David Graeber
from The Baffler No. 19
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A secret question hovers over us, a sense
of disappointment, a broken promise we were given as children about
what our adult world was supposed to be like. I am referring not to the
standard false promises that children are always given (about how the
world is fair, or how those who work hard shall be rewarded), but to a
particular generational promise—given to those who were children in the
fifties, sixties, seventies, or eighties—one that was never quite
articulated as a promise but rather as a set of assumptions about what
our adult world would be like. And since it was never quite promised,
now that it has failed to come true, we’re left confused: indignant, but
at the same time, embarrassed at our own indignation, ashamed we were
ever so silly to believe our elders to begin with.
Where, in short, are the flying cars? Where are the force fields,
tractor beams, teleportation pods, antigravity sleds, tricorders,
immortality drugs, colonies on Mars, and all the other technological
wonders any child growing up in the mid-to-late twentieth century
assumed would exist by now? Even those inventions that seemed ready to
emerge—like cloning or cryogenics—ended up betraying their lofty
promises. What happened to them?
We are well informed of the wonders of computers, as if this is some
sort of unanticipated compensation, but, in fact, we haven’t moved even
computing to the point of progress that people in the fifties expected
we’d have reached by now. We don’t have computers we can have an
interesting conversation with, or robots that can walk our dogs or take
our clothes to the Laundromat.
As someone who was eight years old at the time of the Apollo moon
landing, I remember calculating that I would be thirty-nine in the magic
year 2000 and wondering what the world would be like. Did I expect I
would be living in such a world of wonders? Of course. Everyone did. Do I
feel cheated now? It seemed unlikely that I’d live to see
all the things I was reading about in science fiction, but it never occurred to me that I wouldn’t see
any of them.
At the turn of the millennium, I was expecting an outpouring of
reflections on why we had gotten the future of technology so wrong.
Instead, just about all the authoritative voices—both Left and
Right—began their reflections from the assumption that we do live in an
unprecedented new technological utopia of one sort or another.
The common way of dealing with the uneasy sense that this might not
be so is to brush it aside, to insist all the progress that could have
happened has happened and to treat anything more as silly. “Oh, you mean
all that
Jetsons stuff?” I’m asked—as if to say, but that was just for children! Surely, as grown-ups, we understand
The Jetsons offered as accurate a view of the future as
The Flintstones offered of the Stone Age.
Even in the seventies and eighties, in fact, sober sources such as
National Geographic
and the Smithsonian were informing children of imminent space stations
and expeditions to Mars. Creators of science fiction movies used to come
up with concrete dates, often no more than a generation in the future,
in which to place their futuristic fantasies. In 1968, Stanley Kubrick
felt that a moviegoing audience would find it perfectly natural to
assume that only thirty-three years later, in 2001, we would have
commercial moon flights, city-like space stations, and computers with
human personalities maintaining astronauts in suspended animation while
traveling to Jupiter. Video telephony is just about the only new
technology from that particular movie that has appeared—and it was
technically possible when the movie was showing.
2001 can be seen as a curio, but what about
Star Trek? The
Star Trek mythos was set in the sixties, too, but the show kept getting revived, leaving audiences for
Star Trek Voyager
in, say, 2005, to try to figure out what to make of the fact that
according to the logic of the program, the world was supposed to be
recovering from fighting off the rule of genetically engineered supermen
in the Eugenics Wars of the nineties.
By 1989, when the creators of
Back to the Future II were
dutifully placing flying cars and anti-gravity hoverboards in the hands
of ordinary teenagers in the year 2015, it wasn’t clear if this was
meant as a prediction or a joke.
The usual move in science fiction is to remain vague about the dates,
so as to render “the future” a zone of pure fantasy, no different than
Middle Earth or Narnia, or like
Star Wars, “a long time ago in a
galaxy far, far away.” As a result, our science fiction future is, most
often, not a future at all, but more like an alternative dimension, a
dream-time, a technological Elsewhere, existing in days to come in the
same sense that elves and dragon-slayers existed in the past—another
screen for the displacement of moral dramas and mythic fantasies into
the dead ends of consumer pleasure.
Might the cultural
sensibility that came to be referred to as postmodernism best be seen as
a prolonged meditation on all the technological changes that never
happened? The question struck me as I watched one of the recent Star Wars
movies. The movie was terrible, but I couldn’t help but feel impressed
by the quality of the special effects. Recalling the clumsy special
effects typical of fifties sci-fi films, I kept thinking how impressed a
fifties audience would have been if they’d known what we could do by
now—only to realize, “Actually, no. They wouldn’t be impressed at all,
would they? They thought we’d be doing this kind of thing by now. Not just figuring out more sophisticated ways to simulate it.”
That last word—
simulate—is key. The technologies that have
advanced since the seventies are mainly either medical technologies or
information technologies—largely, technologies of simulation. They are
technologies of what Jean Baudrillard and Umberto Eco called the
“hyper-real,” the ability to make imitations that are more realistic
than originals. The postmodern sensibility, the feeling that we had
somehow broken into an unprecedented new historical period in which we
understood that there is nothing new; that grand historical narratives
of progress and liberation were meaningless; that everything now was
simulation, ironic repetition, fragmentation, and pastiche—all this
makes sense in a technological environment in which the only
breakthroughs were those that made it easier to create, transfer, and
rearrange virtual projections of things that either already existed, or,
we came to realize, never would. Surely, if we were vacationing in
geodesic domes on Mars or toting about pocket-size nuclear fusion plants
or telekinetic mind-reading devices no one would ever have been talking
like this. The postmodern moment was a desperate way to take what could
otherwise only be felt as a bitter disappointment and to dress it up as
something epochal, exciting, and new.
In the earliest formulations, which largely came out of the Marxist
tradition, a lot of this technological background was acknowledged.
Fredric Jameson’s “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late
Capitalism” proposed the term “postmodernism” to refer to the cultural
logic appropriate to a new, technological phase of capitalism, one that
had been heralded by Marxist economist Ernest Mandel as early as 1972.
Mandel had argued that humanity stood at the verge of a “third
technological revolution,” as profound as the Agricultural or Industrial
Revolution, in which computers, robots, new energy sources, and new
information technologies would replace industrial labor—the “end of
work” as it soon came to be called—reducing us all to designers and
computer technicians coming up with crazy visions that cybernetic
factories would produce.
End of work arguments were popular in the late seventies and early
eighties as social thinkers pondered what would happen to the
traditional working-class-led popular struggle once the working class no
longer existed. (The answer: it would turn into identity politics.)
Jameson thought of himself as exploring the forms of consciousness and
historical sensibilities likely to emerge from this new age.
What happened, instead, is that the spread of information
technologies and new ways of organizing transport—the containerization
of shipping, for example—allowed those same industrial jobs to be
outsourced to East Asia, Latin America, and other countries where the
availability of cheap labor allowed manufacturers to employ much
less technologically sophisticated production-line techniques than they would have been obliged to employ at home.
From the perspective of those living in Europe, North America, and
Japan, the results did seem to be much as predicted. Smokestack
industries did disappear; jobs came to be divided between a lower
stratum of service workers and an upper stratum sitting in antiseptic
bubbles playing with computers. But below it all lay an uneasy awareness
that the postwork civilization was a giant fraud. Our carefully
engineered high-tech sneakers were not being produced by intelligent
cyborgs or self-replicating molecular nanotechnology; they were being
made on the equivalent of old-fashioned Singer sewing machines, by the
daughters of Mexican and Indonesian farmers who, as the result of WTO or
NAFTA–sponsored trade deals, had been ousted from their ancestral
lands. It was a guilty awareness that lay beneath the postmodern
sensibility and its celebration of the endless play of images and
surfaces.
Why did the
projected explosion of technological growth everyone was expecting—the
moon bases, the robot factories—fail to happen? There are two
possibilities. Either our expectations about the pace of technological
change were unrealistic (in which case, we need to know why so many
intelligent people believed they were not) or our expectations were not
unrealistic (in which case, we need to know what happened to derail so
many credible ideas and prospects).
Most social analysts choose the first explanation and trace the
problem to the Cold War space race. Why, these analysts wonder, did both
the United States and the Soviet Union become so obsessed with the idea
of manned space travel? It was never an efficient way to engage in
scientific research. And it encouraged unrealistic ideas of what the
human future would be like.
Could the answer be that both the United States and the Soviet Union
had been, in the century before, societies of pioneers, one expanding
across the Western frontier, the other across Siberia? Didn’t they share
a commitment to the myth of a limitless, expansive future, of human
colonization of vast empty spaces, that helped convince the leaders of
both superpowers they had entered into a “space age” in which they were
battling over control of the future itself? All sorts of myths were at
play here, no doubt, but that proves nothing about the feasibility of
the project.
Some of those science fiction fantasies (at this point we can’t know
which ones) could have been brought into being. For earlier generations,
many science fiction fantasies
had been brought into being.
Those who grew up at the turn of the century reading Jules Verne or H.G.
Wells imagined the world of, say, 1960 with flying machines, rocket
ships, submarines, radio, and television—and that was pretty much what
they got. If it wasn’t unrealistic in 1900 to dream of men traveling to
the moon, then why was it unrealistic in the sixties to dream of
jet-packs and robot laundry-maids?
In fact, even as those dreams were being outlined, the material base
for their achievement was beginning to be whittled away. There is reason
to believe that even by the fifties and sixties, the pace of
technological innovation was slowing down from the heady pace of the
first half of the century. There was a last spate in the fifties when
microwave ovens (1954), the Pill (1957), and lasers (1958) all appeared
in rapid succession. But since then, technological advances have taken
the form of clever new ways of combining existing technologies (as in
the space race) and new ways of putting existing technologies to
consumer use (the most famous example is television, invented in 1926,
but mass produced only after the war.) Yet, in part because the space
race gave everyone the impression that remarkable advances were
happening, the popular impression during the sixties was that the pace
of technological change was speeding up in terrifying, uncontrollable
ways.
Alvin Toffler’s 1970 best seller
Future Shock argued that
almost all the social problems of the sixties could be traced back to
the increasing pace of technological change. The endless outpouring of
scientific breakthroughs transformed the grounds of daily existence, and
left Americans without any clear idea of what normal life was. Just
consider the family, where not just the Pill, but also the prospect of
in vitro fertilization, test tube babies, and sperm and egg donation
were about to make the idea of motherhood obsolete.
Humans were not psychologically prepared for the pace of change,
Toffler wrote. He coined a term for the phenomenon: “accelerative
thrust.” It had begun with the Industrial Revolution, but by roughly
1850, the effect had become unmistakable. Not only was everything around
us changing, but most of it—human knowledge, the size of the
population, industrial growth, energy use—was changing exponentially.
The only solution, Toffler argued, was to begin some kind of control
over the process, to create institutions that would assess emerging
technologies and their likely effects, to ban technologies likely to be
too socially disruptive, and to guide development in the direction of
social harmony.
While many of the historical trends Toffler describes are accurate,
the book appeared when most of these exponential trends halted. It was
right around 1970 when the increase in the number of scientific papers
published in the world—a figure that had doubled every fifteen years
since, roughly, 1685—began leveling off. The same was true of books and
patents.
Toffler’s use of
acceleration was particularly unfortunate.
For most of human history, the top speed at which human beings could
travel had been around 25 miles per hour. By 1900 it had increased to
100 miles per hour, and for the next seventy years it did seem to be
increasing exponentially. By the time Toffler was writing, in 1970, the
record for the fastest speed at which any human had traveled stood at
roughly 25,000 mph, achieved by the crew of Apollo 10 in 1969, just one
year before. At such an exponential rate, it must have seemed reasonable
to assume that within a matter of decades, humanity would be exploring
other solar systems.
Since 1970, no further increase has occurred. The record for the
fastest a human has ever traveled remains with the crew of Apollo 10.
True, the maximum speed of commercial air flight did peak one year
later, at 1,400 mph, with the launching of the Concorde in 1971. But
that speed not only has failed to increase; it has decreased since the
Concorde was abandoned in 2003.
None of this stopped Toffler’s own career. He kept retooling his
analysis to come up with new spectacular pronouncements. In 1980, he
produced
The Third Wave, its argument lifted from Ernest Mandel’s
“third technological revolution”—except that while Mandel thought these
changes would spell the end of capitalism, Toffler assumed capitalism
was eternal. By 1990, Toffler was the personal intellectual guru to
Republican congressman Newt Gingrich, who claimed that his 1994
“Contract With America” was inspired, in part, by the understanding that
the United States needed to move from an antiquated, materialist,
industrial mind-set to a new, free-market, information age, Third Wave
civilization.
There are all sorts of ironies in this connection. One of Toffler’s
greatest achievements was inspiring the government to create an Office
of Technology Assessment (OTA). One of Gingrich’s first acts on winning
control of the House of Representatives in 1995 was defunding the OTA as
an example of useless government extravagance. Still, there’s no
contradiction here. By this time, Toffler had long since given up on
influencing policy by appealing to the general public; he was making a
living largely by giving seminars to CEOs and corporate think tanks. His
insights had been privatized.
Gingrich liked to call himself a “conservative futurologist.” This,
too, might seem oxymoronic; but, in fact, Toffler’s own conception of
futurology was never progressive. Progress was always presented as a
problem that needed to be solved.
Toffler might best be seen as a lightweight version of the
nineteenth-century social theorist Auguste Comte, who believed that he
was standing on the brink of a new age—in his case, the Industrial
Age—driven by the inexorable progress of technology, and that the social
cataclysms of his times were caused by the social system not adjusting.
The older feudal order had developed Catholic theology, a way of
thinking about man’s place in the cosmos perfectly suited to the social
system of the time, as well as an institutional structure, the Church,
that conveyed and enforced such ideas in a way that could give everyone a
sense of meaning and belonging. The Industrial Age had developed its
own system of ideas—science—but scientists had not succeeded in creating
anything like the Catholic Church. Comte concluded that we needed to
develop a new science, which he dubbed “sociology,” and said that
sociologists should play the role of priests in a new Religion of
Society that would inspire everyone with a love of order, community,
work discipline, and family values. Toffler was less ambitious; his
futurologists were not supposed to play the role of priests.
Gingrich had a second guru, a libertarian theologian named George
Gilder, and Gilder, like Toffler, was obsessed with technology and
social change. In an odd way, Gilder was more optimistic. Embracing a
radical version of Mandel’s Third Wave argument, he insisted that what
we were seeing with the rise of computers was an “overthrow of matter.”
The old, materialist Industrial Society, where value came from physical
labor, was giving way to an Information Age where value emerges directly
from the minds of entrepreneurs, just as the world had originally
appeared ex nihilo from the mind of God, just as money, in a proper
supply-side economy, emerged ex nihilo from the Federal Reserve and into
the hands of value-creating capitalists. Supply-side economic policies,
Gilder concluded, would ensure that investment would continue to steer
away from old government boondoggles like the space program and toward
more productive information and medical technologies.
But if there was a conscious, or semi-conscious, move away from
investment in research that might lead to better rockets and robots, and
toward research that would lead to such things as laser printers and
CAT scans, it had begun well before Toffler’s
Future Shock (1970) and Gilder’s
Wealth and Poverty
(1981). What their success shows is that the issues they raised—that
existing patterns of technological development would lead to social
upheaval, and that we needed to guide technological development in
directions that did not challenge existing structures of
authority—echoed in the corridors of power. Statesmen and captains of
industry had been thinking about such questions for some time.
Industrial
capitalism has fostered an extremely rapid rate of scientific advance
and technological innovation—one with no parallel in previous human
history. Even capitalism’s greatest detractors, Karl Marx and Friedrich
Engels, celebrated its unleashing of the “productive forces.” Marx and
Engels also believed that capitalism’s continual need to revolutionize
the means of industrial production would be its undoing. Marx argued
that, for certain technical reasons, value—and therefore profits—can be
extracted only from human labor. Competition forces factory owners to
mechanize production, to reduce labor costs, but while this is to the
short-term advantage of the firm, mechanization’s effect is to drive
down the general rate of profit.
For 150 years, economists have debated whether all this is true. But
if it is true, then the decision by industrialists not to pour research
funds into the invention of the robot factories that everyone was
anticipating in the sixties, and instead to relocate their factories to
labor-intensive, low-tech facilities in China or the Global South makes a
great deal of sense.
As I’ve noted, there’s reason to believe the pace of technological
innovation in productive processes—the factories themselves—began to
slow in the fifties and sixties, but the side effects of America’s
rivalry with the Soviet Union made innovation appear to accelerate.
There was the awesome space race, alongside frenetic efforts by U.S.
industrial planners to apply existing technologies to consumer purposes,
to create an optimistic sense of burgeoning prosperity and guaranteed
progress that would undercut the appeal of working-class politics.
These moves were reactions to initiatives from the Soviet Union. But
this part of the history is difficult for Americans to remember, because
at the end of the Cold War, the popular image of the Soviet Union
switched from terrifyingly bold rival to pathetic basket case—the
exemplar of a society that could not work. Back in the fifties, in fact,
many United States planners suspected the Soviet system worked better.
Certainly, they recalled the fact that in the thirties, while the United
States had been mired in depression, the Soviet Union had maintained
almost unprecedented economic growth rates of 10 percent to 12 percent a
year—an achievement quickly followed by the production of tank armies
that defeated Nazi Germany, then by the launching of Sputnik in 1957,
then by the first manned spacecraft, the Vostok, in 1961.
It’s often said the Apollo moon landing was the greatest historical
achievement of Soviet communism. Surely, the United States would never
have contemplated such a feat had it not been for the cosmic ambitions
of the Soviet Politburo. We are used to thinking of the Politburo as a
group of unimaginative gray bureaucrats, but they were bureaucrats who
dared to dream astounding dreams. The dream of world revolution was only
the first. It’s also true that most of them—changing the course of
mighty rivers, this sort of thing—either turned out to be ecologically
and socially disastrous, or, like Joseph Stalin’s one-hundred-story
Palace of the Soviets or a twenty-story statue of Vladimir Lenin, never
got off the ground.
After the initial successes of the Soviet space program, few of these
schemes were realized, but the leadership never ceased coming up with
new ones. Even in the eighties, when the United States was attempting
its own last, grandiose scheme, Star Wars, the Soviets were planning to
transform the world through creative uses of technology. Few outside of
Russia remember most of these projects, but great resources were devoted
to them. It’s also worth noting that unlike the Star Wars project,
which was designed to sink the Soviet Union, most were not military in
nature: as, for instance, the attempt to solve the world hunger problem
by harvesting lakes and oceans with an edible bacteria called spirulina,
or to solve the world energy problem by launching hundreds of gigantic
solar-power platforms into orbit and beaming the electricity back to
earth.
The American victory in the space race meant that, after 1968, U.S.
planners no longer took the competition seriously. As a result, the
mythology of the final frontier was maintained, even as the direction of
research and development shifted away from anything that might lead to
the creation of Mars bases and robot factories.
The standard line is that all this was a result of the triumph of the
market. The Apollo program was a Big Government project,
Soviet-inspired in the sense that it required a national effort
coordinated by government bureaucracies. As soon as the Soviet threat
drew safely out of the picture, though, capitalism was free to revert to
lines of technological development more in accord with its normal,
decentralized, free-market imperatives—such as privately funded research
into marketable products like personal computers. This is the line that
men like Toffler and Gilder took in the late seventies and early
eighties.
In fact, the United States never did abandon gigantic,
government-controlled schemes of technological development. Mainly, they
just shifted to military research—and not just to Soviet-scale schemes
like Star Wars, but to weapons projects, research in communications and
surveillance technologies, and similar security-related concerns. To
some degree this had always been true: the billions poured into missile
research had always dwarfed the sums allocated to the space program. Yet
by the seventies, even basic research came to be conducted following
military priorities. One reason we don’t have robot factories is because
roughly 95 percent of robotics research funding has been channeled
through the Pentagon, which is more interested in developing unmanned
drones than in automating paper mills.
A case could be made that even the shift to research and development
on information technologies and medicine was not so much a reorientation
toward market-driven consumer imperatives, but part of an all-out
effort to follow the technological humbling of the Soviet Union with
total victory in the global class war—seen simultaneously as the
imposition of absolute U.S. military dominance overseas, and, at home,
the utter rout of social movements.
For
the technologies that did emerge proved most conducive to surveillance,
work discipline, and social control. Computers have opened up certain
spaces of freedom, as we’re constantly reminded, but instead of leading
to the workless utopia Abbie Hoffman imagined, they have been employed
in such a way as to produce the opposite effect. They have enabled a
financialization of capital that has driven workers desperately into
debt, and, at the same time, provided the means by which employers have
created “flexible” work regimes that have both destroyed traditional job
security and increased working hours for almost everyone. Along with
the export of factory jobs, the new work regime has routed the union
movement and destroyed any possibility of effective working-class
politics.
Meanwhile, despite unprecedented investment in research on medicine
and life sciences, we await cures for cancer and the common cold, and
the most dramatic medical breakthroughs we have seen have taken the form
of drugs such as Prozac, Zoloft, or Ritalin—tailor-made to ensure that
the new work demands don’t drive us completely, dysfunctionally crazy.
With results like these, what will the epitaph for neoliberalism look
like? I think historians will conclude it was a form of capitalism that
systematically prioritized political imperatives over economic ones.
Given a choice between a course of action that would make capitalism
seem the only possible economic system, and one that would transform
capitalism into a viable, long-term economic system, neoliberalism
chooses the former every time. There is every reason to believe that
destroying job security while increasing working hours does not create a
more productive (let alone more innovative or loyal) workforce.
Probably, in economic terms, the result is negative—an impression
confirmed by lower growth rates in just about all parts of the world in
the eighties and nineties.
But the neoliberal choice has been effective in depoliticizing labor
and overdetermining the future. Economically, the growth of armies,
police, and private security services amounts to dead weight. It’s
possible, in fact, that the very dead weight of the apparatus created to
ensure the ideological victory of capitalism will sink it. But it’s
also easy to see how choking off any sense of an inevitable, redemptive
future that could be different from our world is a crucial part of the
neoliberal project.
At this point all
the pieces would seem to be falling neatly into place. By the sixties,
conservative political forces were growing skittish about the socially
disruptive effects of technological progress, and employers were
beginning to worry about the economic impact of mechanization. The
fading Soviet threat allowed for a reallocation of resources in
directions seen as less challenging to social and economic arrangements,
or indeed directions that could support a campaign of reversing the
gains of progressive social movements and achieving a decisive victory
in what U.S. elites saw as a global class war. The change of priorities
was introduced as a withdrawal of big-government projects and a return
to the market, but in fact the change shifted government-directed
research away from programs like NASA or alternative energy sources and
toward military, information, and medical technologies.
Of course this doesn’t explain everything. Above all, it does not
explain why, even in those areas that have become the focus of
well-funded research projects, we have not seen anything like the kind
of advances anticipated fifty years ago. If 95 percent of robotics
research has been funded by the military, then where are the
Klaatu-style killer robots shooting death rays from their eyes?
Obviously, there have been advances in military technology in recent
decades. One of the reasons we all survived the Cold War is that while
nuclear bombs might have worked as advertised, their delivery systems
did not; intercontinental ballistic missiles weren’t capable of striking
cities, let alone specific targets inside cities, and this fact meant
there was little point in launching a nuclear first strike unless you
intended to destroy the world.
Contemporary cruise missiles are accurate by comparison. Still,
precision weapons never do seem capable of assassinating specific
individuals (Saddam, Osama, Qaddafi), even when hundreds are dropped.
And ray guns have not materialized—surely not for lack of trying. We can
assume the Pentagon has spent billions on death ray research, but the
closest they’ve come so far are lasers that might, if aimed correctly,
blind an enemy gunner looking directly at the beam. Aside from being
unsporting, this is pathetic: lasers are a fifties technology. Phasers
that can be set to stun do not appear to be on the drawing boards; and
when it comes to infantry combat, the preferred weapon almost everywhere
remains the AK-47, a Soviet design named for the year it was
introduced: 1947.
The Internet is a remarkable innovation, but all we are talking about
is a super-fast and globally accessible combination of library, post
office, and mail-order catalogue. Had the Internet been described to a
science fiction aficionado in the fifties and sixties and touted as the
most dramatic technological achievement since his time, his reaction
would have been disappointment.
Fifty years and this is the best our scientists managed to come up with? We expected computers that would think!
Overall, levels of research funding have increased dramatically since
the seventies. Admittedly, the proportion of that funding that comes
from the corporate sector has increased most dramatically, to the point
that private enterprise is now funding twice as much research as the
government, but the increase is so large that the total amount of
government research funding, in real-dollar terms, is much higher than
it was in the sixties. “Basic,” “curiosity-driven,” or “blue skies”
research—the kind that is not driven by the prospect of any immediate
practical application, and that is most likely to lead to unexpected
breakthroughs—occupies an ever smaller proportion of the total, though
so much money is being thrown around nowadays that overall levels of
basic research funding have increased.
Yet most observers agree that the results have been paltry. Certainly
we no longer see anything like the continual stream of conceptual
revolutions—genetic inheritance, relativity, psychoanalysis, quantum
mechanics—that people had grown used to, and even expected, a hundred
years before. Why?
Part of the answer has to do with the concentration of resources on a
handful of gigantic projects: “big science,” as it has come to be
called. The Human Genome Project is often held out as an example. After
spending almost three billion dollars and employing thousands of
scientists and staff in five different countries, it has mainly served
to establish that there isn’t very much to be learned from sequencing
genes that’s of much use to anyone else. Even more, the hype and
political investment surrounding such projects demonstrate the degree to
which even basic research now seems to be driven by political,
administrative, and marketing imperatives that make it unlikely anything
revolutionary will happen.
Here, our fascination with the mythic origins of Silicon Valley and
the Internet have blinded us to what’s really going on. It has allowed
us to imagine that research and development is now driven, primarily, by
small teams of plucky entrepreneurs, or the sort of decentralized
cooperation that creates open-source software. This is not so, even
though such research teams are most likely to produce results. Research
and development is still driven by giant bureaucratic projects.
What has changed is the bureaucratic culture. The increasing
interpenetration of government, university, and private firms has led
everyone to adopt the language, sensibilities, and organizational forms
that originated in the corporate world. Although this might have helped
in creating marketable products, since that is what corporate
bureaucracies are designed to do, in terms of fostering original
research, the results have been catastrophic.
My own knowledge comes from universities, both in the United States
and Britain. In both countries, the last thirty years have seen a
veritable explosion of the proportion of working hours spent on
administrative tasks at the expense of pretty much everything else. In
my own university, for instance, we have more administrators than
faculty members, and the faculty members, too, are expected to spend at
least as much time on administration as on teaching and research
combined. The same is true, more or less, at universities worldwide.
The growth of administrative work has directly resulted from
introducing corporate management techniques. Invariably, these are
justified as ways of increasing efficiency and introducing competition
at every level. What they end up meaning in practice is that everyone
winds up spending most of their time trying to sell things: grant
proposals; book proposals; assessments of students’ jobs and grant
applications; assessments of our colleagues; prospectuses for new
interdisciplinary majors; institutes; conference workshops; universities
themselves (which have now become brands to be marketed to prospective
students or contributors); and so on.
As marketing overwhelms university life, it generates documents about
fostering imagination and creativity that might just as well have been
designed to strangle imagination and creativity in the cradle. No major
new works of social theory have emerged in the United States in the last
thirty years. We have been reduced to the equivalent of medieval
scholastics, writing endless annotations of French theory from the
seventies, despite the guilty awareness that if new incarnations of
Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, or Pierre Bourdieu were to appear in
the academy today, we would deny them tenure.
There was a time when academia was society’s refuge for the
eccentric, brilliant, and impractical. No longer. It is now the domain
of professional self-marketers. As a result, in one of the most bizarre
fits of social self-destructiveness in history, we seem to have decided
we have no place for our eccentric, brilliant, and impractical citizens.
Most languish in their mothers’ basements, at best making the
occasional, acute intervention on the Internet.
If all this is true in the social sciences, where research is still
carried out with minimal overhead largely by individuals, one can
imagine how much worse it is for astrophysicists. And, indeed, one
astrophysicist, Jonathan Katz, has recently warned students pondering a
career in the sciences. Even if you do emerge from the usual decade-long
period languishing as someone else’s flunky, he says, you can expect
your best ideas to be stymied at every point:
You will spend your time writing proposals rather
than doing research. Worse, because your proposals are judged by your
competitors, you cannot follow your curiosity, but must spend your
effort and talents on anticipating and deflecting criticism rather than
on solving the important scientific problems. . . . It is proverbial
that original ideas are the kiss of death for a proposal, because they
have not yet been proved to work.
That pretty much answers the question of why we don’t have
teleportation devices or antigravity shoes. Common sense suggests that
if you want to maximize scientific creativity, you find some bright
people, give them the resources they need to pursue whatever idea comes
into their heads, and then leave them alone. Most will turn up nothing,
but one or two may well discover something. But if you want to minimize
the possibility of unexpected breakthroughs, tell those same people they
will receive no resources at all unless they spend the bulk of their
time competing against each other to convince you they know in advance
what they are going to discover.
In the natural sciences, to the tyranny of managerialism we can add
the privatization of research results. As the British economist David
Harvie has reminded us, “open source” research is not new. Scholarly
research has always been open source, in the sense that scholars share
materials and results. There is competition, certainly, but it is
“convivial.” This is no longer true of scientists working in the
corporate sector, where findings are jealously guarded, but the spread
of the corporate ethos within the academy and research institutes
themselves has caused even publicly funded scholars to treat their
findings as personal property. Academic publishers ensure that findings
that are published are increasingly difficult to access, further
enclosing the intellectual commons. As a result, convivial, open-source
competition turns into something much more like classic market
competition.
There are many forms of privatization, up to and including the simple
buying up and suppression of inconvenient discoveries by large
corporations fearful of their economic effects. (We cannot know how many
synthetic fuel formulae have been bought up and placed in the vaults of
oil companies, but it’s hard to imagine nothing like this happens.)
More subtle is the way the managerial ethos discourages everything
adventurous or quirky, especially if there is no prospect of immediate
results. Oddly, the Internet can be part of the problem here. As Neal
Stephenson put it:
Most people who work in corporations or academia
have witnessed something like the following: A number of engineers are
sitting together in a room, bouncing ideas off each other. Out of the
discussion emerges a new concept that seems promising. Then some
laptop-wielding person in the corner, having performed a quick Google
search, announces that this “new” idea is, in fact, an old one; it—or at
least something vaguely similar—has already been tried. Either it
failed, or it succeeded. If it failed, then no manager who wants to keep
his or her job will approve spending money trying to revive it. If it
succeeded, then it’s patented and entry to the market is presumed to be
unattainable, since the first people who thought of it will have
“first-mover advantage” and will have created “barriers to entry.” The
number of seemingly promising ideas that have been crushed in this way
must number in the millions.
And so a timid, bureaucratic spirit suffuses every aspect of cultural
life. It comes festooned in a language of creativity, initiative, and
entrepreneurialism. But the language is meaningless. Those thinkers most
likely to make a conceptual breakthrough are the least likely to
receive funding, and, if breakthroughs occur, they are not likely to
find anyone willing to follow up on their most daring implications.]
Giovanni Arrighi has noted that after the South Sea Bubble, British
capitalism largely abandoned the corporate form. By the time of the
Industrial Revolution, Britain had instead come to rely on a combination
of high finance and small family firms—a pattern that held throughout
the next century, the period of maximum scientific and technological
innovation. (Britain at that time was also notorious for being just as
generous to its oddballs and eccentrics as contemporary America is
intolerant. A common expedient was to allow them to become rural vicars,
who, predictably, became one of the main sources for amateur scientific
discoveries.)
Contemporary, bureaucratic corporate capitalism was a creation not of
Britain, but of the United States and Germany, the two rival powers
that spent the first half of the twentieth century fighting two bloody
wars over who would replace Britain as a dominant world power—wars that
culminated, appropriately enough, in government-sponsored scientific
programs to see who would be the first to discover the atom bomb. It is
significant, then, that our current technological stagnation seems to
have begun after 1945, when the United States replaced Britain as
organizer of the world economy.
Americans do not like to think of themselves as a nation of
bureaucrats—quite the opposite—but the moment we stop imagining
bureaucracy as a phenomenon limited to government offices, it becomes
obvious that this is precisely what we have become. The final victory
over the Soviet Union did not lead to the domination of the market, but,
in fact, cemented the dominance of conservative managerial elites,
corporate bureaucrats who use the pretext of short-term, competitive,
bottom-line thinking to squelch anything likely to have revolutionary
implications of any kind.
If we do not notice
that we live in a bureaucratic society, that is because bureaucratic
norms and practices have become so all-pervasive that we cannot see
them, or, worse, cannot imagine doing things any other way.
Computers have played a crucial role in this narrowing of our social
imaginations. Just as the invention of new forms of industrial
automation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had the
paradoxical effect of turning more and more of the world’s population
into full-time industrial workers, so has all the software designed to
save us from administrative responsibilities turned us into part- or
full-time administrators. In the same way that university professors
seem to feel it is inevitable they will spend more of their time
managing grants, so affluent housewives simply accept that they will
spend weeks every year filling out forty-page online forms to get their
children into grade schools. We all spend increasing amounts of time
punching passwords into our phones to manage bank and credit accounts
and learning how to perform jobs once performed by travel agents,
brokers, and accountants.
Someone once figured out that the average American will spend a
cumulative six months of life waiting for traffic lights to change. I
don’t know if similar figures are available for how long it takes to
fill out forms, but it must be at least as long. No population in the
history of the world has spent nearly so much time engaged in paperwork.
In this final, stultifying stage of capitalism, we are moving from
poetic technologies to bureaucratic technologies. By poetic technologies
I refer to the use of rational and technical means to bring wild
fantasies to reality. Poetic technologies, so understood, are as old as
civilization. Lewis Mumford noted that the first complex machines were
made of people. Egyptian pharaohs were able to build the pyramids only
because of their mastery of administrative procedures, which allowed
them to develop production-line techniques, dividing up complex tasks
into dozens of simple operations and assigning each to one team of
workmen—even though they lacked mechanical technology more complex than
the inclined plane and lever. Administrative oversight turned armies of
peasant farmers into the cogs of a vast machine. Much later, after cogs
had been invented, the design of complex machinery elaborated principles
originally developed to organize people.
Yet we have seen those machines—whether their moving parts are arms
and torsos or pistons, wheels, and springs—being put to work to realize
impossible fantasies: cathedrals, moon shots, transcontinental railways.
Certainly, poetic technologies had something terrible about them; the
poetry is likely to be as much of dark satanic mills as of grace or
liberation. But the rational, administrative techniques were always in
service to some fantastic end.
From this perspective, all those mad Soviet plans—even if never
realized—marked the climax of poetic technologies. What we have now is
the reverse. It’s not that vision, creativity, and mad fantasies are no
longer encouraged, but that most remain free-floating; there’s no longer
even the pretense that they could ever take form or flesh. The greatest
and most powerful nation that has ever existed has spent the last
decades telling its citizens they can no longer contemplate fantastic
collective enterprises, even if—as the environmental crisis demands— the
fate of the earth depends on it.
What are the
political implications of all this? First of all, we need to rethink
some of our most basic assumptions about the nature of capitalism. One
is that capitalism is identical with the market, and that both therefore
are inimical to bureaucracy, which is supposed to be a creature of the
state.
The second assumption is that capitalism is in its nature
technologically progressive. It would seem that Marx and Engels, in
their giddy enthusiasm for the industrial revolutions of their day, were
wrong about this. Or, to be more precise: they were right to insist
that the mechanization of industrial production would destroy
capitalism; they were wrong to predict that market competition would
compel factory owners to mechanize anyway. If it didn’t happen, that is
because market competition is not, in fact, as essential to the nature
of capitalism as they had assumed. If nothing else, the current form of
capitalism, where much of the competition seems to take the form of
internal marketing within the bureaucratic structures of large
semi-monopolistic enterprises, would come as a complete surprise to
them.
Defenders of capitalism make three broad historical claims: first,
that it has fostered rapid scientific and technological growth; second,
that however much it may throw enormous wealth to a small minority, it
does so in such a way as to increase overall prosperity; third, that in
doing so, it creates a more secure and democratic world for everyone. It
is clear that capitalism is not doing any of these things any longer.
In fact, many of its defenders are retreating from claiming that it is a
good system and instead falling back on the claim that it is the only
possible system—or, at least, the only possible system for a complex,
technologically sophisticated society such as our own.
But how could anyone argue that current economic arrangements are
also the only ones that will ever be viable under any possible future
technological society? The argument is absurd. How could anyone know?
Granted, there are people who take that position—on both ends of the
political spectrum. As an anthropologist and anarchist, I encounter
anticivilizational types who insist not only that current industrial
technology leads only to capitalist-style oppression, but that this must
necessarily be true of any future technology as well, and therefore
that human liberation can be achieved only by returning to the Stone
Age. Most of us are not technological determinists.
But claims for the inevitability of capitalism have to be based on a
kind of technological determinism. And for that very reason, if the aim
of neoliberal capitalism is to create a world in which no one believes
any other economic system could work, then it needs to suppress not just
any idea of an inevitable redemptive future, but any radically
different technological future. Yet there’s a contradiction. Defenders
of capitalism cannot mean to convince us that technological change has
ended—since that would mean capitalism is not progressive. No, they mean
to convince us that technological progress is indeed continuing, that
we do live in a world of wonders, but that those wonders take the form
of modest improvements (the latest iPhone!), rumors of inventions about
to happen (“I hear they are going to have flying cars pretty soon”),
complex ways of juggling information and imagery, and still more complex
platforms for filling out of forms.
I do not mean to suggest that neoliberal capitalism—or any other
system—can be successful in this regard. First, there’s the problem of
trying to convince the world you are leading the way in technological
progress when you are holding it back. The United States, with its
decaying infrastructure, paralysis in the face of global warming, and
symbolically devastating abandonment of its manned space program just as
China accelerates its own, is doing a particularly bad public relations
job. Second, the pace of change can’t be held back forever.
Breakthroughs will happen; inconvenient discoveries cannot be
permanently suppressed. Other, less bureaucratized parts of the world—or
at least, parts of the world with bureaucracies that are not so hostile
to creative thinking—will slowly but inevitably attain the resources
required to pick up where the United States and its allies have left
off. The Internet does provide opportunities for collaboration and
dissemination that may help break us through the wall as well. Where
will the breakthrough come? We can’t know. Maybe 3D printing will do
what the robot factories were supposed to. Or maybe it will be something
else. But it will happen.
About one
conclusion we can feel especially confident: it will not happen within
the framework of contemporary corporate capitalism—or any form of
capitalism. To begin setting up domes on Mars, let alone to develop the
means to figure out if there are alien civilizations to contact, we’re
going to have to figure out a different economic system. Must the new
system take the form of some massive new bureaucracy? Why do we assume
it must? Only by breaking up existing bureaucratic structures can we
begin. And if we’re going to invent robots that will do our laundry and
tidy up the kitchen, then we’re going to have to make sure that whatever
replaces capitalism is based on a far more egalitarian distribution of
wealth and power—one that no longer contains either the super-rich or
the desperately poor willing to do their housework. Only then will
technology begin to be marshaled toward human needs. And this is the
best reason to break free of the dead hand of the hedge fund managers
and the CEOs—to free our fantasies from the screens in which such men
have imprisoned them, to let our imaginations once again become a
material force in human history.
* *
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