<nettime> Consensus within the Bay Area elites?

[Brian Holmes <bhcontinentaldrift@gmail.com>]

In 2008, a fellow named Mark Leonard published what was probably the 
most useful book of the year, entitled "What does China think?" With 
great concision he went through the country's think tanks, one by one, 
with a five or six page summary of the people, the problematics and the 
major statements issuing from each. The book begins with the idealism of 
China's New Left. It ends with generals plotting grand strategy (of 
which, for them, military strategy is only a small part).

On this list, with all our collective knowledge, contacts and capacities 
to learn, we ought to do a similar analysis of the tech companies in the 
Bay Area (and perhaps other major technology development hubs). How do 
the network elites see the future? How do they believe they can direct 
the global development forces which are already managed, day in day out, 
by the computational routines embedded in their products? What are their 
politics and geopolitics? And how do they "think" via cables, software, 
devices and infrastructure design? A deep and detailed understanding of 
what is being discussed by such elites today would be far more useful 
than the superficial critique so commonly produced on the blogosphere 
and conference circuit (let alone the bickering that Felix denounced).

As some of you know, I'm convinced that for better and for worse there 
will be a new economic growth wave rising in the next few years, in 
response to the current dead-end and generalized climate of fear and 
uncertainty. This is common sense among corporate elites, so they are 
quite interested in the subject. Following a suggestion by Ãrsan Åenalp, 
I have been looking at the latest writings of Jeremy Rifkin, an American 
tech and business guru who has set up shop in the EU and advises 
European governments, particularly Germany. I am listening right now to 
the talk he gave in the Google authors series. I recommend it. Beyond 
the deflatable hype about the "zero marginal cost" of production in a 
totally networked p2p economy, it is clear that tech elites and the 
governmental sectors they have in their pockets foresee an 
intensification and systematization of the wired and wireless economy, 
based on the multiplication and interconnection of microprocessors and 
analytic software apps (that's the famous "Internet of Things," hats off 
to Rob van Kranenburg for proposing to study its philosophy). Major 
economic and social consequences can in effect be expected from this 
interconnection.

On the one hand, you're a thing: everything you do on the networks is 
tracked, surveilled, compiled, analyzed. Fair enough, on nettime we've 
had that aspect covered for years. On the other hand, every humble 
material thing is an entity in a network ontology: and far beyond the 
one-size-fits-all fantasy of ubquitous RFID chips, what's emerging is a 
new logistics system for global distribution of energy, raw materials 
and manufactures (some of it is already built and operational). You can 
also throw in a new generation of assembly-lines robotics (including 
industrial maker-bots) and a new personal transport system (the 
driverless car, in which Google itself is so deeply invested). As 
Florian Cramer pointed out in a reply to Van Kranenburg, this kind of 
pervasively networked system not only opens up tremendous possibilities 
of horizontal cooperation (between persons, businesses and institutions) 
but also, huge security holes like the Heartbleed OpenSSL disaster: so 
the networked elites are very interested in how to govern the system 
they are creating.

Think a little bit about the Heartbleed-type problem, to the 10th power. 
The infamous book by Eric Schmidt and Jared what's-his-name, the 
Washington security goon, is no accident. In American history, we lived 
through the capitalist development of the giant mass-production 
corporation, epitomized by the Ford Motor Co., from 1900 to 1940; and 
then, after those kinds of productive forces issued in the most 
devastating war imaiginable, we lived through the government 
orchestrated systematization of mass production, in the postwar 
"Fordist" period from 1945 to 1973. There is a dialectic here: the 
initial development of a productive system is followed by a major cisis; 
then that productive system is reworked, rationalized and integrated to 
a social order (or at least, the capitalist version thereof).

Under the long shadows of 9/11 and the 2008 crisis, the Bay Area elites, 
whether at Google, Cisco, HP or Apple, seem to be moving toward a 
fragile and probably untenable consensus that "something similar" will 
happen again. In other words, somehow, somehow, the US will find a 
social and governmental synthesis that allows techno-economic 
development to be guided by and for giant US corporations. And somehow 
(this is where the "thinking" gets extremely magical) this synthesis 
will be libertarian, user-friendly, horizontal, wild-west, and so forth.

As for Rifkin, he represents a more pragmatic East Coast version of the 
Californian Ideology (and he actually grew up in Chicago). Like many 
so-called progressive American intellectuals, he found a better 
reception for his ideas in Europe, where, since the days of Bernstein 
and early German social democracy, a left ideology is considered a 
necessary mask on capitalist development. Rifkin's ideas about the smart 
electric grid and the Internet of Things now appeal to both the German 
and the Chinese governments. They appear to believe that recent 
technological developments can be fused into a new productive order, 
manifested in the extension of railways lines and development corridors 
across the entire Eurasian landmass (the giant free-trade/logistics 
project that the Chinese call "The New Silk Road"). They want to put 
German hi-tech, European consumption, and Asian manufacturing capacity 
together, and mitigate climate change along the way.

The green capitalism widely denounced on the eco-anarchist left 
coalesces here, in the concept of a Euro-Sinic (or perhaps, 
Euro-Sinical) production system whose green ideology would cover massive 
Chinese infrastructure investments, with Germany replacing the US as the 
key banker and technological and scientific partner. This perspective 
thinks big, on the scale of Eurasia. The aim is to use capitalist 
modenization to guide the largest part of the world's population through 
the devastating first half of the twenty-first century, as inequalities 
grow worse and climate change takes hold. Of course the Euro-Sinical 
program itself will accelerate those same contradictions...

How do the Bay Area elites situate themselves within this emerging 
world-picture? What is their consensus, and where does it fall apart? 
Who has the greatest power to set the agendas? And to what degree do 
these tech elites remain unconscious and merely reactive? I do not claim 
to know the answers, certainly not in the necessary detail. The facile 
"critique" of this or that form of evil-doing is definitely blocking us 
from even grasping how Google thinks, and how Apple-Cisco-HP-etc thinks, 
and how they get together and think with BofA and Wells Fargo and Citi 
and the NSA and the DoD and so forth.

In short, I see two mistakes, dear nettimers. One is failing to see that 
the Bay Area elites and their interlocutors are fully engaged in the 
titanic project of imagining, designing and governing a pervasively 
networked social system on a global scale. The second one is the failure 
to see that they are not alone, and that similar problems are being 
dealt with by potentially more organized and more powerful forces, who 
do not think in purely communicational and financial terms, but instead 
deal also with large-scale industry.

best, Brian


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