prospect article on digital exuberance

I have an article in the new edition of Prospect magazine, outlining ethical anxieties about our apparently inevitable shift towards an 'always on everywhere' society. Although it's liable to be misinterpreted, the intention of the argument is not to decide for or against a set of technologies, but to move beyond the sub-modernist obsession with quantities and technical capabilities of infrastructure. Why, I ask, can we not reach the same recognition with digital networks that we belatedly did with roads, namely that they are often a necessary factor in modernisation, but neither inevitable nor universally desirable? Or:

In developing a critique of digital exuberance, I do not want to side with those who oppose modernity wholesale. But community depends on some sense of continuity and co-dependence, and a sense of the inescapability of social relations. When we talk about the architectural and planning disasters of the 1950s and 1960s, we do not mean that they failed in their ambitions to move vehicles swiftly in and out of cities—far from it. We mean that they destroyed the conditions in which urban communities might thrive by undermining social networks and the possibility of local culture... The removal of friction is not intrinsically bad, but nor is it intrinsically good. The question is how malleable we want the world to be, and "as malleable as possible" is surely not always the right answer.

I imagine this will be scoffed at in government and industry as conservatism (I have already been compared by one senior government wonk to William Morris, and I think he was referring to naive anti-industrialism as opposed to my wallpaper designing skills). But I am continuously staggered as to how policy-makers and politicians are allowed to get away with using 'more' and 'newer' as proxis for 'better'. I am envious of their certainty that technological change is taking us somewhere, and isn't simply a way of keeping boredom at bay, while propping up our stock-indexed pensions, but I'm also fascinated to know on what philosophical basis they can really claim this as progress.

In Political Machines, Andrew Barry makes my argument better than me when he writes "perhaps more than ever before technology is expected to carry the promise, or the threat, of radical social and political change in the future". But in doing so, how much does it dampen our imagination and hunger for other forms of modernity, that are not dependent on the tedious whirlwind of constantly changing equipment?

Comments

[Phil]

I like this a lot (although I almost certainly won't be reading it in /Prospect/). It reminds me of an odd shift in the work of Guy Debord (my intellectual hero), who moved over time from wanting to destroy every public building which couldn't be collectively transformed (the dead hand of the past, etc) to seeing (some) old buildings as relics of freer and more authentic times, and hence potential cultural resources for radical change. (He'd aged thirty years in the mean time, which may have had something to do with it.)

On a less grandiose level, I think what you're describing is a curiously *un*sophisticated game of bait-and-switch:

"You want change? Well, you want things to get better, so you must want things to *change*. Great - we want things to change too! Welcome aboard!"

Followed in due course by:

"What, you don't like what we're doing? I thought you wanted things to change?"

I blame the end of the Cold War - I'm sure the dynamic of capitalist innovation has been more frantic ever since then.

[Phil]

OK, I've read it & still like it, but I've got one criticism. When you write, in the context of digital broadcasting & the end of spectrum scarcity, about the need to

"help people navigate an otherwise giddying degree of choice"

I think that key word 'choice' needs to be unpacked. The main dynamic isn't a proliferation of a thousand different niche broadcasters - I remember Andrew Neil, of all people, seriously predicting this - but a race to the bottom. (I like Stephen Fry's image of asking for a teaspoon and being given a 'choice' of a hundred plastic stirrers.) Even the BBC is only a partial exception to the rule: where we used to have one all-purpose news/entertainment/kids' channel and one highbrow, we've now got one all-purpose channel, two entertainment channels, two for kids, one for news... and one highbrow. And this relates back to your earlier reference to Reich on capitalism and irrational desires: if they're going to make money, the 'choices' we're given all need to be fairly undemanding. Another film? *More* Big Brother? Oh, go on then.

[Will Davies]

Glad you liked the piece Phil. On your point about choice, the piece is certainly not siding with those who believe expanding consumer choice represents anything like an expansion in political/democratic choice. The quote you highlight was not questioning whether or not choice in this context is 'real'; but a choice between 100 channels of crap is still, on a certain level, a choice.

On Debord, I didn't know that. I had Adorno in the back of my mind, with some (half-remembered quote) about "real progress would be when we were tired of progress"...

[JamesB]

Hi,

I think you've managed to articulate the role of technology and choice very well. There seems to be a clamour to embrace new new things as seen by people spreading memes via blogs and the like without actually adding anything to the debate or thinking about it. I'm thinking of the boing boing and slashdot slaves particularly.

It's interesting to see how people are employing strategies for dealing with being contactable by mobile phone [as it's matured as an social 'artefact'], of the belated realisation that the phone is both an extension of your Labour and a constant negotiation of privacy. Dual sims, 2-3 mobiles, turning the phone off during certain hours etc. Now we see parallels with social software and people linking out of linked-in and friendster... of thinking beyond the software to the 'effects' which are often just not that great.

the promise of technology is very seductive. but in many ways it's made us more risk averse and compliant rather than radical, despite the most radical gestures often being made by those hackers and web-services developers making the digital world around us.

[Phil]

On Debord, have a look at this:
http://www.users.zetnet.co.uk/amroth/scritti/debord5.htm
"The Hacienda must be destroyed; or, Why was Debord afraid of ruins?"

Given at the Hacienda (the one in Manchester, named after the proto-situationist line "The Hacienda must be built")... which has since been pulled down and replaced by a block of flats. Oops.

[Will Davies]

The Guardian's recent Google article explores something similar:

"It [Google] knows what it is doing technologically; socially, though, it can't possibly know, and I don't think anyone else can either. The best historical analogy for where Google is today probably comes from the time when the railroads were being built. Everyone knew that trains and railways would change the world, but no one predicted the invention of suburbs."

[Lean]

I liked your article. It's interesting that the spatial aspects of the Internet are so underplayed. A lot of the thinking and research seems to be coming from the technologists (e.g. the mobile phone companies, the human-computer interaction people) and some artists (locative media people), but very little from the people who regard the spatial as their domain-- the architects and urban planners.
Perhaps the introduction of mobile phones to the Tube will underline to people how usage of mobile phones in a space changes the nature of that space, and the new attributes of the space. Might provoke some debate on the pros and cons of allowing unfettered access to all spaces. In any case, a before and after study would be a very interesting piece of research!

[Will Davies]

Agreed, Lean, although the obvious person to mention with regard to the spatial aspects of communication technology would be William Mitchell, who has been writing on little else for over a decade. But he is so relentlessly upbeat, that you stop trusting him.

The other person would be someone like Stephen Graham, who has explored things such as the 'software-sorted society'... but that is thinking specifically about power relations and economy, rather than micro-politics of etiquette and informal contact.