supplied manpower, equipment and funding, and Hollywood provided actors, directors and, for the most part, the talent. Between 1939 and 1945, close to 2500 films were made. If war is the mother of all things, Hollywood has become its most notorious offspring. After such extensive collaboration, the opening of the ICT might appear to be a minor case of incest, just further proof that LA has never had much of a purchase on reality, rather than a cause for alarm. But there is a difference. By its very task and potential power to create totally immersive environments – where one can see, hear, perhaps even touch and emotionally interact with digitally created agents – the ICT is leading the way into a brave new world that threatens to breach the last firewalls between reality and virtuality. Set against the larger techno-strategic scheme of things, ICT matters – very much. It could well be the first joint avant-garde – or at least the first since the Futurists joined ranks with the Italian fascists – of both film-making and war-making. It is always dangerous to invoke fascism when speaking of the present, not least out of the fear of provoking those who intone with regularity that it cannot happen here – wherever ‘here’ might be in cyberspace. But we need also to always remember how technologies of representation first developed in the interwar period displayed a remarkable capacity to upstage and in some cases displace democratic politics. In the rush to vilify, we might fail to understand how fascism is more than a historically fixed event. It was also a symptom of a failure of democracy to come to grips with new technologies of representation. Consider, for instance, the 1934 Nuremberg party rally in Germany. Staged as much for the cameras of Leni Riefenstahl as for the party faithful (she had 30 cameras and a staff of 120 at her disposal), the rally featured a speech by Nazi Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels, in which he endorsed a creative and popular propaganda: May the shining flame of our enthusiasm never be extinguished. This flame alone gives light and warmth to the creative art of modern political propaganda. Rising from the depths of the people, this art must always descend back to it and find its power there. Power based on guns may be a good thing; it is, however, better and more gratifying to win the heart of a people and to keep it. Siegfried Kracauer, perhaps the most acute observer of the alliance between film and politics in the interwar period, considered Goebbels’ ‘genius’ to be his ability to stage a popular enthusiasm, where ‘Reality was put to work faking itself, and exhausted minds were not even permitted to dream any longer.’9 This, says Kracauer, is why the newsreel figured so largely in the process: To keep the totalitarian system in power, they had to annex to it all real life. And since, in the medium of the film, the authentic representation of
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unstaged reality is reserved to newsreel shots, the Nazis not only could not afford to set them aside, but were forced to compose from them their fictitious war pictures.10 Walter Benjamin also warned of a new and incestuous relationship between mass politics and mass means of reproduction. In the final footnote to his famous essay ‘The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction’, he focuses on how new technologies of representation and perception produce political effects: One technical feature is significant here, especially with regard to newsreels, the propagandist importance of which can hardly be overestimated. Mass reproduction is aided especially by the reproduction of masses. In big parades and monster rallies, in sports events, and in war, all of which nowadays are captured by camera and sound recording, the masses are brought face to face with themselves. This process, whose significance need not be stressed, is intimately connected with the development of the techniques of reproduction and photography. Mass movements are usually discerned more clearly by a camera than by the naked eye. A bird’s-eye view best captures gatherings of hundreds of thousands. And even though such a view may be as accessible to the human eye as it is to the camera, the image received by the eye cannot be enlarged the way a negative is enlarged. This means that mass movements, including war, constitute a form of human behavior which particularly favors mechanical equipment.11 Then consider more recent methods of technically updating bread and circuses: The Colosseum as recreated for Ridley Scott’s Gladiator – a sword-andsandal epic of the kind they didn’t make anymore until he did – appears to be three massive stories high, but only the first story actually existed . . . The rest was painstakingly added with computer-generated effects, one byte at a time. The gladiator sequences, which are at the heart of Mr Scott’s film, were shot to mimic the way modern-day sporting events are shown on television . . . to subliminally make them more real to today’s audiences. There is, for example, the ‘blimp shot,’ a favorite at the Super Bowl, in which the camera seems to float over the top of the massive Colosseum.12 And if this seems to be too much of a historical reach, consider one last event, Super Bowl XXXII, where, after the singing of the national anthem, a global audience of 800 million viewers was treated to a low-level flyover of Tampa’s Qualcomm Stadium by a B-2A Spirit stealth bomber, prompting one of the announcers to remark that he was sure glad it missed the Budweiser blimp. Earlier, in the first-ever use at a major US sporting event, the crowd in the
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stadium had been subjected at the turnstiles to a face-matching surveillance system, in which ‘their facial images had been digitized and checked electronically against the computer files of known criminals, terrorists and con artists of the Tampa Police Department, the FBI and other state and local law enforcement agencies’.13 To be sure, the threat to democracy cannot be reduced to technology. The first time around, the interwar period was, among other things, a failure of democratic politics to understand the mimetic appeal of primal, emotive sources of identity in times of great uncertainty. In a remarkable 1935 essay, ‘The revival of feudalism’, political theorist and theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, interpreted the rise of Hitler as a reaction to a misguided effort by liberalism to suppress ‘the organic character of society’ that is expressed, sometimes excessively, in displays of tradition, community and ethnic loyalty. ‘Fascism’, wrote Niebuhr, ‘is this outraged truth avenging itself.’ He concluded that Nazism ‘could not have achieved such monstrous proportions if our culture had not foolishly dreamed and hoped for the development of “universal” men, who were bereft of all loyalties to family, race, and nation’.14 In a strange and disturbing way, Niebuhr’s theoretical speculations about that period find an echo in a recent study undertaken by the Triangle Institute for Security Studies in North Carolina.15 The first part of their extensive project involved a survey of military and civilian leaders, to determine whether there ‘is a gap between civilian society and the military, and if so whether differing values, opinions, perspectives, and experience, harm military effectiveness and civil-military cooperation’. The survey is a complex document, and cannot be reduced to a sound-bite. But three conclusions, which underpin the basic assumptions of virtuous war, leap from the page: 1. Elite military officers today ‘express great pessimism about the moral health of civilian society and strongly believe that the military could help society become more moral and that civilian society would be better off if it adopted more of the military’s values and behaviors’.16 2. ‘Contrary to a traditional understanding of civilian control, elite military officers believe that it is their role to insist and advocate rather than merely advise on key elements of decisions concerning the use of force, for instance: “setting rules of engagement” (83 per cent), developing an “exit strategy” (80 per cent), and “deciding what kinds of military units (air vs. naval, heavy vs. light) will be used to accomplish all tasks” (89 per cent).’17 3. ‘On non-traditional missions, elite military officers are twice to four-times as casualty averse as American civilians (mass or elite). Casualty aversion may be more a function of a zero-defect mentality among senior officers, in which casualties are viewed as indications the mission will be perceived to be a failure.’18 During the interwar period, at the rallies, in films and, yes, even at the Super Bowl, this gap between military virtues and civilian values was on
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spectacular display, representing a democratic void which all kinds of virtuous solutions appeared ready to fill. Is the ICT leading the way? At the level of scope and influence, it seems almost comical to entertain such a notion. But then, at the closed luncheon that followed the ICT press conference, the featured speaker, writer and director John Milius (Apocalypse Now, Red Dawn) spoke, half-jokingly, of how he wanted to put an end to the alienation between the military and the film industry by setting up a production team for the Army that would make Wag the Dog look tame. And what are we to make of statements like this one from a USC News Service press release: ‘Maintaining a strong military is, and has been, national policy since the birth of our nation. It is entirely appropriate that USC do all that it can to assist the US Army in fulfilling its mission, which is the defense of our nation and its citizens.’19 Fair enough, to most patriots. But one ex-general did find some hidden dangers lurking in such policies – President Eisenhower. In his famous 1961 farewell address, Eisenhower warned of the ‘danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite’. What would he have made of this addition of universities, new media and entertainment industries to his ‘military-industrial complex’? Of new technologies of simulation being built at universities to create a high fidelity between the representation and the reality of war? Of the human mimetic faculty for entertainment and gaming joining forces with new cyborg programs for killing and warring? He’d probably not have let it get in the way of his golf game. But by the end of the day, we must ask, pace Eisenhower, whether the military-industrial-media-entertainment network (MIME-NET) is now online. The verdict is still out on the ICT. So far, it has produced more promissory notes than any actual project developments: contra Valenti, if not outright secrecy, ‘I’d-rather-not-say-at-the-moment’ was the most common response to any queries. The reasons given for not going on record were ongoing negotiations and imminent signings, with one of the ‘best-known directors in Hollywood’ and some of the ‘best computer graphics guys on the planet’. But the only names dropped were Randal Klieser (director of Blue Lagoon and Honey I Blew Up the Kids) and 3D Realms, makers of the videogame Duke Nukem (motto: ‘The only good alien bastard is a dead alien bastard’). One person who did have more to say was Mike Zyda, chair of modelling, virtual environments and simulation at the Naval Postgraduate School, chair of the original 1997 National Research Council report that gave cause and code for the establishment of the ICT,20 and, not coincidentally, chair of Michael Macedonia’s 1995 Ph.D. dissertation in computer science. He originally envisioned the ICT as a place that would act as coordinator and broker for the most imaginative and technically advanced modellers and simulators. More recently, his view was that the ICT shouldn’t be chasing Hollywood: it should target off-the-shelf videogames technology that are leaving computer graphic industries like Silicon Graphics in the dust. ‘The Defense Department has spent millions’, says Zyda, ‘and it still can’t match SimCity.’ And following on
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from this, that commercial videogames could be redesigned to test the intellectual aptitude and psychological attitudes of potential recruits, while spin-off technology would be used to help kids at risk to explore potential career paths. Richard Lindheim, who was eventually appointed Director of ICT, had a different vision. After a long career at NBC, Lindheim went on to become Executive Vice President of the Paramount Television Group, producing The Equalizer and taking charge of the later Star Trek series, Next Generation, Deep Space Nine and Voyager. His previous employment probably best explains why the Holodeck keeps popping up in his conversations (as well as explaining how Herbert Zimmerman, the art director of Star Trek, was procured to design the ICT’s office space). ‘The ICT is on a quest to envision and prepare for the future’, and, says Lindheim, ‘Our Holy Grail is the Holodeck’.21 Lindheim invokes writers like Jules Verne, who invented the idea of the modern submarine and inspired scientists to turn unreality into reality; Voyager could do the same for the ICT. The Holodeck is not just a metaphor: it is the endgame for the ICT. The Holodeck and the Holy Grail notwithstanding, the ICT is unlikely to save (or destroy) the world. It is not yet evident that it can run a project, a battlefield simulation, let alone an intergalactic war. However, cutting edge or opening wedge, the ICT does look to be Hollywood’s – and the Pentagon’s – premier laboratory for virtuous war. Will this new alchemy of brass, celluloid and silicon produce a kinder, gentler, sexier cyborg, like Voyager’s Seven of Nine? Or will the simulations of the ICT turn on their creators, like Frankenstein’s monster? Either way, the ICT looks to be the first virtual embodiment of the military-industrial-media-entertainment network.22
5 CODEWORK
F R O M C Y B E R S PA C E T O B I O S PA C E , F R O M N E U R O M A N C E R T O G A T TA C A
M c K e n z i e Wa r k
Flesh is only the thermometer of a becoming.1
In that classic work on the art of ‘living with cyberspace’, William Gibson’s Neuromancer, the man who coined the term ‘cyberspace’ has his hero glance at some trees: ‘Case would have been hard pressed to distinguish a pine from an oak, but a streetboy’s sense of style told him that these were too cute, too entirely and definitively treelike.’2 They are, in short, not natural grown trees, but some kind of genetically synthesized version. Neuromancer came out in 1984, and since then a remarkable if unexpected sampling of things that Gibson anticipated about living with cyberspace have turned out to be uncannily on the mark. We might not be jacking the net into the backs of our skulls, but genetically modified organisms are now a commonplace. At an exhibition called Genomic Revolution, one could find scientists canvassing the idea of genetically modified frogs that glow in the dark.3 The idea is to release the frogs into the wild. Scientists could then recapture the frogs, and put them under an ultraviolet light. If the glow-worm gene inserted into them makes them luminant, it indicates the presence of a particular kind of pollution in their environment. That little frog has become a warning lamp on the dashboard of ecology. But this is not the most curious or alarming aspect of the extension of cyberspace into the very fabric of biological being. When Ian Wilmut and his colleagues at the Roslin Institute cloned Dolly the sheep, the possibility immediately arose of cloning other mammals. As Martha Nussbaum and Cass Sunstein write, ‘the arrival of Dolly made it clear that human beings would soon have to face the possibility of human cloning’.4 If by cyberspace we mean
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the reduction of all aspects of life to the manipulation of information, then this is surely the most disturbing outer reach of cyberspace – and one approaching reality faster than some of the sexier aspects of the wired world. When William Gibson wrote Neuromancer, the Internet was still the exclusive domain of nerds and hobbyists. Not for the first time, it was an artist, in this case a novelist, who intuited from the information around him a possible emergent pattern, a possibility, a fibre in the wind. In this essay, I want to look at another work of art, the film GATTACA,5 which I believe is likewise worthy of attention as a work that intuited certain possibilities latent in the biological phenomenon that is Dolly the sheep. It is not that science fiction, whether in novel or film, ‘predicts’ the future, but that it discovers the possibilities of the present. GATTACA is to the possibility of what we might call ‘biospace’ what Neuromancer is to cyberspace: the most arresting expression in a work of art of what it might possibly be. Like William Gibson, its makers have that streetwise sense of style that sees what is hiding in the codes. By reading, close reading, of a work of art that intuits the possibilities of this world, we equip ourselves with at least some chance of choosing among those possibilities. This is what we might call ‘codework’ – the work of unravelling the possibilities caught in the code – and existing free of it. In the popular imagination, genes are like letters in an alphabet, signs in the code of DNA, which spell out the shape and form of the organism for which they are the program. Two kinds of metaphor inform popular understandings of what a gene is and how it works. One comes from computer programming. The analogy links genetic code to computer code. Just as a bug in a computer code expresses itself in the faulty operation of the computer that attempts to run the bug-ridden program, so too the faulty operation of an organic body is imagined to have its origins in an analogous bug in the genetic program. The other analogy comes from semiotics, the study of signs. Here the analogy compares the genetic code to a linguistic one, and sees the body expressed by the genetic code as analogous to the meaning expressed by the text. Here the fault might be imagined to be more aesthetic than technical – the flaw in the body of the organism, or in the body of art, derives from the inadequate handiwork of the artist. In short, popular understanding of genetic code is commonly derived from understanding of other kinds of code. Popular anxieties about the technological intervention into genetic coding derive from fears produced by this kind of metaphorical link. If there are codes, then one may reasonably fear that control of those codes may be the key to control in general, particularly in these times in which, as French cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard says, ‘Information . . . has wormed its way into everything affecting sexual relations as well as kitchen implements.’6 Fear of control over the codes of human language, machine language and the biological genetic code increasingly merge in paranoid visions of cyberspace as biospace. GATTACA is a pure expression of these anxieties. It is a strikingly austere and serene film, a rare attempt to create a cinematic work of art that in form and
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proportion aspires to classicism, which we might define as an art of proportion and purity of form. The film is set ‘in the not too distant future’, at a time when genetic technology is starting to be routinely applied to humans. Here the control over any and every space merges – not just cyberspace and biospace, but celestial space as well. GATTACA pictures a world in which control of the microscopic is an element in the desire to colonize the macroscopic. Part of the fascination with genetics lies in the idea that by debugging the code, by eliminating ambiguities, the body it composes might thereby be perfected. GATTACA explores an imaginary world where this possibility seems within reach. It is fitting that this ideal of human form perfected should be the preoccupation of a film that is in formal terms perfection itself. GATTACA wants to argue that form perfected is lifeless, bloodless, insipid and enervating – and it does so not just by imagining a world of deathly classical purity, but by doing so in a work of art as cold as marble. Even the fight scene and the sex scene are still life. The film opens with two epigraphs, followed by the first image, a close-up of nail clippings and discarded hairs, the rogue protrusions of the body that defile its perfection.7 The main title gives way to the main credits, in which every G, A, T and C in a cast or crew member’s name appears with a special luminance, a reminder that the film’s title is itself composed out of the letters of the four component nucleotide bases of DNA itself. The discarded nail clippings belong to our narrator, Jerome, who washes himself with a somewhat obsessive attention to detail. After discarding as much loose debris from his body as possible, he burns it in a beautiful stainless steel incinerator. He then attaches to himself a false fingertip with a blood sample hidden within it, and a pouch of urine which he will hide under his sombre and perfectly tailored suit. We see Jerome heading off for work in his electric car, filing in silently with a throng of others, all equally well dressed, well presented, all equally bloodless. This is a world of refined, cool, classically modern surfaces.8 It is the home of the lifeless blue and black suited elite of the GATTACA space agency, the NASA of the very near future. Only the genetic elite can reach for the stars. There is a blood test just to get through the door every day – hence Jerome’s false fingertip with someone else’s blood sample in it. As he presses the fingertip to the machine, it extracts a drop of his blood, and identifies him as Jerome Morrow. ‘There is truly nothing remarkable about the progress of Jerome Morrow,’ Jerome tells us in voice-over, ‘except that I am not Jerome Morrow.’ Cut to a beach scene, bathed in sunlight. ‘I was conceived in the Riviera,’ our narrator tells us, taking the story back to the beginning, ‘not the French Riviera, the Detroit variety.’ The camera pans to reveal that this beach has a very American-looking parking lot, in which there is a car, in which lie Anton and Marie in post-coital embrace. ‘They used to say that a child conceived in love has a greater chance of happiness. They don’t say that any more.’ Romance is precluded, blocked – this is not a world that is supposed to have the storm
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and stress of that kind of life, and so this work of art is classical, not romantic. Purity of form requires emotional restraint. Romanticism (even Gibson’s ‘neuromanticism’) requires passion and singularity. ‘I’ll never understand what possessed my mother to put her faith in God’s hands rather than those of her local geneticist,’ our mystery narrator says, as his birth takes place under the sign of a crucifix. The nurse takes the newborn baby and extracts a blood sample which she places in a machine. She then reads out our narrator’s likely future story: manic depression, attention deficit disorder, heart attack, ‘early fatal potential. Life expectancy 30.2 years.’ A father hovers nervously in the operating theatre. When asked for a name for this child, the mother suggests Anton, after his father. But this isn’t the child to which the father wants to give his own name, so he chooses Vincent. Vincent is a sickly child, short-sighted, accident prone. He gets thrown out of pre-school. ‘Suppose something happened to him,’ the teacher says, ‘the insurance won’t cover it.’ ‘Like most other parents of their day, they were determined that their next child would be brought into the world, in what has become the natural way.’ The image of an embryonic cell cluster, magnified, appears on a screen. The geneticist is black and balding: ‘You have specified hazel eyes, dark hair and, ah, fair skin.’ The last he repeats to them with barely suppressed irony. Anton and Marie are unsure of all this, so the geneticist assures them: ‘Keep in mind this child is still you. Simply the best of you. You could conceive naturally a thousand times and never get such a result.’ The second son, conceived through the geneticist’s codework, is called Anton, ‘a son my father considered worthy of his name’. As Anton grows, he quickly surpasses Vincent. He is as tall at aged 8 as Vincent is at 10. ‘By the time we were playing at blood brothers, I understood that there was something very different flowing through my veins.’ Only blood brothers is not a game Anton will play. Vincent cuts his finger open as they play on the beach, but Anton is off into the surf. The boys play chicken instead, swimming as far out as they dare, to see who will swim back first, and of course it is always Vincent who loses. Anton’s sense of superiority prevents him bonding with his own brother. He has to prove, over and over, which of them is made of the right stuff. Not surprisingly, Vincent has a growing dislike for this planet. He dreams of space. ‘You have to be realistic,’ his mother advises. His father is more to the point: ‘The only way that you’ll see the inside of a space ship is if you were cleaning it.’ For Vincent is a Utero, a Faith Birth, an In-valid; his brother Anton is a Valid, a Vitro, a Made Man. This is the new order in the world. ‘It didn’t matter how much I lied on my résumé. My real résumé was in my cells.’ Of course, it’s illegal to discriminate. ‘Genoism, it’s called. But no one takes the law seriously.’ We see Vincent go for a job interview, only the interviewer asks no questions, he simply puts a urine sample cup on the desk. ‘A legal drug test can just as easily become an illegal peek at your future in the company.’
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Interestingly, Vincent’s interviewer is black. GATTACA would like us to imagine this world of the near future is one in which discrimination is now based on genotype, not phenotype. Of course, all the principal cast are white, even though we see black and Asian faces hovering in the background, even at the elite world of the GATTACA space programme. There is some irony in this vision of the white man’s social Darwinism: It has been updated with genetic technology, and turned against those whom such an ideology was supposed to benefit in the first place. GATTACA does not quite have the courage of its convictions, and the actors who portray this hierarchy of genotypes are from the current hierarchy of phenotypes – blue-eyed whites. But it does manage a subversive hint that this is an arbitrary order. A more curious proposition the film wants to advance is that even if there were a genuine, rather than a merely ideological, hierarchy of types, it would still be wrong to enforce it, to allocate the spoils of life on such a basis. Purity of form is not all, the film argues, even against its own formal beauty. There is still the matter of spirit, of will. The case for romanticism, for feeling, passion, chance, life, is made within the sober-suited straitjacket of a classical work of art. GATTACA is a work of art made using the technology of what is now the screen’s classical form: cinema. Unlike many other science fiction films of the late twentieth century, few of its effects are ostentatiously digital. The digital sublime invoked from Bladerunner to The Matrix as the sign of things to come is here largely absent. The digital screen also makes few appearances here; it is where work in GATTACA is done, but not where anything of significance happens. The work of GATTACA is to show that cyberspace leads elsewhere. Not to the digital sublime, but to the classical ordering of the body, or at least, the attempt to classically order the body. Here is not the hybrid, monstrous, ‘cyborg’ body, but the body purified and ranked. In this graded, ordered world, of the near future, Vincent can find no way to get ahead, until one day, out swimming against his brother, he finally beats him, ‘out into the open sea’. Vincent has to take a chance on life, on the unknown rather than on this orderly world. ‘It was the moment that made everything else possible.’ Vincent beating his brother in the water confounds the moral order of this perfect world. He is a romantic hero in a world that is a classical artwork. He tears himself away from his family and joins the shuffling ranks of Invalids, who do what looks a lot like what service workers do. ‘I must have cleaned half the toilets in the state.’ He arrives at GATTACA, not through the front door, but through the service entrance. ‘I belonged to a new underclass, no longer determined by social status or the colour of your skin. We now have discrimination down to a science.’ For this is what codes are for. The digital is a difference made for ordering. The ends of codework may lie not in the wilds of cyberspace but in the zoo of biospace. Vincent’s foreman is Caesar (Ernest Borgnine). For someone with such a royal name, he knows his place. ‘When you clean the glass, Vincent, don’t clean it too
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well. You might get ideas.’ To which Vincent replies, ‘Yeah, but if the glass is clean, it will be easier for you to see me when I’m on the other side of it.’ Caesar scoffs. Such things don’t happen in this genetically ordained world of pure, Platonic forms. Being so close to GATTACA drives Vincent to consider extreme measures. ‘The best test score in the world wasn’t going to matter unless I had the blood test to go with it.’ And there is a way to procure that. ‘For the genetically superior, success is easier to attain, but is by no means guaranteed. After all, there is no gene for fate. When for one reason or another a member of the genetic elite falls on hard times, their genetic identity becomes a valued commodity for the unscrupulous.’ Vincent’s job, as the romantic hero, is to turn fate to advantage and use it against the preordained. Through an illegal genetic ‘broker’ (Tony Shalhoub), Vincent meets his collaborator in genetic fraud, with whose help he will get into GATTACA. ‘His credentials are impeccable. An expiration date you wouldn’t believe . . . You could go anywhere with this guy’s helix tucked under your arm.’ Vincent objects that he doesn’t look like Jerome, but the broker demurs. ‘When was the last time anyone looked at a photograph?’ Identity, in this new world, has moved on from external markers of self, such as the photograph and fingerprint, to the internal one of the unique genetic sequence. Codework is not about signs as sliding representations, but codes as keys to a turning world of power. Jerome, it transpires, is English, but the broker sees no objection in this either. ‘They don’t care where you were born. Just how. Blood has no nationality. So long as it’s got what they’re looking for, it’s the only passport you need.’ Vincent meets Jerome at the latter’s home, a forbiddingly abstract apartment dominated by a spiral staircase. The two seal their bargain under its smooth steel helix. Jerome is confined to a wheelchair by a car accident – which we later discover was a suicide attempt. He is stuck on the lower level of the house. The top floor, from now on, will be Vincent’s. ‘Jerome had been engineered with everything he needed to get into GATTACA, but the desire to do so.’ A champion swimmer, he shows Vincent his silver medal: ‘With all I had going for me, I was still second best.’ Despite the beauty and perfection of his physical form, compared to Vincent he seems to lack something, a quality of spirit, the quality upon which this film will rest the possibility of romantic resistance to a genetically predestined hierarchy. Jerome ‘suffered under a different burden, the burden of perfection’ whereas Vincent is ‘one of those who refuses to play the hand he was dealt’. Comes the big day, Vincent’s interview for a job at GATTACA, and he has to strap a sample pouch of Jerome’s urine to his leg. Only the pouches Jerome has prepared all test positive: ‘There is more vodka in this piss than there is piss.’ Vincent, the ‘de-gene-erate’, lectures one of the elite on the care of the self. Cut to Vincent, posing as Jerome, with Doctor Lamar, as the latter pours that piss into the testing machine and Jerome’s ID comes up. ‘Congratulations!’ he says. ‘What about the interview?’ asks Vincent. ‘That was it.’ And so, every day, Vincent scrubs and clips and pumices himself, trying to
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exfoliate anything that might leave a trace of himself inside GATTACA, ‘to limit how much of my In-valid self I would leave in the Valid world’. And every day, Jerome prepares samples of his blood and urine, and even bits of hair and skin for Vincent to discreetly dust about his workstation at GATTACA. Everything is going smoothly, with only one of the Mission Directors suspecting that this Jerome Morrow is not quite who he appears to be. One day, while Vincent is carefully cleaning his workstation, another Mission Director, Josef (Gore Vidal), stops by. ‘You keep your workstation so clean, Jerome,’ he observes. ‘Cleanliness is next to godliness, isn’t that what they say?’ Vincent replies, none too convincingly. Ironically, his attention to perfection of form is more devious than sanctified. And his diligence has paid off. Josef informs him that he is ‘taking us to Titan’, the 14th moon of Saturn, and that he takes off in a week. Titan, a moon shrouded in cloud, as Vincent observes, a world beyond this world for which there is yet no measure. But first, the obligatory substance test. ‘You have a beautiful piece of equipment there, have I ever told you that?’ observes Lamar, watching Vincent piss. ‘I don’t know why my folks didn’t order one like that for me.’ The doctor chats away amiably about his son, as the machine confirms the provenance of the piss as belonging to one Jerome Morrow. All would be well, only the Mission Director, who suspects something, turns up dead. Vincent panics. ‘The place is going to be crawling with Hoovers.’ Detective work now being a matter of vacuuming the crime scene for particles of organic matter, they are called Hoovers in memory of both FBI director J. Edgar and a famous brand of suction cleaner. Someone else is also on Vincent’s case. Irene (Uma Thurman) pinches a hair from the comb he keeps in his workstation, and has him ‘sequenced’. This convenient service provides readouts on the genetic make-up of potential objects of ‘romantic’ interest. As we observe at the sequencing centre, there’s very little that is romantic about it, as the sequence merely identifies the sequencee’s place in the genetic hierarchy, not their capacity for passion. Fortunately for Vincent, it was one of Jerome’s hairs, deliberately placed there by Vincent, that Irene finds. But the eyelash the Hoovers find at the crime scene is one of Vincent’s real ones, and now he is in serious trouble. But the police are in conflict about how to proceed. One seems to be something of a genetic elite type (Loren Dean), and he wants to pursue other lines of investigation, the other, Detective Hugo (Alan Arkin), thinks they have their man, but as a mere ‘flatfoot’ his views hardly count. Casting a curious eye around the GATTACA gymnasium, the elite detective asks Mission Director Josef about GATTACA hiring practices, while trim bodies puff and sway in the background. ‘Who do you have to be, to be here?’ Josef’s answers are revealingly evasive. ‘Well naturally our standard is beyond that of the common citizen. Occasionally we’ve been forced to accept candidates with minor shortcomings, but now there are enough of the right kind of people to warrant a new measuring stick. Bodies with minds to match, essential as we push out further and further.’
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Gesturing to the rows of GATTACA employees on treadmills, the elite detective observes: ‘Yet you still closely monitor performance.’ Vincent, on one of those treadmills, is trying to look fit while having a heart seizure. ‘We have to ensure that people are meeting their potential,’ says Josef. ‘Or exceeding it?’ ‘No one exceeds his potential.’ ‘If he did?’ ‘It would simply mean we had not accurately gauged his potential in the first place.’ Or in other words, for all the director’s certainty, the standards are arbitrary. And yet, despite being arbitrary, they have become a cultural norm. In love and work, in everything, all work is codework. Vincent, in his guise of Jerome, comes face to face with his old boss Caesar, who simply doesn’t recognize him. He has accepted the barrier as absolute. You cannot pass from one side of the glass to the other. Caesar’s role in the film is to stress how unique, how singular Vincent is. Not every In-valid is in romantic revolt against classical order – some simply accept their alleged genetic ‘shortcomings’ and a subordinate place in that order. Or at least appear to accept it. The GATTACA employee with only ‘minor shortcomings’ is Irene. Where Jerome is physically perfect but lacks spirit, Irene has some of Vincent’s spirit but is also a little like him in being just a bit short of perfect. As it transpires, everyone subtly deviates from their predicted course and place in this movie. Perhaps even Caesar. Irene confesses to Vincent: ‘I had you sequenced. I read your profile. I’m sorry. It seems you’re everything they say and more.’ And he responds: ‘What about you Irene? You’re engineered just like the rest of us.’ Only codework has its limits. She gives him a hair to sequence, so he can find out for himself. She still believes that veracity, the truth of the matter, lies in the code, whereas Vincent sees this as just another appearance that can be misleading. He casts her strand of hair to the breeze. Having found Vincent’s hair and matched it to his identity, the Hoovers have plastered his In-valid face everywhere, and Vincent is getting jumpy. ‘They’ll recognize me!’ But Jerome’s retort is: ‘I don’t recognize you!’ Jerome, who in his own life is a quitter, won’t let Vincent give up. Jerome is crippled, we discover, because he deliberately stepped in front of a car. He finds ambition and spirit, vicariously, through Vincent’s impersonation of who he was meant to be. It’s a diagram of a more complex world of codes, where codes create not just the relative differences that may delineate a hierarchy, but trace also lines of escape and creation and non-identity. Irene and Vincent grow closer. Out on a date, they attend a piano recital, while the Hoovers line up In-valids for summary searches and identity checks. The recital is refined, but somehow lifeless. The pianist, we discover, is genetically engineered with twelve fingers. Vincent is not impressed. ‘Twelve fingers or one, it’s how you play.’ The piece can be played only with twelve, but for Vincent purity of form implies a hierarchy of form, and hierarchy of form leaves no room for innovation, chance and the exception. This is at one and the same time an aesthetic and an ethical objection. GATTACA is a world made over in a fixed image of perfection, but one that
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limits the very thing sexual selection is supposed to provide – diversity, difference, the random chance of new forms. Romanticism in art, love and work is Vincent’s ethical alternative to a narrow understanding of codework. It is an ethics of difference beyond the digital, the difference of the unknown, the unquantified, the unmarked. At a time when codework does indeed promise, and threaten, to work its way into the microscopic, GATTACA holds open the escape hatch of the infinitesimal. Vincent’s interest in Irene is hampered by the interest of the police in his Invalid self, but finally, they are alone together. They fuck in her apartment, by the seashore, and we see them reflected in a mirror, with waves crashing in the background. They are upside down in the shot, and indeed, something is not quite right here. The ocean is a chaos, it is chance, danger, flux – everything at the opposite end to the vitrified world of GATTACA. In trying so hard to get into the latter, Vincent is in danger of losing touch with what the film posits as his source of strength, his affinity with the ocean. We see a post-coital Vincent notice a hair on his pillow. He leaps out of bed and tries to scrub himself free of stray signs of life with a pebble washed up on the shore. The Hoovers are closing in on Vincent. The elite detective decides to pay him a visit at home, and Vincent has to call Jerome and ask him to ‘be himself’ when the detective arrives. In a sudden burst of life, Jerome drags himself up the spiral staircase, and allows the detective to draw blood from his vein for an identity check. But the detective is still suspicious, and heads down the spiral staircase, to where Jerome and Vincent keep all of the equipment that supports their elaborate deception. On the brink of discovery, the detective’s mobile phone rings. His partner, Detective Hugo, has solved the case. The murderer is not Vincent, but Josef. The Mission Director murdered his colleague to protect the mission to Titan, which the dead Mission Director wanted to cut back. Hugo found Josef’s spit in the dead man’s eye. Vincent, cleared of the murder, still has to explain himself to Irene. ‘They have got you looking so hard for any flaw, that after a while that’s all you see. For what it’s worth, I’m here to tell you that it is possible.’ The flaw is not the opposite of beauty, but its precondition; this is a romantic film despite its classical surfaces. The romantic narrative impulse strains against, and finally breaks through, the classical form. The difference that matters is not the digital, but the analog, not the discrete, but the indiscrete, not the finite, but the infinitesimal. It is along the line that if we escape from order creation can begin again. Cleared of the murder, reconciled with Irene, one thing still stands in the way of Vincent’s dream of leaving the planet. The elite detective is waiting for Vincent at his workstation, for he is of course Vincent’s own brother, Anton. While clearly relieved that his own brother is not the killer, Anton cannot let him get away with fraud. But Vincent no longer lives in the shadow of his stronger, younger brother. ‘In case you haven’t noticed, I don’t need any rescuing. But you did once.’ And into the surf the two brothers dive again, the rivalry between them is to
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be settled the old way. For the second time, Vincent proves the stronger swimmer. ‘This is how I did it, Anton. I never saved anything for the swim back.’ Vincent’s relationship with Irene will similarly be resolved through narrative symmetry. He offers her his own hair to have sequenced, and she too lets it be caught by the wind, the wind which, like the sea, is all chaos and movement. And he is reconciled too with Jerome, who confesses, ‘I got the better end of the deal. I only lent you my body; you lent me your dream.’ Jerome, his true blood brother, the swimming champion who can no longer swim, recognizes that Vincent has so thoroughly become him that his own existence is superfluous. His second suicide attempt will be more effective than his last, and will have a purpose, in allowing Vincent to fully become him. He has stored away a freezer-full of urine and blood samples, just in case. Just when the viewer thinks that all of Vincent’s relationships have come to a perfect ending, as he prepares for take-off to misty Titan, Doctor Lamar appears, for an unexpected substance test. Knowing he has been caught out right on the brink of success, Vincent rehearses his confession: ‘Just remember, I was as good as any, and better than most . . .’. Lamar is not shocked: he has known all along. ‘For future reference, right-handed men don’t hold it with their left.’ And the doctor’s reason for helping perpetuate this genetic fraud? ‘Unfortunately, my son isn’t all that they promised, but then who knows what he could do . . . .’. And one wonders at this point, whether Josef knew too, or Caesar? Perhaps Vincent was not alone after all. Perhaps there is a subtle process of resistance to ‘Genoism’ even in its most elite stronghold, GATTACA. As the rockets that will take Vincent to Titan ignite, so too does the furnace into which Jerome has hauled his own body, his swimming medal around his neck. We see for the first time that it has the image of two swimmers on it. Fire stands at the end, like water at the beginning, as a sign of flux and change, difference and possibility. The silver medal is the final emblem for what Jerome and Vincent have achieved: a cooperative effort among people who met by chance, and who got each other over the waves of circumstance. Cooperation among differences, rather than stratification to separate differences, is the aesthetic, but also the ethic, that GATTACA advances. From a scientific point of view, GATTACA deals more in fear and fantasy of genetic codework than in facts. But this is not an insignificant topic for cinema. Genoism – a prejudice this film pre-emptively names – is the last attempt to ground discrimination ‘scientifically’. It is social Darwinism perfected. Genoism may be a fantasy, but it is one with real adherents. Even if it were possible, GATTACA argues, it is still wrong. But GATTACA is more than a film with a message. The dream of social Darwinism, it shows, is an aesthetic one, a classical dream of pure and immutable hierarchy of forms. The discriminating taste of classicism is as unethical as the discriminating taste of genoism. Ironically, it is this work in the classical medium, cinema, which points to classicism as the language of the digital, and denounces the ethical limit of that
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language. GATTACA distributes the terms differently to the accepted languages of this cyberspace in which we live – and have always lived. The digital codes for hierarchy and order, in any time, in any space. What escapes the finite world of differences, the infinitesimal, is the line along which the possibilities of the world unfurl. GATTACA is a story with a hero, in which the hero confronts the possibilities of biospace and finds, for himself at least, a positive option. What it leaves open is the problem of confronting the possibilities of biospace with something other than a rocket ride the hell out of here.
6 A I S F O R A N I M AT I C S ( A U T O M ATA , A N D R O I D S A N D A N I M AT S )
C a t h r y n Va s s e l e u
Animation is best known as the art of giving cartoon characters the illusion of life. Appreciated primarily as a form of mass entertainment, its participation in the realization of new cultural configurations of life has never been given much thought. For all his quick-action-packed chases, Daffy Duck1 would never qualify among biologists as a portrait of life. The duck with limbs like bits of rubber hose occasionally made the point himself, exposing his innards to reveal a lack of anatomical parts. Biology changed its ways following the discovery of the structure of DNA. The science of life replaced its vocabulary of mechanics, physics and chemistry with that of linguistics and communications theory. Messages, information, programs, code, instructions and decodings became the new concepts of the life sciences.2 This new vocabulary had ramifications beyond the scientific study of life. It laid the ground for the convergence of biology and cybernetics. Today debate about what it is to be a living thing ranges across art, biology, philosophy, engineering and computer science, but scant attention has been paid to the fact that in pursuit of this question, scientists and artists alike have turned to animation – not to breathe illusory motion into inanimate objects, graphics and materials – but as a method for modelling the complexity of life. Taking the convergence between biology and cybernetics into account, what follows is a discussion that considers animation as a force of technological transformation that works its way free of the frame of illusion. In order to extend the field of animation beyond its popular conception, I will address the art in terms of animatics. I begin by proposing that, as a term that refers to the ‘machinery’ of animation, the animatic applies equally to animation’s manual, mechanical, cinematic, electronic or cybernetic machinery. I then discuss the animatic in relation to the automaton and its centrality in the evolution of My thanks to Becky Main, Jodi Brooks and Kate Gilroy for the many and varied conversations in which they have contributed to this chapter.
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cinema. In the second section, automata such as bots, robots, digital avatars and artificial-life experiments are differentiated from their electro-mechanical precursors. With the aid of a late nineteenth-century fictional female android, the final section focuses on a slippage between the use of animation for generating and visualizing dynamic behaviour in animated artificial life, and its use as a method for artificially animating the living. A N I M AT I C S A N D A U T O M ATA
Whatever the technological apparatus, the animatic refers to an art whose basic concern is the invention of methods which can in and of themselves generate phenomena and sensations that exhibit dynamism.3 Dynamism pertains to forces that produce motion that cannot be predicted or explained in terms of a prior determining principle. Dynamical systems favour complexity, alteration, chance outcomes and transience. They visualize the cosmos in terms of energy, motion, interaction, chaos and transformation rather than equilibrium, stasis, predictable events, and permanence. With reference to dynamism, the animatic has as its objective the generation of objects and experiences that are of themselves lively, dimensional, energetic and animated. By virtue of this objective, animation is closely aligned with the concept of a ‘creative spiritual force’. Equally, however, the animatic has been an agent in the cultural reworking of that concept, through the realization of its objective by manifestly technological means. As diverse proponents of animatic practices are profoundly aware, the subliminal moving force that is part and parcel of the fabric of the animatic is the automaton. Conceived of and used since antiquity,4 the automaton also played a key if paradoxical role in the modern figuration of consciousness as an autonomous, creative force. Jacques de Vaucanson was mindful of this when he put three mechanical automata on public display in Paris in 1738. One of these, a duck that could waggle its body, consume fish and excrete the noxious remains, went on to make a name for itself throughout Europe as the most famous automaton of its time. De Vaucanson’s duck was a masterpiece of the eighteenth-century technical genre of mechanical automata. It was driven by a weight, and featured over a thousand hidden parts that had been fabricated using specially invented precision lathes, as well as being the first duck to feature gizzards fashioned from rubber hosing – an exotic new material originating from the Amazon. Designed by de Vaucanson with the scientific purpose of illustrating moving anatomy by means of a mechanical device (and profiting financially from the excitement its exhibition aroused), this lively invention brought Descartes’ ideas about the automatic actions of organic processes to light as a technical reality. The coexistent concepts of machines that could be animated and organisms that could be mechanized was based on a mechanistic view of nature that was opposed to the ordering powers of reason. As voluminous twentieth-century discourses on robots, cyborgs and artificial intelligence attest, this separation
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barely holds any meaning for us.5 For Kant (like Descartes), however, the distinction was vital, and it made de Vaucanson’s duck a troublesome pest. The bird merely demonstrated that self-motivation (be it mechanically or psychically prescribable) was an erroneous concept upon which to base the independence of reason. It fell short of the latter by settling for the ‘freedom effect’ of a causality that was internal to the acting thing.6 If, in the highest exercise of its faculties the actions of consciousness were in any way causally predetermined, as were the mechanically determined actions of the duck, then thinking would be just as automatic.7 Man would be as spontaneously motivated as a weightpowered mechanism, the determination of whose actions were ultimately out of its own hands.8 As de Vaucanson’s scientific contraption demonstrated, automata could serve as models of both the autonomy of thought, and blindly motivated zombies inwardly dispossessed of their own independent powers of thought. In presenting cinema, initially the moving image, as a spiritual automaton that brings to light an intelligible content through which it constructs its own semiotic objects, Deleuze recognized that the psychomechanical qualities of cinema offered themselves as an avenue for the direct confrontation of this paradox. Automata of movement (clockwork and motor) provided a regime of images and signs that did not develop into, but paved the way for, electronic, cybernetic and computational automata of thought.9 Although directed towards cinema’s semiotic objects rather than animation per se, it is arguable that in Deleuze’s study of the time-image he coincidentally anticipates yet another life for the moving image in a return to its animatic origins. The latter is prompted by the same question that, Deleuze proposes, cinema directs towards itself: ‘What are the new forces at work in the image, and the new signs invading the screen?’10 Animation, within and as opposed to the spectral and psychomechanical qualities of cinema, showcases these forces for all to see, hear, participate in materially, and experience uncannily directly. In its drive to actually produce the sensation of movement, Philip Brophy argues that the animatic does not settle for the mere representation of movement. The animatic ‘keys us into the mobilization of dynamics’.11 The most successful genre of twentieth-century animation was the animated cartoon. Norman M. Klein describes a way in which many early American animated cartoons, particularly those produced at Fleischer Studios, openly modelled experience in terms of the industrial machine.12 As with many other styles of animation, a feature that set these cartoons apart from live-action narrative cinema was their naked glorification of their own technology – and by extension, the technological. In the Fleischer cartoons this was displayed as a running gag; in caricatures of contests between machines and nature, and in the taking of an undisguised delight in the parallel-world-making powers of the artificial. The audience’s fascination with Fleischer cartoons was, as Klein puts it, that they were ‘automata that struggle’. As energetic as the images were, they were unable to entirely escape their masters (the animator/the motion picture
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machine).13 Reducing the experience to an occasion for laughs, the wider cultural effect of this form of mass entertainment was that it helped make modern industrial technology more innocuous and appealing. The cartoon image, animated by its self-reflective movie-machine gag, promulgated the interests of industrial capitalism. Within the context of modernist theories and strategies of alienation, Klein argues that those interests were served by the experience of being ‘held in the movie machine’s embrace, uncritically, as a visceral way of willingly suspending our belief’.14 In reference to my own argument, by focusing on the Fleischer cartoon’s fidelity to its state of technological dependence – the image as struggling automaton – Klein’s reading of the early American animation industry presents the art form as fundamentally ideological in its intent. In making play of the paradox that defines both the cartoon character and its reception, animation not only keys us into the mobilization of dynamics – it also pays homage to the industry from which it has sprung. The Fleischer cartoon is an instance of a historically specific animatic regime. It also produces an experience that animation is equally capable of generating in other media. A N I M AT I O N A N D A U T O M AT I O N
Traces of the struggling automaton have carried over into cyberspace, where, to quote Friedrich Kittler: ‘[W]e are all being controlled through our machines, and the more networked machines become, the stricter the mechanisms of control and the safeguards will get.’15 Cyberspace is also a domain with its own breeds of automata which, for brevity’s sake, I call cybernetic automata. I use this term to include all kinds and combinations of physical and virtual environments and ‘agents’ that feature cybernetic feedback, procedural and information systems.16 A perceivable difference between automata modelled on industrial machinery and cybernetic automata is that instead of struggling to free themselves of their makers, cybernetic automata are inconceivable apart from this network. As such, they give positive inflection to the experience of telepresence as a liberating, unconscious abandonment to machinic networks. Re-energized and disseminated throughout cyberspace, the animatic has turned from graphically mobilizing the dynamics of mechanical reproduction processes, to methods that pay homage to cybernetic systems of control. The self-regulating mechanisms of cybernetic automata challenge and redefine the paradox of automation. In order to elucidate this paradox, succinctly expressed in Kittler’s remark, a brief reminder of the debatable shades of difference between automata and automation is called for. According to Leon Bagrit, an automaton, or automatic machine is one with a self-regulating mechanism that allows it to perform a particular function without human intervention. Its actions are mechanized in a completely predetermined way. Automation is just a conceptual step away; it is a system based on feedback mechanisms, which substitutes programmed machine-controlled operations for human manipulations.17
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Despite this simple explanation, Errki Huhtamo observes that Bagrit was not himself entirely convinced of its validity. By continued association with automaticity and mechanization, the implication remained that automation was, in essence, unthinking, repetitive motion. This was not an accurate portrayal when the ultimate symbol of automation was the self-regulating artificial system of the industrial robot. It is telling, Huhtamo points out, that Bagrit resorted to borrowing the term cybernation in order to make the point that automation, and automated action, really implies systems of communication and control.18 The paradox that automation originally presented was that of action– control. On the one hand, self-regulating changeable mechanisms were proclaimed as developments that gave human operators mastery over machines that reacted to them. On the other hand, the substitution of programmed machine-controlled operations for human manipulation presented an image of machines that could act and make changes directly on their own. The operator stood passively by, simply monitoring and adjusting the independent actions of automatic appliances, equipment and machinery. Within this paradox, the issue that automation raised was one of quality of action rather than amount of control. This is Huhtamo’s observation, based on his proposition that the current emphasis in cybernetic media on interactivity is not new, but one that has since the 1950s gradually made a lie of the concept of automation as something that is independent of human agency, or a matter of giving up active control: ‘In an interactive system the role of the human agent is not restricted to control and occasional intervention. Rather, the system requires the action of the user, repeatedly and rapidly.’19 By Huhtamo’s account the interactive user keeps the system going by being active, physically engaged, alert and impatient. Another aspect of interactivity that is stressed by some designers of interactive systems is that users alter their behaviour in real time in the course of interacting with their environment,20 or alternatively, that environments change and grow new forms in real time in the course of human interactions with them.21 Interactivity both reinforces, and takes issue with the paradigm of command and control, and interactive systems have become a complex hybrid of mechanized/automated human–machine relationships as a result. For the purposes of my discussion, the turn to interactivity as an animatic regime can also be put another way. Engaged in mutual and simultaneous activity, users and systems are animated by each other. Departing from the static or closed-state industrial-machine model, animation methods now include the use of recursive combinations of simple genetic elements that can produce self-organizing, interactive evolving systems, developed through artificial life (ALife) research. ALife research is being combined with the application of techniques borrowed from artificial intelligence (AI) research to create agents that are equipped varyingly with synthetic behavioural functions and built-in motivational elements that make possible some degrees of autonomous expression, intentionality, learning and mobility,
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and the ability to evolve new characteristics.22 These autonomous functions are defined by networks of multiple interacting agents in which any sense of a centralized or hidden agency is systematically dispersed and decomposed.23 And along with the new configurations of agency that cybernetic systems, interfaces and software are producing, they have enabled anyone with sufficient computer skills and resources to become an animator in a flash. Fleischer’s cartoon characters were modelled on the electric dynamo, as the generator of the instantaneous energy that powered automated mechanical processes. Post-industrial animation methods are becoming increasingly modelled on systems that are driven and altered in their procedures by the patterns and accidents of information. Paul Virilio has equated the energy of information with the bomb triggered by the energy of the atom. In that equation, interactivity is to information what radioactivity is to energy.24 Animation has harnessed the same equation as Virilio’s ‘information bomb’ (the new weapons system founded on information and communication technologies). The animatic has grafted the aleatory effects of interactivity onto its well-refined kinaesthetic model of dynamism, transforming the entropy of information into a dynamized medium. Animation persists in shaping our will towards automation. It does so by adopting interactive methods that produce enjoyable sensations of freedom of movement and changes of being within the constraints of its machinery. This involves inventing methods in which interaction with cybernetic systems becomes a dynamic sensory experience, while using the same methods to control just how much the underlying system comes alive. As such, animation is a promotional tool of cybernetic technologies, helping to make the dynamics of cybernetic systems visible and understandable. Remove the interactive interface and the machinery quickly regains an overwhelming autonomy – a veritable dynamo of unintelligible code. But with the aid of a constructed point of view and a set of controls that allows de facto immersion in and traversal of animated three-dimensional space, interactive three-dimensional computer games produce states of hypermobility that defy the dynamical equations of any physicist.25 Here the accelerations and accidents of information are diverted, time lags and glitches aside, into mass forms of online and offline entertainment. A N I M AT I N G T H E L I V I N G
Cybernetic automata have become our tools, playmates, alter egos, emissaries, interlocutors, alien species, offspring, research laboratories, fantasy spaces and objects of desire. The liveliness of these zoetropes is still uncanny and unfamiliar to us, just as moving pictures and other phantasmagoria were to late nineteenth-century audiences. Despite this, the ALife and AI methods that I have touched on previously are not entirely new to animation, but new ways of approaching the dynamics of motion. A good example of this is Jeffrey Ventrella, an animator who creates evolving two- and three-dimensional
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characters, using an animat approach. Animats are autonomous agents that are able to exhibit the acquisition of lifelike adaptive behaviour within specially designed experimental architectures.26 In the case of Ventrella’s evolving artificial-life systems, the generation of animated motion is directed towards the design of ‘future cyberspaces in which characters are not just animated, they are autonomous, reactive agents as well’.27 Included among Ventrella’s work is a simulation called Sexual Swimmers, which, despite its suggestive title, is nothing much to look at in the way of titillating or even visually seductive graphics.28 What is fascinating about this experiment, as well as others Ventrella has designed, is the way that it marries genetic algorithms and the business of animatics to produce unscripted realtime animation. Sexual Swimmers is a virtual ecosystem that is modelled on some of the physics of an aquatic environment. It is populated by a variety of two-dimensional articulated stick figures that are programmed to hunt for food and seek out a mate with which to reproduce. Each of these ‘swimbots’ has some built-in physics, motor control and colour preferences that enable it to evolve both locomotive functions and morphological features that are attractive to other swimmers. Survival depends on finding ‘food’, and ‘reproducing’. When the antennae-like ‘heads’ of two swimbots of mutually desirable colour come into close enough proximity, they engage, if they have sufficient energy, in a gloriously simplified spontaneous reproduction that takes place entirely within this quasi-seminal environment. Ventrella describes Sexual Swimmers as an evolving interactive movie in which the characters and the environment ‘design themselves’.29 He argues that a feature of his design approach that distinguishes it from previous approaches to animation is that while mechanical automata, zoetropes, and so on, have been designed in a basically top-down fashion, an animat approach allows for adaptive behaviours and increasing complexity to emerge in a bottom-up fashion within a dynamic interactive environment. This now-familiar design philosophy is similar to the direction robotics research is moving. Referring to the introduction of genetic algorithms into animation methodologies as a case of ‘Disney Meets Darwin’, Ventrella emphasizes that, despite being driven by the serendipity of an evolving simulation, his approach does not begin with or have any eye towards the interests of biological research. Ventrella’s animats conform to principles of biological evolution in caricature only, progressing as a series of generations in a preordained cycle of birth, consumption, reproduction and death. Ventrella regards his ALife simulations primarily as a method for augmenting the evolution of movement in classical character animation.30 Stripped down to the barest graphic essentials to save on computational energy, what the animator most wants to see is the physics of his swimmers, expressed in space and time. This he cannot do if there is no movement. ‘The important thing is to visualize what is there, rather than what is not. By not being obscured by cosmetics, the essential dynamics shows through.’31 Ventrella’s work highlights the use of an animat framework as a method for
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visualizing dynamic behaviour in systems and software; with the intention of creating new forms of animated motion, rather than animating illusion. Of Sexual Swimmers, Ventrella says: ‘It is important to point out that in this simulation, genetic evolution is totally reliant on the physical model which animates the creatures.’32 Whatever familiar and newly observable signs of life or intelligence cybernetic automata display (the principles that life is motion, adaptable, evolving, self-organizing, etc.), the claim is that these characteristics are outcomes of the system’s physics, architecture and design. The autonomous locomotive and reproductive capacities of Ventrella’s animats are readable as signs of life in terms only of their grounding in a dynamic local environment. In the dynamism that these automata exhibit, cybernetic systems of communication and control are not just seen as a limiting framework, they are given credit as organizing processes that underline the autonomy of both organic and inorganic life-forms. Given the evident engineering at work, what would it take for anyone to believe that these organizational processes are a close enough approximation to those in nature for animats and animals to be just alike? This is a new question that is being asked of a very familiar art. By way of beginning to address it I compare it to a similar question that arises in a famous tale about an android called Hadaly. Hadaly’s fictional creation is the subject of Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s story L’Eve future (published in 1889).33 Hadaly is an android invented by a fabled Edison in response to the plight of an old friend, Lord Ewald, who is in love with a young woman, Miss Alicia Clary, whose beauty is a torment to him because he cannot fail to see that it is profaned by a soul that is afflicted with reason. Responding to the request for a phantom who would be identical to the young woman but without the obstacle of a governing consciousness, Edison fabricates an automated simulacrum of her. His machine, Hadaly, succeeds in seducing Ewald. It is not Hadaly’s invention, but Annette Michelson’s connection of L’Eve future and the-coming-into-being of cinema that makes this automaton relevant to my discussion.34 First, Michelson reads the fable of Hadaly’s creation as a new version of a familiar aesthetic genre of woman’s subjection to the analytic mode of dissection, fragmentation and restitution in submissive entirety, to the lover’s gaze. Second, the main objective of Michelson analysis is to present the android Hadaly as the prototype of a cultural surrender to cinema: ‘a world, assenting on the eve of its future, to that synthesis of the parameters of mechanical reproduction figured as simulacrum of the female body’.35 One of the things at issue that Raymond Bellour highlights in his recounting of the story, is not how could Edison reproduce the identity of a woman, but, as his friend Lord Ewald asks of him, ‘How can I believe in this reproduction?’36 Edison responds that he knows that Ewald will struggle against all odds to vitalize the phantom body he so desires, in the android without genitality. Hadaly is more of a woman than Alicia, but thus also something other than human. It makes sense therefore that Michelson’s reading specifically contests the idea that Edison’s transformation of the female subject is an instance of
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male envy of an inherent female procreativity. Instead, the ideal female body’s coming into focus for Ewald is read by Michelson as the matrix of a cultural assent to representation as cinema. L’Eve future is a tale of the substitution of a mechanical soul for the animus of a governing consciousness. This is achieved in the process of substituting the mechanism by which a moving image is produced for a living being. While the story rang truest for its contemporary readers if the android was a woman, Hadaly is the legacy of an aesthetic genre whose methodology has had an uncontrollable impact on the idea of human autonomy generally – not just one that has affected women. As a historical figure, Hadaly has become naturalized in animats such as Sexual Swimmers, where the mutation of information serves as the engine of formal novelty among notional creatures devoid of minds or genitality. Instead of a separate intellect, intelligence is part and parcel of an evolving genetic algorithm. So too is reproduction, conceived of as an act of selective transmission of morphology and mate-preferences. A century after L’Eve future, Sexual Swimmers turns cinematic realism on its head. Familiar with film’s representation of live action, we now have little difficulty with the premise of featuring life as a real-time movie, presented in (terms of) motion. However, just as Ewald was able to use Hadaly to vitalize the phantom body he so desired, an interactive film in which the characters and the environment ‘design themselves’ tells us more about our struggles and desires in relation to cyberspace than it does about the evolution of life. The automata that have appeared in the course of this chapter have been assembled to indicate a line of inquiry into the laboratories of the synthesis of simulated dynamic systems and the living – a creative/associative coupling to which it appears a world is readily assenting. In these laboratories, the living and the engineering of the living are conceived of simultaneously in a dynamic way. Life is set in motion, as animation.
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PA R T I I I CYBER POLITICS
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INTRODUCTION
The term ‘cyber politics’ embraces all manner of cybernetic power production, from ‘E(electronic)-democracy’ and World Wide Web or ‘Web-orchestrated cyberadvocacy’ to the ‘mediating practices’ of women within cyberspace, the emergence of ‘technopower’ and its ‘cyberfutures’. The significance of cyber politics in a book of writings on living with cyberspace is not to be underestimated. For one thing, in the main, forms of cybernetic power are effected, transmitted and distributed in cyberspace. For another, power is frequently exercised within cyberspace immediately, unlike the use of power in the realm of physical space, which is often much more circuitous in its operation and effects. Cyber politics is therefore at the forefront of the technological, political and social developments taking place within cyberspace today. To some extent, then, it is even possible to account for the often hidden cybernetic and political influences that swirl through our technologies and our everyday lives largely unnoticed. But any such account must explain not only the cybernetic forces moulding the rise of cyber politics but also how these powers are combined with the culture and economy of ‘cyber society’ (see Part I). The significance of cyber politics in the practices of mediation within cyberspace denotes that any attempt to alter the subsequent directions of cyberspatial evolution, for example on the way to a larger measure of democracy or enhanced women’s professional cyber opportunities, necessitates their examination. Cyber politics gives rise to specific theoretical approaches and observed conditions, and endorses particular conceptual frameworks or refutes the fixed operations of cyberpower. Within the wider context of cyber society, cyber politics thus plays a pivotal part in the formation of insights into cyberspace. It allows us to comprehend the fundamental forces operating within cybernetic spaces and to examine the contours of cybernetic power with respect to individuals and social groups. In this way, cyber politics contributes to the understanding of cybernetic power and confirms its importance for the social relations of individuals while seeking to explain the results of its operation on various communities within cyber society. Such an understanding may result in an appreciation of the cybernetic subjugation of democracy at the level of the ‘digital grassroots’ or in the wielding of digital power and influence by what Armitage and Roberts in Chapter 3 call the ‘global kinetic elite’. Yet whatever the outcome, one thing is clear: further investigations into the nature, significance and impact of cyber politics are essential.
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As William H. Dutton and Wan-Ying Lin suggest in Chapter 7, which opens Part III: ‘The promise of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in supporting more democratic patterns of political participation has been promoted for decades.’ Dutton and Lin also broach the issue of ‘the mobilization of groups’ that, as they formulate it, is ‘so fundamental to pluralist systems’. This leads to several further issues. For instance, whereas ‘ICTs that support many-to-many and group communication, such as teleconferencing have been a particular focus of research’, the ‘widespread diffusion of the Internet and World Wide Web has been accompanied by a growing number of anecdotal accounts and empirical studies’. The introduction of these issues develops arguments made by Dutton1 and by Lin and others elsewhere that political scientists need to familiarize themselves with questions of cybernetics and aim to explore the empirical relationships between ICTs and political groupings. And, furthermore, that as cyber politics progressively infiltrates everyday life, exploring the ‘role cyberadvocacy can play in political campaigns, particularly at the grassroots’, becomes ever more pressing. Dutton and Lin present a ‘case study of a Web-orchestrated campaign in the US aimed at blocking the imposition of a telephone area code “overlay” for the western region of the County of Los Angeles, California’. Conducted during 2000, the campaign was described as a ‘public uprising’ by the mass media and accredited with the formation of public policy. Dutton and Lin ask an appropriate question: ‘Why might an “uprising” emerge around a technical debate over how many numbers to dial?’ Their contribution aims to depict and analyse the part played by the Web in this campaign and, in doing so, Dutton and Lin specify motifs that may well be used by similar Web campaigns in the future focused on cyberadvocacy, such as those arranged by local communities or women’s groups. Since the foundation of cyberspace, women have been at the cutting edge of its development, attempting an assortment of ‘cyberfeminist’ interpretations of its various cultural, economic and political domains. Some, such as Verena Andermatt Conley’s contribution to cyber economics in Part IV, ground their studies in the increasingly ambiguous spheres of cybernetic culture and economic practices where women voice issues concerning cyberspace on women’s terms. For these writers, the appraisal of cyberspace is not to be commenced under the sign of its exclusively cybernetic dimensions or from the point of view of the repercussions of ICTs on the culture and economy of women. In fact, a key thesis motivating this standpoint is the assumption and assertion that cyberspace and its technologies are firmly rooted within the cultural and the economic realms. A striking example of women using cyberspace to refashion socially and politically implanted interconnections is provided by Saskia Sassen in Chapter 8. In this chapter, and drawing in part on her recent work,2 she pays attention to two important consequences arising from the fact that cyberspace is socially and politically embedded. Firstly, ‘cyberspace is inflected by the values, cultures, power systems, and institutional orders within which it is embedded’.
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Sassen’s contribution concerns the ‘gendering’ of these various values, cultures, systems and orders together with the assertion that the ‘embeddedness of cyberspace is also gendered at least in some of its components, and, further, that so is cyberspace itself’. If a focus on women and cyberspace is called for, argues Sassen, it is in part because there is great variability of gendering by geography and demography, income, race, ethnicity and nationality. Yet, she suggests, ‘there are likely to be situations, sites and individuals not marked by gendering’. Hence, the second consequence of cyberspatial embeddedness for Sassen is that ‘the articulations between cyberspace and individuals – whether as social, political or economic actors – are constituted in terms of mediating cultures’. Chapter 8, therefore, proposes that ‘mediating cultures are likely to be shaped by gendering as well as by other marking conditions’, while also paying careful attention to the problems posed by the complex concepts of gendering and female and male cyber subjectivities. In Chapter 9, the final contribution to Part III, Tim Jordan explores the question of power in cyberspace by making use of, among others, the theoretical writings of the classical sociologist Max Weber and the poststructuralist cultural and political theorist Michel Foucault. Building on his previous work,3 Jordan’s contribution thus traverses Weber’s paradigm of power as the custody of individuals and the political writings of Foucault that, according to Jordan, are especially helpful in comprehending cyberpower in socio-political terms. At the broadest level, Jordan is seeking in Chapter 9 to provide both a theoretically informed explanation of power and an apprehension of our capacity to move through the world. For Jordan, Weber’s and Foucault’s conceptions of individual and social power are such that, while remaining somewhat ‘elusive’, they can, nevertheless, be advanced into cyberspace. Even so, Jordan explains that for the purposes of this chapter, Weber’s and Foucault’s exegesis of power must stay ‘in the background and subordinate to the task of defining cyberpower in the context of “really existing” cyberspace’. The concepts and issues evaluated by Jordan in his contribution therefore incorporate the routines of living with cyberspace, inclusive of the now near planetary technological experience of all those who enter cyber society each day by ‘logging on’ or ‘clicking in’ to that defining space of the twenty-first century, cyberspace. Chapter 9 also skilfully makes its way through the complexities of ideas such as cybernetic individualism and identity, hierarchy and collectivities, information overload, the digital grassroots, and elite relations. The chapter concludes with a study centred on the case of RealPlayer which reveals how a specific company’s product extensively utilized in cyberspace to play music over the Internet was procuring unknown to users precise customer portraits and eroding the confidentiality of large numbers of people dependent upon RealPlayer.
7 E-DEMOCRACY
A CASE STUDY OF W E B - O R C H E S T R AT E D CYBERADVOCACY
1
W i l l i a m H . D u t t o n a n d Wa n - Y i n g L i n
The promise of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in supporting more democratic patterns of political participation has been promoted for decades.2 ICTs that support many-to-many and group communication, such as teleconferencing, have been a particular focus of research, since the mobilization of groups is so fundamental to pluralist systems.3 The widespread diffusion of the Internet and World Wide Web has been accompanied by a growing number of anecdotal accounts and empirical studies of the role cyberadvocacy can play in political campaigns, particularly at the grassroots.4 This chapter provides a case study of a Web-orchestrated campaign in the US aimed at blocking the imposition of a telephone area code ‘overlay’ for the western region of the County of Los Angeles, California. The campaign was labelled a ‘pubic uprising’ by the news media5 and credited with shaping public policy. Why might an ‘uprising’ emerge around a technical debate over how many numbers to dial? The study sought to describe the role of the Web in this campaign and to identify themes that might apply to other Web campaigns – ‘cyberadvocacy’.6 T H E S T O P T H E O V E R L AY C A M PA I G N
The Stop the Overlay campaign sought to block the creation of a new telephone area code (424) that was to be superimposed (overlaid) on any existing 310 code. Rather than split the geographical region of the west Los Angeles area (Westside), which was covered by the area code 310, the State of California’s Public Utility Commission (PUC) agreed to superimpose a new area code 424 over the same geographic area covered by 310. The creation of this overlay
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would double the number of available telephone numbers. However, as planned, it would also mean that all telephone subscribers of the area would need to dial (or punch) eleven digits (1 + area code + phone number), even if they are calling their next-door neighbours. The geography of area codes in Los Angeles The area code 310 was first introduced in 1992 (see Table 7.1). It was to relieve a shortage of telephone numbers in the western area of Los Angeles County, which included the wealthier cities of Beverly Hills, Malibu and Santa Monica and, to the south of the area, the beach cities and Palos Verdes peninsula. It was formed by a split from area code 213, which separated much of west Los Angeles from the central business district of Los Angeles. Phone companies had been adding area codes for years, based on a purported number shortage, caused by a proliferation of multiple lines, faxes, pagers, computer modems and cellular phones. Five years after 310 was introduced, citing an increasing demand for numbers, the phone companies requested a split of 310 by creating a new 562 area. Two years later, in 1999, the local phone companies claimed to be running out Table 7.1 A chronology of key events in the ‘Stop the Overlay’ campaign Time
Events
1992 2 May
310 area code created, splitting area from area code 213.
1997 25 January
562 area code splits off area of area code 310.
1999 16 April 1 May 10 June 24 June 9 September
15 September 16 September 9 October 2000 June
310 overlay (eleven digits to make a local call) to be implemented. StopOverlay.com website launched. State legislators petition PUC to halt the area code overlay. PUC temporarily delays 310/424 overlay plan. California State Assembly Bill 406, the Consumer Area Code Relief Act of 1999, passed without specifically mentioning 310 overlay issue. Governor urges the PUC to rescind eleven-digit dialling and halt the 310/424 area overlay. Panel kills 310 overlay. Assembly Bill 406 signed into law by Governor. California telephone companies ask the Federal Communications Commission to force twelve new area codes in the state, including six in the Los Angeles area.
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of phone numbers once again. However, instead of calling for another area code split, they proposed to overlay a new area code 424 on the existing 310 code. They argued that this would allow many households and businesses to keep their existing phone numbers and that businesses would not need to reprint stationery, update their customer-contact databases, or even risk losing old customers who do not have their new area code. Other overlays had been implemented in the cities of Maryland, New York, Texas, Georgia, Florida and Colorado, among others, with only a few persistent consumer protests. Also, California had more new area codes and experienced a higher rate of area code splits than most states. From 1947 to 1992, the number of area codes in California grew from three to thirteen. During the subsequent seven years, the number nearly doubled, with 25 area codes in place by the end of 1999. The PUC expected to open fifteen more area codes by 2002, unless conservation measures were put in place.7 Telephone numbers are memorized by individuals and embedded within technologies, such as address books and speed diallers. They can become an aspect of one’s identity and even a status symbol, such as signifying a longtime resident. Number changes can be frustrating, inconvenient and costly to consumers and businesses. In west Los Angeles, many phone subscribers were unhappy, but generally resigned to the impending overlay. The fax heard across Los Angeles A defining moment in launching the Stop the Overlay campaign was when one subscriber, Steven Teitelbaum, a plastic and reconstructive surgeon based in Santa Monica, first received a form letter from his local phone company. The letter told him that he was entering a ‘permissive’ period in which seven-digit dialling would be allowed, but that he should start practising eleven-digit dialling to get ready for the ‘overlay’. Teitelbaum8 was upset by the tone of the letter, and by a sense that neither he nor other consumers had been well informed or involved in the decision to impose this overlay. He scrawled the message ‘BULL’ across the top of the letter and faxed it to his friend, Bob Scheer, a columnist of a local edition of the Los Angeles Times and a professor at the University of Southern California (USC) in Los Angeles. His handwritten note across the letter asked Scheer what this was all about and whether he would look into this matter. A nationally syndicated columnist, Scheer also contributed a regular column to Our Times, a local Westside edition of the Los Angeles Times. Bob Scheer9 had studied engineering and understood enough about telecommunications to ask the right questions and know a reasonable answer. His phone interviews convinced him that the process of developing and implementing the overlay ignored public concerns; it was the outcome of industry meetings which determined that a shortage existed and that an area code split or overlay was required. Members of the PUC were permitted to attend these industry meetings, but they were not allowed to vote. Moreover, to protect proprietary information from competing companies, the proportion of used
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numbers was not even available to the PUC, even though the numbers were allocated by the PUC free of charge to the phone companies. Without this information, the public could not know if a real shortage existed. Furthermore, there was no mechanism for the phone companies to return numbers that were unused. His persistence gained him access to lawyers, regulators and industry experts, such as key PUC staff, who validated his conclusion that telephone companies were ‘hoarding’ numbers. By his estimate, only one out of six allocated numbers were actually in use.10 The primary factor contributing to the shortage was that numbers were allocated in blocks of 10,000. Scheer saw no valid technical argument for continuing to allocate numbers in these huge 10,000-number blocks given modern digital switching technologies and the capability for number portability, which enables consumers to switch from one provider to another without giving up their number. The practice was a dated response to efforts to foster local competition in telecommunications. Scheer began to devote some of his columns in Our Times to the overlay issue, arguing that the phone number shortage was ‘hogwash’ and the real problems were centred on a technically flawed scheme for the allocation and administration of telephone numbers, which lacked public accountability.11 He argued: ‘California has 180 million potential phone numbers in its current code setup and only 35 million are in use.’ His stories about this number shortage ‘nonsense’ ended with phone numbers of relevant elected officials, which he encouraged readers to call and to voice concerns. Moving onto the web Dr Teitelbaum had also pursued this issue by setting up a new screen name on his America Online (AOL) account, called
[email protected], to which Scheer began to refer the readers of his newspaper column. It provided people with a more complete list of information on how to contact elected and appointed officials. Residents were asked to write a letter in their own words, if only a few sentences. They were also encouraged to fax it to the listed officials, in addition to contacting them by e-mail and by phone. A younger colleague of Scheer’s, Joshua Fouts, was involved in Web design, computer consulting and programme activities at the Annenberg School for Communication at USC, where Scheer taught courses. As Executive Director of the Annenberg School’s Online Journalism Review, Fouts was well aware of the capability and use of the Web. Fouts was also a telephone subscriber on the Westside. Initially, he was annoyed by the overlay, and intrigued by Scheer’s editorials, but he dismissed the problem as a relatively minor issue of convenience. However, debates with his wife, Jackie Weber, also a computer consultant, led him to see the issue as one of public accountability, since the public was being asked to pay a price for the ease and convenience of the telephone industry and the PUC. This led him to become personally involved. Fouts offered to help create a Web presence for the campaign, Teitelbaum
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agreed to finance the dot-com website, and Scheer agreed to provide his editorials and reporting on the overlay. Fouts and his wife set up the site www.stopoverlay.com in about 24 hours of focused effort. Strong positive reactions from the public contributed to maintaining and enlarging the campaign. Scheer’s initial Our Times article on the area code issue was met with a comparatively strong and positive response from readers, encouraging Scheer to continue writing on the number shortage ‘myth’.12 Also, the website – Stopoverlay.com – quickly gained substantial traffic. The site was first publicized through the newspaper and Bob Scheer continued to remind readers of the site in his series of columns. In May, soon after its launch, page viewing reached a peak at nearly 9,000 requests. The hits decreased over time but stayed at over 4,000 per month until after the campaign concluded. The homepage of the website functioned as a ‘news alert’, informing viewers of the most recent developments in their campaign and calling for real-time help, whenever necessary. The site collected, archived and posted all news clippings on this issue, provided detailed fact sheets, and not only urged people to take action, but explained how they could act. For example, the site listed the names and contact information of key elected and appointed public officials, and official representatives of the local phone companies. Hyperlinks were embedded that enabled those visiting the website to voice their concerns to the targeted individuals simply by clicking a mouse button. The website was augmented in July, when Fouts created an e-mail distribution list that visitors to the site could join. The list was used to send regular email updates to this targeted list of subscribers. For example, the distribution list was used to call for action in the days before the PUC was about to vote on a proposal that would determine whether the overlay would take effect. Interactivity was supported through the site in ways beyond the distribution list. The message board on the website provided an ‘e-soapbox’ for the public, and was used to post general announcements, deal with technical questions, and monitor the overlay legislation and relevant campaign or industry news. The forum also opened up a section to post gossip and rumours. The website and related distribution list were key tools for orchestrating the actions of Westside residents. It was when the group launched www.stopoverlay.com in May 1999 that west Los Angeles residents appeared to reach a critical mass and began to act collectively. Many credited the site also with helping the campaign to build awareness of the issue, particularly among politicians, from the local city halls to Sacramento and Washington, DC. In addition, the website’s access logs were of value to the organizers in tracking the interest in their campaign. They could see from the logs when their site began to attract new audiences, such as the general public on AOL, the telephone company headquarters in San Francisco, public officials in Sacramento and regulators from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in Washington, DC. All became visible online.
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Legislative action Independently of the Stop the Overlay campaign, given a surge of consumer complaints from constituents, State Assemblyman Wally Knox, a Democrat from Los Angeles, and US Representative Henry Waxman, also a Democrat from Los Angeles, had filed a petition with California regulators on 10 June 1999 to halt the area code overlay. Wally Knox signed as the lead petitioner to the PUC. Knox argued that the popularity of cell phones, pagers and fax machines was not the full reason for this proliferation of area codes. Like Scheer, he attributed it also to industry number hoarding, deregulation of the industry, and faulty demand projections. He found a ready ally in Bob Scheer and his colleagues. Inspired and supported by demonstrated citizen interest, he introduced the California State Assembly Bill 406 (AB 406), an area code reform bill, that later became known as the Consumer Area Code Relief Act of 1999. AB 406 was designed to force state public-utility regulators and telephone companies to adopt telephone number conservation measures before an area code split or overlay could be implemented. Days before the Assembly was due to vote on AB 406, Knox, with support from Stop the Overlay, organized the ‘Big Hang-Up’ protest of 31 August 1999. Residents were asked to hang up their phone from 3.10 p.m. for one hour to ‘silently’ protest the phone companies’ manipulation of area codes. The event captured wide press coverage including the Los Angeles Times and four major local television stations, which helped to heighten the issue and spotlight the proposed legislation. Then, on the day of the vote and only hours before it was due to be taken, Bob Scheer used his cell phone to call virtually every voting member of the Assembly rumoured to be against the bill. He was able to get through to nearly everyone, since he was a well-known journalist. His approach was direct: ‘Look, I write a column for the Los Angeles Times. I want to know why you are voting against the bill.’ Surprised to receive a call like this, some explained that their opposition centred on a particular paragraph in the bill. Wally Knox took the lead in removing this ‘poisonous paragraph’ thirty minutes before the vote,13 and AB 406 was passed by a near-unanimous vote (79:1) on 9 September 1999. Up the federal structure State and local officials are more significant actors in cable and telecommunications matters than are local officials in most other nations. But in the case of area code assignments, the PUC’s regulatory authority over the local exchange carriers (LECs) was circumscribed. The uproar over the 310/424 overlay in Los Angeles worked to the advantage of some PUC members, who were lobbying to gain more local discretion through the PUC’s Petition for Additional Delegated Authority to the FCC on 23 April 1999. Five months after this petition was filed, the FCC ruled that the PUC be granted, with conditions, the authority to mandate that the phone companies adopt number conservation measures before an overlay plan could be implemented. The PUC was thereby authorized to institute thousand-block
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pooling trials, establish usage thresholds (including requiring carriers to submit number utilization data), reclaim unused and reserved codes, require sequential number assignments, and address claims of carriers requesting numbering resources outside of rationing procedures.14 The PUC had yet to rule on the 310/424 overlay. Among the five commissioners, one was expected to vote in favour of blocking the overlay, as it was his own proposal, and another was expected to support him. Another commissioner was thought to be opposed and impossible to sway. Therefore, the Stop the Overlay campaign organizers used their distribution list to ask subscribers to focus their efforts on contacting the two remaining undecided commissioners, and the Governor, since phone companies were urging him not to sign AB 406, if it arrived at his desk. Facing organized consumer opposition, a favourable FCC ruling, and the overwhelming passage of AB 406, the PUC voted ‘no’ to the overlay on 16 September 1999. The Stop the Overlay website declared ‘a victory for grassroots activism in the Internet age’.15 The struggle does not end After the overlay plan was defeated in September 1999, Stopoverlay.com continued to attract thousands of visits as people checked information regarding the detail of the PUC decision and shared their victory.16 It was not until October that the page requests began to fall. The public uprising was over, but further reforms of area code administration continued, with the FCC granting a waiver to permit phone numbers to be allocated in blocks of 1000 (vs 10,000) within the 310 area, and later introducing this as a nationwide strategy for conserving numbers.17 The issue continued to evolve, however. Nearly a year later, in a letter to the FCC, LECs serving California requested the FCC to force the California PUC to permit twelve new area codes, including six within the Greater Los Angeles area.18 By February 2001, state auditors recommended that the PUC split the 310 area code in two, rather than overlay it, by creating a new 424 area in the southern half of the 310 area. To some, this represented a ‘bitter defeat for the residents and businesses’ that fought the overlay.19 The long-term role of the Web-orchestrated campaign remains problematic, since it may be more difficult to reorganize and sustain opposition over time against well-organized companies with institutionalized mechanisms for sustaining their activity in politics and public policy.
PERSPECTIVES ON THE DYNAMICS OF W E B - O R C H E S T R AT E D C Y B E R A D V O C A C Y
The web of media on all channels One of the strongest themes that carried through this case study was the degree to which the effectiveness of the Web was dependent on the use of all media,
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not simply the Web. The Internet and the Web reinforced and complemented other media. This was apparent from the moment that Steven Teitelbaum faxed Bob Scheer the letter from his phone company, but the entire Web strategy was anchored in the use of all channels of communication. A key attribute of the web page was the use of the Web to generate phone calls, e-mails, visits and letters to politicians. For instance, the organizers used the Web and phone systems to create the Big Hang-Up protest, which was successful in gaining TV news coverage for the campaign. Bypassing traditional gatekeepers: disintermediation and agenda-setting Despite a reliance on multiple media, the Web created an alternative channel for reaching the public that bypassed traditional gatekeepers. For example, the Los Angeles Times generally failed to cover the public opposition to the overlay until the later stages of the ‘uprising’. Scheer was able to cover the story in his own column within a local Santa Monica edition of the Los Angeles Times, but metropolitan-wide coverage was muted. By virtue of their ability to bypass traditional gatekeepers and reconfigure access to the public, the organizers were able to redefine the issues at stake, and eventually to shape the agenda of the more traditional gatekeepers. The phone companies had defined the issue as whether to split or overlay area codes to create more phone numbers. The campaign organizers redefined the issues quickly to focus on stopping any change, forcing the phone companies to conserve numbers, and challenging the PUC to protect consumers. The malleable geography of cyberadvocacy At the outset, Stop the Overlay was a locally organized campaign that was targeted on a local issue. The geography of this campaign contrasts with the expectations surrounding the geopolitics of the Web, and suggests that the geography of Web-orchestrated campaigns are malleable and could be usefully categorized by the degree to which their organizers and the targets of their activities are each localized or distributed.20 In contrast to Stop the Overlay, for example, many locally targeted campaigns are organized by a geographically distributed group, such as the protest against the World Trade Organization’s (WTO) 1999 Summit in Seattle. Cyberadvocacy also brings together geographically distributed organizers to focus on action disbursed nationally or globally, as well as on the efforts of local groups organizing action across a broad geographic area, which captures the evolution of Stop the Overlay, as the local issue moved to venues in Sacramento and Washington, DC. Over time, the Web changed the geography of access to stories about the overlay. Our Times was a local community newspaper, but Stopoverlay.com enabled the phone companies, Sacramento politicians and members of the FCC direct access to Scheer’s articles. The politics of speed and staying power The Web also enabled the pace of organization to be redefined. On the one
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hand, the campaign was fast, establishing the campaign in a way that could mobilize voters in a very short time to support legislative actions which may have been unsuccessful without a demonstration of public support. On the other hand, it was short-lived and depended on reaching consumers at the high point in an issue-attention cycle. Organization begets organization. But in this case, there was really no organized citizen opposition to the Stop the Overlay campaign. The telephone industry chose not to react directly to citizen opposition to the Stop the Overlay campaign, such as by organizing a counter website. Instead, the industry relied on a well-organized and financed lobbying effort in Washington, DC and Sacramento in the months and years that followed their setback. The telephone companies chose to fight another day in more traditional ways, but they had the staying power to continue their lobbying over the long term, generating questions about the ability of cyberadvocacy to maintain organization over time. Reconfiguring access – more than efficiency Disintermediation and geography were only two ways in which the Web helped reconfigure access. One of the major social implications of ICTs is the degree to which they reshape access to information, people, services and technology.21 The most common argument is that the low relative cost of the Internet will drive more communication online and facilitate more interaction among players and thereby support collective behaviour. This case study suggests that the Internet not only changes the way participants communicate with one another, or even the frequency of communication, but actually reconfigures the networks of communication, changing who says what to whom. Before the Web was adopted in the campaign, strong ties were seen between local phone companies and regulatory agencies. Regulatory bodies had connections among themselves, even though their interaction might often be routine. On the other hand, Bob Scheer had a personal friendship with Steven Teitelbaum and Joshua Fouts, while Teitelbaum and Fouts did not know each other or many other Westside residents at the outset. As a journalist, Scheer managed to reach Westside residents via his column; however, residents had virtually no interaction with the PUC or the FCC. The Internet changed this network. Over the Web, Westside residents, including principal activists, were all tied together within a communication network. Despite the fact that the LECs maintained linkages with regulatory agencies and officials, consumer activists also managed to contact public officials frequently and efficiently. In other words, the Internet did more than effectively facilitate an existing network. It further extended the network and connected different actors. RECONFIGURING THE BROADER ECOLOGY OF GAMES
Public policy can be viewed as the outcome of an ‘ecology of games’.22 The ecology of games is a sensitizing concept that focuses attention on the unfold-
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ing interplay among the separate but interdependent actors and decisions over time. The metaphor of a game helps see actors as purposive players in a variety of activities defined by their own rules and assumptions in trying to achieve particular goals. Every actor is involved in one or more ‘games’ (arenas of competition and cooperation structured by a set of rules and assumptions about how to act in order to achieve a particular set of objectives) within a broader system of action composed of two or more separate but interdependent games.23 The Stop the Overlay campaign was one actor in an area code game that was nested within a broader ecology of games. The area code game shares several characteristics with all games. First, a game has a set of goals or objectives, such as stopping the overlay. Of course, games may have one single objective but others may have multiple goals, as did the campaign, which also sought to empower consumers and defeat the phone company lobbyists. Second, a game has a set of prizes, which may vary widely from profit to authority to recognition to fulfilment, as in the case of Scheer, Teitelbaum or Fouts. Third, games have rules that govern the strategies or moves open to players. The rules may change over time, such as when the venue moves from the legislature to the PUC, and there may not even be consensus on the rules of the game, as when Scheer seems to threaten opponents with public exposure. A game has a set of players, defined by the fact that they interact (compete or cooperate) with one another in pursuing the game’s objectives. Finally, games are played in a larger ecology. For example, it was one of many consumer efforts to block or effect proposed changes in area codes, and therefore this game was nested among a larger ecology of efforts to block changes in area codes. By reconfiguring access, Stop the Overlay reshaped the broader ecology of games in ways that changed area code policy. In the west Los Angeles campaign, however, Scheer and his colleagues also redefined the issues to encompass games beyond a simple area code game. For example, his major efforts were to show that this was more than an issue of changing area codes; this was an issue of democratic accountability, consumer rights and corporate profit versus the public interest. Thus, Scheer coupled the area code campaign to a broader and more potent citizen (consumer) sovereignty game. This game cuts across many areas of everyday life, and raises issues over whether consumers are adequately informed and influential in the formation of government policy and regulations. In addition, the campaign had the good fortune to be aligned with other games simultaneously under way that had direct relevance to the outcome of the area code game. For example, another, more bureaucratic federalism game pitted state regulators, the PUC, against the FCC in disagreements over who has jurisdiction over various elements of telecommunication regulations. This struggle over jurisdictional turf was relevant in that authority to regulate area code assignments was one issue at stake over the span of local authority. This gave some members and staff of the PUC reason to side with the Westside residents. Likewise, a more partisan, ideological game was also relevant. This set some
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of the more liberal Democrats on the staff within the PUC against some of the more conservative Republican-appointed commissioners, with these staff perceiving the appointed officials as too responsive to the telecommunications industry, and not as receptive as they should be to public concerns. In this case, Stop the Overlay gave legitimacy to one side in this internal bureaucratic struggle. Another separate but related game was between competing telephone companies, with the state public utility regulators and the FCC acting as umpires, but also advocating equity among telephone companies as a means for ensuring competition in telecommunications. For instance, if the subscribers to a new telephone company’s services would be required to dial more numbers than the subscribers to the old dominant local phone company, then this would unfairly advantage the existing companies and constrain competition.24 However, the intensity of this game had diminished by 1999, leaving the incumbent providers of telecommunications services in the area to fight this battle by themselves. CONCLUSION
In reshaping access, Stop the Overlay changed the communication networks among key political actors in ways that are not explained simply by efficiency, speed or effectiveness, such as focusing on the declining cost of communication. The Web helped alter the geography of access, as well as the networks of communication, in ways that changed the dynamics of the policy process. By understanding politics as an ecology of games, the role of the Internet and the Web in reconfiguring this ecology becomes central to explanations of its significance for public policy. Cyberadvocacy accomplished this by employing all channels of communication, not just the Web.
8 M E D I AT I N G P R A C T I C E S
W O M E N W I T H / I N C Y B E R S PA C E
Saskia Sassen
There are multiple ways of examining the social interactions between the new digital technologies and women. Growing research literature addresses a broad range of social aspects, ranging from empirical examinations of the impact of the new technologies on female-typed jobs, on women’s professional opportunities, and on women’s time, to more theorized accounts about cyberspace and subjectivity.1 The analysis in this chapter is centred on the cultures and practices through and within which women articulate cyberspace on their terms. Thus my concern here is not with the purely technical features of cyberspace and what these might mean for women, nor is it simply with its impact on women. My concern is, rather, with this in-between zone that constructs the articulations of cyberspace and women in social terms. A key proposition organizing the chapter is that cyberspace is socially embedded, and not a purely technological event, and this brings with it at least two consequences that are crucial. The first is that cyberspace is inflected by the values, cultures, power systems and institutional orders within which it is embedded. Insofar as these various realms are marked by gendering, we can posit that this embeddedness of cyberspace is also gendered at least in some of its components, and, further, that so is cyberspace itself. Thus a focus on women and cyberspace is warranted.2 This is so even though there is enormous variability in this gendering by place, age, class, race, nationality, issue-orientation; at the same time, there are likely to be various situations, sites, individuals not marked by gendering. The second consequence of this embeddedness is that the articulations between cyberspace and individuals – whether as social, political or economic actors – are constituted in terms of mediating cultures; it is not simply a question of access and understanding how to use the hardware and the software. To some extent, these mediating cultures are likely to be shaped by gendering as well as other marking conditions.
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The concept of gendering has increasingly become problematic and is used here as shorthand for a complex bundle of issues.3 Gendering as an actual process or condition is multi-valent, ranging from female disadvantage to affirmations of the value of the female subject – a subject positioned against war, environmentally attuned, and a carrier of other types of normative strength. Further, there are many distinct female subjectivities, including distinctions inside master categories such as class, race and nationality. It all signals that simply to speak of gendering is too elementary. Finally, theoretically we can distinguish the female and male subject from the biological entities female and male. Thus there are work cultures where women function as male subjects and there are work cultures where men are produced as female subjects. It is impossible to introduce all these distinctions in such a brief piece, and it will be necessary to speak in general terms more often than not. C Y B E R S E G M E N TAT I O N S
Cyberspace is embedded both in the technical features and standards of the hardware and software, and in actual societal structures and power dynamics.4 Its topography weaves partly through non-electronic space. There is no purely digital economy and no completely virtual corporation. This means that power, contestation, inequality – in brief, hierarchy – inscribe electronic space and shape the uses and production of software. To a large extent, cybercultures have been shaped as masculine. Thus, even as cyberspace gives women new opportunities to launch businesses and political initiatives, it will not mean that they can fully escape older forms of power and inequality in cyberspace.5 The fact that cyberspace is embedded and cannot be read as a purely technological event, or merely in terms of its technical capacities, is further illuminated by the differences between private and public-access digital networks.6 The Internet is a different type of space from the private networks of the financial industry; and the firewalled corporate sites on the Web are different from the public portion of the Web. The financial markets, operating largely through private dedicated digital networks, are a good instance of private cyberspace. The three properties of digital networks: decentralized access, simultaneity and interconnectivity have produced strikingly different outcomes in this case from those of the public-access Internet. Although the power of these financial electronic networks rests on a kind of distributed power, that is, millions of investors and their millions of decisions, it ends up as concentrated power. The trajectory followed by what begins as a form of distributed power we associate with the public-access Internet may assume many forms, in this case one radically different from that of the Internet. It signals the possibility that network power is not inherently distributive. Intervening mechanisms can reshape its organization. To keep it as a form of distributed power requires that it be embedded in a particular kind of structure. We cannot take the
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distributed power and hence the democratizing potential of digital networks as an inevitable feature of this technology, as is so often the case in utopian readings. The limits of cyberspace to bring about changes in existing hierarchies of power and structures of privilege also may be inferred from the fact that existing cybersegmentations can trump women-oriented agendas. There is no doubt that cyberspace brings new opportunities for women both in business domains and in larger civic as well as home settings (see Tables 8.2 and 8.3, pp. 114 and 115–16).7 For instance, in highly digitized sectors, women as professionals have experienced new opportunities and they may fight for greater equality in opportunities and rewards with men. But they do so largely within the confines of existing hierarchies of economic power. In this regard it may be naive to overestimate the emancipatory power of cyberspace in terms of its capacity to neutralize gender distinctions. Beyond these issues of intentionality and use, lies the question of infrastructure.8 Electronic space is going to have a far greater presence in highly industrialized countries than in the less developed world; and will be more evident in the middle-class households of developed countries than for poor households in those same countries. However, what is crucial to emphasize here is the fact that there are very cheap ways of delivering access to the Internet, far cheaper than the standard telephone system, and hence that once such access is secured, the opportunities for low-income households and communities, and hence for women, can increase enormously, as I discuss later. Recognizing the embeddedness of cyberspace, in my research I have come to regard the Internet as a space produced and marked through the software that gives it its features and the particular aspects of the hardware mobilized by the software.9 These features can also function as an indicator of transformations in the articulations between cyberspace and larger institutional orders. There are significant implications attached to the fact that one of the leading Internet software design focuses in the last few years has been on firewalled intranets for firms and firewalled tunnels for firm-to-firm transactions.10 Both of these represent, in some sense, private appropriations of a ‘public’ space.11 Further, the growing interest in electronic commerce has stimulated the development of software linked to identity verification, trademarks protection and billing. The rapid growth of this type of software and its use in the Internet does not necessarily strengthen the public-ness of cyberspace. This is especially significant if there is less production of software aimed at strengthening the openness and decentralization of the Net as was the case in the earlier phases of the Internet. Further, this newer type of software also sets up the conditions for copyrighting, including the possibility of charging for what can be implemented as copyrighted use/access, including per-use charge. In my reading, far from strengthening the Internet’s democratic potential as many liberal and neo-liberal commentators maintain, this type of commercialization can threaten it. It also carries major implications for the impact of democratizing initiatives, including those by women.
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And yet, cyberspace remains a crucial force for new forms of civic participation, especially in its public-access portion. Non-commercial uses still dominate the Internet. The race is on to invent ways of expanding electronic commerce and ensuring safety of payment transactions. But at the same time there has been a proliferation of non-commercial uses and users. Civil society, whether it be individuals or non-governmental organizations (NGOs), is an energetic presence in cyberspace. Looking at cyberspace as embedded allows us to go beyond the common duality between utopian and dystopian renderings of the Internet and cyberspace generally. Even as it reproduces masculine cultures and hierarchies of power, cyberspace also enables women to engage in new forms of contestation and in proactive endeavours in multiple different realms, from political and economic to personal. Further, in the context of globalization these initiatives can go global and bypass national states and major national economic actors, thereby opening a whole new terrain for women’s initiatives.
WOMEN’S CYBERPRESENCE AND CYBEROPPORTUNITIES
The embeddedness of cyberspace and the larger social reflexivity this entails are evident in the facts about the presence of women. There is still underrepresentation of women even as their Internet usage is growing sharply. This combination captures the contradictory features of women’s conditions in the larger social world today. Secondly, where the specificity of cyberspace enables the emergence of new cultures of interaction between cyberspace and the larger social order, there is also specificity in the opportunities and forms of presence of women. Aggregate level data show clearly that in country after country women are rapidly raising their share of Internet use but remain less than half of all users. Table 8.1 provides an overview of Internet usage in particular countries. Considering the sample of countries in the table, by 2000, women’s share of Internet use was about 45 per cent in Denmark, Australia, Finland, Hungary, Singapore, Japan, Lithuania and Thailand, and half of all people online in the USA and Estonia. These aggregate figures contain highly specific trends. For instance, in the USA the data for 2000 show that among first-time users in 2000, women exceeded men slightly and, among girls aged 12 to 17, usage increased by 125 per cent. Internet usage is also growing faster among women in a country as diverse from the USA as South Korea, partly as a function of catching up.12 The specificity of cyberspace and the new cultures of interaction it entails are made evident by the presence of women in e-businesses started by women and in the proliferation of new women-oriented websites. Table 8.2 shows examples of women start-ups as of 2000; these are firms owned and operated by women. Clearly, given the dynamism in these sectors, we can expect turnover in ownership, not to mention cessation of operations. We include a sampling of firms in
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Table 8.1 An overview of Internet usage in selected countries in 2000 (%) Country
Male users
Female users
Female users of total users
Female users of total at home users
Argentina Australia Belgium Canada China Czech Republic Denmark Estonia Finland Germany Great Britain Hungary India Indonesia Ireland Israel Italy Japan Korea Latvia Lithuania Malaysia Norway Philippines Poland Portugal Singapore Spain Taiwan Thailand USA
20 54 40 60 28 30 69 35 49 44 40 19 18 4 45 47 41 77 62 16 10 28 69 12 20 19 52 32 45 21 58
13 43 26 40 18 21 56 31 41 29 28 15 7 2 33 34 21 59 40 11 8 21 57 9 11 12 43 20 36 17 54
39.9 44.6 40.4 40.5 37.8 42.4 45.3 50.4 46.8 40.7 41.9 46.5 26.7 33.3 42.8 42.2 35.3 44.4 39.0 44.7 47.6 42.6 45.7 43.1 36.7 40.7 46.3 39.4 43.2 45.5 49.2
n.a. 48.43 39.40 51.00 30.44 n.a. 44.14 n.a. 46.06 36.60 42.83 n.a. n.a. n.a. 45.22 42.90 n.a. 41.43 45.65 n.a. n.a. n.a. 42.05 n.a. n.a. n.a. 43.49 39.12 44.20 n.a. 52.18
n.a. = not available. Source: compiled from various sources (see note 12).
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Table 8.2 Women start-ups –owned and operated * Category
Website
Portal, content and community ventures
Astronet AudioBasket eSampo Ivillage ThirdAge Media
Web-based service ventures
Desktop.com EDGAR Online E-Loan NetCreations – bought by an unnamed third party for cash, not up anymore
E-commerce ventures
Della.com – renamed weddingchannel.com Eve.com – out of business, now recommends sephora.com oneNest Petopia – finished, bought by petco Sparks.com SuperVerticals
E-business applications and web-technology ventures
CoVia eCommerce Industries Marimba RightWorks
* Some may have been sold off: not indicated here. Source: Dotcom Divas, 2000.
four distinct categories: a) portal, content and community ventures; b) webbased services; c) e-commerce; and d) e-business applications and webtechnology ventures. The listed websites for each of these women start-ups provide more detailed information. Table 8.3 lists technology and womenoriented e-mail listserves. There is a very large number of websites oriented to women’s issues such as health or personal concerns not included at all here if they were not created and/or run by women. Moreover, there is a substantial variety of websites addressed to women and/or originated/run by women, covering a broad range of issues, often for age-specific groups.13 Beyond the fact that these sites are largely instrumental, they tell us a wider story about the Internet. They become a collective refutation of a very common representation of cyberspace as reducing sociability and engagement with one’s community. On the contrary, it can build local community. At the same time, being located in cyberspace makes it increasingly possible for these websites to evolve towards transnational networks of such local sites, probably an unplanned trajectory for many of them. In the next section I return to this subject through a discussion of new types of women activists networks.
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Table 8.3 Technology and women-oriented e-mail listserves (electronic forums)* Name
Function
AFRO-TECHIES
Discussion group for technically inclined women of African descent seeking to expand the experience and knowledge of black women in technology.
ASIA-WOMEN-IT
Discussion of issues and concerns relating to women in Asia and the new global information and communication technology.
A-WIA (American Women’s Internet Association)
Organization and list for American women and their supporters ‘actively involved within the Internet environment.’
CONFERENCE-L
List for discussion before and during the Women’s Internet Conference (18–21 October 1997).
CYBORG-L
Run by ‘Women on the Net’, a UNESCO-SID project to provide a multicultural gender perspective on international communication systems.
FACES
Cyber-resource and international mailing list for women interested in the media and communication arts to share projects, exhibits, critical opinions and text.
FEMINAMAIL
Affiliated with women-oriented search engine Femina; weekly update to Femina database.
FEMINANET
List to ask for help finding online sites for personal, work-related and academic interests.
GK97-GENDER
Connected to Global Knowledge 97 Conference; focuses on gender issues related to knowledge and information technologies.
GRANITE
Platform for discussion to stimulate research from a feminist/women’s perspective of gender and new information technologies.
GRRLTALK
Discussion of GNU/Linux operating system, Open Source Software movement, Free Software Foundation, etc.
ISOC-WOMEN-DISCUSS
Discussing access to the Internet and information.
KNOWHOWCONF
To follow KnowHow Conference.
MAC-WOMEN
Macintosh help forum.
MAIDEN-L
For women new to the Internet who need help.
NOWA.INTERNATIONAL
For women who provide computer training to women, dealing with gaining access to new technology, women-specific training, and a general networking medium. Continued
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Table 8.3 Continued Name
Function
SPIDERWOMEN
Forum for women who manage and/or design websites.
UHURA
Collaborative research project online, for women researching some aspect of the Net.
VS-ONLINE-STRAT
Forum for issues related to women’s organizations’ utilization of electronic communication and publishing technologies.
WEBWOMEN-CHAT
Non-technical list for women on the Web, ‘to keep the chatter away from the focused, technical lists’.
WEBWOMEN-GRAPHICS
Anything related to the creation and/or manipulation of computer graphics.
WEBWOMEN-HTML
For women web-content developers.
WEBWOMEN-TECH
For women who manage the technical aspects of websites.
WISDOM
Women’s Internet Site Development and Online Mentoring for Australian women and others interested in Internet literacy.
WOMEN-L
Discussing women’s issues with a focus on the Internet and technology.
WOMEN IN TECHNOLOGY
Both local and national through the list organization Tropica.
WOMEN OF KALI
Moderated list for discussions of feminist politics especially concerning misogyny in the media and on the Net.
WOMEN SPACE
How women and women’s organizations are using the Internet.
* Similar lists for various other subjects exist but are not included in this table. W O M E N ’ S L O C A L S T R U G G L E S I N C Y B E R S PA C E
Of central importance for gauging the socio-political implications for women of their presence in, and use of, cyberspace, is the potential transformation of a whole range of ‘local’ conditions or institutional domains where women remain the key actors, into ‘microenvironments with global span’. Among these domains are the household, the community, the neighbourhood, the local school and health care provider, and other such places. What I mean by their transformation into microenvironments with global span is that technical connectivity will create a variety of links with other similar local entities in other
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neighbourhoods in the same city, in other cities, and in neighbourhoods and cities in other countries. A community of practice can emerge that creates multiple lateral, horizontal communications, collaborations, solidarities, supports. It can enable women or any person or group to pursue projects not easily accommodated in their local, often limiting and oppressive, situation. This brings with it a number of significant possibilities. Whereas before, women’s engagement in these domestic or family-related institutions reproduced their isolation from larger public spheres and cross-border social initiatives, that engagement now can emerge as the anchor for participation. Returning to Table 8.3, several of the e-mail listserves are centred in these female-typed domains yet by being online open themselves to women from many other communities beyond their own physical neighbourhood or city and country. Secondly, in a context where globalization has opened up the world of international transactions to non-state actors of all sorts, women, especially through NGOs, have gained a whole new ascendancy.14 Whereas before, women interested in international relations were typically confined to what was at the time a fairly invisible and hardly influential world of NGOs, today NGOs are emerging as key players and therewith propelling women into situations to which they rarely had access in the past. Cyberspace makes it possible for even small and resource-poor NGOs to connect with other such NGOs and engage in global social efforts. This is an enormous advance for women engaged in certain types of struggle, particularly those concerning women’s issues, whether these are fought through women’s organizations or through more general NGOs, such as human rights organizations.15 This is a particular moment in the history of digital networks, one when powerful corporate actors and high-performance networks are strengthening the role of private digital space and altering the structure of public-access digital space. Digital space has emerged not simply as a means for communicating, but as a major new theatre for capital accumulation and the operations of global capital. But civil society – in all its various incarnations – is also an increasingly energetic presence in cyberspace. The greater the diversity of cultures and groups the better for this larger political and civic potential of the Internet, and the more effective the resistance to the risk that the corporate world might set the standards. From struggles around human rights, the environment and workers’ strikes around the world to genuinely trivial pursuits, the Internet has emerged as a powerful medium for non-elites to communicate, support each other’s struggles and create the equivalent of insider groups at scales going from the local to the global.16 The possibility of doing so transnationally at a time when a growing set of issues are seen as escaping the bounds of nation-states makes this even more significant. Through the Internet local initiatives can become part of a global network of activism without losing the focus on specific local social struggles. This is important for women insofar as they have been confined to local issues in many parts of the world or have chosen to focus on local issues. It enables a new type of cross-border activism, one centred in multiple localities yet intensely
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connected digitally. Activists can develop networks for circulating not only information (about the environment, housing, wages, etc.) but also political work and strategies. There are many examples of such types of cross-border social work. For instance SPARC, set up by Sheela Patel, started out organizing women slum dwellers in Bombay. Now it has a network of such groups throughout Asia, and some cities in Latin America and Africa. This is in my view one of the key forms of social activism that the Internet can make possible: activisms concerned with local issues but with a difference – these are localities that are connected with each other across a region, a country or the world. Because the network is global does not mean that it all has to happen at the global level: it may well be a network of localities concerned with local issues. The architecture of digital networks, primed to span the world, can actually serve to intensify transactions among residents of a city or region, and it can serve to make them aware of neighbouring communities, gain an understanding of local issues that resonate positively or negatively with communities that are right there in the same city rather than with those that are at the other end of the world. Or it can serve to intensify transactions around the local issues of communities that are at opposite ends of the world. It is a peculiar mix of an intense engagement with the local, with place, and of an awareness of other ‘locals’ across the globe. In brief, social activists can use digital networks for global or non-local transactions and they can use them for strengthening local communications and transactions inside a city or rural community. Recovering how the new digital technology can serve to support local initiatives and alliances across a city’s neighbourhoods17 is extremely important in an age where the notion of the local is often seen as losing ground to global dynamics and actors and the digital networks are typically thought of as global. This is not the cosmopolitan route to the global. This is about the global as a multiplication of the local. These are forms of sociability and struggle, deeply embedded in people’s actions and activities. They are also forms of institutionbuilding work that can come from localities and networks of localities with limited resources and from informal social actors. We see here the potential transformation of women, ‘confined’ to domestic roles, who can emerge as key actors in global networks without having to leave their work and roles in their communities. From being experienced as purely domestic, these ‘domestic’ settings are transformed into microenvironments located on global circuits. They do not have to become cosmopolitans in this process, they may well remain domestic in their orientation and remain engaged with their households and local community struggles, and yet they are participating in emergent global social circuits. Cyberspace is, perhaps ironically, a far more concrete space for social struggles than that of the national political system. It becomes a place where nonformal political actors can be part of the political scene in a way that is much more difficult in national institutional channels. Nationally, politics needs to run through existing formal systems: whether the electoral political system or the judiciary (taking state agencies to court). Non-formal political actors are
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rendered invisible in the space of national politics. Cyberspace can accommodate a broad range of social struggles and facilitate the emergence of new types of political subjects that do not have to go through the formal political system.18 Insofar as women have historically been excluded from formal political systems and insofar as many of their struggles can be partly enacted outside those systems, cyberspace is an enabling environment for their struggles and for their emergence as non-formal political actors.
9 TECHNOPOWER AND ITS CYBERFUTURES
Tim Jordan
A cartography of the powers that circulate through virtual lives can now be drawn; it is a chart of the forces that pattern the politics, technology and culture of virtual societies. Such a theory of cyberpower provides an insight into cyberspace because it allows us to understand underlying pressures on virtual worlds. To examine these forces two forms of cyberpower need to be defined: cyberpower of the individual and of the social.1 Both of these types of power allow an understanding of the interrelations of virtual individuals, societies, technopowers and communities, interrelations that result in the mutual subjection of digital grassroots and digital elites. Once these definitions have been made, a case study of the hacking of RealJukebox will allow a concrete investigation of the effects of cyberpowers. Power is central to these discussions but is itself a complex and difficult concept, too extensive to be reasonably examined here without turning from life in cyberspace to definitions of power. To explore power in cyberspace, a number of particular, well-established theories of power will be drawn on. The interpretation of power at play in the theoretical background of this chapter has been drawn principally from work by Max Weber, Barry Barnes and Michel Foucault, though it is Weber and Foucault who are directly relevant to what follows. Weber provides a model of power as the possession of individuals that is particularly useful in understanding cyberpower of the individual. Foucault sees power as strategies that spread into people’s day-today interactions giving rise to forms of domination and is particularly useful in understanding cyberpower of the social.2 If these theories share something it is that understanding power helps us understand people’s abilities to act in the world, whether it be a Weberian analysis of the powers individuals can use or a Foucaldian understanding of the powers people are caught within. It is such understandings of the elusive concept ‘power’ that are taken forward into cyberspace in this chapter, though they always remain in the background and subordinate to the task of defining cyberpower in the context of ‘really existing’ cyberspace. To begin this analysis it is useful to start with the
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mundane, everyday and universal experience of those who enter cyberspace – logging-on. INDIVIDUALS, IDENTITY AND HIERARCHY
We habitually begin our journeys into cyberspace as individuals. In front of a computer screen, reading the glowing words we confront our virtual singularity before building a sense of others. There is a double sense of individuality here. Firstly, people must simply connect to cyberspace by logging-on, almost certainly involving someone entering their online name and their secret, personal password to be rewarded with their little home in cyberspace (consisting of elements like their e-mail or list of favourite websites). Secondly, moving from this little home to other virtual spaces usually involves both logging-on again and again within cyberspace and further moments of self-definition; for example, choosing an online name, choosing a self-description or outlining a biography. The experience of logging-on occurs not only when entering cyberspace but is repeated across cyberspace as we enter name, password and personality and it produces a sense of being an individual. This individuality allows cyberpower to be understood as a range of powers individuals can use. Cyberspace seems to allow different actions to be taken virtually than are possible in offline life. These actions can be defined around two poles: identity fluidity and renovated hierarchies. These will be briefly explored in turn. Identity fluidity summarizes the processes through which online identities are constructed. It remains true that in all sorts of online forums an individual’s offline identity cannot be known with any certainty. The reasonably well-documented instance of a conservative Jewish, teetotal, drug-fearing, lowkey, sexually awkward, heterosexual, male, abled, psychiatrist convincingly posing as an atheistic, sexually predatory, dope-smoking, hard-drinking, flamboyant, bisexual, female, disabled, neuropsychologist underlines the potential disconnection between online and offline identities.3 However, it would also be a misconception to conclude identity disappears online. Identities that constrain, define and categorize exist online, but are made with different resources to offline identities. Broadly online identities are constructed out of two types of indicator: identifiers and style. Neither of these mandate that someone’s offline identity must reappear within their online identity, though there are many ways in which a repressed offline identity may return. Identifiers are the addresses, names, self-descriptions, and more that designate contributions to cyberspace. E-mail addresses are the most common form of identifier. For example, imagine receiving, one morning, e-mails from the following two addresses:
[email protected] and
[email protected]. Before you read the e-mail, certain preconceptions will form. Perhaps you know that the Hack Tic is a group of Dutch hackers, as confirmed by the .nl referring to the Netherlands. ‘billg’ from a company called Microsoft, might indicate the richest man in the world, Bill Gates of Microsoft Corporation. The content of any message from such addresses will most likely be understood differently
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depending on the reading of the e-mail identifier, even if an identical message were received from both sources. Identifiers include the signatures people place at the bottom of their e-mail, the often lengthy self-descriptions Muds (realtime, text-based, multi-player online environments) and some discussion groups allow, the various names we might choose or have imposed on us for various lists, newsgroups, and so on, and the visual avatars being developed for three-dimensional virtual places. All these are the virtual equivalent of seeing someone’s face and being able to think male or female, black or white, old or young. The second type of resource for identity is style. Anybody who participates repeatedly within a place in cyberspace will eventually come to have their style recognized, even become recognizable from their style. Groups also provide certain stylistic resources. Abbreviations are common in the typed world of online discussions, for example, btw for ‘by the way’, and sometimes generate their own specific abbreviations. Donath notes a newsgroup that discusses pregnancy in which ‘onna’ stands for ‘oh no not again’.4 These abbreviations establish both individual and group styles, marking those who do not use or understand the abbreviations as outsiders. Online identities are constructed and judged through a number of markers that replace offline resources. Where offline we might look at someone’s face and think ‘old’, online we look at their address and think ‘.edu – student or teacher?’ Where we might examine clothes, online we look at what is written and learn a personality from a style. Identity is both present in cyberspace and is different to non-virtual space; the only mistake here would be to assume that the powers flowing around offline identities are absent online, instead of identifying the particular forms of identity which exist in cyberspace and through which cyberpower takes hold. The second component of online life that appears obvious to the individual online is that virtuality alters hierarchies. Three ways in which hierarchies are affected can be noted: identity, many-to-many communication and anticensorship. The first, identity, is a key building block in offline hierarchies, but if no one knows your identity then you cannot be placed in a hierarchy on that basis. This seems undoubtedly true, and to the extent that someone keeps their offline identity separate from their online then offline hierarchies based on identity can be dislocated. However, identity does not disappear online but is remade according to the rules of identifiers and styles, as just discussed. This means that specifically online hierarchies can be expected, such as that noted by Branwyn who was told by an online sex enthusiast that ‘In compu-sex, being able to type fast or write well is equivalent to having great legs or a tight butt in the real world.’5 All the various resources available for the construction of online identities also function to create online hierarchies. We can be reasonably certain that many may treat an e-mail from
[email protected] as being of different importance to many other e-mails we receive. The second way hierarchies are dislocated is through many-to-many communication and its ability to include people in decision-making. The inclusion of people in offline decision-making is limited by the need to meet together, to speak one at a time,
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to overcome the hierarchies of identity, and so on. The work of Sproull and Kiesler is fundamental here in establishing that electronically mediated discussions have characteristics distinct from face-to-face discussions, in that they are more inclusive, more equal, take longer to reach decision and are more prone to people abusing each other.6 The third way offline hierarchies are undermined in online life is by the censorship-evading properties of the Internet. Information that governments or courts might have restricted is difficult to hold back once it is free in cyberspace. The global nature of cyberspace is important here, as it only requires information to be published in one country connected to the Net for that information to be let loose in cyberspace. Similarly, offline hierarchies can be undermined through broader access to information. For example, in the UK in recent years there has been a debate over the ability of patients to research their illness and treatment over the Internet and whether this undermines the authority of physicians. Without entering into this particular debate, we can note it is one possible way that control of information might be undermined through cyberspatial communication. If identity fluidity and renovated hierarchies constitute cyberpower from the viewpoint of the individual then power at this level must be understood as the possession of individuals. If we pause and reflect on what cyberspace seems to offer us as individuals, then the ability to remake our identity and to renovate the hierarchies we are caught within make cyberspace appear as a place that offers various powers. These powers can be used by individuals to take various actions they had not previously been able to. For example, patients may gain information that enables them to understand and perhaps contest the treatment their doctor is recommending. We can now understand the enormous hopes and commitment cyberspace sometimes draws from people, because viewed as a space based on individuals the main effects of cyberspace seem to be to offer various powers to act. It is from this perspective that the most hopeful visions of cyberspace derive. It is also a perspective based on the repeated and ongoing experience everyone has that entering cyberspace marks us as an individual; it is not a perspective that is simply naive, it is one reinforced by the daily experience of millions who have virtual lives. TECHNOPOWER: INDIVIDUALS TO COLLECTIVES (AND BACK)
Many people report a transformation7 in their perception of online life. From an initial combination of bewilderment and scepticism many come to accept the online world as normal. With stable online identities people begin to have ongoing conversations, to meet the same others and learn their peculiarities. The particular rules of different corners of cyberspace become clear and normal, but then it is often realized that the individual is no longer the final cause of online life, for communities have emerged. The transformation is not magical but sociological. Even communities that begin by assuming the sovereign individual is primary soon come to realize that collective responsibilities and rules
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appear, created by many and over which no one person has control. This distinction of the two forms of cyberpower (individual and social) is not a simple opposition between individuals and collectives but an inversion of the relationship between them. In cyberpower of the individual, individuals possessing cyberpowers produce collective bodies and individuals are here understood as the fundamental cause and constituent of community in cyberspace. In opposition to this, what is often realized is that collectives create the conditions under which certain forms of individuality become possible. At both levels of cyberpower virtual individuals and virtual communities exist, but their relations are reversed. Cyberpower of the social derives from the belief that individuals have their possible actions defined by certain social conditions. Any action taken in cyberspace, from buying and selling stock to changing gender in a Mud, occurs only because we have entered a space created and maintained by various technologies – Internet providers, routers, personal computers, optic fibres, modems, and so on. Communities that can be understood as providing the basis for virtual individuals are constituted in-theiressence by technologies. For example, the nature of Usenet communities are primarily defined by the fact that Usenet technologies create discussion groups made out of posts. Different forms of individuality are possible in Muds, such as building virtual homes, and on the Web, such as graphics. All these powers that cyberspace offers the individual are based on communally created and experienced technologies. If you assume cyberspace is the realm of societies and collectives, then a form of technopower now becomes visible. Technopower8 is the constant shifting between objects that appear as neutral – keyboards, monitors, e-mail programmes – and the social or ethical values embedded in these objects by their designers, producers and administrators. Each questions the other. If e-mail software allows many-to-many communication, we can ask why?, who made software do this?, what results from this?, and in asking we open up the inhumane appearance of the programme to find humans who embedded their ethics or ideals in lines of software code. Technopower forms the social structures of cyberspace through a constant shapeshifting between seemingly inert technology and startlingly alive values. It is constituted like an infinite series of Chinese boxes, each opening onto another and each layer composed of the same elements, inert-seeming technology and alive-seeming values. Technopower is also seen in offline life. From car engines (why are they made so powerful?) to ice cream, we live surrounded by technological artefacts that leak social values. The difference between online and offline here is that online social forms are constituted fundamentally, if not totally, from technopowers. When we adopt the perspective of the social in cyberspace, we lose sight of individuals and their powers and bring into focus technopowers that create the possibility that cyberspace exists in the first place. Dead technology always opens on the living, just as it is the living who create technology. At the level of the social, cyberpower is a technopower. However, there is more to say, as a particular direction in virtual technopower can be defined.
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T H E T E C H N O P O W E R S P I R A L A N D I N F O R M AT I O N O V E R L O A D
Information is practically endless in cyberspace and this creates an abstract need for control of information that can never in fact be satisfied, though the provision of ever more complex technologies at times dulls informational hunger. What can be called the technopower spiral is constituted out of three moments: information overload, mastering overload with a tool, and the recurrence of information overload. First, there is the ongoing and repeated sensation of information overload in cyberspace. Cyberspace is the most extreme example of a general acceleration in the production and circulation of information.9 For example, cyberspace encourages people to produce information rather than passively consume it, and information moves faster and in greater quantities in cyberspace than in other spaces. Most powerfully, cyberspace releases information from material manifestations that restrict its flow and increase its price. This constant increase in the sheer amount and speed of information leads many to experience information overload. How many of us know the feeling of signing up to an e-mail list and then finding that the constant flow of e-mails means messages have to be deleted before being read and the group resigned from? How many of us search the Web for a particular topic only to end up with megabytes of files or piles of printouts destined never to be read because there is simply too much? Cyberspace increases information’s velocity and size to such an extent that information overload is a recurrent experience of virtual lives. The second moment in the spiral in technopower is the attempt to master whichever moment of information overload has occurred. Typically, information overload is addressed with new technologies. Various solutions to the glut of information that cyberspace produces have been created and Maes lists intelligent agents that schedule meetings, filter Usenet news and recommend books, music and other entertainment.10 All these share a number of traits. Firstly, they interpose some moment of technology between user and information. This is always a moment in which technopower is articulated because some technological tool, appearing as a thing yet operating according to values, is the means of controlling information overload. Secondly, the devices themselves produce information problems because they need to be installed and used properly. No matter how sophisticated a device the user will need to understand how to manage the device or risk being controlled by it. Thirdly, new tools nearly always make cyberspace easier to use, tending to create a new form of overload. The goal of many tools is to reduce the amount of information received by focusing or managing it in some automated way. However, the very success of any such tool means the production of more information because the tool makes gaining information more efficient and there is always more information waiting out there in the near-infinite reaches of cyberspace. Problems of information overload tend to re-emerge with the devices that become essential to information management themselves producing too much information. For example, search engines such as Yahoo! or Excite tried to meet the need to make the Web’s resources accessible. But now these engines themselves groan under
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the weight of cyberspace’s possibilities, often cataloguing only a small proportion of the total information out there and requiring several searches on different engines. To meet this second-order problem of information overload, meta-search engines have emerged that simultaneously search several other search engines. In this example, the same problem, too much or too poorly organized information, is met twice by technological tools: first search engines and second meta-search engines. The technopower spiral is completed and reinitiated with the emergence of a new problem of information overload. This spiral of overload, tools, more overload and more tools is fundamental to technopower in cyberspace. It means that as individuals pursue their cyberpowers, they constantly demand more tools to master the seemingly infinite amount of information that confronts them. Technopowers are constantly elaborated to meet the demand to control and manage information in cyberspace, thereby ensuring that cyberspace becomes more and more technologically complex. This, in turn, means that the ability to act in cyberspace is constantly elaborated by those who have technological expertise. The digital elite can now be defined as those controlling the expertise to manage and create the virtual possibilities others rely on. Two broad components of this digital elite are those who utilize expertise themselves, such as hackers who rely on their knowledge and skills to manipulate cyberspace’s fabric, and those who manage many people’s expertise, such as corporate leaders like Bill Gates and Windows or collective efforts like Linus Torvalds and Linux who coordinate large groups of experts to create important substructures to online life. The digital elite controls the fabric of cyberspace and the technopower spiral ensures they are increasingly in control of an ever more complex fabric. Cyberpower of the social is a power of domination, through which an elite based on expertise in the technologies that create cyberspace increasingly gain freedom of action, while individual users increasingly rely on forms of technology they have less and less chance of controlling. Ultimately, the direction of technopower in cyberspace is toward greater elaboration of technological tools to more people who have less ability to understand those tools. If cyberpower of the individual was a hopeful form of power, pointing to the increasing range of actions cyberspace can help an individual to take, then cyberpower of the social is pessimistic because it reveals networks of interactions that increase the ability to act of an expertise-based elite. G R A S S R O O T S A N D E L I T E S : T H E C A S E O F R E A L P L AY E R
The connection between individual and social forms of cyberpower is mutually conditioning; it is an embrace of reciprocated subjection. Individuals seek to enhance and protect their powers in cyberspace, often dealing with problems of information overload that threaten to overwhelm them. The resultant demand is for further articulations of technopower in the form of new tools that extend or maintain individuals’ powers. But these tools build the power of the digital
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elite by complicating and extending the elite’s control over the fabric of cyberspace. This interaction can be explored through a brief case study of the 1999 hacking of Real Networks’ RealJukebox. Being able to use video or radio over the Internet extends individuals’ powers. It allows both an extension of consumerism, such as being able to listen to UK radio stations in Australia, and a more profound shift in which being able to set up a radio station becomes much easier. Here a potential change in power from radio, and perhaps television, being open not only to the well financed but to more grassroots development becomes possible. To support this development a whole range of new tools have emerged, a whole new layer of technopower has been elaborated. One of the most widespread is RealPlayer, a software package that allows access to video and radio over the Internet and which is fundamentally free. A related Real product is RealJukebox that facilitates playing music on a PC or over the Internet. We see here an extension of individuals’ powers in their new abilities to hear live radio, to watch live or recorded events or to listen to recorded sounds and to produce and broadcast such material themselves more easily. But in 1999 it was revealed that Real’s tools were doing more than they claimed. Richard Smith is a technologist who explores privacy issues on the Internet. Looking for new material for speeches he was giving, Smith turned to rumours about Real and privacy. He analysed RealJukebox to find that it recorded and sent to Real information on a daily basis. The information included which songs were being recorded on a user’s hard drive, which MP3 player they might own, which songs were being played on their PC’s CD drive and which songs were being downloaded from the Internet. In all cases, information on frequency of use was also recorded. In addition, Smith noticed an encrypted message and he had a friend decrypt it, to find it was a unique identifying number. This number was allocated by Real to a person when they completed the compulsory registration that allowed them to download a free copy of RealJukebox, including details such as name, address and e-mail address. All the information that RealJukebox was secretly sending was thus attached to a number that connected that information to an identifiable individual. Real was illicitly gaining detailed consumer profiles and undermining the privacy of every individual reliant on RealJukebox and it turned out that a similar system was in place in the more widespread RealPlayer.11 Such profiling is a powerful and valuable tool, allowing the identification of individuals and their tastes. The individual still had access to the capabilities of RealPlayer and RealJukebox, but within these tools a part of the digital elite was undermining their privacy and targeting their desires. We see here the simultaneous development of individual power along with domination by digital elites. The embedding of social values in technological tools by elites, such as Real’s desire for surveillance, goes hand in hand with individuals gaining greater abilities to act. A further example, again from Richard Smith, is that much of Microsoft’s software puts personal information in ‘metadata’ in documents that the user of the software never sees or is alerted to. Smith
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reversed this relationship by investigating Microsoft’s 1999 Annual Report to find that it had been written on an Apple Macintosh G3 using Word98 for Macintosh. Microsoft’s own documents demonstrated that they prepared one of their key annual documents using their rival’s operating system. Smith whimsically demonstrated another invasion of privacy embedded in technological tools by the digital elite.12 One key trend within cyberpower is the ongoing battle between digital elites and virtual individuals. It is a trend in which both demand changes from each other and fuel each other’s powers, a trend in which the tools that the grassroots demand simultaneously offer new capabilities for action while undermining other facets of online life. It is not just that the two forms of power feed into each other but that they often simultaneously contradict each other. Further elaborations of technopower can be expected as elites and individuals attempt to exploit each other, but the long-term probability is that each elaboration will leave cyberspace defined by ever more complex technologies and the digital elite ever more in charge of the fabric of cyberspace. CYBERPOWER
Cyberpower aims not at the immediately obvious forms of politics, culture and authority that course through cyberspace but at defining the forces that condition and limit these. Two types of cyberpower, the individual and the social, have been explored in this chapter. Interrelations between these two powers point towards growing control over the fabric of cyberspace by a digital elite, that at the same time must provide more and more possibilities for action for individuals. The control the elite gains is over the technologies that allow cyberspace to exist, and to define what it is possible to do in cyberspace. Yet this control is also affected by the demands and powers of virtual individuals. The case of RealJukebox demonstrates the way technopower is constitutive of the future of life in cyberspace. It is only when seemingly asocial tools are opened up to reveal their embedded values that the new forms of domination of digital elites can be found and, in some cases, turned back against them. The restless, constant change and growth in cyberspace is conditioned by these interrelations of power. Life in cyberspace is suffused with forms of cyberpower.
PA R T I V CYBER ECONOMICS
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INTRODUCTION
The cybernetic properties of modern and postmodern capitalism are in large part the results of economic transformation. Their features and trajectory mirror the innovative potentialities of technological feedback systems, economic production and spatial dispersion that the emergence of ‘cyber economics’ simultaneously makes real and indicates what has only previously been imagined. Concurrently, the advent of the ‘cybereconomy’ is effecting important sociopolitical and cultural shifts and, in particular, those associated with women’s connections with business in cyberspace as consumers and as ‘cybercitizens’. Accordingly, one of the most significant aspects of the concept of ‘cyberspace’ today is that it requires us to reconsider the origin and meaning of the geographical idea of ‘space’. However, a key theme that arises from an understanding of cyber economics and the chapters presented in Part IV is that any attempt to circumscribe human consciousness within a technologically defined and rigidly determined apprehension of the economic and organizational, spatial and social spheres is unlikely to succeed. For any such attempt is an effort to identify the concept of living with cyberspace with the restriction of human consciousness itself. In Chapter 10, the first contribution to Part IV, Ian Miles considers the cybereconomy in relation to modes of power and feedback, interaction and the various elements of economic practices. Paying close attention to the role of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in socio-economic life, Miles investigates the idea of the cybereconomy in terms of how business procedures are coupled with the operations of cybernetics. For Miles, and drawing on his recent work with Andersen and others,1 the appearance of the cybereconomy demonstrates two newly arriving occurrences. The first is the important role played by what he calls ‘knowledge-intensive service firms’ and their workers in helping the evolution of these business undertakings within the context of the ‘knowledge economy’. The second is how ICTs are used to reorganize economic alliances and to redirect business procedures within the framework of the ‘information economy’. The majority of developments in the cybereconomy are enacted in cyberspace, expedited by innovative and unfolding realms of social communication that are growing within what Manuel Castells calls the ‘network enterprise’.2 Yet conjectures concerning the future direction of the cybereconomy have frequently been thwarted. In this chapter, Miles delineates some of the
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technological and social advances that have amazed numerous forward-looking business people and organizations. For example, under cybernetic capitalism, business-boosts to technological development on the part of industrial organizations are often rapidly transformed into an opportunity for consumers to redesign their attributes and, consequently, an occasion for producers to resign themselves to constant anxiety. ICTs are thus no longer the sole province of large producers but sites and signs of consumer activity and adaptation. This shows the shift in emphasis that takes place when cyber economic production is transplanted into the hands of creative consumers. Consequently, Miles views the role of political institutions, non-governmental organizations and political actors of all kinds as significant for the contemporary development of the cybereconomy. One of the founding presumptions of cyber economic theory is that there is something noteworthy about what, for instance, Sean Cubitt has called ‘cybernature’ – the province of ‘second nature’ or the conglomeration of the human and the machine.3 Cybernature is the land of the CYBernetic ORGanism, the ‘cyborg’. Cybernature diverges significantly from what Cubitt labels the ‘antinatural’ – the modern empire of a ‘postnature’ that is technologized and thought of as antinatural – and the ‘supernatural’ or the pre-modern estate that is the world of nature combined with superstition, magic and religious wonder. The noteworthiness of cybernature is formulated in influential conceptualizations such as Donna Haraway’s interpretation of ‘cyberfeminism’.4 Here, as Cubitt puts it, ‘the cyborg embodies the possibility of emergence from gendered nature and gendered technologies into a space in which the body is not a prison where biology is destiny, but a playground of willed and fluid identities’.5 Haraway’s cyborg, as much metaphorical as literal, is therefore a rather flamboyant assertion, a theory-fiction fable for our times concerning technology, the future shape of the human body and contemporary society. This cyborg, which marks out cybernature principally in terms of new feminist economies and the cultural politics of our cyborg nature, such as the prevalence of new forms of desire and virtual identities, is of course promoted by cyberfeminists other than Haraway. These include Allucquére Rosanne Stone, probably one of the USA’s most prominent cyberfeminists today and the author of The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age.6 Chapter 11, by Verena Andermatt Conley, pursues the theme of cybernature albeit not via the domain of Cubitt’s conceptual repertoire but through the kingdom of Haraway’s ‘cyborgian’ cyberfeminism. Conley returns to Haraway’s ‘cyborg manifesto’ and ‘socialist-feminism’ in the light of recent political and economic developments. She reassesses Haraway’s communiqué to the women of the world – first dispatched in the mid-1980s – that they should jack into the circuits of cyberspace and, as Conley puts it, ‘leave the shackles of patriarchy and a traditional symbolic behind’. Even so, Conley reminds us that the economics of living with cyberspace and its cybernetic grids of power and wealth directly affect even those cyberfeminists who, like Haraway, would ‘rather be a cyborg than a goddess’. Conley thus delivers a twenty-first century
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feminist perspective on Haraway’s particular characterization of cyberfeminism and what might be termed ‘cybersocialism’. But for Conley womencybercitizens must do more than make ‘simple connections’. Rather, they need to influence and to reinvent the perpetually changing cybernetic and economic organization of the world. Even in Haraway’s world of cyborg manifestos, goddesses and machines, then, women-cybercitizens must confront not only technology but also political economy. In Castells’ commentary on political economy, the origins and meaning of space is primarily located in contemporary dominions such as the ‘space of places’ – the hustle and bustle of the city streets – or the ‘space of flows’ – the serene silence of the privatized electronic spaces of The Network Society.7 Can we conclude from such commentaries that the concept of space is a comparatively novel theory of the history of humanity? Certainly, it is possible, and evidence exists from antiquity onwards, to conceive of the idea of space as something that cannot easily be separated from the notion of time. Whilst apprehensions of space have altered periodically since it was constructed from a theoretical and geometric standpoint, it is clear that, since at least the time of Aristotle, a tangible impression of space has been missing from the discipline of political economy. In Chapter 12, the final chapter of Part IV and also of the volume as a whole, Phil Graham considers the source and significance of the concept of space within cyber economic discourses of cyberspace. Invoking the idea of ‘concrete space’, Graham seeks to eschew the diminution of space to a facet of time. For to view space as an adjunct of time, Graham argues, is to neglect the historical reality of the founding moments of advanced capitalism, moments which, regardless of what people produced in them, were constructed upon concrete spaces. Moreover, if concrete space is to be employed in any meaningful sense then it must be inhabited solely, lawfully and independently. Indeed, what is critical for the continuous functioning of capitalism is the necessity of transforming capital’s vision of private property into a social fact. Graham notes that in some circumstances it is hard to picture let alone establish the space within which specific communities take action so that it could be split into individual units. For Graham, the techno-legal and political definitions associated with the development of private property over the course of the history of capitalism cannot be conceived of beyond the pre-existence of a number of everyday and variable social connections within particular spaces. In his contribution, then, Graham proposes that ‘we create the possibility for property only by doing what we do within certain spaces’. His suggestion evokes that of the geographer, David Harvey,8 in that Graham asserts that human conceptions concerning the importance of space are linked to their ideas and knowledge of property and work, family, community, nationality and different kinds of social and symbolic spaces. In the final analysis, Graham is insistent that social and symbolic spaces are manifestly dissimilar from the concrete space he focuses on in the early sections
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of Chapter 12. This is because, for Graham, ‘geotechnical’ spaces like land, sea and air continue not merely unrelated to the activities people perform in them but also separately to the experience of containment and constraint they sometimes feel when their efforts encroach on the activities of others. In what Graham calls ‘electrospace’ (the radio spectrum) he detects the monopolization of economic space. Electrospace has thus become a geotechnical attribute of both cyberspace and the fluctuations of human decision-making. In this way, cyberspace is at once presently being carefully prepared for privatization at all spatial scales and yet also remains an incoherent worldwide public data bank. For Graham, global electrospace is the all-embracing concrete space. It is, in conclusion, the cybernetic space that currently allows for the planetary development of an economic realm for the simultaneous manufacture, misappropriation and reciprocity of conscious social action.
10 TOWARDS THE CYBERECONOMY
MAKING A BUSINESS OUT O F C Y B E R S PA C E
Ian Miles
The prefix ‘cyber’ draws our attention to processes of feedback, control, and interaction between different components of systems. It also signifies new Information Technology (IT), which is now being applied to many of these processes in social and economic life. Thus, if we are to explore the term ‘cybereconomy’, it will make sense to consider how business processes are articulated together through processes of cybernetic feedback. In terms of relatively new and emerging phenomena here, we can suggest, for example, the role of knowledge-intensive service firms and employees in aiding the development of these business processes. This aspect of the cybereconomy is sometimes referred to as the knowledge economy. It also makes sense to consider the ways in which IT is applied to restructure economic relationships and refocus business strategy. This aspect of the cybereconomy is often known as the information economy.1 This chapter will provide a brief introduction to some of the main issues raised by these approaches to the cybereconomy, looking at how ‘cyberspace’ – the new arenas for social interaction that are being created in information networks – has evolved and been involved in new business practices. Expectations about how the cybereconomy would develop have repeatedly been upset, as social and technological developments have taken entrepreneurs and forecasters alike by surprise. In particular, the ways in which new IT might be used, and the design features required for its large-scale uptake, have been difficult to anticipate. Large businesses continue to seek to shape the cybereconomy, but consumers are often actively adapting technology to their interests, rather than passively adopting what they are sold. The role of political institutions and non-governmental organizations can also be
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important, but the cybereconomy is creating new challenges for political actors of all sorts.2 C O N S T R U C T I N G C Y B E R S PA C E
The Internet originated in a network established to connect researchers in US defence projects in the 1960s, and for a long time the main users of computer networking systems were researchers in (usually government-funded) areas of big science and high-tech (such as nuclear physics and space research). During the 1970s, experience of new IT was sufficiently widespread for people to begin seeking ways of making the potentials that they could foresee more generally available. There was even a movement entitled ‘Computer Liberation’, in the USA, which stimulated the creation of build-it-yourself computer kits for hobbyists, and of the very first personal desktop computers. Another line of development was pursued by European telecommunications authorities (still in the public sector at that time), who sought to give people network access to large-scale computer facilities. These latter efforts to create a widely used cyberspace (the term itself had not been invented yet, of course) involved the image of mass access to large-scale information utilities (to paraphrase the title of a representative book).3 The dominant experience of IT users until the late 1970s was one of large computers accessed by fairly feeble peripherals. By extrapolation, the idea was that commercial services could be provided to a wider public in this way. Simple terminals could be linked via phone lines to improved databases, giving users access to news, timetables, databases and (perhaps) the services of professionals and retailers. This vision was at the heart of videotex (in Europe, Singapore, Canada – similar early computer-communications systems for non-specialists such as Compuserve and Prodigy also emerged in the USA in the 1980s). The aim was to reach out and provide resources to the mass of people not belonging to those few sectors of research and business prepared to pay handsomely for information. The implicit vision of the cybereconomy, then, envisaged new content industries supplementing the computer and telecommunications sectors; and improved delivery of educational, financial and other information. In the early 1980s – about the time the personal computer (PC) was first making its mark – determined efforts were made to establish videotex as the decisive step towards a mass online economy. However, only France’s Minitel (with free terminals) managed to achieve the anticipated commercial success and public acclaim; in most countries only small numbers of computer hobbyists and a few business sectors really took to the medium. Furthermore, it became clear that where videotex was successful in attracting user interest, what proved most dynamic was not access to databases, but interpersonal messaging. After this, some specialist and hobbyist news services and types of consumer electronic commerce (e-commerce) attracted some traffic. A similar pattern emerged in the US media.
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While videotex languished, PCs gradually became commonplace in offices and even homes. A community of users acquired basic skills, and rising expectations as to what IT could provide grew. Computers could be linked through the Internet, overcoming many of the barriers of cumbersome and proprietary online services. The term ‘cyberspace’ had been coined by William Gibson in the 1980s, with his science fiction stories celebrating outlaws such as hackers.4 At the end of the 1980s the Web was invented in a public research laboratory, again to promote the exchange of scientific information. Since data of all kinds could be accessed via websites, once browsers were invented to let people easily locate relevant information, and Internet service providers (ISPs) made connection easy, established online services were turned on their heads. The Web set off on its explosive development in the 1990s, finally creating the level (if not the style) of mass use of cyberspace that videotex’s proponents had dreamed of. Existing business and consumer services ‘migrated’ to web formats – and there was an explosion of new information (and misinformation, opinion, entertainment, etc.) sources.5 Now the image of the Wild Web displaced the view of cyberspace as a domain controlled by large authoritative organizations (often public authorities) providing information resources to users (Table 10.1 contrasts these two images). The skills and motivation required for effective use of the Web were the province of millions of people rather than a few large organizations. These millions of PC users, in effect, could say what they wanted, to whom they wanted, by setting up websites or using e-mail. But in this view, anything goes, in cyberspace – you cannot trust anyone to be who or what they claim, any service to deliver what it offers. Pornography, illicit copying of intellectual property, and similar activities flourish. The cybereconomy is a frontier economy. A few pioneers finding riches, with fraudsters and villains stealing other people’s assets, and with all sorts of barter and communal sharing going on that a more modernized – or tamed – economy would control or supersede. This image has continued to be popular. In the first years of the twenty-first century, Napster rapidly established a community of several tens of millions of users exchanging MP3 music files with each other. This sent shivers down the spine of the recorded music industry; its response being a legal challenge to Napster for misappropriation of the industry’s intellectual property rights. Napster reached an agreement with the music business about charging for content, but it will be hard to control all such virtual communities, since several models have been introduced which are less vulnerable to legal action than Napster. These systems enable members to access valued material (which may have been produced purely for fun or interest, may come at a price, or have been pirated from some publisher). Some commentators see these models as hopeful examples of how commodity exchange may be transcended; others see such ‘peer-to-peer’ networking as a way of creating large-scale distributed databases for the cybereconomy, and are seeking ways of establishing commercial applications.
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Table 10.1 Information utilities versus Wild Web Information utilities
Wild Web
Information provision (Web presence)
Perceived high costs of computer equipment and network access. Together with the need for professionalism in information production, presentation, updating, etc., makes this a task which can only be successfully addressed by sophisticated and usually large and authoritative organizations.
Breakthroughs in Web interfaces and authoring software, and low cost of PCs and Internet access, make it possible for practically anyone to publish practically anything via the new media.
Locating information suppliers (customer recognition)
Large and authoritative organizations, which are typically already actively providing information and other services to the same user communities, have little trouble making their presence and availability known via centralized registries of databases held by one (or at most a very few) providers of access to online services.
Users have access to a much wider range of sources of information than they are used to. They need to become sophisticated in developing their own sense of reliable and relevant information sources. There is a major role for proactive users and information suppliers to develop directories, ‘hot lists’ of useful sites, travellers’ guides, and the like.
Locating information (search)
Information has to be provided in an accessible form by providers – typically by a combination of layered menus, and facilities to search by keywords. The authoritative suppliers can model the search systems on their existing catalogues, directories, etc.
As above, there is a major role for users to play in helping each other locate relevant material. Too much prescription as to how websites are organized will deter innovation, however.
One element of the cybereconomy is a revitalized gift economy, and another is the challenge, from both organized and inchoate social groups, to conventional modes of business. (Witness the proliferation of sites attacking globalization or particular companies or practices, or promoting consumer interests, etc.) But capitalism has shown itself extremely capable of appropriating countercultural innovations in the past: the jury is out on the claim that things are really different now. In any case, the romance of the Wild Web is defended by such libertarian promoters of electronic messaging as the Electronic Frontier Foundation. They have argued vociferously and articulately against public
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and private initiatives to regulate cyberspace content, privacy, and the like. Many Web activists have shown themselves capable of innovating around what they see as efforts to curtail freedom or privacy. To their frequent irritation, the take-off of the Web has also fostered more commercial interest. The twentyfirst century dawned with a ‘dot com frenzy’ as huge sums of money were invested in (often dubious) start-up companies seeking to offer consumer and retail services in cyberspace. The cybereconomy could be a mass-consumption economy. But Business-to-Consumer (B2C) e-commerce, while attracting the lion’s share of media and stock market attention, is generally agreed to represent only a fraction of the whole e-commerce scene. Business-to-Business (B2B) applications are as much as ten times more important in terms of value. They will probably remain so, because: • behind every consumer transaction there is typically a long chain of B2B transactions in intermediate goods and services; • many of these goods and services are provided by computerized organizations, and they and the transactions may well be routinely logged on company databases; • companies have the staff and resources to invest in exploring and integrating e-commerce systems. This is not to say that everything is plain sailing. Small companies in particular may not have time or expertise to devote to new IT applications, which may require costly and difficult reorganization of databases – especially where conformance with the standards used by other organizations is needed. Most businesses were thus much slower to adopt electronic data interchange (EDI) for commercial transactions than expected in the 1980s and 1990s. This slow uptake again exemplifies the cybereconomy’s tendency to evolve in unanticipated ways. T H E R E V O L U T I O N D E L AY E D ?
6
Robert Solow noted that ‘you can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics’. In other words, despite all of the investments in new IT, standard economic statistics show few signs of a cybereconomy having emerged. Investment would have been expected to bring business improvements, but many managers had been complaining about the lack of pay-off from IT expenditure. The 1990s saw a great deal of discussion of Solow’s ‘productivity paradox’, and among the arguments which were employed in efforts to resolve it were: • Inadequacies of the statistics. Our statistical systems are largely designed for counting outputs of standard material goods: they fail to capture quality improvements in services and in IT products in particular (where
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the amount being spent is a poor proxy for the computing power being delivered). • Overselling of the technology. IT may have rapidly increased its share of investment in equipment, but it is still a small fraction of overall capital investment. Furthermore, the new technology is far less efficient and effective than its proponents claim. The gains it may bring can be offset by system failures, learning costs, frequent (often unnecessary) upgrades and other problems. • Insufficient organizational change and learning. New ways of structuring work and new management practices reflecting the information and information processing made available by IT are required for the technology to do more than automate established ways of doing things piecemeal. The cybereconomy should involve more than just the proliferation of IT hardware and software; it implies effective use of these technological capabilities, especially the scope for networking, which means new communications patterns, not just the speeding-up of information-processing activities. By the turn of the millennium evidence was emerging suggesting that the productivity paradox was beginning to recede – perhaps reflecting organizational learning and the increased use of networking capabilities. During the 1990s several studies had appeared indicating that performance improvements in firms could be associated with IT use. For example, a correlation was reported between higher levels of IT capital and increased productivity in large US companies, especially those using IT to enhance customer service.7 Other studies confirmed this general picture, and provided evidence that major productivity improvements were emerging in the US economy. (Paul Schreyer has recently provided a measured overview of the discussions and data.8) Slower adoption of networking, and less sophisticated managerial analysis of the new capabilities, quite possibly underpinned the lack of such a trend in Europe. In the maturing cybereconomy, the islands of automation are increasingly networked together. Furthermore, many more devices – not only mainframes and PCs, but also mobile phones, digital TVs, and so on – are proliferating. Manuel Castells has written eloquently on the rise of the network economy.9 The stock market frenzy over ‘dot com’ companies at the turn of the millennium reflected first, a perception of the important changes under way and in the offing, and second, investors’ difficulties in developing informed assessments of new opportunities and picking winners from among a horde of competing services. E-commerce firms – especially those offering business to consumer ecommerce – were at the heart of the stock market storm of 1999/2000. A major problem for investors and technology-watchers has been that the models for effective IT use in the networked economy are still being established, as ecommerce demonstrates. E-commerce is of considerably more significance than the chance it offers investors to reap huge rewards or make huge losses on the stock market.
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E-commerce is networking applied to the transactional elements of economic activities, linking the islands of automation of factory-floor production, warehouses, offices, and so on. Richard Lewney10 discusses the potential consequences of e-commerce for economic activities. It may reduce the time and effort purchasers require to identify suppliers and compare their offers. This lowers search costs, and should increase competition among suppliers – pushing them to lower profit margins or greater efficiency (the former redistributes income, the latter increases the income that can be distributed through the economy). E-commerce should also reduce transaction costs, by removing the need for costly human intermediation (e.g. online banking is much cheaper than telephone banking, let along conventional high street banking), and substantially reduce the cost of tailoring offerings to purchasers’ requirements. E-commerce can provide more complete and timely information such as better matching of supplier offers to purchaser requirements (improved capture and processing of data on purchasers), and more effective collaboration between (physically remote) people and establishments (allowing for decreased inventories, cost and time in product development, etc.). More extensive organizational changes may involve restructuring the value chain. This can take the form of ‘disintermediation’, for example, direct sales to users from producers and wholesalers; and of ‘reintermediation’ such as new ‘infomediaries’ assisting in searching for suppliers, in aggregating the demands of different purchasers so as to achieve more leverage and scale economies, in providing facilities for online auctions, and so on. Other new businesses may form to underpin e-money arrangements, to authenticate credentials (trust services), and, of course, to support web hosting and the delivery of physical goods. Lewney reviewed a number of efforts to estimate the potential economic impacts of e-commerce via economic models, and undertook an ambitious modelling exercise. The models suggest increased GDP resulting from ecommerce of 2–5 per cent in the long term – five to ten years – depending on the speed at which e-commerce is introduced. Of course, such estimates are also highly dependent on the detailed assumptions that are made as to the ways in which e-commerce might change prices, demand and other phenomena. They also reflect the speed with which the developments unfold: recent experience suggests there are liable to be false starts and disappointed expectations. The media frenzy about B2C e-commerce, as we saw, contradicts industry estimates that the great majority of e-commerce activity is B2B. Even B2B cannot be assured of speedy diffusion: the slow uptake of EDI shows that persuasive arguments as to cost savings may not be sufficient to convince many firms to move towards putting their transactions online.11 In the EDI world, many small firms were only using the technology because they were pressured into it by their large business partners, whose clout they could not resist. In principle, the new models of e-commerce on the Web are very different from EDI. They work to common standards rather than within proprietary networks. This allows for new entrants to rapidly set up e-commerce systems,
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and to tailor these to the company’s own established frameworks for describing products and product characteristics. This also allows companies to represent themselves in their own preferred terms, with innovation in design and facilities. EDI requires an accommodation to the standardized classifications required to interact with other parties on the network that many businesses have been reluctant to undertake. Such standardized frameworks do at least permit more automated search and purchasing, and reduce the learning times required for users to get to know their trading partners. Idiosyncratic websites impose more search costs on users – thus, one is often forced repeatedly to input the same or a similar set of details in a different format, rather than being able to recycle information prepared for other transactions. Large efficiency gains from using e-commerce may thus remain elusive, or partners may be ‘locked in’ to each other by reluctance to take the time to learn a new system. It takes time, too, to create the new business models that enable integration of internal and external processes, and the restructuring of supply chains and patterns of collaboration across organizations. Such models may enable not just cost saving but also more rapid response and innovation. But they require organizational learning. FENCING THE ELECTRONIC FRONTIER?
The wide diffusion of the Internet and Web systems in the late 1990s prompted a sea change in attitudes. A wave of enthusiasm for electronic markets gathered strength, and a wide range of new services were established – such as online auctions, customer aggregation (allowing economies of scale through bulk buying), and search systems allowing for comparison of costs and product features. Such developments helped give rise to a new image of cyberspace, as the realization of more perfect markets. The information imperfections of traditional markets would be overcome, allowing for reduced transaction costs, greater efficiency, and scope for small players to compete on more level playing fields with big operators. The libertarian capitalist vision here in many respects is compatible with that of a Wild Web. All that is required is the introduction of more entrepreneurial spirit, and a few sheriffs and their deputies to civilize the barbaric early settlers and to tame the outlaws and bandits (for which read hackers, fraudsters and information pirates). The increasing volume of commercial activity on the Web has fuelled concern about the commercialization of cyberspace, the fencing of the electronic frontier. The critical developments here include: • Inauthenticity. The Wild Web has its share of websites expounding crackpot ideas – but now there is a proliferation of commercial sites. Rather than sharing information freely, these are often seeking to promote their own sales or causes (sometimes covertly). • Collusion. Such commercial sites, through clever seeding of, and agreements with providers of, portals and search engines, appear early and frequently
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in search results. Often the results of Web searches are swamped by vast volumes of the cyberspace equivalents of junk mail and leaflet litter. • Misinfomediaries. Apparently independent services that offer price comparisons and similar functions are suspect. The ‘best value product’ that is located may be chosen more on the basis of commercial arrangements than on an objective comparison of quality and price. • Portal power. Many of the newer users of the Internet are effectively ‘locked in’ to particular portals by the financial and learning costs associated with changing service providers. (The portal of first call is often dictated by software bundled with the PC, mobile phone or digital TV – changing this software is sometimes simple, but may require expertise and/or a third party.) Commercial portals are liable to guide and restrict access to websites, especially on the new platforms of mobile phones and digital TV. Needless to say, the portals receive fees and/or a share of revenue from the services to which they route users. • Cyberplaypens. ‘Lock in’ can be more than a matter of requiring user effort to escape a portal. In the digital TV sites in particular, there is considerable effort to create so-called ‘walled gardens’. Here the range of sites and services that can be accessed is very heavily selected by the network provider/ broadcaster. This selection looks likely to be a function of (high) payment – just as national TV advertisements mainly feature only cash-rich firms. The ‘Internet’ that is offered the user is a pale imitation of the Web we know and love. Parents may feel secure that their children are not accessing pornography or being accessed by paedophiles, but there is less access, too, for small or local businesses, or unorthodox political content. How far such trends will dominate depends on the strength of the forces behind the other visions of the cybereconomy.12 The different visions offer partial views of some potentials, strategies and trends in the cybereconomy – will it operate as a much more level playing field, offering access to a wider range of commercial and non-commercial providers of resources, goods and services, or as a complex of constructed and collusively constrained markets? Table 10.2 compares these two images in a systematic way. The new electronic markets are constructed and to some extent contested. They are constructed by the strategies of companies, regulators, and users of cyberspace. They are contested internally – in that there are different portal providers, even if on some platforms and in some countries the situation is highly monopolistic or oligopolistic. They are contested externally, by libertarian and other critics who seek to give people tools to escape the portals, to make it harder for firms to track their buying and browsing habits, and so on. And they are beginning to attract the attention of regulators, who are becoming aware that the issue is not just about stopping AT&T or BT grabbing too big a share of online services, but concerns much more complex patterns of inclusion, exclusion and collusion in cyberspace – and thus involves the shaping of the cybereconomy more generally.
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Table 10.2 Freed markets versus fenced frontiers Freed markets
Fenced frontiers
Information provision (Web presence)
Easy for small players to create high-quality websites and to compete with big players. Becomes even easier as userfriendly and cheap software and service providers become more available.
High skill requirements to create and maintain sites, and labour costs of real-time transactions and other interactions give substantial advantages to big players. Problem will increase as websites become more sophisticated and demanding.
Locating information suppliers (customer recognition)
Small players able to be located speedily if websites designed appropriately. Need to be able to understand customer information requirements (which will guide search requests), and smaller firms often have better client relations. ‘Translation costs’ reduced.
Brand names more trusted and used for navigation by clients. Large firms spend much on marketing and advertising their Web presence, ensuring high recognition.
Locating information (search)
Customers and clients can use powerful tools to locate and compare products and supplies, to find cheapest prices, etc. This will increase efficiency of economic processes and create more level playing fields.
Many search engines are not sources of independent advice, but reflect instead commercial partnerships. Large companies can flood cyberspace with ‘hits’ that are really mere marketing.
C O N C L U S I O N S : C R E AT I N G T H E C Y B E R E C O N O M Y
This chapter has argued that the cybereconomy is being produced through the interplay of the choices and strategies of numerous social and economic actors. This interplay often has results that are quite unlike the one-sided anticipations of progress that have been made by forecasters and many proponents of new IT.13 We took the example of e-commerce and the use of cyberspace to demonstrate that visions of the cybereconomy have changed dramatically over time, and that the nature of this new economy is a social construct rather than a given. The new networking capabilities create opportunities for major innovations in practically all economic processes (design, production, transactions, etc.), and in practically all economic sectors. The awareness of the potential significance of information and IT strategies is liable to grow for organizations of all sorts – not least in response to efforts to fence the electronic frontier, such as
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those noted above. We can expect to see more discussion about the structures governing the cybereconomy, and its ground rules. A process of mutual learning, in which people are inspired or repelled by the actions of others and influence these actions in one way or another, and where the configurations of technologies, regulations and applications co-evolve, is under way. The cybereconomy does not just permit feedback and interaction between economic agents, then, it is itself shaped by such feedback and interaction processes among social actors. The big challenge is for social and organizational innovation – including new political strategies and alliances – to keep pace with the rapidly expanding technological potentials.14
11 WOMEN-CYBERCITIZENS
Ve r e n a A n d e r m a t t C o n l e y
Nearly two decades ago, Donna Haraway’s provocative ‘Cyborg Manifesto for a Socialist Feminism’ sent a clear message to women, urging them to connect in cyberspace and leave the shackles of patriarchy and a traditional symbolic behind. ‘I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess,’ exclaimed the author defiantly in her conclusion.1 Of particular importance for feminists speculating about living in cyberspace from the point of view of political economy in the twenty-first century, is Haraway’s specific mention of feminism in connection with socialism: ‘I would like to sketch a picture of possible unity, a picture indebted to socialist and feminist principles of design.’2 In this chapter, I want to reassess Haraway’s manifesto today with an emphasis on feminism and political economy. FEMINIST ECONOMIES
For Haraway, feminist emancipation even when attained by connecting ‘online’ cannot be thought outside of a political liberation with socialist inflections. Indeed, in his writings on political economy, Marx argued that social relations are governed by economic relations and that societies function according to power relations that remain largely invisible.3 Groups in power naturalize or essentialize terms that are, in fact, caught in historical configurations. Complementing Marx’s findings, Engels declared that in a bourgeois society based on a capitalism of accumulation, women are considered the property of men. Private property produces inequality among social classes and the sexes. A century later, informed by structuralism and poststructuralism, feminists writing in the wake of the events of May 1968 in Paris denounced patriarchal, symbolic modes of exchange felt to be one with bourgeois capitalism. According to a poststructuralist credo, they denounced a neo-Hegelian dialectic based on the recognition of one of the terms at the expense of the other – usually the woman – and announced that all terms are relational. To change one term affects all the others. Combining feminism with socialism, these women focused specifically on altering existing modes of symbolic and economic exchange. One of them, Luce Irigaray, put it thus: ‘Trade that organizes
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patriarchal societies, takes place exclusively among men. Women, signs, goods, currency all pass from one man to another.’4 And, exhorting feminists, she asks: ‘But what if the “goods” refused to go to the market? What if they maintained among themselves another kind of trade?’5 It is to insure its power that patriarchy – one in the West with bourgeois capitalism – had upheld a strict division between subjects and objects and reduced the latter to the status of commodities to be exchanged and circulated. A F E M I N I S T C R I T I Q U E O F R E P R E S E N TAT I O N
To help maintain a status quo in the world through culture, bourgeois capitalism had mobilized an art based on representation, that is, on the assumption of a pre-existing world to be imitated and of which realism was the dominant mode. To represent the world ‘as it is’, disallows the exposure of hidden power relations. When seeking to transform bourgeois forms of exchange and their corresponding symbolic orders that excluded them, post-1968 feminists questioned representation and substituted the latter with imaginary forms of writing. They undermine the symbolic with an imaginary that focuses on the words themselves. Imaginary creations are inventions; they are part of an art of writing. A direct link between word and referent is put in question. Words are no longer used to substitute things or people, but to ‘approach’ them. All writing becomes allegorical and there is no more final truth. Writing after Marx but also Freud, feminists declare that every attempt at mimesis is an economimesis. One’s relation to the wor(l)d is always filtered through one’s own story. Having criticized the past that excluded them, the women (re)invent the future by looking for different ways of relating to others and the world. This new world would no longer be based solely on possession and accumulation, facilitated by political, linguistic or symbolic economies. Post-1968 feminists appealed to Martin Heidegger’s pronouncements to argue for poetry as techne¯ against an instrumental technology that, one with capitalism and representation, enframes and controls the world.6 They also invoked Michel Foucault who, in Discipline and Punish, traces the history of a progressive disciplining of the subject and denounces repressive technologies of the body, including grammar and syntax, used to control and immobilize women.7 Feminists argued for (psychic) mobility through imaginary, poetic inventions and through other ways of exchanging among people and the world, be it by word or deed. The link between word and referent (or world) is no longer essentializing. Representation is replaced by allegory and invention. The emphasis is on how with words, new links are created between people and the world. The world is no longer simply there to be imitated, nor do words make it disappear entirely. Rather, through the power of invention, new worlds are made possible and new links created.
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S I M U L AT I O N
It was barely ten years later and while this line of argument still had currency that Donna Haraway launched her own manifesto. Without discounting the repressive tendencies of technologies decried by poststructuralists, the biologist turned culture critic argued nonetheless for a liberating force of cybertechnologies that do away with many of the repressive ways denounced by Irigaray and other feminists. Keenly aware of an epistemological shift that was taking place under the impact of new cybertechnologies, Haraway prophesied the death of Foucault’s clinic that was instrumental in the disciplining of the body, the end of representation and hailed the advent of simulation. Giving the feminist argument a new inflection, Haraway declared that since representation was used to essentialize women, a cyber culture based on simulation can only be liberating. No longer tied to a referent or the world, and no longer cast as unwilling victims in a staged Oedipal drama, women were, in Haraway’s account, free to invent and reinvent themselves through simulation. When everything has become artificial, there are no more essences. While celebrating the liberating side of cyberspace, she made it clear that its advent was facilitated by yet another turn in the evolution of capitalism. Indeed, against post-1968 utopian visions, she showed how a capitalism of accumulation gave way, in the 1960s, to one of circulation. Commodities were superseded by a circulation of signs and money. This new economy promoting consumption, simulation and a circulation of signs, invalidated – at least in theory – exclusions based on racism as well as sexism. In a world dominated increasingly by markets, only those who cannot be productive are excluded, regardless of race or sex. Far from being duped, Haraway showed that the shift that takes place, and affects all areas of knowledge, has both positive and negative effects on women. Though gender is no longer an issue in an economy that is not interested in families or in women as home-makers, for historical reasons, those who were previously excluded often find themselves again in inferior positions. In spite of this caveat, in a moment of utopia and hope, Haraway dwells at greater length on the benefits of cyberspace for women and only hints at some of the dangers to come. Writing at the height of postmodernism, and heavily indebted in her use of simulation to the work of Jean Baudrillard, especially as reread by Fredric Jameson in his article on the cultural logic in late capitalism, Haraway unabashedly declared the end of the old and the beginning of the new,8 and that transformations of humans’ social space under the impact of teletechnologies and cyberspace would bring about a new social and political order. Haraway argued for the necessity of ‘a politics rooted in claims about fundamental changes in the nature of class, race, and gender in an emerging system of world order analogous in its novelty and scope to that created by industrial capitalism’.9 ‘We are living’, she declared, ‘through a movement from an organic, industrial society to a polymorphous, information system – from all work to all
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play, a deadly game.’10 In the process, the concept of labour is lost and so are the real and truth when all is simulation. Unlike feminists who criticize the oppression of women from within the framework created by industrial capitalism and argue for a return to precapitalist and pre-technological modes, Haraway made it clear that humans live on the threshold of a radical reconfiguration. She made a chart of transitions from the comfortable old hierarchical dominations to the scary new networks she called the ‘informatics of domination’.11 Haraway’s columns point to the rapid reorganization of a complex world in which, under the impact of cybertechnologies, all disciplines evolve rapidly. The major transitions that affect all areas of knowledge include the shift from representation (or mimesis) to simulation as distinct from invention (or economimesis), from the bourgeois novel and realism to science fiction and postmodernism, from depth and integrity to surface or boundary, from heat to noise, from biology as clinical practice to biology as inscription, from decadence to obsolescence, from reproduction to replication, from community ecology to ecosystems, from a racial chain of being to neo-imperialism or United Nations’ humanism, from family/market/factory to women in the integrated circuit, from public/private to cyborg citizenship, and from white capitalist patriarchy to informatics of domination.12 The list goes on. If some of the claims seem, retrospectively, to be symptomatic of a moment of exhilaration and euphoria, the general line of reasoning still holds. When going from one column to the other, from nature to artifice, the first term is invalidated as well. Haraway writes emphatically: ‘We cannot go back ideologically or materially. It’s not just that “god” is dead so is the “goddess”.’13 It is not a question of remedying an omission in a tradition by inserting a missing term. The shift that occurs reorganizes all terms. One can no longer think in terms of essential properties so important for nineteenth-century bourgeois capitalism and patriarchy. In an era of simulation and complex systems, humans think in terms of noise, boundary constraints, rates of flows, systems logic and obsolescence. Current paradigms from science and technologies are used to think through the world. Haraway is close here to Baudrillard who, already in System of Objects published in French in 1966, commented on the disappearance of the symbolic order with its essentializing properties and moral constraints in relation to new ways of relating to objects. Before the widespread advent of computers, Baudrillard notes an evolution in the exchange and circulation of commodities toward consumption. When objects no longer personify human relationships or are invested with the moral constraints and essences that give coherence to a patriarchal world order, then humans are free to invent and reinvent their own space in which all is simulated. This is of particular importance for those who were oppressed and kept in an assigned place by the previous order with its economic and symbolic forms of exchange thought to be immutable. In the realm of culture, simulation predates its current use in cybertechnologies. Baudrillard makes it clear that humans’ new-found freedom under the
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impact of simulation cannot be separated from a capitalist economy of consumption, one with advertisements or slogans and, at the same time, from material and spiritual loss. The transformation from representation to simulation does away with interiority and opens to a new exteriority in the world.14 There is loss but also gain. On the one hand, humans lose their fixed place in society and thus have access to a new mobility, on the other, identity is henceforth based on status derived from material possessions and, increasingly, a circulation of signs. Simulation comes with the transition from commodity capitalism to another based on structural laws of value. At first, this gives women and other oppressed groups a sense of freeing themselves, a sense that will be intensified manifold with the advent of cyberspace. Cyberspace will do away with the symbolic order by means of simulation in ways that, at first, seem far more radical than either the pre-technological ‘imaginary’ of other feminists or Baudrillard’s simulation. Yet, the disappearance of the symbolic, the culture critic warns his readers, comes at a price: that of the loss of ‘soul’. Indeed, the radical substitution of representation with simulation brings with it its own set of problems. Where a poststructuralist feminist critique of representation introduced new links between word and thing, between word and body, simulation cuts all links. With it, the weighty body and the world seemingly disappear. This may be an inevitable outcome in an increasingly digitized world. Yet the latter, to repeat, can never be separated from new forms of capitalism that, through the omnipresence of advertisement, through an excess of words and images, is solely intent on increasing circulation and profits. Simulation is coopted by a system that renders the world and its power relations invisible. Seen thus, this new condition of mobility obtained by simulation in cyberspace is perhaps not so desirable after all. Women should, perhaps, explore less the possibility of substituting nature with artifice, than of creating different links that would be neither pre-technological nor entirely simulated. While continuing to emphasize the importance of changes in production and reproduction, we can argue for the creation of new links somewhere between the bodily links proposed by feminists associated with the events of 1968 and Donna Haraway’s notions of connectivity, between an organic gathering or linking and purely technical ways of connecting. Where few will dispute today the growing importance of cyberspace in all areas of women’s lives, even fewer will be purely celebratory. Daily use of cyberspace now encompasses most areas of women’s lives, from corresponding with distant friends and business partners to shopping and paying bills online, to reading news, gathering information, watching films or listening to music. In spite of spectacular results in areas such as distribution of knowledge all over the world, reactions to cyberspace have ranged from outright condemnation by earlier feminists, recently joined by male culture critics from Paul Virilio to Slavoj Zizek who see in it a loss of ‘humanness’ and a ‘threat to sexual relations’, to celebrations of new forms of desire and virtual identities in the writings of Rosanne Allucquére Stone or Sherry Turkle.
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Avoiding one or the other extreme, we can take another look at cyberspace, specifically from four points made by Haraway on simulation, cyborg citizenship, neo-imperialism or United Nations’ humanism, and informatics of domination. We will pay special attention to modes of linking in connection with symbolic and economic forms of exchange. A S I M U L AT E D W O R L D
The first point, to repeat, is that when a world of simulation replaces one based on representation, when a world of disappearance replaces appearance, this is beneficial to all those excluded since it does away with the very criterion of exclusion.15 In a digitized world of bytes, pixels, with no more models, everything can be reconfigured instantly. The world of labour – based on physics – becomes a game – based on information. We do not simply add simulation or cyberspace to our existing lives, we transform – or reorganize – all of our lives. Yet, as we have shown, the current transition risks doing away not only with gender but also with all other symbolic forms of human relations. Today’s world of simulation cannot be thought outside present forms of a capitalism that is only interested in selling and that wants to create markets by creating desire. On the one hand, simulation is liberating, on the other, far from doing away with existing power relations, it leads to new forms of domination by the market and empties human relations of their ‘soul’. When simulation replaces cumbersome and hierarchical symbolic with a mere circulation of signs, it leaves a void that many humans currently attempt to fill by resorting to new forms of spirituality, from new age conversions, to inspirational and self-help literature, to religion – though the last itself can no longer be thought outside of a market. WOMEN-CYBERCITIZENS
This brings us to our second point, that is, the disappearance of the opposition between private/public in favour of what Haraway calls cyborg citizenship. Displacing her emphasis somewhat, we can argue that, in a world that no longer recognizes measures of success that have currency in traditional systems of authority – such as marriage or children for women – and in which the only measure of achievement is that of public recognition and money, the private realm is devalorized. Women have to rethink existing categories such as marriage, children or housekeeping and reorient themselves toward a public sphere that alone counts in today’s economy. At the same time, the withering away of symbolic systems guaranteed by traditional authority restructures human relations. With the devalorization of the familial sphere, the public sphere is gaining in importance. Women or children are no longer put under the protection of a husband or father but of a court. They are now protected by rights. It is less the opposition between private and public that disappears than the first term of the opposition
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altogether. Henceforth, women will make their voices heard as public citizens. The ease with which cyberspace enables connectivity and mobility simultaneously and across long distances, makes it the perfect medium for a rally of citizens or women-cybercitizens. With the means afforded by cyberspace, places of resistance have increased manifold but so have forms of domination. With the withering away of communist Marxism and the hopes associated with it for a classless society, bipolar forms of opposition have splintered. The field of resistance evacuated by communism has been claimed by many groups and organizations. Women function prominently among them. They promote causes that pertain specifically to their own rights or to those of others. In cyberspace, women can connect as citizens beyond national territories to argue for their own rights and those of others by putting pressure on governments and companies. Yet the latter too become transnational which, in turn, jeopardizes citizens’ rights guaranteed by the state. NEO-IMPERIALISM
Thirdly, we can reiterate that each new technology brings with it new forms of liberation and oppression. Women-cybercitizens have to be vigilant and avoid what Haraway denounced without elaborating as a ‘United Nations’ humanism’ that, under the guise of ‘compassion’, offers help to groups and populations based on the interests of the givers rather than the receivers. Compassion, with its emphasis on pity, becomes easily a form of narcissism and furthers the projection of one’s interests. The superimposition of one’s own values – what in psychoanalysis was called projection – without thinking of others and one’s relations to them, is facilitated by cyberspace. Simulation has rendered the world of humans, fauna and flora invisible. Lessons of political economy are quickly forgotten. Womencybercitizens have to remind themselves and others that social groups are not as homogeneous as they are made out to be in simulation and that a world of feedback and pressure relations continues to exist at the social and physical level. Far from simply replacing an oppressive humanism with simulation, women must think of new ways of being ‘human’ or of keeping a ‘soul’ in a digitized world. I N F O R M AT I C S O F D O M I N AT I O N
This leads us to our fourth point. Women too are by now contributing to an ‘informatics of domination’. Many are using cyberspace to further their own personal gains. While, at least in some parts of the globe, women have achieved greater equality and more wealth, they have also joined the ranks of those who – perhaps unbeknownst to them – exploit others through their actions. On the one hand, women become venture capitalists, media people, journalists who make pronouncements on the world that will affect others directly, often in negative
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ways. On the other, access to cyberspace is still based on social inequality. The majority of humans do not have access to it, due to economics (prohibitive costs), religious taboos (fear of contamination) or simply to a lack of electricity. A very high percentage of humans, especially women, remain illiterate. Of importance for our purposes, is to avoid the obliteration of a world under the impact of simulation and information alone. Cyberspace enables women to work across distances in a quasi-simultaneous way. This renders obsolete notions of a pre-assigned place in particular, but seemingly also those of physical space in general. When constructing mental territories on their terminals, women cannot rely solely on efficient connectivity and on smooth transmission of information devoid of human or psychic links. When militating as cybercitizens, it is of continued importance for women to help others open a space from where they can construct their own worlds that may or may not be in accord with our own. Cybercitizenship is ill served by those who are blindly printing and signing letters without an understanding of the complexity of issues. L I V I N G W I T H C Y B E R S PA C E
Let us recapitulate the four points that will transform women’s lives in the decades to come under the influence of cyberspace. We can hypothesize that women will enter the realm of simulation and leave representation far behind. The notion of a pre-existing world to be copied has simply disappeared. The advantage is the doing away of traditional symbolic networks with their coded gender relations and the establishing of new forms of citizenship. The danger is the possibility not only of losing a world, that of representation, but of the world altogether. When (psychic) links are replaced with simple technical connections and efficiency, women risk losing their ‘soul’ and their way of being ‘human’ in the process. This drawback is emphasized further by the present market economy and a finance capitalism intent on reducing the world – people, fauna and flora included – to a general equivalence of signs and sheer profit. Natural goods = cultural goods = material goods, is the slogan of the day. In a simulated world, women forget that they are part of a material environment even though the ‘naturalness’ of the latter has been entirely reassessed. When information is information and the world is divided into zeros and ones, complex issues discovered paradoxically by means of simulation on computer screens, are all but forgotten.16 Clearly, as Haraway pointed out, there is no going back to ‘older’ ways of being. Yet the fact that there is no more fixed, natural world to be imitated and that humans can intervene at the very basis of life, does not do away with the need for establishing new links both among humans and with the physical and social environment. Even in a world of cloning, the material environment continues to count.17 A global world, in fact, re-emphasizes the importance of the local. To recognize this will enable women to separate a productive simulation from its commercial cooptation and (ab)use.
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With the withering away of traditional, symbolic networks of authority, women’s insertion in the social order has changed. Henceforth, women’s existence is guaranteed by rights. Rights are given attention at a time when, in a market economy, the realm of the private – with no income – has lost its importance. Success is measured by public activities and achievements. It is as cybercitizens that women now defend their rights and those of others. While teletechnologies make gender and racial divisions irrelevant, new divisions have appeared based on money. As forms of resistance increase so do forms of neo-imperialism. A world that is culturally much more varied than is commonly admitted, is being homogenized often against its will by the stronger and the quicker, that is, by those in power that now include women. This, to repeat, is not to say that humans will go back to earlier days. Globalism is here to stay and so are, for the time being, markets. Post-1968 feminists had argued, in the case of psychoanalysis, globalism can be turned for or against people, women included. They had insisted on bringing women to life from the symbolic death in which they were pining away. They had explored other ways of ‘living with’, that is, in company of, others. Similarly, we can inflect the title of the present volume to emphasize the importance of bringing women in the world to life, with help of the screen. With more communication, abuse is easier to detect. Women will have to use cyberspace to denounce not only their exclusion from power but the very power structures themselves. N E W W AY S O F L I N K I N G
Information systems and cyberspace promote global forms of thinking according to absolute right and wrong, good or bad, that is, dichotomies patterned on the model of zeros and ones. Against a simple logic of either/or that privileges simulated ‘moral’ issues at the expense of political economy, women have to reintroduce complexities and interrelations. A computer logic seemingly orders the world according to one’s wishes. In the process, it does away with the world and its complexities. Women-cybercitizens, like their post-1968 avatars, must again emphasize questions of linking two or more terms to change the relations between them. In the Art of the Motor, Paul Virilio warned against the totalitarian aspects of information qua information. Next to sheer technical connectivity that is one aspect of simulation, he gave a nod to Gregory Bateson who, with recourse to biology, developed the notion of information as a form of inscription or writing.18 When seen as a form of psychic inscription, information can be used to argue for links between humans and the world in ways that undo old humanistic binaries and divisions. If simulation has made possible an allegorical reading of the world from which essences have vanished, it has also cut all human links by emphasizing efficient connectivity. With another nod to Bateson and post-1968 feminists, we propose to reorient simulation by combining it with the latter’s related notion of invention which does away with representation without, however,
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letting women forget that words help mediate relations between them and the world. Navigating between the two, we can say that when representation gives way to simulation, then simulation has to be used not only to do away with essences but also to reintroduce a new notion of a physical environment that now includes humans and technology. From a finite world of representation, women can move toward one of constant reinvention in which simulation plays an important part. Seen thus, information and simulation will be used not just to enhance connectivity and mobility but to facilitate new ways of linking. Domination through information threatens a society obsessed with money at the expense of other values that emphasize relations between humans and the world. With a memory of oppression and a sense of proximity to others and to a world that risks being lost in days of simulation, women can militate in cyberspace as citizens to bring about a new sense of community and identity. Helped by simulation and cyberspace, they will hopefully avoid the pitfalls of earlier organic communities based on essences. They will also use simulation to emphasize the relations between humans and environment. Defining themselves through constraints and no longer ‘organically’, communities of women-cybercitizens will constantly evolve by definition. These new communities as system are always reorganizing themselves or, to use a term privileged by earlier feminists, in becoming. Whither they will go can never be entirely predicted or controlled. In a world altered at vertiginous rates under the impact of cybertechnologies, women must not forget the importance of creating new links. They will hopefully reintroduce a sense of solidarity that gives agency and respects differences. Solidarity, with echoes of responsibility and common interests will reorient the currently fashionable term of ‘compassion’ that smacks of United Nations’ humanism and that can easily be used to silence others, eradicate their cultures and render the world with its power relations invisible. Women-cybercitizens will use their screens to reinvent links instead of making simple connections. In cyberspace, women-cybercitizens will continue to inflect the organization of a world no longer just given but constantly to be invented and reinvented. Neither goddesses nor machines, women-cybercitizens will hopefully link henceforth with machines to help create and re-create the world.
12 S PA C E A N D C Y B E R S PA C E
ON THE ENCLOSURE OF CONSCIOUSNESS
Phil Graham
Consciousness is the total awareness of life which people have. It includes their understanding of themselves as individuals and of their relations with other individuals in a variety of forms of organization, as well as with their natural environment. Consciousness is a dynamic process. It grows and decays with the interaction of doing (or practice) and cognition over the life cycle of the individual in the family and other social formations. It draws on emotions, ideas, instincts, memory and all the other sensory apparatus.1 The production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is at first directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourses of men, the language of real life . . . The same applies to mental production as expressed in the language of politics, laws, morality, religion, metaphysics etc. of a people. Men are the producers of their conceptions, ideas, etc. . . . Consciousness can never be anything else than conscious existence, and the existence of men is their actual lifeprocess.2
This chapter is about the meaning of space in political economy. Space is a relatively new concept in human history. In antiquity, there was ‘no simple location, no analytical space’, nor did there exist a ‘common-sense’ distinction between time and space: ‘time was the only reality, and space still had to be discovered – or invented – by Parmenides after 500 BC’.3 Understandings of space have changed many times since it was first defined in abstract geometric
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terms, and perhaps for that reason, a concrete conception of space has been largely missing in studies of political economy since Aristotle.4 For whatever reason, when the subject of space is broached by political economists they tend to define it in relation to some aspect of time, such as labour, rent, the circulation time of money and goods, the depreciation of machinery, and so on.5 Even in the most recent efforts to define the meaning of space in cyberspace – as exemplified by Castells’ ‘space of flows’ – concrete space is reduced to an aspect of time: ‘Space is the expression of society’; ‘space is crystallized time’; ‘space is the material support of time-sharing social practices’ and so on.6 Unfortunately, to reduce space to an aspect of time ignores the very significant fact that the foundations of capitalist (and pre-capitalist) forms of politico-economic organization are built upon finite, concrete spaces that exist independently of what people do. To be of any economic use in capitalism, these sorts of space must be occupied exclusively. Land is exemplary. The legal definition and ownership of land is the very basis of private property. Capitalism could not exist without it. As an idea and a reality, private property has become quite taken for granted. However, we can perhaps grasp the kinds of technical, legal and historical work that have gone into making the idea of private property a social reality by means of a thought experiment. Imagine that you live at sea on a vessel that comfortably contains about 40 or so people. You cannot see land on any horizon. You have never seen it. The currents are such that the vessel drifts at regular intervals within indistinct but recognizable boundaries. The community harvests fish at one time of the year, whales at another, and nutritious seagrasses at another. Rain falls predictably enough so that people have enough water during most years. Here is the problem: in such a situation, how would you go about imagining and defining the space within which the community moves so that it could be broken up into separate subdivisions, which could then be owned by particular individuals? At the very least, you would need technical and legal definitions of the space. Your community would also need the means to patrol and enforce the boundaries of each and every subdivision, as well as the boundaries of the community as a whole. Otherwise anybody could redefine the space in their own terms, thus dispossessing incumbents of their spaces. This is basically how privately owned land became a reality over roughly three hundred years.7 But the pre-existence of a set of more or less informal and flexible social relationships within specific spaces is most essential to their formalization. In other words, we create the possibility for property by only doing what we do within certain spaces. Our ideas about the meaning of space are inseparably tied to our conceptions and experience of property, work, family, community and nationality. They are a function of the entire web of activities and relationships in which we are embedded.8 We make many kinds of spaces by doing what we do: social space, organic space, symbolic space and geographical space, to name but a few.9 For example, a conversation in a workplace can be viewed as creating many different types of social and symbolic spaces all at once. The conversation creates and maintains interpersonal spaces, or relationships between people; attitudinal
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spaces, or cultures; organizational spaces, within which social behaviours are regulated; and ideational spaces, in which special ways of knowing are preserved, such as in an economics department of a university or a legal firm.10 But social and symbolic spaces – products of time-bound social activities – are of a distinctly different nature from the much more concrete kinds of space I want to draw attention to here (such as the land and buildings in which a workplace conversation might take place). Geotechnical spaces – like land, sea and air – exist independently of what people do; they contain and constrain what we do (we cannot grow potatoes in the ocean), and they share a common aspect in that they can only be occupied exclusively – two different people, or groups, or factories, or cities cannot occupy the same geotechnical space at the same time. It is simply an impossibility. The same holds for ‘electrospace’, or what is usually called radio spectrum: a particular frequency cannot be used effectively by different people or organizations at the same time.11 Like land, electrospace must be monopolized to be of any economic use whatsoever. Electrospace is the geotechnical aspect of what we currently call ‘cyberspace’ – literally, the space of ‘human decision-making’.12 It is currently being prefigured for ‘privatization’ on a global scale. Our present cyberspace is a hodgepodge and rather disjointed network of telecommunications infrastructures (copper and fibreoptic cable, satellites, television and radio transmitters, their associated institutions, and so on). It is marked by innumerable socio-technical and geotechnical discontinuities. Global electrospace, though, is the all-encompassing, concrete geotechnical space within which digitalized social and symbolic spaces are being formally defined to facilitate a global, immediate and continuous space for the production, appropriation and exchange of conscious social activity. THE HISTORICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF THE MEANING O F S PA C E
There have been three significant periods in recent history during which the meaning of geotechnical spaces have been redefined at the most basic levels throughout Western societies: the formalization of feudalism at the end of the twelfth century; the enclosures movement between the mid-fifteenth and late eighteenth centuries, which ended feudalism and created private property and the modern nation-state; and the (legal and technical) definition of airspace and electromagnetic space, which, from the end of the nineteenth century, were major stimuli for twentieth-century nationalism.13 During these periods, relationships between whole masses of people were also legally redefined at the most basic levels. It is noteworthy that these periods correspond to the rapid diffusion of new media, respectively paper, the printing press and the radio.14 Our current period is potentially as significant as these three preceding transformations because of a historically unprecedented reorganization of electrospace on a global scale, once again facilitated by new media. Unfortunately, the significance of a privately owned global electrospace appears to have gone largely undiscussed in terms of its concrete spatial aspect, perhaps because
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electrospace now seems to be pure social activity (whether commercial or otherwise). Since the discovery and technicalization of electrospace, up until quite recently, ‘nations of the world have never departed from the basic “world property” concept’ of spectrum rights, and ‘such rights have in practice been treated as one of the most important bases of politico-economic power’ throughout the twentieth century.15 In other words, the global privatization of electrospace is the global privatization of that power base. It is the privatization of the space in which the production, distribution, exchange and consumption of ‘consciousness’ (or ‘knowledge’) commodities have, for more than a century, formed the basis of the most expansive, powerful and violent systems of political organization in human history.16 T H E C E N T R A L I T Y O F E L E C T R O S PA C E T O A N Y CYBERECONOMICS
Electrospace ‘is to communications today as land is to crops and water to fish. It is a peculiar natural resource, one whose politico-economic and social aspects have largely been ignored by social scientists’.17 The tendency of social science to ignore the geotechnical aspect of electrospace continues. Electrospace is currently being ‘cleared’ of its occupants and ‘enclosed’. The assumption underpinning this trajectory is that Internet traffic will ‘migrate from personal computers to devices like cell phones and hand-held computers’, and that the spectrum must therefore be privatized.18 Whether or not the technological ‘migration’ of the Internet will occur is irrelevant. Imperatives from legislators and business that bandwidth must be ‘cleared’ for such an occurrence are very insistent. The public nature of the area currently being sold off (and given away) to private corporations is well evidenced by the nature of its incumbent occupants. For example, in the USA, the ‘Defense Department, law enforcement authorities and public safety organizations’ are expected to ‘shift’ their entire communication systems to other, less commercially ‘useful’ areas of electrospace.19 That ought to be enough in itself to raise questions about the social efficacy of privately owned global electrospace. Electrospace is literal and concrete rather than virtual and symbolic space, just like land, and must be seen as such to understand the significance of its privatization. The consciousness of electrospace as concrete space was far more prevalent when radio first emerged as an influential medium.20 What heightened that consciousness was an extremely intensified sense of nationalism throughout the most technologically advanced countries following the unprecedented slaughter of the First World War. A concern with mass propaganda, most notably in the USA, brought with it the realization that ‘radio communication is particularly susceptible to national control’ because electrospace ‘requires some control if it is to serve any human purpose whatsoever’.21 It was therefore quickly realized that electrospace is concrete space because it can only be used effectively if occupied exclusively. Over the last century, it has
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become the ultimate in public resources, like air and water. Electrospace is the non-depletable, concrete resource upon which any global cybereconomy, if it is to exist at all, must eventually be built.22 However, the concreteness of electrospace has slid into the realms of incomprehensibility for many people. It has become as conceptually opaque as the idea of privately owned land upon which capitalism developed. Electrospace exists everywhere, at all times and all frequencies, but because it is most generally sold in lengths of time (like, for example, a 30-second radio or television advertisement), it is most readily understood as time. Alternatively, legislators treat electrospace like ‘raw material’, or as a kind of ‘space in the fourth dimension’ which should (according to the radical individualistic, anti-social tenets of ‘market-based’ neo-liberalism) be left ‘open to private exploitation, vesting title to the waves according to priority of discovery and occupation’. But that is to misunderstand electrospace, it is not a fourth dimension, for there is also breadth and depth of wave (amplitude and frequency) and doubtless the correct analogy is the whole electro-magnetic field; but private property in any natural field or wave is only a human convention and one that it would be dangerous to extend to this new-discovered continent.23 A newly discovered continent, indeed; all-pervasive, and clearly all of a piece. However, those words were written in 1924. Today, privately owned electrospace is potentially a global, rather than national, space – it is the only global and continuous geotechnical space through which we can communicate at the speed of light. Unfortunately it has become passé, if not entirely ‘invisible’, both as space and as a foundation of political power. It has been relegated to the realm of myth because it is generally sold and understood as quantities of time. However, in economic terms, the time aspect is invariably and inevitably tied to labour, to what people do, which is measured in time. In any cybereconomy, the aspect of labour that must be technologized, appropriated and commodified is its conscious aspect. H U M A N A C T I V I T Y, S O C I A L S P A C E A N D CONSCIOUSNESS COMMODITIES
If any concrete space is to become private property with economic significance, the pre-existence of an established network of time-bound social activities is an absolute prerequisite.24 Like the ownership of land, the formal ownership of human activity and its products is a matter of law: ‘How does one become an owner of productive stock? How does one become owner of the product created by means of this stock? Through positive law.’25 The legal distribution of property rights in the ownership of human activity is perhaps the most overt aspect of any transition in human social relations. John of Salisbury’s Policratus is historically instructive in this respect.26 It comes
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just before the important turning-point in institutional development at the end of the twelfth and the beginning of the thirteenth century, when legal precision began to be stamped on a number of previously indefinite relationships, and when feudal independence tended to become consolidated into definite organs of political control.27 Today, a similar process is under way. New forms of legal precision are being stamped on human relations at the most intimate levels.28 There is also a pervasive sense, as there was during the enclosures movement, that there exists an unbreachable social and conscious distance between the people who define rules for almost all forms of human activity, and those who are bound by those rules but are excluded from making them.29 Like the legal definition of geotechnical spaces, ‘official’ definitions of social relationships (social spaces) are a function of technical and legal expertise. Social technologies, such as policies that define the legitimacy of wage- and money-forms, production technologies, management techniques and the way in which legal violence (war and punishment) is organized are all forms of socio-technical expertise. Political and legal definitions formalize and fix (to a certain extent and for a certain time) the meaning of very particular aspects of social life. They transform informal relationships into formal and codified ones, rendering flexible and variegated social relationships as relatively inflexible symbolic systems, such as law. It was from strenuous and sustained efforts in these directions that the historical development of wage labour became the dominant method of appropriating human energy – human life – or what political economists call labour. This remains the case in the developing ‘knowledge economy’, although precapitalist forms of ‘labour’ (‘casualization’ and ‘outsourcing’) are once again becoming commonplace. The aspect of ‘labour’ which is commodified in cyberspace is its conscious aspect. Consequently, today’s most frenetic and farreaching legal activities are concerned with the ownership of ‘intellectual property’.30 With the not-so-gradual development of a global, privately owned electrospace, an artificial, humanity-wide split is being effected (both technologically and legally) between labours of the muscle and of the mind. The artefacts of consciousness that people produce in the constitution, reconstitution and transformation of their social spaces are necessarily the commodityforms of any cybereconomy. I have elsewhere identified this as a definitive aspect of ‘hypercapitalism’, the form of capitalism within which the most intimate and fundamental aspects of human social life – forms of thought and language – become the most prevalent commodities. Although the activities and social relations that correspond to new commodity-forms continue to differ in levels of legal and economic formality, the aspects of humanity which are to be formalized include every facet, function and product of consciousness.31 ‘Information’ produced for people, by people, about people (and their environments) is therefore the ‘raw material’ of cybereconomies. Art, science, culture, education, communication and commerce are identified by legislators
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as the social domains within which cybercommodities are to be produced.32 But to focus solely on the commodity-forms produced within specific activity spaces is to miss most of the picture, namely their socio-biological and environmental sources. With increasing attention given to intellectual property regimes, a new formality is being stamped upon existing social and biological relations of ‘globalized’ humanity. More particularly, legal formality and monetary values are being placed on the conscious relationships that people have with particular symbolic artefacts.33 Today, in the development of intellectual property rights, relations between such intimate and abstract ‘things’ as words, sounds and genes are being formalized at law. These laws are designed to be imposed worldwide. Flippantly defining such commodities as ‘goods of the mind’, or as the ‘essence of life’, does little to clarify the picture.34 Such a view misses the point that these already freely existing relations are being redefined so as to be ownable and sellable as quickly as they fall within technical and legislative reach. As such, their redefinition is nothing less than the largest and most pernicious attempt at outright theft by a powerful group of elites in the history of humanity, if only because of the sheer size of the current human population. Individuals are currently buying the gene pools of whole countries, with the governments of Tonga, Estonia and Iceland selling exclusive rights to their constituencies’ gene pools.35 Underpinning the global expropriation of ‘abstracted’ humanity is a set of contradictions inherent in any cybereconomy, at least as it is currently conceived of by its technocratic designers (policy-makers and their corporate ‘advisers’). These are: the assumed predominance of exchange-values (money) over production-values; the collapse of distribution and consumption into the same moment as that of production and exchange; and the subsumption of usevalue (useability) under the logic of exchange-value (saleability). Consequently the production of money becomes an increasingly irresistible imperative.36 But money is just the idea of value given a (sometimes) physical form. To fully unpack these collapsed relations would take far more time and space than I have here; however, a brief excursion is necessary to comprehend the significance of these practical and conceptual implosions. I describe them under the term ‘value-relations’. VA L U E - R E L AT I O N S , S PAT I A L C O N S C I O U S N E S S A N D T H E A L I E N R E A L I T I E S O F C Y B E R S PA C E
The idea of value ‘is intimately associated with the most remote experiences of the human race. Ever since it has been possible to predicate desirability of anything, have values existed.’37 That is the definition of value in the broadest and most abstract terms possible: the social desirability of anything whatsoever. Value-relations are those aspects of the social within and during which the desirability of any given aspect of our environment is produced, attributed and expressed by people. Value-relations are expressed patterns of social ‘preference’
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and ‘decision-taking’, or, what can be called evaluative ‘patterns’.38 Such patterns are largely the result of historical normative work. In other words, evaluative patterns – actively expressed perceptions of value – also specify the acceptability of what is perceived to be desirable within a given social domain. Because they are expressed choices – decisions – evaluative patterns peculiar to any given social group exist at the expense of other possible value-relations. In a globally mediated social system, ideally encompassing the whole of humanity, the very concept of value takes on very complex dimensions. Paradoxically, and perhaps because faced with such vast complexity, value has been narrowed at the policy level to the most singular and simplistic system, namely price. Discourses of efficiency, growth, progress and control derive their logics and techno-logics almost exclusively from this illusory, ‘thingly’ system of value: The more production comes to rest on exchange value, hence on exchange, the more important do the physical conditions of exchange – the means of communication and transport – become for the costs of circulation. Capital by its nature drives beyond every spatial barrier. Thus the creation of the physical conditions of exchange – of the means of communication and transport – the annihilation of space by time – becomes an extraordinary necessity for it.39 And this is precisely what has happened: exchange-value has become an end in itself, and the ‘annihilation of space by time’ is achieved by the conceptual implosion of geotechnical space (land, sea, air and electrospace) and social space (social activity) into mediated time (conscious labour) through the active manipulation of spatial consciousness. Globally, value-relations have been reduced to mathematical expressions of space over time (the global circulation speed of money or ‘capital’). Paradoxically, the larger this number (i.e. the closer it gets to a mathematically undefined term), the greater the perceived efficiency and ‘growth’ in the system!40 Similarly, conscious social activity (social and symbolic space) is measured in relation to ‘the speed of thought’ because, ‘expressed passively, the magnitude of labour appears as an amount of space; but expressed in motion, it is measurable only in time’.41 When understood entirely as time, social space is annihilated by imperatives for speed.42 There have never been so many human lives dedicated to the production of consciousness commodities. And time is money. It is also the most ancient and basic measure of human life. The destruction of space by time is a function of faster social exchanges.43 In terms of value-relations, this is expressed as a relationship between the fastest possible speed at which perceptions of value can be exchanged across the greatest possible space. Perceptions of value thus become the primary commodity-forms of hypercapitalist production processes. The production of mediated perceptions of value across vast geotechnical spaces is an ongoing, massive and immediate complex of consumption (destruction), circulation (distribution) and exchange.
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A paradox of this spatially imploded system is that by decreasing timedistances between people, it simultaneously annihilates existing perceptions of social space, the situated sense of social coherence – belonging – that arises from social interaction. Thus, in any fully developed cybereconomy, the alienation of conscious human activity from its source, along with their perceived value, is complete. CONCLUSION
It is a commonplace bias of every age to think of itself as historically unique. At some level, this is necessarily true for every moment in history. However, there are very few ages during which the relationships between great masses of people and their geotechnical environments are redefined on such a far-reaching and fundamental level as is the case today. The privatization of global electrospace distinguishes the current era from any other as historically unique. The enclosures movement was another such age, as was the formal definition of the feudal system in Europe during the late twelfth century. These periods combined the ‘legal’ formalization of previously informal networks of social relations with the ‘legal’ and technical redefinition of concrete space. While electrospace is generally treated by legislators as little more than a complex time-bound conduit – a medium – for symbolic activities and institutional organization, it is not only that. It is quite literally a concrete space in the most precise economic sense of the word. Its most incomprehensible aspect is that it can only be traversed at a single speed – the speed of light. The speed of electrospace is its most confounding aspect; it conflates space and time precisely because of its speed. Nevertheless, electrospace retains its concrete spatial characteristics. It is everywhere, all the time, at all frequencies. It is, as far as we know, the only non-depletable, omnipresent foundation upon which any global cybereconomy can be built. There is, of course, much more to grasping political economy than the ‘legal’ reallocation of rights in geotechnical space. We must also grasp the domains of human activity that legislators are redefining, harnessing and exposing to commodification in the emergent space; the commodity-forms of the economy and their relationship to their ‘producers’ and ‘consumers’; the value-relations upon which exchange, circulation and distribution are premissed and enacted; and the global web of institutions that are ostensibly responsible for defining all of these aspects. Most importantly, we must consider which aspects of human social activity are to be commodified within this space, and whether such aspects ought to be legally commodified. And since electrospace is global – in fact our only global social space – we must understand the relationship of those institutions that would claim proprietorship over what must become the property base for fiefdoms over the most intimate, abstract and concrete aspects of humanity. These are the foundational tasks for any future political economy in cyberspace.
NOTES AND REFERENCES
L I V I N G W I T H C Y B E R S PA C E : A N I N T R O D U C T I O N T O TECHNOLOGY & SOCIETY IN THE 21
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1 Cornelius Castoriadis devised the idea of the social imaginary. See, for example, David Ames Curtis (ed.), The Castoriadis Reader, Oxford, Blackwell, 1997. 2 On the concept of hypermodernity see, for instance, John Armitage, ‘Project(ile)s of Hypermodern(organ)ization’, ephemera: critical dialogues on organization, 1 (2), 2001: 131–48 (electronic journal: www.ephemeraweb.org). 3 Broadly, the notion of cyberfeminism can be defined as an affirmation of the idea that technological progress and female liberation are at once reciprocal and a threat to male or patriarchal dominance. See, for example, Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, London, Free Association Books, 1991; Sadie Plant, Zeros and Ones: Digital Women and The New Technoculture, London, Fourth Estate, 1997. 4 Daniel Bell, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting, London, Heinemann, 1974. 5 On the neo-Marxist critical theory of ICTs see, for example, Herbert Schiller, Information and the Crisis Economy, Norwood, NJ, Ablex, 1984. 6 Krishan Kumar, From Post-Industrial to Post-Modern Society, Oxford, Blackwell, 1995. 7 David Lyon, The Information Society: Issues and Illusions, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1988; Frank Webster, Theories of the Information Society, London, Routledge, 1995; Mark Poster, The Mode of Information: Poststructuralism and Social Context, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1990; Michael Piore and Charles Sabel, The Second Industrial Divide, New York, Basic Books, 1984. 8 Manuel Castells, The Informational City, Oxford, Blackwell, 1989; id., The Rise of the Network Society, Oxford, Blackwell, 2000. 9 Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity, Cambridge, Polity Press, 2000; Zygmunt Bauman and Keith Tester, Conversations with Zygmunt Bauman, Cambridge, Polity Press, 2001. 10 Webster, Theories of the Information Society. 11 Armitage, ‘Project(ile)s of Hypermodern(organ)ization’, pp. 131–48; Chris Dercon, ‘Speed-Space’, in John Armitage (ed.), Virilio Live: Selected Interviews, London, Sage, 2001: 69–81.
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12 Paul Virilio, A Landscape of Events, trans. Julie Rose, Cambridge, Mass., The MIT Press, 2000. 13 John Armitage and Joanne Roberts, ‘From the Hypermodern City to the Gray Zone of Total Mobilization in the Philippines’, in Ryan Bishop, John W. Phillips and Wei Wei Yeo (eds), Perpetuating Cities: Postcolonial Urbanism in South East Asia, London and New York, Routledge, 2003. 14 Bauman, Liquid Modernity. 15 On cyberfeminism see n. 3. 16 Madan Sarup, An Introductory Guide to Post-Structuralism and Postmodernism, Hemel Hempstead, Harvester, 1993. 17 Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers, London, Cape, 1972. 18 John Armitage, ‘From Modernism to Hypermodernism and Beyond: An Interview with Paul Virilio’, in John Armitage (ed.), Paul Virilio: From Modernism to Hypermodernism and Beyond, London, Sage Publications in association with Theory, Culture & Society, 2000: 25–55. 19 Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women. 20 Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz, Stanford, Calif., Stanford University Press, 1999. 21 Friedrich Kittler, ‘The information bomb: a conversation’, in Armitage, Virilio Live, pp. 97–109, esp. 109. 22 Nicholas Zurbrugg, ‘Not words but visions!’, in Armitage, Virilio Live, pp. 154– 63, esp. 156. 23 William H. Dutton, ‘The ecology of games shaping telecommunications policy’, Communication Theory, 2 (4), 1992: 303–28. 24 Judy Wajcman, Feminism Confronts Technology, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1991. 25 Judy Wajcman (ed.), Current Sociology (Special Issue on Information Technology), 2002. 26 Brian Loader (ed.), Cyberspace Divide: Equality, Agency and Policy in the Information Age, London, Routledge, 1998. 27 Tim Jordan, Cyberpower: The Culture and Politics of Cyberspace and the Internet, London, Routledge, 1999. 28 John Armitage, ‘Editorial Introduction: Machinic modulations: new cultural theory & technopolitics’, Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, 4 (2), 1999: 1–16.
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29 On the difference between neo-classical and radical political economy see, for example, E. K. Hunt and Howard J. Sherman, Economics: An Introduction to Traditional and Radical Views, New York, Harper & Row, 1990. 30 Robert M. Solow, Growth Theory: An Exposition, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2000; Castells, Informational City; Robin Mansell and W. Edward Steinmueller, Mobilising the Information Society, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2000. 31 Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women. 32 Dallas Smythe, Dependency Road: Communications, Capitalism, Consciousness and Canada, New York, Ablex, 1981. 33 Phil Graham, ‘Hypercapitalism: A Political Economy of Informational Idealism’, New Media & Society, 2 (2), 2000: 131–56.
I N T R O D U C T I O N T O PA R T I
1 Daniel Bell, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting, London, Heinemann, 1974. 2 Ibid., p. 14. 3 David Lyon, The Information Society: Issues and Illusions, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1988. 4 Frank Webster, Theories of the Information Society, London, Routledge, 1995. 5 Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. G. Bennington and B. Massumi, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1979. 6 Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society, 2nd edn, Oxford, Blackwell, 2000. 7 David Lyon, Surveillance Society: Monitoring Everyday Life, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2001. 8 Paul Virilio, A Landscape of Events, trans. J. Rose, Cambridge, Mass., The MIT Press, 2000; Zygmunt Bauman, The Individualized Society, Cambridge, Polity Press, 2001.
CHAPTER 1
1 See David Lyon, The Information Society: Issues and Illusions, Cambridge, Polity Press/Blackwell, 1988; Frank Webster, Theories of the Information Society, London, Routledge, 1995; Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society, Oxford, Blackwell, 1996.
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2 See Barry Smart, Modern Conditions, Postmodern Controversies, London, Routledge, 1992: 60. 3 See Alvin Toffler’s The Third Wave, London, Pan, 1980. 4 Webster, Theories of the Information Society. 5 N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1999, ch. 3. 6 Daniel Bell, The Coming of Postindustrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting, London, Heinemann, 1974. 7 Castells, Rise of the Network Society. See David Lyon, ‘The net, the self, and the future’, Prometheus, 3, 1999. 8 See Alistair Duff, ‘Joho Shakai: the Japanese contribution to information society studies’, Keio Communication Review, 22, 2000: 41–77. 9 Mike Crang, Phil Crang and Jon May, Virtual Geographies: Bodies, Space, and Relations, London, Routledge, 1999: 12–13. 10 Paul Virilio, The Lost Dimension, New York, Semiotext(e), 1991: 13. 11 Zygmunt Bauman, Globalization: The Human Consequences, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1998: 17–18. 12 William Wresch, Disconnected: Haves and Have-Nots in the Information Age, New Brunswick, NJ, Rutgers University Press, 1996. 13 Howard Rheingold, The Virtual Community, Reading, Mass., Addison-Wesley, 1993. 14 Sadie Plant, ‘On the matrix: cyberfeminist simulations’, in Rob Shields (ed.), Cultures of Internet: Virtual Spaces, Real Histories, Living Bodies, London, Sage, 1996: 170. 15 James Beniger, The Control Revolution, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1986. 16 See David Lyon, Surveillance Society: Monitoring Everyday Life, Buckingham, Open University Press, 2001. 17 See David Lyon, ‘The world-wide-web of surveillance’, Information, Communication, and Society, 1 (1), 1998; Oscar Gandy, ‘It’s discrimination, stupid!’, in James Brook and Iain A. Boal (eds), Resisting the Virtual Life: The Culture and Politics of Information, San Francisco, City Lights, 1995: 35–47. 18 Jean Baudrillard, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, trans. P. Patton, Sydney and Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1995 [1991].
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19 Quoted in Benjamin Woolley, Virtual Worlds, Oxford, Blackwell, 1992: 191. 20 Quoted in Elizabeth Reid, ‘Virtual worlds: culture and imagination’, in Steve Jones (ed.), CyberSociety: Computer-Mediated Communication and Community, London, Sage, 1995: 175. 21 William Gibson, Neuromancer, London, Grafton, 1986: 67. 22 Late Show, BBC2, 26 Sept. 1990, quoted in Woolley, Virtual Worlds, p. 122. 23 Paul Frissen, ‘The virtual state: postmodernisation, informatisation, and public administration’, in Brian Loader (ed.), The Governance of Cyberspace, London, Routledge, 1997: 125. 24 Joe Ravetz, ‘The Internet, virtual and real reality’, in Brian Loader (ed.), Cyberspace Divide: Equality, Agency, and Equality in the Information Society, London, Routledge, 1998: 121. 25 Mark Slouka, War of the Worlds: Cyberspace and the High-Tech Assault on Reality, New York, Basic Books, 1995: 132. 26 Ibid., p. 141. 27 Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1989: 155. 28 See Colin Gunton, The One, the Three, and the Many, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1993: 210. 29 See Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1990: 13. 30 Ibid., p. 14. 31 David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, Oxford, Blackwell, 1990. 32 See John Thompson, Media and Modernity, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1995: 83. 33 See Paul James, Nation Formation, London, Sage, 1996: 25. 34 Thompson, Media and Modernity, pp. 82–7. 35 Ibid., p. 85. 36 James, Nation Formation, p. 31. 37 Jack Goody, The Domestication of the Savage Mind, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1977, 15–16, cited in James, Nation Formation, p. 32. 38 Craig Calhoun, ‘The infrastructure of modernity: indirect social relationships,
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information technology and social integration’, in Hans Haferkamp and Neil Smelser (eds), Social Change and Modernity, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1992: 219. 39 James Slevin, The Internet and Society, Cambridge, Polity Press, 2000: 78–89. 40 Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1993, cited in Slevin, Internet and Society, pp. 78, 81. The ‘contexts’ are, in Slevin’s terms, ‘arenas of circulation’. 41 See Lyon, Surveillance Society. 42 Nina Wakeford, ‘Gender and the landscapes of computing’, in Crang, Crang and May, Virtual Geographies, p. 200. 43 Daniel Miller and Don Slater, The Internet: An Ethnographic Approach, Oxford, Berg, 2000: 172.
CHAPTER 2
1 Nicholas Negroponte, Being Digital, London, Hodder & Stoughton, 1995: 183. 2 Cf. Mark Slouka, War of the Worlds: Cyberspace and the High-Tech Assault on Reality, London, Abacus, 1995: 30. 3 See Ben Woolley, Virtual Worlds: A Journey in Hype and Hyperreality, Oxford, Blackwell, 1992. 4 Sadie Plant, Zeros and Ones: Digital Women and the New Technoculture, London, Fourth Estate, 1997: 46. 5 Chris Shilling, The Body and Social Theory, London, Sage, 1993. 6 See Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, London, Free Association Books, 1991. 7 Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1991. 8 Zygmunt Bauman, Life in Fragments: Essays in Postmodern Morality, Oxford, Blackwell, 1995. 9 Zygmunt Bauman, In Search of Politics, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1999: 45. 10 Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1991. 11 Amitai Etzioni, The Spirit of Community: Rights, Responsibilities and the Communitarian Agenda, London, Fontana, 1995.
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12 Robert Bellah, Richard Madsen, William Sullivan, Ann Swidler and Steven Tipton, Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1985: 154. 13 Manuel Castells, The Power of Identity, Oxford, Blackwell, 1997. 14 Christopher Lasch, The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy, New York, Norton, 1995, chs 4–5. 15 Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1990. 16 Anthony Giddens, Beyond Left and Right: The Future of Radical Politics, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1994. 17 Anthony Giddens, The Third Way: The Renewal of Social Democracy, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1998. 18 Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, London, Michael Joseph, 1994: 572. 19 Giddens, Third Way, pp. 43–4. 20 Frank Webster, ‘Information, capitalism and uncertainty’, Information, Communication and Society, 3 (1), 2000: 69–90. 21 Peter Worsley, The Three Worlds: Culture and World Development, London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1984, ch. 2. 22 David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change, Oxford, Blackwell, 1989. 23 Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society, Oxford, Blackwell, 1996, ch. 5. 24 Manuel Castells, End of Millennium, Oxford, Blackwell, 1998, ch. 3. 25 Cees Hamelink, The Ethics of Cyberspace, London, Sage, 2000.
CHAPTER 3
1 Taken from Laurie Anderson, ‘Love Among The Sailors’, Bright Red, Warner Bros Records, 1994. 2 Cornelius Castoriadis coined the concept of the social imaginary. See, for example, David Ames Curtis (ed.), The Castoriadis Reader, Oxford, Blackwell, 1997. 3 On hypermodernity and excess see, for example, John Armitage, ‘Project(ile)s of Hypermodern(organ)ization’, ephemera: critical dialogues on organization, 1 (2), 2001: 131–48 (electronic journal: www.ephemeraweb.org). The concept of the
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individualized society belongs to Zygmunt Bauman, for which see his The Individualized Society, Cambridge, Polity Press, 2001; see also Paul Virilio, ‘The Twilight of the Grounds’, in The Desert, Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, London, Thames & Hudson, 2001: 102–18. On Virilio’s concept of ‘speed-space’ see Chris Dercon, ‘Speed-Space’, in John Armitage (ed.), Virilio Live: Selected Interviews, London, Sage, 2001: 69–81. 4 On the ‘global kinetic elite’ see John Armitage, ‘Beyond Postmodernism? Paul Virilio’s Hypermodern Cultural Theory’, CTHEORY, 23 (3), Article 90, 2000: 1–17, Arthur and Marilouise Kroker (eds) (www.ctheory.net/). 5 Paul Virilio, A Landscape of Events, trans. Julie Rose, Cambridge, Mass., The MIT Press, 2000. 6 On the ‘economies of excess’ see parallax, 18, Jan.–Mar., 2001, guest editor John Armitage. 7 On our development of Georgio Agamben’s concept of the ‘gray zone’ see John Armitage and Joanne Roberts, ‘From the Hypermodern City to the Gray Zone of Total Mobilization in the Philippines’, in Ryan Bishop, John William Phillips and Wei Wei Yeo (eds), Perpetuating Global Cities: Postcolonial Urbanism in South East Asia, New York and London, Routledge, 2003. 8 Stan Davis and Christopher Mayer, Blur: The Speed of Change in the Connected Economy, Oxford, Capstone, 1998. 9 Jonas Ridderstråle and Kjell Nordström, Funky Business: Talent Makes Capital Dance, Harlow, Pearson, 2000; Bill Gates, The Road Ahead (rev. edn), London, Penguin, 1996; Bill Gates (with Collins Hemingway), Business @ The Speed of Thought: Succeeding in the Digital Economy, London, Penguin, 1999. 10 Arthur Kroker and Michael A. Weinstein, Data Trash: the theory of the virtual class, Montreal, New World Perspectives, 1994: 77. 11 Ibid., p. 9. 12 Ridderstråle and Nordström, Funky Business, pp. 19–25. 13 Davis and Mayer, Blur, pp. 5–18; Ridderstråle and Nordström, Funky Business, pp. 19–25. 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid. 16 Davis and Mayer, Blur, back cover. 17 Ridderstråle and Nordström, Funky Business, back and inside cover. 18 The Road Ahead is of course Gates’s revised and updated edition of his best seller of 1995. Subsequently, with the depreciatory reviews that the book was little
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more than uncritical Microsoft hype, gained from reading the first edition, The Road Ahead was revamped and refocused primarily on the Internet by Gates in 1996, in part at least to pacify contemporary critics of late twentieth-century chronotopianism such as the Krokers. 19 Gates, Road Ahead, back cover. 20 Arthur and Marilouise Kroker, ‘Digital Ideology: E-Theory (1)’, CTHEORY, Article 73, Arthur and Marilouise Kroker (eds), 1999 (available online at www.ctheory.net/). 21 The phrase ‘technological materialism’ belongs to John Rennie Short, for which see his Global Dimensions: Space, Place and the Contemporary World, London, Reaktion Books, 2001: 166. 22 Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society (2nd edn), Oxford, Blackwell, 2000; id., The Internet Galaxy: Reflections of the Internet, Business and Society, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2001; Anthony Giddens, Beyond Left and Right, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1994; id., The Third Way, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1998. 23 On the ‘spirit of informationalism’ see Castells, Rise of the Network Society, pp. 210–15; on the concept of the ‘radical centre’ see Giddens, Third Way, p. 70. 24 On Giddens’s concept of ‘limited meritocracy’ see his The Third Way, p. 105. 25 Castells, Internet Galaxy, p. 256. 26 Giddens, The Third Way, p. 105. 27 Castells, The Internet Galaxy, back cover. On Giddens’s performance at White House seminars see Alex Callinicos, ‘Social Theory Put to the Test of Politics: Pierre Bourdieu and Anthony Giddens’, New Left Review, 236, July/Aug., 1999: 77–102, esp. 80. 28 On the ‘(s)lower classes’ see John Armitage, ‘Beyond Postmodernism? Paul Virilio’s Hypermodern Cultural Theory’, CTHEORY, 23 (3), Article 90, Arthur and Marilouise Kroker (eds), 2000: 1–17 (available online at www.ctheory.net/). 29 Paul Virilio, Speed & Politics: An Essay on Dromology, trans. Mark Polizzotti, New York, Semiotext(e), 1986. 30 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, London, Verso, 1991. 31 Ibid., p. 16. 32 Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity, Cambridge, Polity Press, 2000: 1–15. 33 Ibid., p. 5.
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34 Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy. Volume 1, Consumption, trans. Robert Hurley, New York, Zone Books, 1991. 35 Ibid., p. 21. 36 Zygmunt Bauman and Keith Tester, Conversations with Zygmunt Bauman, Cambridge, Polity Press, 2001: 101. 37 Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi, Minneapolis and Manchester, Minneapolis University Press and Manchester University Press, 1984. 38 Paul Virilio, ‘Calling Card’, A Landscape of Events, trans. Julie Rose, Cambridge, Mass., The MIT Press, 2000: 10–13, 10. 39 Paul Virilio, ‘Calling Card’, in Landscape of Events, pp. 10–13, esp. 10. 40 Ibid. 41 Ibid. 42 Ibid. 43 Paul Virilio, ‘Delirious New York’, in Landscape of Events, pp. 18–22, esp. 18 (original emphasis). 44 ‘Interview with Paul Virilio’, Die Tages Zeitung (TAZ), Berlin, 22 October 2001 (www.taz.de/pt/2001/10/22/a0147.nf/text). 45 Ibid. 46 Bauman, Liquid Modernity, p. 14. 47 Virilio, ‘Twilight of the Grounds’, in The Desert, pp. 102–18, esp. 104. 48 Ibid. 49 On the idea that the emergency has become the rule see Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, Number VIII, in Hannah Arendt (ed.), Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, New York, Schocken Books, 1969: ‘The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the “state of emergency” in which we live is not the exception but the rule’ (p. 257).
I N T R O D U C T I O N T O PA R T I I
1 James Der Derian, Virtuous War: Mapping the Military-Industrial-MediaEntertainment Network, Oxford, Westview Press, 2001. 2 William Gibson, Neuromancer, New York, Ace Science Fiction, 1984. 3 GATTACA, Columbia Pictures, 1997.
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CHAPTER 4
1 John Markoff, ‘Oracle leader calls Microsoft spying “civic duty” ’, New York Times, 29 June 2000: 1. 2 James Stewart, ‘Mousetrap: what Time Warner didn’t consider when it unplugged Disney’, The New Yorker, 31 July 2000: 28. 3 New York Times, 8 May 2000: A13. 4 Ibid., C11. 5 Fortune, 14 Aug. 2000: 34–5. 6 Paul Virilio, War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception, trans. Patrick Camiller, London and New York, Verso, 1989. 7 See Paul Virilio, ‘The strategy of the beyond’, ‘The vision machine’, and ‘Desert screen’, in James Der Derian (ed.), The Virilio Reader, Oxford, Blackwell, 1998. 8 See Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler, trans. and ed. Thomas Y. Levin, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1995; id., The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, trans. and ed. Thomas Y. Levin, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1995; Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz, Stanford, Calif., Stanford University Press, 1999. 9 Kracauer, Caligari to Hitler, p. 299. 10 Ibid., p. 303. 11 Walter Benjamin, ‘The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction’, in Hannah Arendt (ed.), Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, New York, Schocken Books, 1969: 251. 12 Rick Lyman, ‘Building Rome by computer’, New York Times, 28 Apr. 2000: C3. 13 Robert Trigaux, ‘Cameras scanned fans for criminals’, St Petersburg Times, 31 Jan. 2001 (available at www.sptimes.com/News/013101/TampaBay/Cameras_ scanned_fans_.shtml). 14 Reinhold Niebuhr, ‘The revival of feudalism’, Harper’s Magazine (Mar. 1935), quoted in David Little, ‘The recovery of liberalism: moral man and immoral society sixty years later’, Ethics and International Affairs, 7, 1993: 171–202. 15 Triangle Institute for Security Studies, Project on the Gap Between the Military and Civilian Society (available at www.unc.edu/depts/tiss/CIVMIL.htm). 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid.
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19 USC News Service, 17 Aug. 1999 (uscnews.usc.edu). 20 Opportunities for Collaboration Between the Defense and Entertainment Research Communities, Report of the National Research Council, 1997 (available online at books.nap.edu/catalog/5830.html). 21 Interview with Richard Lindheim, 28 June 2000. 22 A shorter version of this chapter first appeared in The Nation, 3 Apr. 2000.
CHAPTER 5
1 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, London, Verso, 1990: 179. 2 William Gibson, Neuromancer, New York, Ace Science Fiction, 1984: 128. 3 Genomic Revolution, Natural History Museum, New York (available at www.amnh.org/exhibitions/genomics/index.html). 4 Martha C. Nussbaum and Cass R. Sunstein (eds), Clones and Clones: Facts and Fantasies About Human Cloning, New York, Norton, 1998: 11. 5 GATTACA, Columbia Pictures, 1997: written and directed by Andrew Niccol; produced by Dany DeVito, Michael Shamberg and Stacey Sher; original score by Michael Nyman; Production design by Jan Roelfs. Principal cast: Vincent (Ethan Hawke); Irene (Uma Thurman); Anton (Loren Dean); Jerome (Jude Law); Detective Hugo (Alan Arkin); Caesar (Ernest Borgnine); Director Josef (Gore Vidal); Black geneticist (Blair Underwood); Lamar (Xander Berkeley); Marie (Jayne Brook); Antonio (Elias Koteas); Gene broker (Tony Shalhoub); Mission Commander (Lindsey Lee Ginter). 6 Jean Baudrillard, America, London, Verso, 1988: 33 (trans. modified). 7 The two epigraphs for the film are from: Ecclesiastes 7: 13, ‘Consider God’s handiwork: who can straighten what He hath made crooked?’; and Willard Graylen, ‘I not only think that we will tamper with Mother Nature. I think Mother wants us to.’ 8 The actual building used for the exterior shots is by the architect Frank Lloyd Wright and is in Pasadena, California.
CHAPTER 6
1 Tex Avery and Bob Clampett (Warner Bros 1937–42). 2 Georges Cangilhem, A Vital Rationalist, François Delaporte (ed.), trans. Arthur Goldhammer, New York, Zone Books, 1994: 316–17.
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3 An animatic, by way of distinction, is a plan of a sequence of scripted animation, showing camera movements and basic image elements. An animatic can be an artwork in itself, but is usually just a filmed storyboard that is used to gauge the timing and intended movement of a final animation. 4 Sigvard Strandh, ‘The Genesis of Control Systems’, in The History of the Machine, New York, Dorset Press, 1979: 167–86. 5 The recognition of this dualism’s obsolescence underpins Donna Haraway’s formative essay, ‘A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s’, Socialist Review, 80 (2), Mar./Apr., 1985: 65–108. 6 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Lewis White Beck, New York, Macmillan, 1956: 99. 7 Ibid., p. 104. 8 It could be said that the duck had its revenge on Kant. Ultimately, the very argument that Kant used to discount the automaton as a model for the autonomy of pure reason revealed a paradox in the idea of autonomy itself. For a critique of Kant’s notion of autonomy in the wake of deconstruction, see Werner Hamacher, ‘One 2 Many Multiculturalisms’, in Hent De Vries, Hent and Samuel Weber (eds), Violence, Identity, and Self-Determination, Stanford, Calif., Stanford University Press, 1997: 314–15. 9 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema II: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galea, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1989: 264–5. 10 Ibid., p. 271. 11 Philip Brophy makes this comment in relation to the animatic apparatus elided with/in cinema. See ‘The Animation of Sound’, in Alan Cholodenko (ed.), The Illusion of Life: Essays on Animation, Sydney, Power Publications, 1991: 73. 12 Norman M. Klein, ‘Machina Versatilis: How the Cartoon Pays Homage to the Machine’, in Seven Minutes: The Life and Death of the American Animated Cartoon, London, Verso, 1993. Fleischer Studios’ productions include The Inkwell, Superman, Popeye and Betty Boop cartoons. 13 Other themes within this allegorical human–machine relationship include animators struggling with their characters, and machines that rise up and crush their masters. 14 Klein, Seven Minutes, p. 80. 15 Paul Virilio and Friedrich Kittler, ‘The Information Bomb: A Conversation,’ trans. Patrice Riemens, in John Armitage (ed.), Angelaki, 4 (2), 1999: 81–90, esp. 84. 16 For a growing taxonomy of ‘agents’ that range across the virtual, biological and robotic, see S. Franklin and A. Graesser, ‘Is it an Agent or just a Program? A
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Taxonomy for Autonomous Agents’, in J. P. Müller, M. J. Wooldridge and N. R. Jennings (eds), Intelligent Agents III, Berlin and New York, Springer-Verlag, 1997: 21–35. 17 Sir Leon Bagrit, The Age of Automation: The BBC Reith Lectures 1964, New York, Mentor Books, 1965: 16–19. 18 Errki Huhtamo, ‘From Cybernation to Interaction: A Contribution to an Archaeology of Interactivity’, in Peter Lunenfeld (ed.), The Digital Dialectic: New Essays on New Media, Cambridge, Mass., The MIT Press, 1999: 99–101. 19 Ibid., p. 106. 20 Simon Penny, ‘Embodied Interaction and the Aesthetics of Behaviour,’ Real-time Computational Art, Cambridge, Mass., The MIT Press, forthcoming. 21 Christa Sommerer with Laurent Mignonneau, ‘Art as a Living System: Interactive Computer Artworks’, Leonardo, 32 (3), 1999: 165–73. 22 Bill Vorn, ‘Machine-Mediated Communication: Agents of Representation’, in Kerstin Dautenhahn (ed.), Human Cognition and Social Agent Technology, Amsterdam, John Benjamin, 1999: 382. 23 Cathryn Vasseleu, ‘The Moving Image and Spectacular Animation’, in Jodi Books and George Kouvaros (eds), Cinema and the Senses: Visual Culture and Spectatorship, Sydney, Power Publications, forthcoming. 24 Paul Virilio, The Information Bomb, trans. Chris Turner, London, Verso, 2000: 134–5. 25 Although a technological by-product of many different branches of physics, cyberspace is itself ontologically ‘beyond’ the space of physics. See Margaret Wertheim, The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace: A History of Space from Dante to the Internet, Sydney, Doubleday, 1999: 228–9. 26 Rolf Pfeifer, ‘Building “Fungus Eaters”: Design Principles of Autonomous Agents’, in Pattie Maes, Maja J. Mataric, Jean-Acady Meyer, Jordan Pollack and Stewart W. Wilson (eds), From Animals to Animats: Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Simulation of Adaptive Behaviour, Cambridge, Mass., The MIT Press, 1996. 27 Jeffrey Ventrella, ‘Animated Artificial Life’ (available at www.ventrella.com/ Alife/Animated/animated_1.html). (Also published in Jean-Claude Heudin (ed.), Virtual Worlds: Synthetic Universes, Digital Life, and Complexity, Reading, Mass., Perseus Books, 1999). 28
Jeffrey Ventrella, ‘Sexual Swimmers: Emergent Morphology and Locomotion Without a Fitness Function’, in Maes, Mataric, Meyer, Pollack and Wilson, From Animals to Animats. (See also www.ventrella.com/Alife/Animated/
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animated_4.html) To view the swimmers and play with Ventrella’s evolving artificial life system select ‘Darwin Pond’ (available at www.ventrella.com). 29 Ventrella, ‘Animated Artificial Life’, p. 1. 30 Ibid., pp. 1, 7. 31 Ibid., p. 5. 32 Ibid., p. 4. 33 Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Tomorrow’s Eve, trans. Robert Martin Adams, Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 1982. 34 Annette Michelson, ‘On the Eve of the Future: The Reasonable Facsimile and the Philosophical Toy’, October, 29, summer, 1984: 3–20. 35 Ibid., p. 20. 36 Raymond Bellour, ‘Ideal Hadaly’, in Constance Penley, Elisabeth Lyon, Lynn Spigel and Janet Bergstrom (eds), Close Encounters: Film, Feminism and Science Fiction, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1991: 114.
I N T R O D U C T I O N T O PA R T I I I
1 William H. Dutton, Society on the Line: Information Politics in the Digital Age, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1999. 2 Saskia Sassen, Globalization and its Discontents, New York, New Press, 1998. 3 Tim Jordan, Cyberpower: The Culture and Politics of Cyberspace and the Internet, London, Routledge, 1999.
CHAPTER 7
1 This chapter updates and extends W.-Y. Lin, ‘Web-centric politics: campaigning and political action on the Internet’, paper presented at the Annual Conference of the International Association of Media and Communication Research, Singapore, 17–21 July 2000, and W. H. Dutton and W.-Y. Lin, ‘Using the Web in the democratic process: the Web-orchestrated “Stop the Overlay” cybercampaign’, European Review, 9 (2), 2001: 185–99. 2 William H. Dutton, Society on the Line, Oxford and New York, Oxford University Press, 1999: 173–93. 3 K. C. Laudon, Communications Technology and Democratic Participation, New York, Praeger, 1977.
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4 B. Bimber, ‘The Internet and political mobilization’, Social Science Computer Review, 16 (4), 1998: 391–401; R. Tsagarousianou, D. Tambini and C. Bryan (eds), Cyberdemocracy, New York, Routledge, 1998. 5 E. Douglas, ‘Phone Firms Pushing FCC to Add Area Codes in State’, Los Angeles Times, 3 June 2000; E. Douglas and J. Shiver, ‘New Rules May Slow the Boom in Area Codes’, Los Angeles Times, 17 Mar. 2000. 6 D. Bennett and P. Fielding, The Net Effect: How Cyberadvocacy is Changing the Political Landscape, Merrifield, Va., e-advocates Press, 1999. 7 PUC, Public Utilities Commission, California Public Utilities Commission Consumer Advisory, San Francisco, California Public Utilities Commission, Telecommunications Division, 12 Apr. 1999. 8 Steven Teitelbaum, personal interview, Los Angeles, 10 Mar. 2000. 9 Bob Scheer, personal interview, Los Angeles, 17 Feb. 2000. 10 One PUC report estimated that at least 3 million unused numbers existed in the 310 area code, and approximately 2.7 million were held by carriers. See PUC, California Public Utilities Commission Report on the 310 Area Code, San Francisco, California Public Utilities Commission, Telecommunications Division, 16 Mar. 2000. 11 Bob Scheer, ‘Readers give a lesson in communications’, Los Angeles Times, Our Times, Santa Monica, 25 Apr. 1999. 12 Bob Scheer, interview on KCRW, Los Angeles, 20 Oct. 1999. 13 Bob Scheer, personal interview. 14 FCC, Federal Communications Commission, California Public Utilities Commission petition for delegation of additional authority pertaining to area code relief and NXX code conservation measures (Order FCC 99–248), Washington, DC, Federal Communications Commission, 1999. 15 Bob Scheer, personal interview, Los Angeles, 20 May 2000. 16 Joshua Fouts, personal interview, Los Angeles, 21 Oct. 1999. 17
E. Douglas and J. Shiver, ‘New Rules May Slow the Boom in Area Codes’, Los Angeles Times, 17 Mar. 2000.
18 E. Douglas, ‘Phone Firms Pushing FCC to Add Area Codes in State’, Los Angeles Times, 3 June 2000. 19 E. Douglas, ‘State Urges Split of 310 Area Code’, Los Angeles Times, 27 Feb. 2001.
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20 This geography of Web-campaigns is developed in Dutton and Lin, ‘Using the Web’, pp. 185–99. 21 Dutton, Society on the Line. 22 N. E. Long, ‘The local community as an ecology of games’, American Journal of Sociology, 64, 1958: 251–61; M. Crozier and E. Friedberg, Actors and Systems, trans. A. Goldhammer, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1980; W. H. Dutton, ‘The ecology of games shaping telecommunications policy’, Communication Theory, 2 (4), 1992: 303–28. 23 Dutton, ‘Ecology of games’, pp. 303–28. 24 PUC, Report on the 310 Area Code.
CHAPTER 8
1 See Juliet Webster, ‘Technological work and women’s prospects in the knowledge economy’, Information, Communication & Society, 2 (2), 1999: 201–21; Celia Stanworth, ‘Women and work in the information age’, Gender, Work and Organization, 7 (1), 2000: 20–32; Arthur and Marilouise Kroker, Hacking the Future: Stories for the Flesh-Eating 90s, New York, St Martin’s Press, 1996; Debra Howcroft, ‘The hyperbolic age of information: an empirical study of Internet usage’, Information, Communication & Society, 2 (3), 1999: 277–99. 2 Much of what has been described for cyberspace in the specialized and general literature is explicitly or implicitly far more likely to be about particular groups of men, because these have thus far dominated usage and produced many of the cybercultures. Thus we also need more information about men who do not fit those particular groups. 3 There is a vast critical literature on various aspects relating to gendering and feminist categories. For a broad range of issues see, for example, Martha Minow, Making all the Difference: Inclusion, Exclusion, and American Law, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1990; Judy Wajcman, Feminism Confronts Technology, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1991; Elizabeth V. Spelman, Inessential Woman: Problems of Exclusion in Feminist Thought, Boston, Mass., Beacon Press, 1988; Aihwa Ong, ‘Globalization and Women’s Rights: The Asian Debate on Citizenship and Communitarianism’, Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies, Special Symposium on Feminism and Globalization: The Impact of The Global Economy on Women and Feminist Theory, 4 (1), 1996; Denise G. Reaume, ‘The social construction of women and the possibility of change: unmodified feminism revisited’ (book review), Canadian Journal of Women and Law, 5 (2), 1992: 463–83. 4 Although using a different vocabulary, we can see Latour making a radical statement in this direction: Bruno Latour, ‘Technology is society made durable’, in J. Law (ed.), A Sociology of Monsters, London, Routledge, 1991. See also, Judy Wajcman (ed.), Current Sociology: Special Issue on Information Technology, 2002
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(forthcoming); Geert Lovink and Patrice Riemens, ‘Digital City Amsterdam: local uses of global networks’, in Saskia Sassen (ed.), Global Networks/Linked Cities, New York and London, Routledge, 2002. 5 See, for example, Brian Loader (ed.), Cyberspace Divide: Equality, Agency and Policy in the Information Age, London, Routledge, 1998; K. Grint and R. Gill, The Gender–Technology Relation: Contemporary Theory and Research, London, Taylor & Francis, 1995; Wajcman, Feminism Confronts Technology. 6 Elsewhere I have examined the extent to which our thinking about cyberspace and network power has been shaped by the properties of the Internet, disregarding the crucial differences between the public-access digital networks of the Internet and private digital networks to which there is no access no matter what one is willing to pay, e.g. private dedicated networks of financial services firms and wholesale financial markets: Saskia Sassen, ‘Digital Networks and the State: Some Governance Questions’, Theory Culture & Society, Special Section on Globalization and Sovereignty, 17 (4), 2000: 19–33. 7 See, for example, Leslie Regan Shade, ‘A gendered perspective on access to the information infrastructure’, The Information Society, 14, 1998: 33–44; Grint and Gill, Gender-Technology Relation; Webster, ‘Technological work and women’s prospects’, pp. 201–21; Cynthia Cockburn and Dilic Ruza Furst (eds), Bringing Technology Home: Gender and Technology in a Changing Europe, Buckingham and Philadelphia, Open University Press, 1994. 8 Shade, ‘A gendered perspective’, pp. 33–44; Saskia Sassen, Globalization and its Discontents, New York, New Press, 1998, ch. 9. 9 Saskia Sassen, ‘Digital networks and power’, in M. Featherstone and S. Lash (eds), Spaces of Culture: City, Nation, World, London, Sage, 1999: 49–63. 10 This saves companies the cost of private internal computer networks and the requisite staffing and servicing, and the cost of frame relay connections or the costs of using intermediaries for firm-to-firm transactions. 11 An additional issue, one to which I am not referring here, is the privatization of infrastructure that has also taken place. See Sassen, Globalization and its Discontents, ch. 9. Since the mid-1990s the backbone has been privatized where before it was financed by the US government, that is to say, taxpayers. This in turn changes the discussion of cyberspace as a public space, but only partly: it can remain public even if there is a fee to be paid for access. For a resource to be public it need not necessarily be free for users. 12 There is no comparative standardized data set on types of Internet usage by women, only various bits of information. Here are examples of somewhat unexpected trends, all for the year 2000. According to data from Ernst & Young, women are far less likely than men to shop online: in France, only one-fifth of all online buyers were women; also in Germany and in Britain, men were far more
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likely than women to shop online; in Poland the figure for women was 20 per cent, and in Italy only 15 per cent. In the USA it was the reverse, two-thirds of women shopped online; they were mostly white and about half earn more than $75,000 and have children. In Britain, a majority of online gamblers were women and children, with 22 per cent of them saying that they believe it is safer, more fun, less intimidating, and more anonymous. Women were only 21 per cent of those who spend 30 per cent of their time online chatting, and only 27 per cent of those who chat at all. According to NetValue, women were 43 per cent of visitors to online banking sites in Singapore; and they were one-third of adult content website viewers in Hong Kong and in Singapore, a share that goes up to 38 per cent in South Korea, and down to 23.4 per cent in Taiwan. According to Roper Starch Worldwide, women in the USA are more likely than men to prefer e-mail and Internet communications over face-to-face meetings with clients. 13 They include: a) websites to give advice and information on subjects ranging from fashion to medical issues, e.g. Cybergrrl, Geekgirl, PlanetGrrl, MomMD.com, Jooly’s Joint (information on multiple sclerosis); b) websites that contain research, news and feminist perspectives, e.g. Feminews, women2women, Feminist Majority Foundation, WWWomen (websearch for women), iVillage (women’s network, similar to Yahoo! in format), IGC:Women’s Net; and c) websites addressed to specific group issues, e.g. H-Minerva (women in war), Korealink Comfort Women (in Korean and English, about the forced prostituting of Korean women by the Japanese military occupying forces), National Partnership for Women and Families, Sports-for-Women, Home-Based Working Moms, Russian Web Girls (in Russian, redefines the term ‘russian women’ and increases their presence on the net), Estrogen Music (hub for independent female musicians on the net), Senior Spirit. 14 For a more theorized account of these issues please see ‘Toward a feminist analytics of globalization’, in Sassen, Globalization and its Discontents. 15 Examples of these organizations that now function globally are the Global Survival Network (available at www.globalsurvival.net/femaletrade.html) and the Coalition to Abolish Slavery and Trafficking (available at www.trafficked women.org/fact.html). For a large inventory of these types of organization and struggle see Global Civil Society Yearbook 2002, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2003 (forthcoming). 16 The Internet may continue to be a space for democratic practices. But it will be so partly as a form of resistance against overarching powers of the economy and of hierarchical power, rather than the space of the unlimited freedom which is part of its romantic representation. The images we need to bring into this representation increasingly need to deal with contestation and resistance, rather than simply freedom and interconnectivity. See Andrew Calabrese and JeanClaude Burgelman, Communication, Citizenship and Social Policy: Re-Thinking the Limits of the Welfare State, Oxford, Rowman & Littlefield, 1998. 17 Lovink and Riemens, ‘Digital City Amsterdam’.
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18 I have made a parallel argument for the city, especially the global city, being a more concrete space for politics. In many ways, the politics of revindication being enacted in cyberspace resonates with many of the activisms evident in large cities today: struggles against police brutality and gentrification, struggles for the rights of the homeless and immigrants, struggles for the rights of gays and lesbians. Much of this becomes visible on the street. Much of urban politics is concrete, enacted by people rather than dependent on mass-media technologies. Street-level politics makes possible the formation of new types of political subject that do not have to go through the formal political system.
CHAPTER 9
1 A third form of power, that of the imaginary, is put to one side in this chapter in order to focus on the relationship between cyberpowers and cyberfutures. See Tim Jordan, Cyberpower: The Culture and Politics of Cyberspace and the Internet, London, Routledge, 1999. 2 Ibid., pp. 7–19. 3 A. R. Stone, The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age, Cambridge, Mass., The MIT Press, 1995; Sherry Turkle, The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit, London, Granada, 1995. 4 Judith Donath, ‘Identity and deception in the virtual community’, in Peter Kollock and Marc Smith (eds), Communities in Cyberspace, London, Routledge, 1999: 29–59. 5 Gareth Branwyn, ‘Compu-sex: erotica for cybernauts’, in Mark Dery (ed.), Flame Wars: the Discourse of Cyberculture, Raleigh, Duke University Press, 1995: 779–91. 6 Lee Sproull and Sara Kiesler, ‘Computers, networks and work’, in Linda Harasim (ed.), Global Networks: Computers and International Communication, Cambridge, Mass., The MIT Press, 1993:105–20. 7 I am telling this story as a shift from individual to collective; however, it is not so much the direction of this change from individual to communal that is essential to my argument, as the recognition that there are at least two distinct types of power in cyberspace. 8 This account of technopower is heavily indebted to both the sociology of scientific knowledge and technology and to politicized readings of epistemology. 9 David Shenk, Data Smog: Surviving the Information Age, San Francisco, HarperEdge, 1997. 10 Patti Maes, ‘Agents that Reduce Work and Information Overload’ (available at pattie.www.media.mit.edu/people/pattie/CACM-94).
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11 Leander Kahney, ‘RealNetworks probe begins’, Wired News, 1/11/99 (available at www.wired.com/news) and ‘The Internet’s “Living Treasure” ’, Wired News, 2/11/99 (available at www.wired.com/news); Richard Smith, ‘The RealJukeBox monitoring system’ (available at www.tiac.net/users/smiths/privacy). 12 Richard Smith, ‘Was the Microsoft 1999 Annual Report produced on a Macintosh?’ (available at www.tiac.net/users/smiths/privacy). For broader issues of privacy see Simon Davies, Big Brother: Britain’s Web of Surveillance and the New Technological Order, London, Macmillan, 1996 and David Lyon, The Electronic Eye: The Rise of the Surveillance Society, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1994.
I N T R O D U C T I O N T O PA R T I V
1 Birgitte Andersen, Jeremy Howells, Richard Hull, Ian Miles and Joanne Roberts, Knowledge and Innovation in the New Service Economy, Cheltenham, Edward Elgar, 2000. 2 Manuel Castells, The Internet Galaxy: Reflections on the Internet, Business and Society, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2001. 3 Sean Cubitt, ‘Supernatural futures: theses on digital aesthetics’, in G. Robertson, M. Mash, L. Tickner, J. Bird, B. Curtis and T. Putnam (eds), FutureNatural: Nature, science culture, London and New York, Routledge, 1996: 237–55. 4 Donna Haraway, ‘A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s’, Socialist Review, 80 (2), Mar.-Apr. 1985: 65–108. 5 Cubitt, ‘Supernatural futures’, pp. 237–55, esp. 246. 6 Allucquére Rosanne Stone, The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age, Cambridge, Mass., The MIT Press, 1995. 7 Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society, 2nd edn, Oxford, Blackwell, 2000. 8 See David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, Oxford, Blackwell, 1989.
CHAPTER 10
1 Cf. Alistair Duff, Information Society Studies, London, Routledge, 2000; K. Robins (ed.), Understanding Information, London, Pinter, 1992. 2 William Dutton (ed.), Information and Communications Technologies: Visions and Realities, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1996. 3 G. Thomas and Ian Miles, Telematics in Transition: The Emergence of New Interactive Services, Harlow, Longman, 1989. 4 William Gibson, Neuromancer, New York, Ace, 1984. The ‘cyberpunk timeline’ provides interesting information on developments in literature and technology (available online at www.subsitu.com/cns/tl.htm).
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5 P. Windrum, Colline Report: The Collective Invention of the World Wide Web, Report to DGXII, Maastricht, MERIT: University of Limburg, 1999 (available online at meritbbs.unimaas.nl/staff/windrum/conc.pdf). 6 R. M. Solow, ‘We’d Better Watch Out’, New York Times Book Review, 12 July 1987: 36. 7 E. Brynjolfsson and L. Hitt, ‘Beyond the Productivity Paradox’, Communications of the ACM, August 1998: 49–57 (available online at mitsloan.edu). 8 P. Schreyer, ‘The Contribution of Information and Communication Technology to Output Growth: a Study of the G7 Countries’, STI Working Paper 2000/2, Paris, OECD, 2000 (available online at oecd.org/dsti). 9 Manuel Castells, The Rise of The Network Society, Oxford, Blackwell, 1996. 10 Richard Lewney, ‘The macroeconomic and structural implications of ecommerce’, paper presented at Cambridge Economics conference E-Commerce: Unbundling the Economic Implications, Robinson College, Cambridge, 6–7 July 2000 (available online at cambecon.co.uk/). 11 E. Bolisani, E. Scarso, I. Miles and M. Boden, ‘Electronic commerce implementation: a knowledge-based analysis’, International Journal of Electronic Commerce, spring, 3 (3), 1999: 53–69. 12 A. McMeekin, Ian Miles and Jason Rutter, ‘Alternative Paradigms for European E-commerce’, IPTS Report vol. 42, Mar. 2000: 31–8 (Special Issue: Technology & Policy Frameworks for E-Commerce) (available online at www.jrc.es/pages/freport.en.html). 13 Ian Miles, ‘Cyberspace as product space’, Futures, 29 (9), 1997: 769–90. 14 Cf. Ken J. Ducatel, Juliet Webster and Werner Herrmann (eds), The Information Society in Europe: Work and Life in an Age of Globalization, Boulder, Colo., Rowman & Littlefield, 2000; William Dutton (ed.), Society on the Line: Information Politics in the Digital Age, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1999; R. Mansell and W. E. Steinmueller, Mobilising the Information Society, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2000.
CHAPTER 11
1 Donna Haraway, ‘A manifesto for cyborgs: science, technology, and socialist feminism in the 1980s’, Socialist Review, 80, Mar.–Apr. 1985: 65–108, esp. 101. 2 Ibid., esp. p. 79. 3 Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, trans. S. W. Ryazanskaya, ed. Maurice Dobbs, London, Lawrence & Wishart, 1981; Friedrich
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Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, New York, Pathfinder, 1972. 4 L. Irigaray, ‘When the goods get together’, in E. Marks and I. de Courtivron (eds), French Feminisms, Amherst, Mass., University of Massachusetts Press, 1980: 107. 5 Ibid., p. 110. 6 Martin Heidegger, ‘The question concerning technology’, in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays (1938), trans. W. Lovitt, New York, Garland Press, 1977. 7 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, trans. A. Sheridan, New York, Pantheon, 1977. 8 Jean Baudrillard, The System of Objects, trans. James Benedict, New York, Verso, 1996; F. Jameson, Postmodernism or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 1991. 9 Haraway, ‘Manifesto for cyborgs’, pp. 65–108, esp. 79. 10 Ibid., esp. p. 80. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid., p. 81. 14 Baudrillard, System of Objects, pp. 12–14. 15 The shift was first noted by Paul Virilio in The Aesthetics of Disappearance, trans. Philip Beitchman, New York, Semiotext[e], c.1991. 16 A lot of complexity has been modelled on computer simulation. The latter is also used to study climate changes. 17 In her work, artist Natalie Jeremijenko deals with these findings. See especially her project ‘One Tree’, in Paradise Now, 2000 (available online at www.geneart.org/jeremijenko.htm). 18 Paul Virilio, The Art of the Motor, trans. J. Rose, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1995: 125.
CHAPTER 12
1 Dallas Smythe, Dependency Road: Communications, Capitalism, Consciousness, and Canada, Norwood, NJ, Ablex, 1981: 270–1.
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2 Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, ‘The German Ideology’, in R. C. Tucker (ed.), The Marx-Engels Reader, New York, W.W. Norton, 1846/1972: 110–66. 3 Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend, Hamlet’s Mill: An Essay Investigating The Origins of Human Knowledge and its Transmission Through Myth, Jaffrey, NH, David R. Godine, 1962/1999: 65. 4 Aristotle, The Politics, trans. T. A. Sinclair, London, Penguin, 1962/1981. Marx is exceptional in this respect. See esp. Karl Marx, ‘Economic and philosophical manuscripts’, in Karl Marx, Early Writings, trans. R. Livingstone and G. Benton, 1844/1975, London, Penguin. 5 S. Enke, ‘Space and Value’, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 56 (4), 1942: 627. 6 Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society: The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture (Vol. 1), Oxford, Blackwell, 1996, ch. 6. 7 Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution: 1789–1848, London, Abacus, 1962: 46. 8 Marc Bloch, Feudal Society (Vol. 1): The Growth of Ties of Independence, trans. L. A. Manyon, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1940/1961: 59; David Harvey, Social Justice and the City, London, Blackwell, 1973/1988: 36. 9 Pierre Bourdieu, Practical Reason: On the Theory of Practice, London, Polity Press, 1998. 10 Jay Lemke, Textual Politics: Discourse and Social Dynamics, London, Taylor & Francis, 1995. 11 W. R. Hinchman, ‘Use and management of the Electrospace: A new concept of the radio resource’, IEEE International Conference on Communication, Conference Record, Boulder, Colo., June 1969: 13.1–13.5. 12 Bob Brewin, ‘DOD recognizes info warfare as key battlefield’, Federal Computer Week, 2 Dec. 1998 (URL consulted 11 December 1998: www.fcw.com/pubs/ fcw/1998/1130/web-infowar-12-2-98.html). 13 Harold Adam Innis, The Bias of Communication, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1951: 80–1. The period in the twentieth century when nationalism developed on a large scale can be viewed as the result of both positive and negative forces like, for example, the breakup of great empires on the one hand, and the development of a highly concentrated sense of national identity through the oral medium of radio on the other. 14 Ibid. 15 Smythe, Dependency Road, p. 307. 16 John Armitage and Philip Graham, ‘Dromoeconomics: towards a political economy of speed’, parallax, 7 (1), 2001: 111–23; Philip Graham, ‘Hypercapitalism:
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a political economy of informational idealism’, New Media and Society, 2 (2), 2000: 131–56. 17 Smythe, Dependency Road, p. 300. 18 ‘US to clean up wireless mess’, Sydney Morning Herald, 16 October 2000: 40. 19 Ibid. 20 William Wallace Childs, ‘Problems in the radio industry’, The American Economic Review, 14 (3), 1924: 520–3. 21 G. F. Church, ‘Short waves and propaganda’, Public Opinion Quarterly, 3 (2), 1939: 209–22. 22 G. L. Rosston and J. S. Steinberg, Using Market-Based Spectrum Policy to Promote the Public Interest, Washington, DC, Federal Communications Commission, 1997. 23 Childs, ‘Problems in the radio industry’, pp. 522–3. My italics. 24 Harvey, Social Justice and the City, pp. 35–7; Karl Marx, 1976, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, trans. B. Fowkes, London, Penguin, 1976: 932–3. 25 Marx, ‘Economic and philosophical manuscripts’, p. 295. 26 See J. Dickinson, ‘The mediaeval conception of kingship and some of its limitations, as developed in the Policratus of John of Salisbury’, Speculum, 1 (3), 1926: 308–37. 27 Ibid., p. 309. 28 Graham, ‘Hypercapitalism’. 29 John Ralston Saul, Voltaire’s Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West, Maryborough, Queensland, Australia, Penguin, ch. 2. 30 For the latest developments, see the World Intellectual Property Organization website at www.wipo.org. 31 Graham, ‘Hypercapitalism’. 32 Philip Graham, ‘Space: Irrealis objects in technology policy and their role in a new political economy’, Discourse & Society, 12 (6), 2001: 761–88. 33 Philip Graham, ‘Predication and propagation: a method for analysing values in technology policy’, TEXT, forthcoming. 34 John Perry Barlow, Cybernomics: Toward a Theory of the Information Economy, New York, Merrill Lynch, 1998.
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35 Vanessa Williams, ‘Biotech firm buys Tonga’s gene pool’, Adelaide Advertiser, 22 November 2000: 2. 36 Graham, ‘Hypercapitalism’. 37 W. G. Langworthy Taylor, ‘Some important phases in the evolution of the idea of value’, The Journal of Political Economy, 3 (4), 1895: 414–33. 38 Raymond Firth, ‘The study of values by social anthropologists: The Marrett Lecture, 1953’, Man, 53, 1953: 146–53. 39 Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (rough draft), trans. M. Nicolaus, London, Penguin, 1973: 524. 40 To clarify: space divided by time. Such a system would reach its apotheosis once the global circulation time of money (the denominator) was reduced to zero. The closer circulation time gets to zero, the larger the increase in ‘value’ would be with each revolution. Any number divided by zero is a mathematically undefined term. The reduction of circulation time to absolute zero is, as far as we know, impossible. 41 Marx, Grundrisse, p. 321. 42 Armitage and Graham, ‘Dromoeconomics’, pp. 111–23. 43 Ibid.
SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
The suggestions for further reading broadly reflect the key themes and concepts considered in this volume. Although many of the works cited are multidisciplinary in nature, they are grouped loosely to mirror the four parts of the book.
PA R T I : C Y B E R S O C I E T Y
Bell, Daniel, The Coming of Postindustrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting, London, Heinemann, 1974. Borgmann, Albert, Holding on to Reality: The Nature of Information at the Turn of the Millennium, Chicago and London, The University of Chicago Press, 1999. Castells, Manuel, The Power of Identity: The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture Volume II, Oxford, Blackwell, 1997. —— End of Millennium: The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture Volume III, Oxford, Blackwell, 1998. —— The Rise of the Network Society: The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture Volume I, 2nd edn, Oxford, Blackwell, 2000. Dijk, Jan van, The Network Society, London, Routledge, 1999. Dodge, Martin and Rob Kitchin, Mapping Cyberspace, London, Routledge, 2000. Dovey, Jon (ed.), Fractal Dreams: New Media in Social Context, London, Lawrence & Wishart, 1996. Duff, Alistair S., Information Society Studies, London, Routledge, 2000. Ellul, Jacques, The Technological Society, trans. J. Wilkinson, New York, Vintage Books, 1964. Feenberg, Andrew, Questioning Technology, London and New York, Routledge, 1999. Hamelink, Cees J., The Ethics of Cyberspace, London, Sage, 2000. Jones, Steve (ed.), CyberSociety: Computer-Mediated Communication and Community, Sage, 1994. —— CyberSociety 2.0: Revisiting Computer-Mediated Communication and Community, London, Sage, 1998. Latour, Bruno, Aramis, or the Love of Technology, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1996. Levinson, Paul, The Soft Edge: A Natural History and Future of the Information Revolution, London and New York, Routledge, 1997. Lyon, David, Surveillance Society: Monitoring Everyday Life, Buckingham, Open University Press, 2001. Mackenzie, Donald, Knowing Machines: Essays on Technical Change, Cambridge, Mass., The MIT Press, 1996. —— and Judy Wajcman (eds), The Social Shaping of Technology, 2nd edn, Buckingham and Philadelphia, Open University Press, 1999. Miller, Daniel and Don Slater, The Internet: An Ethnographic Approach, Oxford, Berg, 2000. Mitchell, William J., City of Bits, Cambridge, Mass., The MIT Press, 1995. —— e-topia: ‘Urban Life, Jim – But Not As We Know It’ , Cambridge, Mass. and London, The MIT Press, 2000.
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Negroponte, Nicholas, Being Digital, London, Hodder & Stoughton, 1995. Rheingold, Howard, The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier, Reading, Mass., Addison-Wesley, 1993. Rushkoff, Douglas, Cyberia: Life in the Trenches of Hyperspace, New York, HarperCollins, 1994. Slevin, James, The Internet and Society, Cambridge, Polity Press, 2000. Slouka, Mark, War of the Worlds: Cyberspace and the High-Tech Assault on Reality, London, Abacus, 1995. Smith, Marc and Peter Kollock (eds), Communities in Cyberspace, London, Routledge, 1999. Virilio, Paul, Open Sky, trans. J. Rose, London and New York, Verso, 1997. —— Landscape of Events, trans. J. Rose, Cambridge, Mass., The MIT Press, 2000. —— The Information Bomb, trans. C. Turner, London, Verso, 2000. Webster, Frank, Theories of the Information Society, London, Routledge, 1995. Wertheim, Margaret, The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace: A History of Space from Dante to the Internet, Sydney, Doubleday, 1999. Wiener, Norbert, Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, Cambridge, Mass., The MIT Press, 1948. —— The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society, New York, Da Capo Press, 1950. Woolley, Benjamin, Virtual Worlds, Oxford, Blackwell, 1992.
P A R T I I : C Y B E R C U LT U R E
Armitage, John (ed.), Machinic Modulations: New Cultural Theory & Technopolitics, Special Issue: Angelaki, 4 (2), 1999. —— (ed.), Paul Virilio: From Modernism to Hypermodernism and Beyond, London, Sage, 2000. —— (ed.), Virilio Live: Selected Interviews, London, Sage, 2001. Aronowitz, Stanley, Barbara Martinsons and Michael Menser (eds), Technoscience and Cyberculture, New York and London, Routledge, 1996. Bell, David and Barbara Kennedy (eds), The Cybercultures Reader, London, Routledge, 2000. Brook, James and Iain A. Boal (eds), Resisting the Virtual Life: The Culture and Politics of Information, San Francisco, City Lights, 1995. Cherny, Lynn and Elizabeth Reba Weise (eds), Wired Women: Gender and New Realities in Cyberspace, Seattle, Wash., Seal Press, 1996. Conley, Verena Andermatt (ed.), Rethinking Technologies, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1993. Crang, Mike, Phil Crang and Jon May (eds), Virtual Geographies: Bodies, Space, and Relations, London, Routledge, 1999. Critical Art Ensemble, Flesh Machine: Cyborgs, Designer Babies and New Eugenic Consciousness, New York, Autonomedia, 1998. Cubit, Sean, Digital Aesthetics, London, Sage, 1998. Der Derian, James, Virtuous War: Mapping the Military-Industrial Media-Entertainment Network, Oxford, Westview Press, 2001. Dery, Mark (ed.), Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture, London, Duke University Press, 1994. —— Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century, London, Hodder & Stoughton, 1996. Dixon, Joan Broadhirst and Eric J. Cassidy (eds), Virtual Futures: Cyberotics, Technology and PostHuman Pragmatism, London and New York, Routledge, 1998. Featherstone, Mike and Roger Burrows (eds), Cyberspace/Cyberbodies/Cyberpunk, London, Sage, 1996. Gibson, William, Neuromancer, London, Grafton, 1986. Golding, Sue (ed.), The Eight Technologies of Otherness, London and New York, Routledge, 1997. Hables Gray, Chris (ed.), The Cyborg Handbook, London, Routledge, 1995. Haraway, Donna, Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, London, Free Association Books, 1991.
SUGGESTIONS
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READING
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Haraway, Donna, Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan_Meets_OncoMouseTM, New York and London, Routledge, 1997. Hayles, N. Katherine, How We Became Posthuman, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1999. Heidegger, Martin, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays (1938), trans. W. Lovitt, New York, Garland Press, 1977. Holmes, David (ed.), Virtual Politics: Identity and Community in Cyberspace, London, Sage, 1997. Jones, Steve (ed.), Virtual Culture: Identity and Communication in Cybersociety, London, Sage, 1997. Kirkup, Gill, Linda Janes, Kathryn Woodward and Fiona Hovenden (eds), The Gendered Cyborg: A Reader, London, Routledge, 1999. Kroker, Arthur and Marilouise Kroker, Hacking the Future: Stories for the Flesh-Eating 90s, New York, St Martin’s Press, 1996. Kroker, Arthur and Marilouise Kroker (eds), Digital Delirium, Montreal, New World Perspectives, 1997. Lyotard, Jean-François, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. G. Bennington and B. Massumi, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1984. Nussbaum, Martha C. and Cass R. Sunstein (eds), Clones and Clones: Facts and Fantasies About Human Cloning, New York, Norton, 1998. Penley, Constance and Andrew Ross (eds), Technoculture, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1991. Plant, Sadie, Zeros and Ones: Digital Women and the New Technoculture, London, Fourth Estate, 1997. Porter, David (ed.), Internet Culture, London, Routledge, 1997. Poster, Mark, The Second Media Age, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1996. Robins, Kevin and Frank Webster, Times of the Technoculture: From the Information Society to the Virtual Life, London, Routledge, 1999. Sardar, Ziauddin and Jerome R. Ravetz (eds), Cyberfutures: Culture and Politics on the Information Superhighway, London, Pluto Press, 1996. Shields, Rob, Cultures of Internet: Virtual Spaces, Real Histories, Living Bodies, London, Sage, 1996. Springer, Claudia, Electronic Eros: Bodies and Desire in the Postindustrial Age, Austin, Tex., University of Texas Press, 1996. Stone, Allucquére Rosanne, The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age, Cambridge, Mass., The MIT Press, 1995. Taylor, Paul A., Hackers: Crime in the Digital Sublime, London, Routledge, 1999. Turkle, Sherry, Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet, New York, Simon & Schuster, 1995. —— The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit, London, Granada, 1995. Virilio, Paul, The Vision Machine, trans. J. Rose, Bloomington and Indianapolis, Indiana University Press, 1994. —— The Art of the Motor, trans. J. Rose, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1995. Wakeford, Nina, Networks of Desire: Gender, Sexuality and Computing Culture, London, Routledge, 2000. Wark, McKenzie, Virtual Geography: Living With Global Media Events, Bloomington and Indianapolis, Indiana University Press, 1994. Winston, Brian, Media Technology and Society, London, Routledge, 1998.
PA R T I I I : C Y B E R P O L I T I C S
Agre, Philip E. and Marc Rotenberg (eds), Technology and Privacy: The New Landscape, Cambridge, Mass., The MIT Press, 1997. Barry, Andrew, Political Machines: Governing a Technological Society, London, Athlone, 2001. Bennett, Daniel and Pam Fielding, The Net Effect: How Cyberadvocacy is Changing the Political Landscape, Merrifield, Va., e-advocates Press, 1999.
194
LIVING
WITH
C Y B E R S PA C E
Bogard, William, The Simulation of Surveillance: Hypercontrol in Telematic Societies, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996. Davies, Simon, Big Brother: Britain’s Web of Surveillance and the New Technological Order, London, Macmillan, 1996. Dutton, William H. (ed.), Information and Communication Technologies: Visions and Realities, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1996. —— Society on the Line: Information Politics in the Digital Age, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1999. Everard, Jerry, Virtual States: Globalisation, Inequality and the Internet, London, Routledge, 1999. Feenberg, Andrew and Alastair Hannay (eds), Technology and the Politics of Knowledge, Bloomington and Indianapolis, Indiana University Press, 1995. Hables Gray, Chris, Postmodern War: The New Politics of Conflict, London, Routledge, 1997. Hacker, Kenneth L. and Jan van Dijk (eds), Digital Democracy: Issues of Theory and Practice, London, Routledge, 2000. Hague, Barry N. and Brian Loader, Digital Democracy: Discourse and Decision-Making in the Information Age, London, Routledge, 1999. Ignatieff, Michael, Virtual War: Kosovo and Beyond, London, Chatto & Windus, 2000. Jordan, Tim, Cyberpower: The Culture and Politics of Cyberspace and the Internet, London, Routledge, 1999. Kroker, Arthur, The Possessed Individual: Technology and Postmodernity, London, Macmillan, 1992. Kroker, Arthur and Michael A. Weinstein, Data Trash: The Theory of the Virtual Class, Montreal, New World Perspectives, 1994. Loader, Brian (ed.), The Governance of Cyberspace: Politics, Technology and Global Restructuring, London, Routledge, 1997. —— (ed.), Cyberspace Divide: Equality, Agency and Policy in the Information Age, London, Routledge, 1998. Lyon, David, The Electronic Eye: The Rise of the Surveillance Society, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1994. Roszak, Theodore, The Cult of Information: A Neo-Luddite Treatise on High-Tech, Artificial Intelligence, and the True Art of Thinking, 2nd edn, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1994. Shenk, David, Data Smog: Surviving the Information Age, San Francisco, HarperEdge, 1997. Thomas, Douglas and Brian Loader (eds), Cybercrime: Law Enforcement, Security and Surveillance in the Information Age, London, Routledge, 2000. Thussu, Daya Kishan (ed.), Electronic Empires: Global Media and Local Resistance, London, Arnold, 1998. Tsagarousianou, Roza, Damian Tambini and Cathy Bryan (eds), Cyberdemocracy: Technology, Cities and Civic Networks, New York, Routledge, 1998. Webster, Frank (ed.), Culture and Politics in the Information Age, London, Routledge, 2001.
PA R T I V: C Y B E R E C O N O M I C S
Andersen, Birgitte, Jeremy Howells, Richard Hull, Ian Miles and Joanne Roberts, Knowledge and Innovation in the New Service Economy, Cheltenham, Edward Elgar, 2000. Barbrook, Richard, ‘The hi-tech Gift economy’, First Monday, 1999 (available online at www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue3_12/barbrook/index.html). Brown, John Seely and Paul Duguid, The Social Life of Information, Boston, Mass., Harvard Business School Press, 2000. Brynjolfsson, Erik and Brian Hahin (eds), Understanding the Digital Economy, Cambridge, Mass., The MIT Press, 2000.
SUGGESTIONS
FOR
FURTHER
READING
195
Cairncross, Frances, The Death of Distance 2.0: How the Communications Revolution Will Change Our Lives, London, Texere Publishing, 2001 Carr, Nicholas G., The Digital Enterprise: How to Reshape Your Business for a Connected World, Boston, Mass., Harvard Business School Press, 1999. Castells, Manuel, The Internet Galaxy: Reflections on the Internet, Business, and Society, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2001. Cockburn, Cynthia and Dilic Ruza Furst (eds), Bringing Technology Home: Gender and Technology in a Changing Europe, Buckingham and Philadelphia, Open University Press, 1994. Davies, Stan and Christopher Meyer, Blur: The Speed of Change in the Connected Economy, Oxford, Capstone, 1998. Davis, Jim, Thomas A. Hirschl and Michael Stack, Cutting Edge: Technology, Information Capitalism and Social Revolution, London and New York, Verso, 1997. Downes, Larry and Chunka Mui, Unleashing the Killer App: Digital Strategies for Market Dominance, Boston, Mass., Harvard Business School Press, 1998. Ducatel, Ken J., Juliet Webster and Werner Herrmann (eds), The Information Society in Europe: Work and Life in an Age of Globalization, Boulder, Colo., Rowman & Littlefield, 2000. Evans, Philip and Thomas S. Wurster, Blown to Bits: How the New Economics of Information Transforms Strategy, Boston, Mass., Harvard Business School Press, 2000. Gates, Bill, The Road Ahead, New York, Viking, 1995. —— Business @ the Speed of Thought: Succeeding in the Digital Economy, London, Penguin, 1999. Jackson, Paul (ed.), Virtual Working: Social and Organisational Dynamics, London and New York, Routledge, 1999. Kelly, Kevin, New Rules for the New Economy, London, Fourth Estate, 1998. Leadbeater, Charles, Living on Thin Air: The New Economy, London, Penguin, 2000. McKnight, Lee W. and Joseph P. Bailey (eds), Internet Economics, Cambridge, Mass. and London, The MIT Press, 1998. Mansell, Robin and W. Edward Steinmueller, Mobilising the Information Society: Strategies for Growth and Opportunity, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2000. —— and Uta Wehn, Knowledge Societies: Information Technology for Sustainable Development, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1998. Martin, James, Cybercorp: The New Business Revolution, New York, AMACOM, 1996. OECD, OECD Information Technology Outlook: ICTs, E-commerce and the Information Economy, Paris, OECD, 2000. Ohmae, Kenichi, The Invisible Continent: Four Strategic Imperatives of the New Economy, London, Nicholas Brealey, 2001. Rifkin, Jeremy, The Age of Access: How the Shift from Ownership to Access is Transforming Capitalism, London, Penguin, 2000. Sassen, Saskia (ed.), Global Networks/Linked Cities, New York and London, Routledge, 2002. Shapiro, Carl and Hal R. Varian, Information Rules: A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy, Boston, Mass., Harvard Business School Press, 1999. Tapscott, Don, Digital Economy: Promise and Peril in the Age of Networked Intelligence, New York, McGraw-Hill, 1996. —— Alex Lowy and David Ticoll (eds), Blueprint to the Digital Economy: Creating Wealth in the Era of E-business, London, McGraw-Hill, 1998. —— David Ticoll and Alex Lowy, Digital Capital: Harnessing the Power of Business Webs, London, Nicholas Brealey, 2000.
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
John Armitage is Head of Multidisciplinary Studies at the School of Social, Political and Economic Sciences, University of Northumbria, UK. He is an associate editor of Theory, Culture & Society, a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Visual Culture and the editor of Virilio Live: Selected Interviews. Verena Andermatt Conley teaches literature at Harvard University, USA. She writes on issues of feminism, ecology and technology, and is the author of Ecopolitics: The Environment in Poststructuralist Thought and editor of Rethinking Technologies. James Der Derian is a research professor of international relations at the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University, and Professor of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, USA. His articles on war and technology have appeared in Wired, The Nation, and The Washington Quarterly. His most recent book is Virtuous War: Mapping the Military-Industrial-Media-Entertainment Network. William H. Dutton is a professor in the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California, USA. He is North American Editor of the journal Information, Communication & Society and the author of Society on the Line: Information Politics in the Digital Age. Phil Graham is a lecturer in communication at the University of Queensland School of Management, Australia. He is on the international advisory board of New Media & Society and has published numerous articles in the areas of media studies, discourse analysis and social theory. Tim Jordan works in sociology at the Open University, UK. He is the author of Cyberpower and co-editor of Storming the Millennium. Tim is also a co-editor of the journal Social Movement Studies and has published on online social movements, hackers, social theory and popular protests. David Lyon is Professor of Sociology and Director of the Surveillance Project at Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada, where his main focus is the social and cultural aspects of new technologies. He has held visiting positions at universities in Australia, Canada, England, France, Japan and New Zealand and his work has been translated into eleven languages. His most recent books are Postmodernity, Jesus in Disneyland: Religion in Postmodern Times and Surveillance Society: Monitoring Everyday Life. Ian Miles is Professor of Technological Innovation and Social Change at the University of Manchester, UK, where he is also Director of Policy Research in
NOTES
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CONTRIBUTORS
197
Engineering, Science and Technology (PREST) and Director of the Centre for Research on Innovation and Competition (CRIC). He has been working on cybersociety-related issues since the early 1980s and on futures studies even longer. His other main research interests include innovation studies and service economics. Joanne Roberts is a lecturer in international business at the University of Durham Business School, UK, and Honorary Associate Fellow at the Centre for Research on Innovation and Competition, University of Manchester, UK. She is the author of Multinational Business Service Firms and co-editor of Knowledge and Innovation in the New Service Economy. Saskia Sassen is the Ralph Lewis Professor of Sociology at the University of Chicago, USA, and Centennial Visiting Professor at the London School of Economics, UK. Her most recent books are Guests and Aliens, The Global City and the edited volume Global Networks/Linked Cities. Her books have been translated into ten languages. She is the Chair of the Information Technology, International Co-operation and Global Security Committee of the Social Science Research Council of the USA. Cathryn Vasseleu is the author of Textures of Light: Vision and Touch in Irigaray, Levinas and Merleau-Ponty. She is the author of numerous articles on imaging technologies and biotechnologies. Cathryn is currently writing a book on contemporary animation practices, supported by an Australian Research Fellowship at the University of Sydney, Australia. Wan-Ying Lin is a Ph.D. candidate in the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California, USA. Her areas of study include telecommunications policy, political economy of communication and social implications of new technologies. McKenzie Wark is Visiting Professor in Comparative Literature at the State University of New York, Binghamton, USA. He is the author of Virtual Geography and two other books, and co-producer of the multimedia work Planet of Noise. Frank Webster is professor in the Department of Cultural Studies and Sociology at the University of Birmingham, UK. His most recent books are Theories of The Information Society and Culture and Politics in the Information Age.
INDEX
activism 117, 118 cross-border 117 social 118 activists 118 ALife see artificial life American National Security Agency 26 animat approach 89 animated motion 89 animatic, the 88 animatics 60, 83, 84 animation 59, 83–91 animats 89–91 Annenberg School for Communication 8, 101 anti-foundationalist 39 anti-humanism 5 Apple Macintosh 128 artificial intelligence 62, 84, 87, 88 artificial life (ALife) 87–9 atemporal perspective 51 Auther, Jennifer 63 automata 6, 84–6, 90 automation 86, 88 automaton 84, 86 B2B 141 B2C 139, 141 Bagrit, Leon 86 Barthes, Roland 5 Bataille, Georges 49 Baudrillard, Jean 3, 5, 6, 27, 149 Bauman, Zygmunt 4, 19, 25, 36, 37, 49, 50, 52 Bell, Daniel 3, 17, 23 Bellah, Robert 38 Benjamin, Walter 68 billing 111 biological research 89 biology 83 biospace 59, 73, 74 business literature 43–5 business studies 45 Business-to-Consumer (B2C) 139, 141
capitalism 40, 131, 133, 138, 147, 157 Castells, Manuel 3, 10, 18, 23, 25, 38, 41, 46, 48 Castoriadis, Cornelius 44 celestial space 74 chronodystopia 43, 50, 53 chronotopia 4, 19, 44–6, 49, 50, 52 chronotopianism 43, 49 civic participation 112 Cixous, Hélène 5 cloning 72 collective identities 38 communication network 108 communication technology 29 control 26 communications mediated 30 communism 152 communitarianism 38 Computer Liberation 136 computer technology 29 computer technology control 26 computer-mediated communications rise in 28 Compuserve 136 concept of space 133 concept of value 163 copyrighting 111 cosmopolitanism 39 Cubitt, Sean 132 cultural transformations 2 cyber culture 5, 60, 110 cyber economics 9, 11, 96, 131 theory 132 cyber politics 7, 95, 96 cyber society 3, 17, 35, 95 cyber theory 1–3, 4, 7, 11, 12 cyberadvocacy 96, 105, 106, 108 Web-orchestrated 95, 104 cybercitizenship 153 cybereconomy 9, 131, 132, 135–40, 143, 144–5
INDEX
cyberfeminism 5, 6, 10, 132, 133 cyberfeminist interpretations 96 theory 10 cyberfutures 95 cyberfuturism 8–9 cybernation 87 cybernature 132 cybernetics 83 cybernetic acceleration 50 cybernetic automata 86, 88, 90 cybernetic distribution 9 cybernetic life 34 cybernetic power 95 cybernetic society 39, 40, 42 cybernetic systems 88, 90 cybernetic technologies 88 cyberpower 95, 120, 121, 124, 128 of the individual 120 of the social 120 cybersegmentations 110, 111 cybersexuality 7 cybersociality 3, 29–31 cyberspace 3, 22, 24–33, 44, 52, 72–4, 76, 86, 91, 95, 96, 109–21, 123, 125, 131, 135, 150–4, 158 alien realities of 162 and reality 27 and (un)reality 27 commercialization of 142 emancipatory potential of 26 embeddedness of 111 power in 120 private 110 cyberspatial evolution 95 cyberspatial experiences 18 cyberspacial relationships 32 cyborg 35, 132 cyborg body 76 cyborg citizenship 151, cyborgs 84 Davis, Stan 44, 45, 46 de-industrialization 36 Deluze, Gilles 5, 6 democracy 95 democratizing initiatives 111 Derrida, Jacques 5 Descartes 6, 84 dialogistic democracy 39 digital divide 47
199
digital elite 126, 128 digital networks 111, 117 architecture of 118 DNA 74, 83 Dolly the sheep 72 Donath 122 dromology 50 Durkheim, Emile 38 dynamic behaviour 90 dynamics of motion 88 dynamism 84 dystopia 27 e-commerce 141, 142 e-commerce, Business-to-Consumer (B2C) 139, 141 e-commerce firms 140 E-democracy 2, 95 ecology of games 106–108 electronic commerce 111 electronic communities 26 electronic data interchange (EDI) 139, 141, 142 electronic frontier, the 142 Electronic Frontier Foundation 138 electronic markets 142, 143 electrospace 11, 134, 158, 159, 160, 161, 164 electrospace, global 158 Engels 146 essential real reality 29 essentialism 28 Etzioni, Amitai 38 evaluative patterns 163 event landscape 49 exchange-value 163 fascism 67, 69 feminism 8 in connection with socialism 146 feminist economies 146 feminist politics 116 feminist theory 7 feminists 26 fenced frontiers 144 film 67 financial industry 110 firewalled intranets 111 firewalled tunnels 111 Fleischer cartoons 85, 86, 88 Foucault, Michael 5, 120, 147 foundationalism 35 Free Software Foundation 115 freed markets 144
200
INDEX
games 28, 107, 108 Gates, Bill 44, 48, 49 GATTACA 58–9, 73–4, 76, 79–82 gender relations 33 gendering 97, 109–10 genes 73 genetic algorithms 89, 91 genetic code 73 genetically modified organisms 72 genetics 74 Gibson, William 21, 24, 28, 32, 48, 58 Giddens, Anthony 19, 29, 35, 37, 39, 40, 46, 48 gift economy 138 global level 118 network 118 global electrospace 158 global kinetic elite 4, 43, 46–9, 50, 52 globalization 112 GNU/Linux operating system 115 Goebbels, Joseph 67 grey zone of disengagement 4, 52, 54 Griffith, D. W. 66 Guattari, Félix 5, 6 Gulf War 27, 28 Hack Tic 121 Hadaly, android 90 Hamelink, Cees 41 Haraway, Donna 6, 132, 133, 146, 148–52 feminism in connection with socialism 146 informatics of domination 149 on cyborg citizenship 151 on informatics of domination 151 on neo-imperialism 151 on simulation 151 on United Nations’ humanism 151 Harvey, David 29 hierarchies 122 affected by anti-censorship 122 identity 122 many-to-many communication 122 offline 122 online 122 historical time 52 Hitler 69 Hobsbawm, Eric 40 Hollywood 64, 66, 67, 70, 71 Huhtamo, Errki 87
hypermodernity 4, 50, 52, 53 theory of 49 ICTs 106 identifiers 121, 122 identity 37, 39, 121, 122 offline 121 online 122 style 122 identity fluidity 121, 123 identity verification 111 Industrial Revolution 22 informatics of domination 149, 151, 152 information 153, 154, 155 information economy 135 information handling 23 information overload 125, 126 information society 3, 21, 22–33 information superhighway 35 information systems 154 information technology revolution 22 information theory 23 Institute for Creative Technologies 58, 62, 64, 65, 67, 70, 71 institutional signification 45 intellectual property 161 intelligent agents filter Usenet news 125 schedule meetings 125 interaction Internet 31 mediated 30, 31 quasi 30 interactive systems 87 interactivity 87, 88 Internet 26, 106, 110, 111, 112, 114, 117, 118, 136, 142 censor-evading properties 123 commercialization 26 democratic potential 111 interaction 31 relay chat channels 31 use 33 in Trinidad 33 Irigaray, Luce 5 IT 139, 140 Jameson, Fredric Jordan, Tim 8
49
Kant 85 Kittler, Friedrich 7 knowledge 36 knowledge economy 135, 161
INDEX
Kroker, Arthur 44, 46 Kroker, Marilouise 46 Lacan, Jacques 5 landscape of events 49–52, 54 L’Eve future 90, 91 Lewney, Richard 141 liquid modernity 4, 49, 53 Loader, Brian 8 local community 114 logging-on 121 ‘Love Bug’ virus 61, 62 Lyon, David 17, 18 Lyotard, Jean-François 5, 17, 50 Macedonia, Mike 64 MacKay, Donald 23 Macy conferences 23 Mansell, Robin 10 Marshall, Alfred 3 Marx, Karl 10, 146 Marxian theory 11 Marxism 152 Mayer, Christopher 44, 45, 46 McLuhan, Marshall 3 meaning of space 157 the historical significance 158 in political economy 156 media, the 27 mediated communications 30 mediated interactions 24, 30, 31 meta-search engines 126 metadata 127 microcomputing 22 Microsoft 127–8 Milius, John 70 Miller, Daniel 33 MIME-NET 57, 70 Minitel 136 misogyny 116 modernist politicians 37 MUDs see Multi-User Dimensions multicultural society 39 Multi-User Dimensions 28, 122, 124 nation, the 39 nation-state, the 38 national identity 39 nationalism 39 Nazism 69 Negroponte, Nicholas 35 neo-imperialism 151, 152–4 network of localities
network society 23 networked warfare 61 networks of communication 106 Neuromancer 58, 59, 64, 72, 73 Napster 137 ‘New’ Labour Party 47 new technologies 26 developments 27 Nicol, Andrew 58 Niebuhr, Reinhold 69 noise political 48 techno-social 48 Nordström, Kjell 44, 45, 46 NovaLogic 63 occupational structures 23 offline hierarchies 122 offline identity 121 online hierarchies 122 online identity 122 Open Source Software movement 115 orphaned self 37 Patel, Sheela 118 Peer-to-Peer networking 137 Pentagon 64, 71 performance improvements 140 Piore, Michael 3 Plant, Sadie 35 polarization 25 political actors, non-formal 118 political economy 157 political imaginary 48 politicians modernist 37 politics 118 post-industrial society 17 post-Marxian theory 11 postmodern era, the 37 postmodern society 17 Poster, Mark 3 poststructuralism 5, 146 post-traditional world 35 power 120 in cyberspace 120 model of 120 President Eisenhower 70 private cyberspace 110 private digital space 117 privatization 158, 159, 163 Prodigy 136 productivity 139, 140
201
202
INDEX
productivity improvements 140 productivity paradox 139, 140 programmes of positive change 18 public-access digital space 117 public-access Internet 110 public administration 28 public agencies 28 public space 111 quasi interactions 30 quaternary relations 30, 31 radio communication 159 radio spectrum 158 Ravetz 28 Real Networks 127 reality constructed 28 real 28 RealJukebox 120, 127, 128 RealPlayer 127 renovated hierarchies 121, 123 representation 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 153, 154, 155 Rheingold, Howard 26 Ridderstråle, Jonas 44, 45, 46 robotics research 89 robots 84 Roslin Institute 72 Sabel, Charles 3 science of life 83 scientific-technological elite 70 search engines 125 self-reflexivity 37 semiology 5 semiotics 73 Sexual Swimmers 89, 90, 91 Shannon, Claude 23 simulation 148–51, 152, 153, 154, 155 Slater, Don 33 Slouka, Mark 28 Smith, Adam 10 Smith, Richard 127 Smythe, Dallas 11 social forecasting, venture in 23 social imaginary 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 52 social inequality 153 social relationships 29, 33 social spatialzation 50 social-cultural transformations 21 sociability 38, 39, 114 the imperative of 38, 39
sociological studies 33 Solow, Robert 10, 139 space 156, 157 concept of 133 meaning in political economy 156 SPARC 118 spatial consciousness 162 spatial signification 11 speed-space 4 Springer, Bob 763 Sproull and Kiesler 123 ‘Steve’ 62 stock market frenzy 140 Stone, Allucquére Rosanne 132 Stop the Overlay campaign 98 STRICOM 64 structuralism 146 surveillance 26, 31 swimbots 89 symbolic order, the 149 technology 32 technopower 95, 123, 124, 126 technopower spiral 125, 126 techno-capitalism 4 techno-social imaginary 47, 48 telecommunications 22 third way politics 39 time-image 85 time-space compression 29 trademarks protection 111 Triangle Institute for Security Studies 69 twilight of the grounds 53 United Nations’ humanism 151, 152 University of Southern California (USC) 62, 64, 70 unreality 28 (un)reality 27, 28 US military 61 USA 38 USC Center for Advanced Technology, Research and Education 62 Usenet communities 124 technologies 124 utopia 27 Valenti, Jack 65 value-relations 162, 163 Vaucanson, Jacques de 84, 85 Ventrella, Jeffrey 7, 88, 89, 90
INDEX
videogames 70, 71 videotex 136, 137 Virilio, Paul 4, 6, 7, 25, 43, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 65 virtual communities 124 virtual government 28 virtual individuals 124, 128 virtual organization 28 virtual reality 32 of cyberspace 28 virtual societies 120 virtual worlds 120 virtualization 28 virtuous war 61, 62, 69, 71 Wajcman, Judy 8 Wakeford, Nina 33 Web, the 108, 110, 137 Web systems 142 Web-orchestrated campaigns 105 Weber 120 Webster, Frank 4, 17, 23 Weinstein, Michael A. 44 Westmoreland, Gen. William C. 27 Wild Web 137, 138, 142
203
women 26, 91, 96, 97, 109, 110, 111, 112, 114, 117, 118, 119, 131, 146, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155 activists networks 114 African descent 115 American 115 Australian 116 cyberopportunities 112 cyberpresence 112 e-businesses 112 in Asia 115 in cyberspace 2, 8 Internet use 112, 113 NGOs 117 on the Net 115 -oriented e-mail listserves 115, 117 socio-political implications start-ups 112, 114 struggles in cyberspace 116 within cyberspace 95 women-cybercitizens 133, 151–2, 154, 155 World Trade Center 51, 52, 54 World Wide Web 26, 95 commercialization 26
