<nettime> The magnificent bribe

[Felix Stalder <felix@openflows.com>]

[This might add to my exchanges with Morlock, from which he posted his
side as "ideology of technology". His part was more interesting than
mine, so unless someone requests it, I will not publish it.]

I just finished reading "Efficiency and Madness. Using Data and
Technology to Solve Social, Environmental and Political Problems", a new
report published by the German Boell Foundation [1], written by
Stephanie Hankey & Marek Tuszynski, of the tactical technology
collective [2]

I can recommend it, because contrary to what the title might suggest,
this is not another set of superficial technology-fixes, advocated by a
narrowly focused NGO, but rather a more abstract attempt to think
through some of the vexing issues about technology and social change. It
doesn't identify any "solutions" beyond calling for a holistic approach
against the hyper-specialisation of technologies that, at best,
displaces problems from one area to another.

In the course of the review of ways to understand the issues, they
revisit Louis Mumford's famous distinction between authoritarian and
democratic "technics" and, in particular, the notion of the "magnificent
bribe", first put forward in 1964 [3]. They write:

<quote>

Mumford defined some technologies as inherently authoritarian and others
as inherently democratic. For him, ‘the first system-centered, immensely
powerful, but inherently unstable, the other man-centered, relatively
weak, but resourceful and durable.’ Two types of technologies are often
cited as examples: nuclear power (authoritarianand necessarily top-down)
and solar power (democratic and with the potential to be bottom-up).
What Mumford accurately predicted, however, writing nearly three decades
before the proliferation of the internet, sensors, chips and mobile
phones, is that dominant technologies would become a hybrid of
‘democratic-authoritarian’. Technologies would be both centralised and
top-down, grassroots and bottom-up, creating a co-dependency between
those who provide technologies (typically companies and governments) and
those who use it (typically citizens). He describes these technologies
as paradoxical and ironic: ‘each member of the community may claim every
material advantage, every intellectual and emotion stimulus he may
desire, in quantities hardly available hitherto even for a restricted
minority.’But Mumford predicted that in accepting the
‘democratic-authoritarian social contract’, the individual will have
surrendered ‘one’s life at source’ in a way that authoritarian technics
dominate society, while occasionally giving back ‘democratically’.
Mumford goes on to describe this exchange as a ‘magnificent bribe’.

</quote>

This fits current social media surprisingly well, both in terms of what
is provided by them, but also what needs to be surrendered to them:
one's life at source. Yet, it's an overly static, in some ways
essentializing, notion of technology, which is either this, or that, or
some mixtures of it.

In relation to social mass media, I think understanding the particular
character of the bribe, and why is has been so willingly accepted and
has since become impossible to refuse, it is necessary to focus on the
transformation of the power dynamics over time.

On the provision side of things, there is obviously access to very
powerful tools usually without service fee and in a easy-to-use form.
Particularly for the early adopters and the skilled users, this
translates into real empowerment, enabling them to do things they could
not do otherwise and do it better than others. The last aspect is
important. Because power is never absolute, but also relative. So, as
more and more people accept the bribe and gain access to the tools, the
relative power gained through these tools decreases to the point where
the tools have become so wide spread, that they confer no extra power
anymore. Now, using them merely becomes a precondition for playing the
game at all.

On the other hand, the data gleaned from our lifes's "surrendered at
source", accrues exclusively at the hand of the service providers thus
continuously enhancing their power vis-a-vis everyone else as time goes
by. In terms if the user, power decreases, in terms of the providers,
power increases. This, in effect, transforms the character of the
technology from primarily democratic, that is, distributing power, to
one that is increasingly authoritarian, that is, concentrating power in
the hand of a largely unaccountable elite.

It's hard to exactly pin-point the moment when then this change in the
political character of the new tools of mass communication occurred. But
I think we can say that the possibility of this transformation was built
on from the beginning and is potential -- realized when successful -- is
a precondition for venture capital to invest. So, when you want a date,
it's the moment when each of these services went public (though there
were built for this moment from almost the start).



[1]
https://www.boell.de/en/2017/11/28/efficiency-and-madness-using-data-and-technologyto-solve-social-environmental-and-political-problems

[2] https://tacticaltech.org/

[3] Lewis Mumford, ‘Authoritarian and Democratic Technics:
Technology and Culture’ in Technology and Culture, Vol. 5, No. 1
(Winter, 1964).



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