Anarchogeek

Militancy and the Sovereignty of Technology

Empire ends with a passage about the roll of the militant in the struggle for liberation. It struck me that this model of what it means to be a militant and definition of militancy was more true to my heart than any discussion about militancy as a street tactic. To be a militant is to resist, but to go “through and beyond resistance, in the collective construction and exercise of a counter power capable of destructing the power of capitalism and opposing it with an alternative program.”

My roll, ideas, and function in this global movement against neoliberalism and toward a multitude of liberations has appeared to me through my actions rather than being something I set out to do. Last week while working with Bolivian activists in Cochabomba somebody called me a ‘Revolutionary Technico.’ That is what I’ve become, a nomadic militant who travels the world and constructs the systems of information and communication through which resistance can be articulated. My actions are built upon a world stage where liberation has become redefined. The more simplistic conception of liberation in the past was based upon seizing power. Through the change of the party in control we would be able to redirect the goods of society toward equitable ends. The tragic blunder was that liberation is not simply about material equality. Society and power, it turned out where much more complex and liberation could not be achieved through the simple redirection of the benefits of modernization.

Globalization in my view, is the process by which the fundamental basis of society has shifted from that of industrial production to that informational production. Resistance today must take different forms. Capital and the markets have become decoupled from the ties of locality and the nation state. So too, our activism has reacted to this fundamental shift by looking beyond the struggle to overthrow or reform the wilting nation state. Today we are faced with a new set of institutions of power. These institutions have been transformed and created on the basis of the information organization. Over the last few decades corporations, governments, and institutions of civil society have become transformed by the informatization of their internal processes. They’ve transformed to a services based model of networked organizations with a highly communicative information technology based infrastructure. It is this transformation is part of what has driven globalization. With this new communications technology physical proximity and bureaucratic middle management has lost its vital roll in the functioning of the organization. The organization is in the process of replacing traditional structures with networked, decentralized, and autonomous forms. The rapid decentralization and internationalization in to the networked society is in large part a result of this technological transformation. Our resistance to oppression and struggle for liberation has equally been transformed.

Negri & Hardt claim that the resistance movements of the 60’s where what drove capital to make this transformation but I only partially agree with that point. Clearly the shift from fordism to neoliberalism was driven in part by the popular rejection of the fordist comprise. Yet the rise of neoliberalism only represents part of the globalization process. The shift in technology form a slowly changing and peripheral factor in society to a central one is less analyzed and perhaps more important.

It’s important to understand technology has having grown to hold tremendous power over the functioning of society. This technology is not some neural force that simple is driven down the narrow and linear path of progress. Technology is a social production and the result of many conflicting factors and forces. It has come to take on a quality of a legal and judicial system, the laws which define the world through which the possible is demarcated. (Lessig) A famous example of this is the conflict between the legal conception of copyright and property and file sharing systems such as gnutella. The legal system says that the social ownership of music is strictly forbidden but multitude has created technological systems that make the legal system impotent. This transformation of the functioning of power has profound implications for the possibility of liberation. Instead of needing to seize or eliminate the power of capital and the state there is the possibility that we can create the world where their power ceases to be centrally relevant.

This transformation is fundamentally due to the existence to a new kind of machine, the computer. In the past analog machines were built for a specific function, and although they could be altered, the nature of the technology meant that the cost of passing on the innovation to a second machine is almost as much as it is initial modification. Computers on the other hand are fundamentally built to be modified. The cost of replicating a new function from one machine to a second is almost nonexistent. Computers have spawned a fundamental shift in the continuity of technological development. Almost every computer is capable of being used to recreate the whole ecology of information technology. There is no way you could use an industrial product, such as car purchased off the assembly line to recreate and modify the technological basis by which cars are produced and function. IT is of course not neural. It has been developed and promoted by the markets that see it as a method by which they could construct more productive and exploitive regimes of work. The same power in IT which allows the multitude to create a technological system by which the ownership of music is taken out of private hands and socialized, allows the possibility for corporations and governments to build systems which monitor, control, and exploit to an unprecedented extent.

In the past the struggle for liberation was over who controls the legal system, which was often determined by who had the potential to exert actual or potential coercive force. Today we are seeing a shift to where to a greater extent the level and form of technology is defining the power dynamics and outcomes of social conflict.

For example, in the US there is a huge debate over access to abortion. Through years of dedicated struggle the left won the legal right to abortion. In reaction the right has fought on two fronts, first to legally prohibit abortions and second to exert direct force to shut down the clinics that provide abortion. The simple existence of the RU-486 abortion pill is shifting the terrain of the conflict. As the pill can achieves wide spread availability in the US then what was a public contestable space, the women’s clinic, becomes a private, dispersed, and invisible activity. The site of intense conflict, the clinic and doctors, disappears with the simple existence of a pill. Even without the abortion pill being legal the drug war makes it clear that if there is a demand, the legal system is unable to stop it’s wide spread use of any drug. Billions are spent every year by governments to enforce their laws regarding the production, transportation, and use of ‘illegal’ drugs to very little effect. The combination of technological feasibility and sufficient social demand can clearly trump traditional legal and judicial systems. With the rate of technological change growing faster we will increasingly see this dynamic play out.

This shift in power has tremendous implications for liberation movements. The traditional systems of laws and power still play a large roll but they are now contrasted with a second system where by the judiciary process is embedded in technological systems. Neither the traditional legal system of the state nor the new system based on technology are exclusively libratory or repressive. They are both shaped by a myriad of conflicting and hybridized lines of power generated by the conflicting by the parties which create and exert power within the systems. With globalization we hare facing a partial shift of sovereignty from the political system to sovereignty of the technological system. This is I believe a truer meaning of the ‘hybridized’ or mixed constitution of Empire.

Neither sovereignty should be idealized. We are faced with a world where everywhere we look we are faced with systems of domination. The nation state was at it’s core a system by which the powerful could have their advantage and domination regulated, ordered, and legitimized. Despite this repressive core, popular struggle won many progressive and necessary concessions from the nation state. With the development of liberal democracy there even became such a level of potential popular participation in governance that large media and educational systems were constructed to manufacture consent to maintain hegemonic power imbalances.

The shift toward a sovereignty of information technology plays out differently than development of past sovereignties. The future of technological development is an open space of possibility and contestation. The powerful corporations and markets are attempting to use this shift to consolidate their position securing unprecedented levels of domination through control over the system in which future struggle for power will take place. They are not acting out of malice but rather are taking the logical step forward within a framework that values the individual maximization of profit and the continued conditions for that profit. If corporations and the markets were able to shape and control the fundamentals to a new system of control based on information technology then the prospects of liberation would be very dim indeed.

The nature of communications and information technology and examples of popular creation and social ownership over the production of new technology presents a hope for an alternative. The shift to information technology presents tremendous growth of the power of our technological systems over society. It creates the possibility of popular social control over these systems. With the traditional legal system the power to make laws rested in the hands of those who controlled society. The power to make the ‘laws’ within the sovereignty of information technology rests in the hands of the creators of that technology. This is where in the struggle lies. Who is going to get to create the technology that becomes popularly adopted? Critical to larger power struggles is which portions of society are interested in and able to adopt this technology to transform themselves.

At present there are two distinct models for the production of information technology. The proprietary and the collaborative free software models. The proprietary model is epitomized by Microsoft the one of the largest corporations in the world. Microsoft has been the longest standing company to argue that information technology is a product which must be bought and sold as property. The argument for proprietary ownership over technology is that the only way to finance the development of the massive projects is the private control over the product. The other model for software and information technology development is the free or open model. Based on free and open collaboration of developers working in flexible, decentralized, and networked organizations free software has two fundamental tenants. First is that the there is a fundamental right for information technology to be held in common equivalent to the rights to free speech and association. The second tenant of the free software movement is that is produces better technology. Human intellectual production is effective when we aren’t compartmentalized in to small and isolated groups but are collaboratively creating out of love and passion. Capitalism argues that money is the only true motivator and therefore all conflicts in society should be resolved on the level of money but rise of information technology fundamentally proves that wrong.

The existence of the internet and almost all the software which has driven the libratory parts of the information revolution were developed out of the free software school. The most complicated and diverse technological communication system in human history could never have been created by proprietary corporate model of development. This is our fundamental advantage when we struggle against corporations over the creation of the technological infrastructure that will underpin society in the era of globalization.

It’s not enough to look at the models and paths for technological development alone. We must consider how technology is deployed in movements, organizations, and institutions. The process is not linear, rather the transformation of organizations and their technology are mutually dependent in their development. Information technology isn’t developed just out of the whim out the creator, but rather to address issues that exist in the real world. The values embedded in that development are reflective of both the creator of the technology and the social, economic, and political pressures placed upon the creator. Within corporations the external pressures upon the developer can be quite strong where as the free developer is more often driven by a sense of inspiration from outside dynamics. Either way the programmer is not an autonomous entity rather s/he is creating within the context which is permeated with values and biases. If we are to advance a project of creating a technological system which embodies specific values then we need to be actively advocating those values.

The values embodied in liberation are not fixed and uniform, rather they are defined and redefined through struggle based on a diverse historical circumstances. To make the claim that one person, group, or perspective has a monopoly on what liberation embodies would be to fall in to the trap that generated the Marxist new man and the American liberation through consumption. To deign a universal and all encompassing conception of values is not to reject agency or to say that all values are equal. I have very real and strongly held values upon which I base my struggle to transform the world. To claim that my values are based on some superior rationality is to claim there is a monopoly on the truth. If anything the rise of the networked society based on the information revolution should tell us is that right and wrong are socially constructed and transitory. We must be critical about what we believe as we struggle to implement it for there is no utopia or end to the struggle. As we liberate ourselves from one form of oppression we are by necessity creating new forms of oppression. The struggle has no beginning or end, rather it is the thread of humanity that runs through history.

We are in an age where technology is taking an increasingly central stage. The values that drive my work are the result of my personal evolution as a person, activist, and programmer. The things I value are: creativity, self-motivation, autonomy, participation, love, democracy, difference, integrity, excellence, intellectualism, disobedience, individuality, humility, egalitarianism, internationalism, passion, solidarity, reflection, and action. My work in building and deploying technology is informed and driven by those values. For our technological systems to be used for further liberation rather than control we need to develop a culture among the creators of technology based on critical reflection upon values. By combining creative action informed by values and an understanding of the role that technology is playing in defining the groundwork of society in the era of globalization we can take forward looking progressive action.

There never has been a universally correct course of action that is bound to create a more just and equitable society. The same truism applies when considering the shaping, building, and deploying technology for social change. In different situations and times people have had to make due with their intuition about how they should best apply themselves to creating change.

My intuition is that people who are the creators of information technology, the programmers and engineers, need to understand their now central roll in the shaping of society. This prospect is a bit scary as many technologists are stereotypically not very interested in the ‘outside’ world. Unlike Edward Said’s work “The Roll of the Intellectual” where the intellectual is understood to play a primary roll in understanding and critiquing society, the programmer’s primary job is creating technological products. The profound implications of the programmer’s work is in some ways seen as secondary. That said, in the same way that mountain climbers will say that they want to climb the mountain because it is there, the justification at the core of many programmer’s work is that they want to ‘change the world.’ Service is a core value in the culture of programmers. One may program for pay or for the joy of it, but seeing your program be used by others is the source of true motivation which drives further creation. This is why there are programmers who have devoted their life’s work to the creation of technology for which they never expect finical compensation.

The bridge between social movements and the technical community is still mostly nonexistent. It’s a bridge that will have to be built piecemeal as geeks rebel from the corporate system of proprietary technology and begin to see the larger implications of their work. For techies to bridge that gap there needs to be groups that work on specific projects for them to join. A social space needs to be opened within movements for techies to function. A few of these spaces already exist in the form of autonomous tech collectives. The collectives do the tech work of sustaining and building a communications infrastructure through which social movements can grow, network, and articulate themselves. Other less explicitly political groups are engaged in thinking about the political implications of the free software they develop. It is through the development of new technology, creatively pushing the cutting edge in directions that undermine the existing power structures, that the real potential radical power of technology can be realized.

My work as an activist is to create and get activists and social movements to use the communications and information technology more effectively than those who want to horde the wealth of our planet and society in the hands of a small elite.

Posted by rabble at March 7, 2002 05:51 PM