One can get emotional with a computer, as with a car, but one can only apply such emotions to human beings if one treats humans like machines, if one is incapable of recognising them as more than a means to an end.
The computer represents lots of physical activities but the only real physical activity is between finger and screen. Even when the keyboard is technically doing something physical (like tilting on a pinball machine) the body learns over time not to make any of the physical movements it would normally do on a real machine, because it makes no difference. This is like synthesisers, touch-sensitive ones, which are not really touch-sensitive like a real piano keyboard, but only speed-sensitive, devoid of genuine percussive qualities which are created by the body. This conforms to the general development of technologically-equipped life under capital which increasingly puts the body in the servile service of the mind seen as an extension of the machine. The separation of the body and the emotions and the mind which computers tend to reinforce is symptomatic of the general hierarchical division of labour which compartmentalises life, and which, in previous epochs, expressed itself in, amongst other things, the hierarchy of whites (“the mind”) at the top, with blacks and women (the body and emotions) at the bottom.
Everywhere the desire to play is colonised by an ever-increasing dependence on technical stimuli. With kids desires being hemmed in on all sides by parents, school, cops, paranoia, the market economy as a whole, lack of objects with which to play and, above all, lack of space, video games can seem to make up for such deprivation. The open spaces taken over by juggernauts and concrete jungles are replaced by the images of space in video machines, in which fantasies can be acted out without practical risk, and which tend to further isolate kids in battles against imaginary enemies. In the space of the video game, the labyrinths of truly exciting cities get represented the more the modern city wipes out all the nooks and crannies for adventure.
The toll is already being exacted by this hardly new wave of the economy: increasingly every person, starting with and emphasising young children, who are least equipped to fighting back, is being reduced to the manias of the lifelong computer programmer, whose enthusiasm in discussing the capablilities of the latest “toys” and his “games” with them is in direct proportion to the monotony that characterises his/her manner of speaking and his/her social existence as a whole. A guy I know said of his computer “After 36 years I’ve found my brain!” The reason those who don’t have computers find conversations between Internet and computer freaks so boring is because the brains of these computer obsessives have been programmed and they not only think their brain is theirs’, but also that it’s interesting despite the fact that their thoughts lack feeling and are so disembodied: all that endless “in” computer jargon showing how brilliant they are and how dumb you are for not understanding this jargon. The computer embodies and affirms the power of positive thinking, to the detriment of every other human quality: subversive analysis, the body, love, friendship, the emotions, sensual contact.
When US President Eisenhower was advised in 1958, given the intensity of the Cold War, to set up the Advanced Research Projects Agency (APRA) for the military, in the attempt to keep the US in the forefront of technology, probably no-one predicted the outcome. In an effort to link up the various military projects and research computers it funded, a new communications protocol from computer to computer (Network Control Protocol) was unveiled at LA University in 1969. By 1972, electronic mail was added and soon the protocol was changed to TCP/IP and accepted as standard by the US government by 1978. Commercial ventures wanted access to it as did the universities and a system whereby messages could be packaged and sent independently over the internet as if they were electronic letters passing through an electronic post office was developed. So much for the anarchy of the Internet!
Along with the war machine that helped its development, the computer was probably the defining symbol of the 20th century. However, the main impetus for the development of these machines, from the abacus onwards, has nearly always been to ease the task of counting money, rather than body bags. One of the first mechanical calculators was designed by the Jansenist Pascal to help his father work out the property taxes he was going to charge his poor peasants. From Babbage’s Analytical Engine of the 1840s to Hollerith’s Tabulating Machine in 1890 there is a fascination with making the task of calculating taxes and profits easier by the employment of number-crunching machines. Hollerith later assisted the tycoon Watson to set up a company which sold and rented thousands of these tabulating machines to small companies for the express purpose of counting money, a company which later became IBM. Eventually, with the development of graphical user interfaces (Apple and Microsoft Windows) the computer moved away from the strict world of numbers and bytes and mathematics to the sharing of information, though this information is itself subject to the quantitative commodity form which gave birth to it and which is at its heart, information which gets treated indifferently, reduced by the logic of equivalence. Information becomes an endless search without purpose other than making money, as abstract as the mathematical mentality that produced the means for its mass distribution.
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Like most technological developments, I.T. vastly speeds up what people are doing anyway. It’s ironic that in the 19th century the Royal Mail delivered most letters within 24 hours of their being posted, and often considerably less. Undoubtedly the massive rise in literacy, together with the vast increase in bureaucratic bills and forms and especially in advertising, has had, as a bi-product, the slowing down of the postal service. E-mail, the Internet and faxes obviously make up for lost time. Although ideas have to be timely to be consequential, relevant, and have to reach as many people as possible who could make use of them, such ideas are only as good as what they say and their consequences. How fast they are said and how many people read them, though important, are not the only things that effect their effect. The fetishism of speed is a reflection of capitals’ need to turn over a constantly accelerating profit in order to realise itself and to eliminate the opposition. At the same time it would be only half true to say this if one failed to mention the pleasure derived from the speed at which one can express oneself and correct oneself which computers provide. When writing by hand or by typing it’s somehow harder to bridge the gap between subjective self-expression and an understanding of how this might make sense or not objectively, to others: computers help to speed up this process, at the same time as allowing one to play around with several thoughts at once in a way that is clearer to oneself than would be if typewritten or handwritten. The problem is when people fetishise this and somehow believe this process is separate from their own history, choices and purposes, that this ‘miracle’ is in the computer itself. People who fetishise computers want the consequence of what they do with a computer to only effect their social relations insofar as the computer/internet’s role as mediation in these relations becomes intensified. In this way the computer becomes not just one means amongst many towards a conscious aim, a tool as useful as a cordless drill, but an end in itself.
Research has shown that people find it a lot easier to be aggressive through email than through other methods of communication. Letters usually have the eccentricity of handwriting and involve longer deliberation than emails. The telephone is a constant dialogue, using your own voice. The relative anonymity of emails, plus the speed in responding compared to letters (no need to make that long trudge to the post office), makes the medium qualitatively different from letters and phones, hence the ease of aggression. Another instance of labour-saving devices intensifying our alienation?
Hackers are the new saboteurs – and much of this sabotage is directed not arbitrarily but at the right people – the multinationals, the banks, the political parties and the military. However, many of these people are so into their highly specialised skill that they look down on those proles who don’t have their skills. The hacktivist embodies many of the contradictions of the normal activist – an ignorance of social relations - but with the added alienation of remaining in their room whilst performing their specialised anti-establishment activity. The legal hackers believe they are subverting this society merely by bombarding enemy websites with thousands of protest messages (e-mail bombs). No need to even go on a demo to contribute to the anti-globalisation movement. This ensures that the chance of meeting people with different ideas and perspectives, of being influenced by these different people, is reduced to a bare minimum. The possibility of changing, and of being changed by, other people is shrunk to an outside chance. This has always been the problem with the Internet: it ensures that only those who are already interested in a particular topic will log on – those not interested in a critique will ignore the website. The great communication tool ensures an endless network of parallel lines that virtually never meet. So far, hackers have only hit people with viruses that wreck people’s programmes, which is fine for our enemies, but how about some friendly ‘hacking’?. Since an attempt to make critical sense of what they dislike (hate hardly comes into it) and to discover what they have in common with other desperate people is utterly alien to them, hackers’ viruses never plant the seeds of subversive theory in the minds of those on the receiving end. So far we have yet to hear of critiques being cleverly disguised and sent to people who would not normally consider listening to them.
The Democratisation of Big Brother
An ad placed in lots of newspapers by United Technologies in the US to usher in 1984 said, “Orwell wrote at a time when computers filled large rooms. Only an army of experts could operate them. Only governments could afford them. If information is power then only governments would have the power the computer offered. What Orwell did not foresee was that information could be stored on a chip smaller than a baby’s fingernail. Like ordinary beach sand, chips are made principally of silicon – one of the earth’s most abundant elements. That the chip has made the computer so widespread removes the fears coming from Orwell’s belief that the power of the computer would rest exclusively in the hands of the elite few”. That these information castles built on sand dominate the isolated individual in a far more labyrinthine and subtle, and apparently individual, a manner than the crude austere Hate Week of Orwell’s 1984 doesn’t make it any the less totalitarian. What’s more, modern totalitarianism does share Orwell’s horrific conclusion to 1984: after all the torture, more and more people love Big Brother. Or, at least, they look to Big Brother, the State, to protect them. The fact that the social individual has been so beaten - by defeats at work, in schools and colleges, in the street, with friends – is the main reason for the individual’s desire to retreat and isolate him/herself behind a computer screen. Though it appears as just an autonomous spontaneous act it’s a result of the totalitarianism that has imposed an isolation even scarier than the fake community of Hate Week, which has been replaced with Indifference Decade. Modern totalitarianism has the insidiousness of appearing to be down to individual choice, conveniently hiding the history of brutal class power that has imposed this domesticated “choice”. The safe ‘community’ of interest groups organised around endless permutations of taste is far safer for modern capital, and for the alienated individual, than the manipulation of demagogic political spectacles such as appear in “1984”. Modern totalitarianism seduces the individual’s desire to be a part of some specialised set-up but not risk getting too heavily involved – dipping in and out of this or that on the Internet at home is as much community as many people dare get:: safe flirting, safe communication, safe smile, safely separate. A world without risk, except the risk of going mad…
The fact that these technologies are being used by greater numbers of people, at least in the ‘richer’ countries, that they are cheap enough to be considered ’democratic’, whereas in the past they were the property of the privileged elite, is hailed as of value in itself. But, as with the car, this extension of bourgeois ‘freedom’ to everybody will have miserable effects as yet unforeseen (cancer, obesity, back problems, repetitive strain injury, headaches, plus severe eye problems for those mainly in the Third World who spend their days endlessly checking silicon chips through microscopes, etc.). Sure, computers won’t cause holes in the ozone layer, kill and maim hundreds of thousands of people a year, give kids lead poisoning and asthma or stop them playing in the streets, but, uncriticised, they will intensify people’s acceptance of these miseries and worse. Already there are studies of the inhibiting unsociable effect of computers on children and adolescents, who increasingly find themselves incapable of relating to other people . Which is just what the commodity economy ordered: who needs to meet people, recognise something in common with them, invent activities with them, fall in love and all that messy stuff when buying and selling and relating to the world merely through abstractions is so much more orderly and smoother?
And all this Brave New Democracy of InfoTech, as with the whole notion and function of democracy in this hierarchical society, is more democratic for some than for others. 30 years ago the highly skilled computer programmer was a fairly rare commodity for which capitalists paid a high salary. Nowadays there are computer programmers who are highly paid. But more and more, working on computers is subject to as much wage differentials as all other sectors. At the bottom there are the vast majority of I.T. workers bored to death working on their word processors, producing spreadsheets and databases for a low wage, at the top Bill Gates indifferent to the prospect of the extra millions – a pittance - he’ll make selling his software to Britain’s schools.
A friend, unemployed on and off, with a £2000 debt hanging over him, who lives in a small council flat in a tower block with several cancer-inducing mobile phone masts on top of it said, of his computer, “It puts me on the same level as those rich people in Hampstead; I can access all these wonderful worlds, just like them”. This ideology of democratic equality is just what the rich in Hampstead want the poor to think. “All these forms of virtual reality are almost as good as the real thing”, he added. Virtual sex for the celibates, virtual friends for the lonely, virtual money for the broke, virtual food for the starving, virtual power for the impotent. Yes – if one ignores the essential, all these forms of virtual reality are almost as good as the real thing. Capital hopes it can fool all of the people most of the time that the difference between reality and fiction is unimportant (it should be said that maybe this friend was just saying these things in reaction to my over-critical stance on computers, which was partly a reaction to his over-eulogising stance).
Democracy, born in Greece, but only for the adult male ‘Citizens’, not for the vast majority – the slaves, the women, the kids, has now been extended to almost everybody over 18 (but not, of course, equally, as it was for the Greek ruling class). This is because a significant number of wage slaves and future wage slaves have internalised the values and ideas of their masters, tamed of their nameless wildness, domesticated. Many, of course, are waking up to the banal fact that “choosing”, for one second by means of a cross every 4 or 5 years, between 2 gangs of rich thugs is no choice at all. But if the “political” side of democracy seems like a con, other aspects don’t. For example, there are few people who see that, as with politicians, the choices available to you on a computer are like those in an election – decided by the programmers who have a vested interest in hiding the profitable reasons behind the false “either/or” choices that make you forget the choice to struggle for your own de-colonised choices. The fact that the choices in an election are effectively reduced to 2 or 3, whereas with a computer, the choices seem infinite, doesn’t alter the fact that the vast majority of choices made with a computer or the Internet are choices for the authority of this world, the world of business, of passivity in the face of externally-defined History, of isolation. What appears to be endlessly accessible at the change of a disc, at the touch of a button – the vast and increasing array of knowledge and ideas of humanity – is essentially only those aspects of knowledge that are profitable to the company that employs the programmers. The logic of business allows no information or ideas that could threaten the world of business, though sometimes such information might be given which threatens a rival business (and one may guess at how reliable such one-sided facts are). In this world any use of computers outside the logic of business or the State is the one use that is actively discouraged (some people, logging onto certain radical websites find a written message appearing on their screen, courtesy of the less subtle State police, “Your interest has been noted”; sometimes access is blocked). If such subversive reasons are mentioned they are dismissed as ‘ideological’; in this way the most ideological pro-economic choices imposed by the rulers and owners on computer programming can pretend to be beyond ideology. The simple fact that these uses are ‘normal’ apparently makes them non-ideological. Any anti-ideological use of computers and the Internet must begin by de-mystifying them. They are not really more useful for human beings than pens, encyclopaedias and telephones: their complex metaphysical subtleties, in the end, are the same as the fetishism of commodities generally. Their use, unfetishised, comes down purely to how you use them against the world of commodities, the world of things and their price, how you use them to affirm your power against a world that denies you any power. Just as the fetishisation of guns can lead to the death of fellow wage-slaves in the war of each against all, or even to suicide, and only rarely are turned on the organisers of our misery, so the computer, as an extension of thought, could be turned against dominant ideology but rarely is.
But why make a big thing about computers? But then why make a big thing about anything? This is just what this society wants us to say. Of course, like television, computers are ‘just’ a symptom of this society – but, like TV, they reinforce it. Unlike pen and paper, they should not be taken for granted. Their history is completely different. That almost everyone gets driven furiously crazy by their computer fucking up is just one symptom of this difference. The unprecedented proliferation of computers coincides with an unprecedented isolation of the masses of individuals from each other.
Video/Computer games
There was a piece of graffiti put up in Sheffield during the Gulf War which said “Hi-tec war kills and maims but the media shows us video games”. Video games often involve military combat which anaesthetise you to the horrors of real military combat. At the same time, various anti-violence moralists criticise video games for encouraging aggressive behaviour, but spectacular violence co-opts real rage into passive forms, so they should be grateful. Sure, maybe such games numb people a bit to any notion that shooting and killing are real situations and have real effects , but undoubtedly the ideological justifications for capitalist wars are far more numbing – as, indeed are the totality of social relations (it’s the feeling of fatal inevitability that numbs people most of all to capitalist wars). With video games it’s more people’s underlying good reasons for expressing genuine anti-hierarchical rage that gets numbed. The rage against alienation becomes pacified into a risk-free fight with fake aliens on a screen: a false exit from isolation which leaves you just as, if not more, isolated as before. From the outside, playing such games seems pathetic, a waste. Sure they are – they distract people from social relations. But this is just moralism, if it ignores what games represent subjectively. In fact the adrenaline-flowing pleasure, the switch between anxious tension at the prospect of getting ‘killed’, and those moments of ‘success’ when you can relax a little if you want, that people experience when playing these games derives from the player’s determination to beat the programmed machine. They are ways of co-opting the excitement and anxiety people always feel when they revolt against this world. That’s one of the reasons that kids playing truant are often found in Amusement Arcades. The games are sometimes a superficial and simplistic representation of people’s complex repressed and anxious rage against the machine of society. They are like drugs – dreadfully addictive and obsessional, blocking out daily life to the degree that you can even neglect some of the basic tasks of the day (just like the proscribed drugs). This can last up until the moment you win, when you find yourself alone and indifferent, wondering what it was that gave you the buzz from that particular game, and yearning for a greater hit.
Above all, these games, and computers and the Internet altogether, present people with an image of space – a window onto endless corridors, large rooms, weird streets and lush vistas – to console the dispossessed for the increasingly claustrophobic lack of freedom which they are increasingly forced to endure.
There are now ‘revolutionary’ computer games, with ‘radical’ choices, none of which involve chucking your computer out the window[8] or looting your local supermarket. But even if they did wouldn’t that just be a way of taming people into not really doing these things? The habit of seeking virtual adventures usually prevails over any desire to practically realise some of the options presented: the isolation of video games makes being teased with the image of collective rebellion unlikely to lead to the awkward and complex tasks involved in real struggle.
Video games give the players the idea of constantly making choices and the sense of freedom of choice, when as with computer graphics, the choices are defined for you. If the desire to beat the machine is the co-optation of the desire to destroy the commodity machine that distracts and destroys us then we must reverse perspective on this not just theoretically but practically. In 1981, in the April riots in Brixton, an amusement arcade in Stockwell Road was trashed and the Space Invaders machines were put out across the road as a mini-barricade against the real Space Invaders – the State in the form of the cops. This is what is meant by “reversal of perspective”: the masses of individuals putting machines in the service of humanity, not humanity in the service of machines.
March 2000.
visits since September 7th 2005
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