Prometheus Wired – The Hope for Democracy in the Age of Network Technology - Hardcover

Barney, Darin

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0226037452 ISBN 13: 9780226037455

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2000

Synopsis

From all sides, we hear that computer technology, with its undeniable power to disseminate information and connect individuals, holds enormous potential for a reinvigoration of political life. But will the Internet really spark a democratic revolution? And will the changes it brings be so profound that past political thought will be of little use in helping us to understand them?

In Prometheus Wired, Darin Barney debunks claims that a networked society will provide the infrastructure for a political revolution and shows that the resources we need for understanding and making sound judgments about this new technology are surprisingly close at hand. By looking to thinkers who grappled with the relationship of society and technology, such as Plato, Aristotle, Marx, and Heidegger, Barney critically examines such assertions about the character of digital networks.

Along the way, Barney offers an eye-opening history of digital networks and then explores a wide range of contemporary issues, such as electronic commerce, telecommuting, privacy, virtual community, digital surveillance, and the possibility of sovereign governance in an age of global networks. Ultimately, Barney argues that instead of placing power back in the hands of the public, a networked economy seems to exacerbate the worst features of industrial capitalism, and, in terms of the surveillance and control it exerts, reduces our political freedom.

Of vital interest to politicians, communicators, and anyone concerned about the future of democracy in the digital age, Prometheus Wired adds a provocative new voice to the debate swirling around "the Net" and the ways in which it will, or will not, change our political lives.

About this title

About the Author

Darin Barney is an assistant professor in the department of History and Politics, University of New Brunswick, Saint John.

From the Back Cover

From all sides, we hear that computer technology, with its undeniable power to disseminate information and connect individuals, holds enormous potential for a reinvigoration of political life. But will the Internet really spark a democratic revolution? And will the changes it brings be so profound that past political thought will be of little use in helping us to understand them?

In Prometheus Wired, Darin Barney debunks claims that a networked society will provide the infrastructure for a political revolution and shows that the resources we need for understanding and making sound judgments about this new technology are surprisingly close at hand. By looking to thinkers who grappled with the relationship of society and technology, such as Plato, Aristotle, Marx, and Heidegger, Barney critically examines such assertions about the character of digital networks.

Along the way, Barney offers an eye-opening history of digital networks and then explores a wide range of contemporary issues, such as electronic commerce, telecommuting, privacy, virtual community, digital surveillance, and the possibility of sovereign governance in an age of global networks. Ultimately, Barney argues that instead of placing power back in the hands of the public, a networked economy seems to exacerbate the worst features of industrial capitalism, and, in terms of the surveillance and control it exerts, reduces our political freedom.

Of vital interest to politicians, communicators, and anyone concerned about the future of democracy in the digital age, Prometheus Wired adds a provocative new voice to the debate swirling around "the Net" and the ways in which it will, or will not, change our political lives.

From the Inside Flap

From all sides, we hear that computer technology, with its undeniable power to disseminate information and connect individuals, holds enormous potential for a reinvigoration of political life. But will the Internet really spark a democratic revolution? And will the changes it brings be so profound that past political thought will be of little use in helping us to understand them?

In Prometheus Wired, Darin Barney debunks claims that a networked society will provide the infrastructure for a political revolution and shows that the resources we need for understanding and making sound judgments about this new technology are surprisingly close at hand. By looking to thinkers who grappled with the relationship of society and technology, such as Plato, Aristotle, Marx, and Heidegger, Barney critically examines such assertions about the character of digital networks.

Along the way, Barney offers an eye-opening history of digital networks and then explores a wide range of contemporary issues, such as electronic commerce, telecommuting, privacy, virtual community, digital surveillance, and the possibility of sovereign governance in an age of global networks. Ultimately, Barney argues that instead of placing power back in the hands of the public, a networked economy seems to exacerbate the worst features of industrial capitalism, and, in terms of the surveillance and control it exerts, reduces our political freedom.

Of vital interest to politicians, communicators, and anyone concerned about the future of democracy in the digital age,Prometheus Wired adds a provocative new voice to the debate swirling around "the Net" and the ways in which it will, or will not, change our political lives.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Prometheus Wired

The Hope for Democracy in the Age of Network TechnologyBy Darin Barney

The University of Chicago Press

Copyright © 2000UBC Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-03745-5

Contents

Acknowledgments......................................................................................ix1 Prometheus Wired...................................................................................32 On Technology......................................................................................273 Networks...........................................................................................584 The Political Economy of Network Technology 1: The Mode of Production..............................1045 The Political Economy of Network Technology 2: Work, Consumption, and Exchange.....................1326 A Standing-Reserve of Bits.........................................................................1927 Government, Politics, and Democracy: Network Technology as Stand-in................................236Notes................................................................................................269Bibliography.........................................................................................307Index................................................................................................325

Chapter One

prometheus wired

There is a mantra among those invigorated by the emergence of network technology. John Perry Barlow, formerly a songwriter for the Grateful Dead and co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, expresses it this way: "Everything we know is wrong." Recently, I appeared as a guest on a television show to discuss the question "Are we becoming cyborgs?" and, after referring to Frankenstein as a potential source of instruction about the perils of dabbling in human creation, I was upbraided by a learned colleague and co-panellist for being mired in "old narratives" that were "useless" in the present context. Similarly, after putting forward my considered criticisms of the "teledemocracy" program developed by one of Canada's major political parties, a party MP informed me that "most of what you have been taught about traditional politics will be of little value in the years ahead ... The old ways don't work any more." What follows is based on nearly the opposite assumption to these – namely, that a great deal of what we already know is not wrong, and is therefore still useful. Even if the advance of network technology fundamentally alters social, economic, and political structures, and even if it radically affects the way we communicate and perceive ourselves or our world, this does not necessarily mean that our amassed knowledge – in particular, what we already know about technology and politics – is an unsound basis for understanding or forming judgments about these changes. In short, we know quite a bit, and it can't all be wrong. In the chapters that follow, I will attempt to bring some of what we already know about technology and politics to bear on a number of the questions facing us as we head into the age of networks.

The movement of digitized information over computer networks is, according to Barlow, "the most profound technological shift since the capture of fire." Judging by the many volumes heralding the onset of a new "information society," the rush of governments to dispense public resources in developing digital infrastructure, the reconfiguration of education systems in observance of perceived technological imperatives, and the sustained buzz emanating from mainstream media, Barlow is not alone in thinking so. Predictions such as this capture our attention because of their audacity, but the comparison of computer networks to fire is interesting for another reason. Fire, of course, is at the very heart of the modern technological mythology.

The myth of Prometheus the fire-giver is an ancient one, but the drama it depicts illuminates much about the modern technological spirit. Basically, the story is as follows: After being insulted by Prometheus, Zeus exacted revenge by punishing his rival's human children. Zeus "hid the livelihood of men ... hid the bread of life ... and hid fire." Seeing the toil this deprivation caused, Prometheus concealed a flame in a fennel stalk and "stole again for men" the instrument that had been taken from them. The theft did not concern Zeus enough for him to punish Prometheus directly, and he worried so little about humans possessing fire – after all, humans had used fire instrumentally well before the gods starting playing games with them – that he did not bother to retrieve it. Instead, out of spite, he visited evil upon men in the form of Pandora, the "all-gifted" female who released among the Titans all the grievous gifts of her pestilence jar, save one: "Only hope abode within her unbreakable chamber under the lips of the jar, and flew not forth." Deprived of hope, human beings could make little use of the fire that had been restored to them. It was at this point that Prometheus – whose name translates literally as "forethought" – was moved to commit the crime that ultimately brought the wrath of Zeus upon him:

Prometheus: I caused mortals no longer to foresee their own doom.

Chorus: Of what sort was the cure thou didst find for this affliction?

Prometheus: I caused blind hopes to dwell in their breasts.

For this, Prometheus was chained to a rock, his ever-regenerating liver to be devoured in perpetuity by an insatiable eagle.

Why was this such a heinous crime – indeed, more heinous than the theft of fire itself – and what does it have to do with the modern technological spirit? Fire illuminates the physical world, but it is hope that relieves people of their spiritual limits and entices them to impose themselves, blindly, on the future. When beings who are mortal by nature no longer foresee their own death, they begin to regard themselves as immortal: as having no natural limits, like gods, which they are not. Hope thus seduces human beings into overestimating and overreaching themselves, with tragic consequences. Beings who recognize their limits can use instruments such as fire (or computer networks) in a healthy and responsible way; but instrumental, hopeful beings who believe themselves to be free of limits are dangerous to themselves and, ultimately, to their gods. Fire was a significant instrument, but without the added fuel of hope its flames could be contained. With hope in their breasts, and brandishing a fiery torch, human beings thought themselves free to light the way to their own destiny, and would act accordingly. The dominion of Zeus was doomed.

Hope enlightens, but it also blinds. It lights the way to the future but, unmoderated by reason, it renders progress toward our self-made destiny reckless, delusional, and dangerous. Just as hope causes us to regard ourselves as more than we are, it also thrusts us into the future as irrational, that is, as less deliberative and reasonable than we are capable of being. Blindness is an extreme condition: blind hope is an immoderate, feverish, and desperate substitute for prudent, thoughtful, responsible deliberation. We hope for the best when we are unable or unwilling to think about what is best. Despair – the absence of hope – has its own pathological consequences for human agency in the world, but this does not mean that blind hope is the best, or even a good, disposition for beings in a world that gives them access to very powerful technical instruments. Far better would be a modest appreciation of the abiding human appetite for a good life, and prudent deliberation about appropriate means for achieving that end.

Nevertheless, it is hope that has consistently animated humanity's collective and public approach to the development of technology. It is not without reason that the Prometheus myth has been so resonant for those who have thought about the technological spirit of the modern age. Francis Bacon, the father of modern science, felt the need to recast Prometheus as a hero rather than a warning; Karl Marx, the great "progressive," invoked the Promethean creed in his earliest work; Mary Shelley, the romantic, subtitled her cautionary tale "The Modern Prometheus"; Friedrich Nietzsche, who saw clearly into the heart of modernity, found Prometheus waiting there. It comes as no surprise that one of the most influential studies of the Industrial Revolution – the cradle of technological development in the West, referred to by the author as a "new age of promise" – bears the title The Unbound Prometheus. In the modern era, Prometheus has been released from his chains, his spirit set free. The story of modern technology is the story of Prometheus's people writ large: the story of humanity blindly wielding instruments to command and transcend that which is given, in the hope of creating its own future. It is my contention that network technology is part of, rather than a departure from, this trajectory. In the age of digital networks, Prometheus is certainly unbound, but he is also wired. It is, I would suggest, imperative that we subject our hopes for this technology to the sort of thoughtful consideration that, in moderating hope, befits our nature as rational beings.

Technologies of Hope and Fire

To begin, I would like briefly to situate networks historically, in relation to the technologies that have preceded them. If, for heuristic purposes, endowment is divided into that which is given in space, time, matter, biological life, and the capacity for consciousness, it becomes possible to identify certain prominent modern technologies as emblematic of the human desire for transcendence, command, or creativity in relation to these categories. It is telling that this spirit has been equally present both in the technologies that inaugurated modernity, and in those that attend its culmination. The transcendence of sensory spatial perceptions was initially a function of the development of glass technologies: spectacles in the thirteenth century, mirrors and microscopes in the sixteenth, mass-produced clear glass windows and the telescope in the seventeenth – all extended humanity's view beyond what it could see with its own eyes alone. Fantastic dreams about expanses imagined and unimaginable were replaced by a conscious desire to command space by travelling over distances seen, which drove the continued development of transportation technologies such as the steamboat in the eighteenth century, the railway in the nineteenth, and the airplane and rocketship in the twentieth. Even the modern city itself can be understood in these terms – the aggregation of human labour required for early, large-scale, industrial production necessitated an overcoming of the distances separating those labourers, and so the urban city was born as a technology of spatial concentration. And as urban space threatened to grow too large for efficient enterprise, a civic reorientation around technologies of transit such as the automobile, superhighway, bus, and subway provided late modernity with its own basis for an obsession with the command of space.

Prior to its conquest by technology, time was more or less conceived of as a boundless eternity, punctuated only by organic rhythms beyond the control of human beings. External rhythms such as the falling of night, the rising of the sun, and the turning of the seasons were clearly beyond human competence, and even those cadences that were internal – the beating of hearts, the welling of hunger, the ageing of bodies – defied human command. The introduction of regularized time in the fourteenth century via the mechanical clock represented an attempt to transcend the organic necessities of time by applying a technology that rendered it subject to human regulation. As David Landes describes, mechanical time emerged in Benedictine monasteries to regulate the ringing of bells marking canonical hours. Though such clocks established a liturgy independent of natural cycles, they were not impious: time belonged to God, and the clock ensured it would not be wasted. It was not until time was secularized, and the clock was enlisted to habituate newly urbanized labourers to the cycles of industry and commerce, that this instrument became emblematic of modernity's conquest of Nature itself.

In a sense, modern humanity transcended time by creating it in a form that could be commanded; the mysteries of Eternity were evaded with help from the mathematics of infinity. Few modern inventions have achieved the near-universal generality of mechanical time, which perhaps explains the privileged place enjoyed by considerations of speed in the design of most technologies developed since its adoption. It also perhaps explains the ease with which the World Congress standardized chronometric measurement across a revolving and rotating planet in 1885, by simply drawing lines on a map to create time zones that allowed for the coordination, in time, of activities separated by vast spaces and political priorities. The unpredictability and sluggishness of pre-modern transportation meant that coordination had been previously unnecessary – things simply arrived when they arrived. The increasing speed of modern transport, rooted as it was in time's mechanization, necessitated its standardization as well. Waiting was simply no longer an option.

This spirit of human ingenuity is also in evidence with regard to modernity's relationship to matter. The difficulties of creating and destroying matter have not deterred modern humanity from setting out to transform it in ways deemed productive and profitable, through the use of technology. The generalization of the clock as a definitive attribute of modernity is matched only by the proliferation of industrial technologies, particularly from the mid-eighteenth century onward, designed and engineered to transcend the limitations imposed on the transformation of matter by human labour. Three principles guided the Industrial Revolution – mechanization of production, increased power generation, and enhanced exploitation of a greater variety of raw materials – and in combination they set the course for the period's technological development. Mechanization came to the textile industry in the late eighteenth century with the invention of the spinning jenny and cotton gin; proceeded through the nineteenth century with the development of a variety of milling, reaping, drilling, lifting, sewing, and pressing machines; and culminated in the twentieth with the arrival of automated robotics. Reliance on animate sources to drive the great machines defeated their very purpose, and so industrialists turned instead to a series of technologies of motive power, the succession of which from the eighteenth to the twentieth century can be followed as if it were the bouncing ball of modernity: from the steam engine to the dynamo, to the internal combustion engine, to the turbine, to the nuclear reactor.

Much like humans and horses, these machines required fuel, and the pursuit of energy has been one of the dominant themes of the modern desire to command raw matter by turning it into something else. For the most part, this pursuit has entailed an extension of the dominion that God granted men over the earth to include dominion under it as well. The art of mining pre-dates the Industrial Revolution, but it was the escalating demand for coal that accompanied steam-driven production and transport, and the smelting of ore that established the mine as a key seam in the fabric of modern industrialism. The ascendancy of the internal combustion engine, augmented by the mass production and consumption of automobiles, brought with it a return to the ground – only with great drills and pumps this time, instead of shovels and hammers – to suck petroleum from its hidden natural stores. Electric power called for similar interventions. Unable to defy gravity, humans proved that they could, at least, harness it for their own ends by enlisting it to cause a vast volume of water to cascade over turbines and create hydro-electricity. And when the efficiency or supply of coal, gas, and water came into doubt, the realm below was once again scoured for unleashable energy. It finally yielded plutonium and uranium – substances whose atoms could be split with powerful results, including some that would ultimately be returned to the ground, whence they came.

The exploitation of raw materials has thus been intimately linked with the search for power throughout modernity. However, it would be wrong to suggest that the modern transformation of matter was concerned solely with the fuelling of machines, and did not also involve the use of raw materials to create objects or things. The shift from organic animal and vegetable matter to inorganic minerals as the primary material of production is a key marker of the modern industrial age. The replacement of wood, in particular, by metals smelted from ores – primarily iron and copper – that had been dug from the earth characterized the material preoccupation of the early modern industrial era. By the beginning of the twentieth century, these metals were to be replaced, to a degree but not entirely, by metal alloys and lightweight, strong, and plentiful aluminum. But the penultimate modern century also brought with it perhaps the most modern of materials: inorganic synthetics, also known as plastics. Plastics had been around since the invention of celluloid in 1868, but it was not until the synthetic resin known as "Bakelite" was patented in 1909 that they become the modern material of choice and began to find their way into everything from tableware to clothing. Not only was plastic about as close to being truly artificial as anything could be, it was also seemingly impervious to other "natural" forces, due to its impermeability, electrical resistance, and flexibility. Plastic was a material sign of human creativity and durability achieved by technological means: "Here in unexpected form was a surrogate for the long-sought secret of transmuting and creating matter."

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Prometheus Wiredby Darin Barney Copyright © 2000 by UBC Press . Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Edition details

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0226037452
• ISBN 13: 9780226037455
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 324