The Spectacle of Entertainment
Part Three: The Computer
William Brown
Overall [he says], the human body has more than 200 ways it can flex itself. Imagine you could use all that flexibility to communicate with your computer. Imagine you could move your hands over your computer's surface to manipulate an onscreen document or pull a spreadsheet into a report. Or that flicking your fingers over a passage brushes it away like crumbs.Then -- using the same "logic" that led him to the invention of the mouse -- Tognazzini goes on to say of consumers' ability to adapt to the radical new interfaces that are now being developed, "We have a natural vocabulary of gestures, so the learning curve would be slight." Correction: we have a naturalized vocabulary of spectacular gestures (and a spectacularly impoverished vocabulary of natural gestures). It is only for this reason that "interfacing" with computers has been and will continue to be easy to learn.
The computer was first used in the cybernetic automation of industrial production. In automated factories (of which there are now a great many), workers are no longer responsible for running the machines, but simply for overseeing their operation by computers. The workers no longer process materials, even indirectly. But -- contrary to the implications of the popular definition of cybernetics -- these workers are not simply replaced by the machines. The workers become surveillants who process data about the work the automatons are doing, communicated to them by the automatons themselves. From the point of view of the labor process (the science of gestures), human beings and technical machines are henceforth equivalent, cogs in the same vast machinic network designed to productively circulate information. In this way, both the speed and the over-all level of "productivity" grow higher. Such would seem to be the appeal of computers to industrial capitalists.
But computers were primarily deployed because they constituted an effective means by which large, centralized, and increasingly class-conscious worker collectives could be neutralized and dispersed. On the one hand, computerized production depends on the performance of machines and therefore tends towards a continuous, twenty-four-hour-a-day process. Since human workers only intervene in the event of a malfunction, there is an inverse relationship between labor time and production time. These workers must be re-trained in the absolute "political and economic necessities" of their new conditions of utter passivity and separation. (If they bitterly resent their re-training, but don't know what is behind the necessity of it, they may end up like one of the hundreds of postal workers who kill their co-workers while on the job; if they welcome their re-training and indeed become well-trained in the new conditions, they will be of no use to any organized labor collective, which would certainly be predicated on the principles of action and solidarity.) On the other hand, computerized production decreases the need for large numbers of in-house, full-time workers. These workers are expensive to train and employ (they require employment and health insurance) and they can strike, call in sick or take legal action if their "reasonable" demands are not met. Automation thus represents freedom from labor -- and thus total freedom -- for the capitalist.
But automated production also confronts political economy with a contradiction that must be resolved: the same technical infrastructure that is capable of abolishing labor entirely must at the same time preserve labor as a commodity and as the sole generator of commodities. The solution has in part been found in the creation of a new segmentation in the work force, which is also a new dispersion of the work force. Computerized production makes possible the extensive use of inexpensive off-site "subcontractors" and part-time unskilled workers who are responsible for maintaining and repairing any machines that do not work, and other menial tasks. (In the case of the Mexican "subcontractors" recently exploited by Texas A & M, those menial tasks included groundskeeping and "assisting" in agricultural production.) Unlike the in-house workers, these poorly-paid off-site workers don't have to be covered by any insurance, do not have the organizational back-up or the job stability necessary to call a strike or work slow-down, do not make any money if they use absenteeism as a weapon, and do not have to be concentrated together as a kind of reserve army of unskilled laborers. Their employers generally have no compunction about paying them poorly, firing them when it is profitable to do so, and cheating the government out of its payroll taxes and the employees out of their social security benefits. To preserve labor as a commodity, without abolishing the socially imposed necessity of labor, computerized production calculatedly fires in-house, full-time employees, only to re-hire them temporarily, at substantially reduced costs, as "freelancers" and "subcontractors," even "consultants." These off-site workers must be given quick and easy access to "information" about the spectacular flows and flights of capital in proportion to what they have lost in wages, benefits and job security; in the event of a strike, the off-site, part-time workers will need to know in an instant where "permanent replacement workers" will be needed. Otherwise computerized production will backfire on both levels of its operation: it will create large and dangerously uninvolved groups of unemployed workers; and it will damage so-called consumer confidence (that is, blind faith in capitalism's divine plan), which lies at the cold heart of the convergence of the labor and commodity markets.
Ironically, opponents of the widespread use of computers have long feared that it would eventually lead to massive centralization, that is, to huge and impersonal databanks that would control all of human life from a few, crucial locations, if not from a single location. It is quite true that networked computers can execute "global" commands (to -- all at once and everywhere -- delete, replace or alter what is no longer "valuable," as well as reproduce and distribute or search for and bring together what still is "of value"), and thus appear to be centralized, exactly in the same way that the mainframe computers themselves are controlled by central processors. It is also quite true that the more "radical" computer designers and programmers are on the verge of advancing the idea that "the computer" should be used to run the very economy that produced it and was produced by it. Thus, "the computer" will soon represent the total liberation of the capitalist -- not only from labor, but from the economy itself as well. In the words of Microsoft physicist and software designer Nathan Myhrvold,
A human programmer comes at a problem with a mind-set that causes him or her to solve it one way: in fact, there's a large space of other solutions - and [computer] evolution can find them. . . . We're getting to a point where there has got to be a way for us to understand the dynamic processes in economics at the same level we understand dynamic processes in computers and the physical sciences.
Thus "the computer" emerges as both the process and product of the spectacle of information -- as a functioning, automated tautology.
But it has taken the invention, distribution and widespread use of "personal" microcomputers (commonly known as PCs) to make visible the real social implications of the computer. In the analysis of Myhrvold, PCs are virtually unthinkably-sophisticated pieces of equipment: he points out that if the Boeing 747 (an interesting comparison) had followed the same rate of development that the computer has followed since the 1950s,
it would travel a million miles per hour, it would be shrunken down in size, and a trip [across the country] would cost about $5. Those enormous changes just aren't part of our everyday experience.In a society that is in part characterized by incessant technological renewal, perhaps it is needless to say that Myhrvold believes that the power of the PC will increase by a factor of a million within the next 15 years.
Today, PCs integrate within one unit the functions of word processing, data processing, electronic mail, mathematical analysis, and game-playing -- that is to say, the PC brings together into one integrated circuit the formerly relatively distinct areas of work and leisure. Ever since the mid-1980s, political economy has found it to be in its interest to encourage the use of PCs as interfaces that permit "tele-commuting" to work without leaving the home, and as tools that transform (recuperate) the workers' desires for independence into a "healthy business spirit" that satisfies capital's growing need for satellites. Therefore the PC decentralizes and expands the time-space of industrial production (the factory) into the home and everyday life. The difference between work and leisure is no longer spatial: it is now temporal, a division between "billable" and "nonbillable" time. Conditioned by many years of invasions and endo-colonializations, the human mind comes to accept, even welcome such ergonomic assaults into its home. The spectacle proclaims that soon, very soon, we will be able to do everything we once did in a variety of locations -- work, shop, bank, entertain ourselves, visit with friends, see the sights, and so forth -- through our PCs, which will be integrated into a variety of telecommunications networks. These proclamations are nearly always accompanied by the images of children, who seem to have a "natural" ability to produce the gestures necessary to run a PC. Thus we are presented with the spectacle of a glorious future in which all computer-literate children (be they white or black, yellow or brown) will grow up to be (sigh!) responsible, well-informed and "productive" adults. But this is also a refracted image of the present, in which the truly natural gestures of children are already being systematically molded into or replaced by spectacular gestures. Indeed, the naturalization of the spectacle is the prime function of so-called edu-tainment software, which the nation's public schools will soon purchase at an annual rate of over $1.5 billion a year. Stored on CD-ROMs, which are rapidly coming to replace printed textbooks, these edu-tainment products are quite productive, for they provide glorification for the general spectacle of information and excellent advertising possibilities for the huge publishing and technology companies that produce them. Billed as better baby-sitters than the television set, these CDs are increasingly being bought by the parents of kids in school.
But as the PC and the proliferating networks into which it is integrated grow in practical importance, the time-space of the factory imposes its authoritarian regime on all of social life; the relation between human being and machine comes to be one of reciprocal surveillance; and the only possible basis for thought becomes spectacular information. The circle of domination grows ever closer to being completed: networked PCs integrate their dependents into the identity of the corporation, which in turn integrates them (both the networked PCs and the humans who are functionally equivalent to them) into the global network of the information economy, which in turn determines the quality of everyone's life, wherever they are. One does not need to be a believer of "conspiracy theories" to accept this vision of the future. Even professional mystifiers such as Jay Kinney, publisher and editor of Gnosis: A Journal of the Western Inner Traditions, are able to see that,
like the Internet, the process of global integration may have no directing center on which to pin the blame, but merely its own internal logic and the confluence of self-interested economic and political entities. In an ad hoc fashion, [even] the big players end up with an unseen agenda that may be quite sufficient to overturn the old order of politics.
But such writers consistently refuse to reach the inevitable conclusion that the "new order" of global political economy, if successfully established, would mark the final denial of humanity.
Part Four: The Suppression of Disorder
Return to William Brown at The Birdhouse
[Writers] [Birdhouse]