His starting point is the 1964 World’s Fair in New York that took place during an intense period of the Cold War, its planning no doubt underway during the time of the Cuban missile crisis. With its futurist IBM Pavilion the Fair acted as Trojan-Horse type propaganda. “Instruments of genocide,� Barbrook writes “were successfully disguised as benefactors of humanity.� Nuclear weapons, militarized computing, and militarized space use were presented as the utopian future being made real in the present.

To make the particular nature of this futurism clear, he contrasts the Fair with London’s Great Exhibition of 1851, which instead disguised Britain’s modern hi-tech world in the medieval fantasies of the Gothic Revival; and with the American exhibition of 1939 whose promise of a suburban America built around the motor car was realized, and had a New Deal rhetoric of a cohesive and peaceful society. On the other hand, the 1964 promises of unmetered energy (nuclear fusion), tourism to the moon, and intelligent computers, have been unfulfilled and, since Chernobyl and an Apollo crash at take-off, have been discredited. Only the Holy Grail of Artificial Intelligence is still on the table, pursued with a fanaticism borne of some deep and perverse psychic need, and enabled by the non-stop levels of its research budget, forthcoming during the period described here, because of an equally deep ideological need to disguise the grotesque military ‘game-playing’ it allowed for.

Barbrook himself was at the 1964 Fair as a boy with his mother, sister, and an academic father who he comes to realize was part of what he calls the cold-war left, one which willingly made accommodation with the technological fantasies on display there, and the ‘military definition of reality’ as described by C. Wright Mills. This, given that he hates this view of the world and what it lead to, gives the book its drive and its edge. It ends with a rousing cry for the equality of an intelligent citizenry, allied to use of the world wide web as a liberatory tool, but it is also an angry lament, that a generation of self-styled progressives should have destroyed social democracy both as a possible, perhaps likely, governmental mode, and as an ideal.

What destroys it is the Vietnam War, though he is scrupulous enough to avoid his anger becoming yet another version of this being ‘an American Tragedy’. He is forthright in saying that this was a Vietnamese tragedy, and is horrified that here were nominal progressives who became obsessed with how many Vietnamese peasants could be killed. This callousness began with an ideological notion of what was modernity – a Cold War version – but also from a faith in technology itself. This faith — in line with the top-down history of social democracy — involved a denial of human agency. Describing the IBM Pavilion at the 1964 Fair, he argues that it wasn’t just military use being disguised, but that the imaginary future of electronic brains concealed the human labour involved. Computers were described as ‘thinking’ so that the hard work, the surplus-value producing labour of designing, building and operating of them, could be discounted.

EX-MARXISTS MADE GOOD

In the course of World War II, various intellectuals, including Marxists, and ex-Marxists, found a place in positions of responsibility and power in a militarized government. This wartime government was the genesis of what C. Wright Mills came to call the Power Elite, and as it morphed into Cold War governments, the ‘military definition of reality’ became a crucial cohesive force for it. In this transition the newcomer intellectuals who remained in this elite included ex-Marxists, and especially ex-Trotskyists whose hostility to the USSR as it existed, made the switch to a wholly militarized American view of the world not so difficult. (1)

Barbrook sees them as playing an important role in the creation of this ‘counter futurism.’ We have seen something depressingly similar among the ‘Blairites’ of New Labour, and the presence of ex-Marxists among today’s American neo-cons has also been noted. He quotes from Ignazio Silone that “the final struggle (for global hegemony)…will be between the Communists and the ex-Communists.� But with both the neo-cons of today, and the real villains of this book, their influence is rather over played for polemical effect. In this book those real villains are intellectuals, social democrat Keynesians if pushed, but with a penchant for American military superiority, and a role in the Power Elite, who had read some Marx, understood the idea of historical materialism, and wanted to create a class-free version of it.

Early in the book he introduces the ex-Trotskyist leader James Burnham, who had made such a switch, to describe a revolution in which a managerial class was the deservedly new elite, one most developed in the USA. To give this notion force, Burnham wanted to give it the Shock and Awe touch, inevitability. It is true that managerialism was new in its ideological and practical importance for the Power Elite, and that computer development would only strengthen this development. Equally, the imagined future was dependent on managerial capacity, but of itself, managerialism provided none of the required appeal.

HEROES AND VILLAINS

Instead, Barbrook presents the advent of cybernetics, and soon after the ‘global village’ notions of converging communication technologies pioneered in new style by Marshall McLuhan. Both were, and are, capable of varying interpretation and so become, though he is hesitant to say it, sites of ‘struggle’. He traces the history of cybernetics back to ‘the Macy Conferences’, and from this there emerge hero and villain. The hero, and this is the big rescue job of the book, is Norbert Wiener. True, Wiener’s theory of a continual feedback between information and action which could be used to describe the behaviour of living organisms and technological systems would seem to make misuse possible, even likely, but he also challenged the ‘patriotic consensus’ of the Cold War which allowed scientists to rationalize their military-funded research; and asserted the need for humans to control their machines.

Later he became an inspiration to a short-lived reformist faction of the USSR elite and their utopian idea of computerized and interactive planning, a “new cybernetic model of communism: the ‘unified information network’.” It did not survive the return to centralized control under Brezhnev, but in turn, spurred the American cybernetic world to make something more inspiring than one dominated by military use and Artificial Intelligence fanaticism. This is how Barbrook characterizes the turn cybernetics had taken when it became dominated by John von Neumann, mathematician and Cold War enthusiast, who had been involved in developing the atomic bomb and then in building a prototype mainframe computer for the US Navy. The inherent danger of metaphor and analogy in scientific work, allowed him to argue that ‘feedback’ meant that computers operated like humans. He is the first of Barbrook’s villains whose propagandizing of AI, allowed the development of war games with a clean conscience for those doing the work.

But this, no more than Burnham’s managerial elite, created much of an attractive version of the future. Enter Marshall McLuhan, an obscure literature professor in Canada with a suitably modern mish-mash of snappy perceptions based on the ideas of Harold Innis. that ‘the movement of information’ played the primary role in shaping human societies. In Understanding Media and the more snappier titled The Gutenberg Galaxy, he postulated a convergence of a communication technologies, and neutral gloablisation. For him “print consciousness – the indifference of rationalism – would be superseded by electronic media consciousness – the empathy of intuition,â€? as Barbrook puts it. One might object to the domineering arrogance of some of its proponents, but the superseding of rationalism, can only make one nervous. The intellectuals of the Power Elite on the other hand, were all to happy keep their monopoly on rationalism, while taking up McLuhan’s ideas. What appealed to them in his work was not just the heralding of the information age, but in particular the converging and ‘unification’ of computing, media and telecommunications, and how this provided a vision of the future in which the USA already had an unassailable lead. The technical determinism implied in his argument – a changed technological mode of communication making for a new mode of consciousness – also meant that, in the right hands, the ideas could be rendered ideologically safe.

MCLUHANISM WITHOUT MCLUHAN

The intellectuals, the ones Barbrook calls ‘the cold war left’, were of the type who tell you what you were really saying the moment you’ve finished saying it. In this instance there was not even acknowledgement of what McLuhan had said.. He had to be interpreted and unacknowledged because he himself was too off-the-wall to provide a Cold War imaginary future, or to be useful to academic careerists. Without acknowledgement, interpretation becomes appropriation, and what was constructed was McLuhanism without McLuhan. This when McLuhan himself had shown his ‘flakiness’ when, at a 1969 meeting of the Bilderberg Group he asked, “What are we fighting Communism for? We are the most Communist people in world history.�

The appropriation of the ideas and breakthroughs of inventers, innovators, and mavericks by those with institutional and financial power is hardly new. In the case of McLuhan, his appropriators were real operators, Daniel Bell and the geopolitical cold warrior Zbigniew Brzezinski, a member of Bell’s multi-disciplinary Commission which had come out of the American Cybernetics Conference of 1964 and was financed by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Bell had already provided an early version of the ‘Third Way’ with his The End of Ideology, (“The end of ideology is not – and should not – be the end of utopia as wellâ€?) having already proved himself a reliable hatchet man for the Power Elite with a critique of Wright Mills’ book, that depended on nod-and-wink put-downs and the distortions that arise from simply ignoring the phenomena it highlighted.(2) As well as professional academics, the Commission also involved think-tankers like Herman Kahn who, in the 1950s, had claimed a nuclear war against the USSR was winnable on the basis of simulated war games. It was he and a colleague from the Hudson Institute who came up with a list of 100 imminent inventions for the Commission. Much was predicated on the power of ‘thinking machines’. Meanwhile Brzezinski in a 1968 article and a 1970 book, reproduced McLuhanism as academic sociology with technology as the driving form of human history, no class conflict involved. And this time it was new technology which was effecting a new economy, and a view of the world to go with it, the information society replacing the industrial with the USA in the lead.

Barbrook argues that Bell found this insufficient, that it didn’t offer their own vision of “the emancipated society�, their vision of utopia, and that this was his self-appointed job. His point of view was essentially similar however: “As in earlier stages of growth, people were spectators of an evolutionary movement outside of their control,� Barbrook writes. Certain ironies also arise. For one thing, there is a distinct whiff of ‘the end of history’ in Bell’s conclusions, and the end of history itself sounds all too like the thousand year Reich, an absurd claim, inviting hubris. Already there has been a new version of the end of history, American also, but from a rather different viewpoint. Then there is the date of Bell’s final ‘canonical text’ (a phrase Barbrook is overly fond of) The Coming of Post-Industrial Society. It finally appeared in 1973, but by then the political-ideological base it had been built on, had gone. Not that the technological developments towards the information society as network (net) came to a stop, far from it, but that his ‘third way version’ had been discredited by the Vietnam War, a triple whammy.

HUBRIS

First of all information technology was used not just in a callous manner in this war, it also created delusions of victory. It is also the Vietnamese – and this irony Barbrook does emphasize – who used television to greater effect, making it integral to the Tet Offensive which had such an impact on American opinion. Then a youth counter-culture which had already smelled something rotten, a technological determinism which was intrinsically anti-democratic in this notion of a post-industrial society, saw that the War brought it out into the open. This counter-culture included students who, for Bell, were to be integral to, leaders of the information society, with bases in the universities. They were integral to his society. Instead many students became militant opponents of the War and all that went with it.

Longer term, the costs of the war was a catalyst for a radical shift in general capitalist policy. The Keynesianism which had been taken for granted by the cold war left was in any case becoming unacceptable to capital and its representative power elite, blamed for its failure to deliver social discipline. The costs of the war and those of the Great Society, and then the oil price shock in the same year that Bell finally published, made this shift in capitalist strategy both necessary and possible. It was a switch aimed at making people work harder for the same, or less money. Computerized technology, developed as it was within the capitalist relations of production that Bell airbrushed out of the picture, was an important means of making this happen. Instead of the greater free time for creativity inherent in the cold war left’s imaginary future, people have come to work harder and for longer hours.

Barbrook describes the political ironies, but remains ambivalent about them because of the longevity he ascribes to the conception of the information society as both imaginary future and fetish, that was developed by this group with Bell as its synthesiser and promoter. But before he gets there, and what this means and has meant for the present, the real villain of this cold war left, W.W. Rostow steps out of his role as a key intellectual contributor to cold war leftist ideology, to become the most enthusiastic of the Washington desk bombers of Vietnam; and the one who could not give up on its supposed efficacy. The saddest off-stage individuals in the book are his parents who had optimistically christened him Walt Whitman. For Rostow, the global village required the destruction of real villages that did not, and had no chance of following his stages of growth,

ARMCHAIR WARRIORS

The ideological contribution was his stages of economic growth theory which had the merit of providing a historical materialist alternative to Marxism as against the dominant bourgeois theories of the market and equilibrium. He understood, as Barbrook puts it, that “market competition was a historical creation rather than an immutable law of nature.� But that was as far as it went, ‘progressive’ only in relation to the pre-New Deal economics of laisser-faire, and in its promise of everyone a consumer of the goods technology had made available. It is a theory which eradicates class and class conflict as a motor of economic growth; and leaves out the crucial importance of the military budget for both research and armaments to the US economic growth of the time, something at least recognized by ex-President Eisenhower in his ‘military-industrial complex’ warning speech of 1961. Most of all the theory itself is also ahistorical, believing that the American model was the only ‘modern’ one in town, and that it was universally available, its prescriptive stages ultimately unrecognizing of all the advantages and violence of the USA’s economic history. For development to take place for Rostow, a change in attitudes to technology was required, along with a “willingness to work�.

However, its claim as a model for modernity and the future for the “Third World� in a period when a proxy Cold War was being fought in this world, fell down when even “communist economics� seemed more modern and realistic, given the USA’s support for the most regressive forms of the elites of that world. That this was the case was intolerable not just to Rostow and the Cold War left, but to American ultra-nationalists wholly imbued with a ‘military definition of reality’ like Samuel Huntington who, at this time, was railing – with racist overtones – about a surfeit of democracy within the USA, itself, and who hated the very idea of the Great Society. (3) With some consistency, his solution to the ‘Maoist threat’ was to destroy the Vietnamese peasantry as a class, the non-modern peasant class. This coalition of forces, the cold war left and authoritarian nationalists, has recently returned to cause more misery to other people, and exhibited the same characteristics:

-the same arrogant ignorance. In the earlier case they could not even be bothered to know Vietnam’s history of fierce independence towards China, when China was presumed to be the instigator of ‘dominos’ falling.
-the same gruesome wishful thinking
-the same absolute belief in the abstract violence of its military technology.

Noting the importance of games theory, and then war gaming, Barbrook says “When processed through a computer, the irrational could be made to appear rational … and according to ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency, an agency with financial backing from the military) computer simulations, the success of their B52 air offensive was guaranteed. When their losses in people and property reached the critical breaking point, the Communists would be forced to admit defeat and abandon the struggle against South Vietnam.�

For Rostow, the war criminal, the people whose losses were to reach breaking point were abstractions, and whose deaths were required to prove a point. At the same time, he never questioned the reliability of the data provided by the US military (with its own interests), and placed his trust in “the mediated interpretation of the war provided by information technologies.� That the people killed in wars are abstract figures for those who perpetuate them was not new, but the fetishizing of information technology took it to new levels, while all the time, this same technology was being proclaimed for making a liberatory society possible.

INTELLECTUALS AND THEIR USES

Imaginary Futures is a history lesson. Its purpose to show how the Net both as shorthand for, and realization of the Information Society, was theorized by the cold war left he describes. He argues that this theorizing made in the circumstances of the Cold War, has somehow survived the limits of its time and, one way or another, established the parameters within which it is imagined. The blind faith in American superiority in information age warfare, re-packed as Shock and Awe, has played a great part in the devastation heaped on the people of Iraq. The notion that any model other than the American information society is of the dinosaur variety (a handy and clichéd symbol implying what is heavy, slow-moving, and awaiting distinction) has had great resonance, as well as minimizing the political impact of a decline in US manufacturing and its balance of trade.

This is true, but as a history of the intellectuals in this process, questions remain. An alternative view of these cold war leftists might be that those who ally themselves with the power elite, are its ‘useful idiots’, useful only at certain times. In this case, that it was not just the Vietnam War, but a shift in the elite’s requirements that meant that any ‘progressive’ elements that existed in their imaginary future could be ditched, and just the rhetoric maintained. This is not a single case. Monetarism for example, economic theory from the 1920s, was dusted down to be used in the capitalist offensive of the 1970s. Lip service to Milton Friedman was still to be paid until his recent death, but voodoo economics and militarized Keynesianism have been the order of the day ever since.

Barbrook cannot bring himself to give this alternative view. It is a history of intellectuals, but he has a problem with them. With a nasty piece of work like von Neumann, the ‘fanatical Cold War warrior’, there is a psycho-political history attached; he was “traumatized by the nationalization of his family’s bank during the Hungarian revolution of 1919�. What we don’t get is any real history of more ‘progressive figures’ in the story. Or rather, a question posed by Armin Medosch, is whether the psycho-political histories of the technologists who helped make some of the building blocks of the Net as a reality, played a part in the nature of the technical developments they worked on. Barbrook makes the practical suggestion that as with reading Marx himself, rather than the Bolshevik version, we should read Norbert Wiener and McLuhan in their own words. Wiener the pacifist socialist he implies is the person who theorized cybernetics as a non-hierarchical form of interaction. But what of J.C.R. Licklider and his ARPA group. Of these he says that some of the cybernetic radicals who had been ‘persuaded’ to serve the US military were able to “hardwire the academic gift economy into its social mores and technical architecture.� This begs the question as to whether certain technical achievements were the product of some ‘socialist’ consciousness. Paul Baran for example, and Licklider himself, was such consciousness at work in the development of packet-switching?

Technological and scientific leaps have been made, or managed by, people committed to such advances being public property. There is the well-known case of Tim Beners-Lee and the world wide web. Sir John Sulston has been very clear about the moral basis of the long battle to keep the Human Genome Project as public property against Craig Venter’s push for profitable patenting. In this instance, motivation did not change the nature of the human genome, but given that it is in this field we are likely to see a new wave of technological determinism, that it is public knowledge is likely to be crucial.

Neither Berners-Lee nor Sulston were financed by the military however, so that motivations are visible. In the case of packet-switching, Barbrook is not helpful with his ‘persuaded’ and ‘hardwired’, a word that seems to substitute itself for explanation. Is the net as gift economy an accidental, ironic outcome of ARPA, or is he suggesting that Licklider and Baran consciously mad a ‘deal with the devil’ knowing the ultimate public good that could come from packet-switching. (4)

If this question, now perhaps being resolved in the world of the computer itself by the ‘hactivists’ of Open Source Culture, is not answered in the book, it is much clearer in the case of the maverick McLuhan. He has been as Barbrook shows, open to interpretation from all sides (5), but it is the “we are the most communist people in history,� that he says to the Bilderberg Conference, which should stand out to us.. It is this possibility, this possible view of the present, which has stood out in Barbrook’s own writing from the famous The Californian Ideology onwards.(6) This is, in a sense, the miracle; an internet which regardless of the motives of those making its constituent parts has real elements of the gift economy and the public ownership of knowledge so important to Sulston, This is what Barbrook aims to celebrate. It is accompanied by his consistent attack on technological determinism, and an insistence on people-made decisions as to how technology can and should be developed. It follows up his previous attacks on capitalist versions of the Net. By giving us the history of intellectuals thriving on an ahistorical view of the world, and what this view leads to, he has given depth to the critique that began with The Californian Ideology, and provided the tools to see through new versions of the same, however attractively packaged.

The imaginary future is an area of contestation. Harlan K. Ullman, co-author of Shock and Awe, a man with his own military consultancy business sits on the Advisory Board of the Roosevelt Group, a characteristically Power Elite organization, a mega-consultancy for CEOs and their senior corporate executives who are “charged with leading, indeed inventing the future.� Given how much technological research is financially controlled by military and corporate interests, a grim future is what they have in mind. Imaginary Futures gives us some tools to recognize and contest the flim-flam with which it will be presented as it was in the New York World’s Fair of 1964.

NOTES

(1) This was not a wholly new phenomena however. In Mimesis, Eric Auerbach describes a frequent trajectory in Europe between the World Wars, of ultra-leftists to the extreme right.

(2) The American Journal of Sociology, November 1958. Reprinted in C.Wright Mills and the Power Elite, Beacon Press 1969. Essays collected by G.William Domhoff and Hoyt B. Ballard.

(3) In his essay in The Crisis of Democracy, Huntington aghast at an excess of democracy makes a plea for cultivating “discouragement and apathy.� He goes on to say “Democracy is only one way of constituting authority, and is not necessarily a universally applicable one. In many situations the claims of expertise, seniority, experience and special talents may override the claims of democracy as a way of constituting authority.� And with the brazen cheek for which he is well known goes on to say – this when the budget for waging war on Vietnam was almost limitless – that “a government which lacks authority and which is committed to substantial domestic programmes will have little ability, short of a cataclysmic crisis, to impose on its people the sacrifices which may be necessary to deal with foreign policy problems and defense.�

(4) Don de Lillo has a fine passage in the Epilogue section of Underground on consciousness and technological outcome financed by the military. The protagonist is watching a weapons demonstration in free enterprise Russia. “Viktor asks me if I’ve ever witnessed a nuclear explosion. No. It is interesting, he says how weapons reflect the soul of the maker. The Soviets always wanted bigger yield, bigger stockpiles. They had to convince themselves they were a superpower. Throw-weight. What is throw-weight? We don’t know exactly but we agree it sounds like hurled bulk, the hurled will of the collective. Soviet long-range missiles had greater throw-weight…
And the USA, I say…
It was the US, Viktor says, that designed the neutron bomb. Many buzzing neutrons, very little blast. The perfect capitalist tool. Kill people, spare property.�

(5) It could be argued that what McLuhan really provides is a vocabulary-led weltanschaung for what was emerging somewhat in the manner of William Gibson’s Neuromancer trilogy, fiction that is also open to various interpretations.

(6) Co-written with Andy Cameron.

The argument does have a weakness in the alternatives it presents:

- an idealistic view of the French Minitel system of which there is evidence that its use is mainly by young professional men;

- the pan-European ideology of modern Gaullism, Europe versus America, a Europe which is not subject to the same analysis of inequality and exploitation applied to the USA.

This insufficiency is excusable given that the Californian ideology, ironically constructed by people with a psychic need to see themselves as rebels, is now ‘the conventional wisdom’. Alternative models are liable to be viewed optimistically by those opposing the dominant ideology. This is especially so when the European Commission’s own Bangemann Report undermined any European strategy when it embraced the Californian ideology with enthusiasm.

What’s less excusable is that this ‘Gaullist’ point of view in ‘The Californian Ideology’ is to ignore initiatives in the USA like the Public Information Exchange (PIE) based in Maryland. It is described as “an electronic clearing house that brings together a wide variety of public information consumers and producers. It has organized coalitions of health care organizations, consumer groups, environmentalists and civil rights groups to put information on-line in America’s 15,000 public libraries.” It has also attempted to provide real information about candidates, their histories and programmes before elections. This in stark contrast to the frightening prospect of instant referenda without the time or means being provided to give the information on which judgements could be made. Against this Mao’s view: “No opinions without research.”

This insufficiency can only be remedied by an informed and scrupulous tracking of what possibilities are offered by the variety of tools made available by the new computer-driven technologies. That and a cold-eyed analysis of what social democracy is capable of doing in this area, whether it is capable of doing anything serious at nation-state level. What I mean by social democracy here is the ability of the state or supra-state structures to regulate what exists, and instigate what does not, with the aim of enhancing the power of those without historically-made resources. Here again a more scrupulous look at the difference between the Gore/Clinton programme of cultivating small-scale public initiatives and making public libraries on line, and that for example of the British Labour party, whose prospective deal with BT makes sense from the point of view of national economic development but depends rather a lot on exhortation and enclouragement when it comes to on-lining all schools and libraries. Geoff Mulgan of Demos (a New Labour thinktank), for example thinks the Gore approach better than the Labour-BT promise.

The techno-utopianianism of the Californian ideology would see these questions as irrelevant political and moral anachronisms. For me, they are difficult and unpalatable. I see myself as being part of a socialist libertarian tradition which has little trust in the nation-state or social democracy. Little trust, because enhancing the power of those without historically-made resources involves some degree of restricting the power of those who have them in abundance, and at minimum their perception of that exclusive power. This is something social-democracy has usually not had the stomach for.

This libertarian socialist tradition I am proud to identify myself with sees the twin evils of elitism and exploitation as what must be fought to make the world civilized and sustainable. Let alone the global reality of these evils, even the words do not exist in the interminable supply of printed text from the Californian ideologists. Who, at the same time, define themselves as libertarians for whom the state is a necessarily stupid – because centralized-oppressor which they no longer need. This at a time when after years of being trashed, there are signs of a rehabilitation of the New Deal and even Johnson’s Great Society. There is hard evidence beyond sentimental recollection, that the state-instigated initiatives of the New Deal (regardless of the motivations of its instigators) released the creativity of masses of poor Americans.

One of the main reasons given by the text for the ‘emergence’ (as Kevin Kelly might put it) of 1960s libertarian hippies in the Californian ideology is the physical defeat of the Californian left by then Governor Ronald Reagan. Fear -and the US state and capital has always been especially violent towards ‘leftist activity’ – is likely to involve a fair degree of displacement activity, the direction of energy to safer goals. Income, ageing, and ambition may also have been involved as well as a genuine intellectual-utopian excitement. California is also an exceptionally privileged area of the globe for a good part of its population. More than that, it is not surprising that this ideology of a computer-driven revolution of infinite potential should come from an area of the globe which is so successful in producing many of the key bits and pieces of this revolution. The re-discovery of American self-confidence vis-a-vis Japan has emanated specifically from this sector of production. That this happened in the presidency of a nominally social democratic President with a seriously IT enthusiast Vice President is either coincidence, or is further evidence of the wilful non-acknowledgement of state support for this sector which the text demonstrates. For the Californian ideology it shows – without regard for anything as banally economic as a long-term over-valuation of the Yen – the triumph of genuine individualism against a corporate version of capitalism.

The embracing of free-market ideology (as articulated by then President Ronald Reagan) by a techno-counter-culture with a psychic need to see itself in rebellion, requires a massive array of flim-flam. In particular it has used Fuzzy Implication and Dodgy Analogy. Global has been a key word in both techniques. It implies an internationalist and ecological view of the world. In fact it has replaced ‘imperialism’ in a way which hides the global hierarchy of exploitation that ‘imperialism’ (however degraded its use became) did not. It derives not just from McLuhan but more tangibly from the icon of 1960s technological optimism, the space programme and those shots of the earth as a globe in space. This image is key in the development of the most fuzzy forms of ecology which also originated in the USA and centred around the phrase ‘Spaceship Earth’. Spaceship earth – we’re all in this together – again had the role of hiding the global hierarchy of exploitation, which in the most tangible ways, prevents the development of any real ecology. I emphasise this because this kind of ecology was important in the 1960′s counter-culture (Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalogue for example) and in Kevin Kelly’s present individualized ecological concerns which have been a rich source of dodgy analogies.

From the global we are lurched into equally fuzzy Good Things as proclaimed by this ideology, the Holistic – the Non-Linear. The fuzziness of these involves the implication that they are automatically non-reductionist which is a Very Good Thing. The preferred course taken by the Californian ideology in the use of these words has been chaos theory. The degraded notion of the holistic can also be seen in the work of ‘management gurus’. We have Richard Pascale of Stanford University urging a ‘holistic approach to management. And we have Tom Peters, frequently described as an evangelist or missionary of management, entitling his latest best-seller, Thriving on Chaos.

Chaos theory, with its dependence on number-crunching, is a child of the computer revolution. It proclaims that there is pattern, that the world is mathematical, just that these patterns are far more complex than linear Newtonian physics would allow. Its holistic/ecological claim is seen in the metaphor/partial reality of an event in one part of the world having an effect on the climate elsewhere. It also creates beautiful patterns called Fractals. On the basis of this it rather fetishizes Weird Connections via its use of statistics on a scale unknown before computing power. It makes big claims for itself in stark contrast to the modesty expressed in Eugene Wigner’s great essay, The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences.

In some respects it mimics the breakthroughs of the modernist science of quantum physics – just as post-modernism takes the Uncertainty Principle of quantum physics and makes of it a lazy analogy for a bogus relativism – in its use of the non-local effect which is central to that physics. N.B. The non-local effect is proposed by J.S. Bell and later proved by Alain Aspect in an experiment in which two unrelated atoms influenced each other without being able to signal each other. A wonderful piece of science, but one which is open to plenty of dodgy analogizing. That we should be vigilant about dodgy analogizing, should be clear from the late 19th century notion of Social Darwinism. The revolutionary theory of evolution, the liberation from monotheism (and the accompanying soul-body dualism) it offered, was analogized into a banal and rather nasty prop to elitism and comepetitive capitalism. Still today, it lurks behind both: to justify the unjustifiable in the one; and to prop up the nostalgic version of itself which the multi-natioanl corporations and their planning staffs maintain as a working ideolgy in textbooks.

Chaos theory like quantum physics is not-Newtonian. What is lazy, and will therefore hide various dirty corners of bad faith, is the assumption that what is anti-Newtonian is A Good Thing in itself. In Kevin Kelly’s Out of Control there is a continual complacency about anything which is non-linear, not-Newtonian; the interchangeable networks/swarm systems/complex adaptive systems he sees across the board. Yet he does not acknowledge the real anti-Newtonian breakthrough of the pre-computer mathematicians of Quantum Physics. Perhaps it is too uncomfortable, whereas Chaos theory, we might say, puts the Certainty back into the Uncertainty Principle.

Equally the attack on Newtonianism from Ilya Prigorgine (Order Out of Chaos) is far tougher. What it does is to attack the notion of timeless equilibria in the Newtonian and posit against it the “irreversible arrow of time” from his own speciality: thermodynamics. Spurious notions like “the End of History” and the equilibria-based mathematical models of neo-classical/liberal economics are both dependent on non-acknowledgement of the irreversible arrow. Chaos theory is static and timeless in its claims to be able to draw the unexpected, with iteration doing the rest, as if all time and all dynamics was a process of iteration. We can see this in the interest of Chaos theory in commodity prices and their historical cycles. There is a safety to it. Just as Kevin Kelly, futurologist, lives in a perpetual present in which, discussing money, there are no questions about the cashability of future pensions for example.

If we compare the technological utopianism of the 1950s which focussed on atomic energy, featured non-photogenic squares, working for the state in white coats and smoking pipes to that of the more exotic Californian ideologues of now what we see is a change of language from the control of nature to that of its management. This reflects those ecolgical and holistic concerns of the present hiding how it is global patterns of exploitation which determine Spaceship Earth’s condition. It also shows a touching faith in our powers of observation and data-gathering (increased so greatly by satellite and computer) to solve ecological problems by themselves. This is the supposed fallacy if intellectuals: if you’re aware of a problem, it’s OK, it’s then manageable. In addition, Who is doing the watching? Who is doing the interpreting?

It is precisely these political questions the Californian ideology avoids, just as those pipe-smoking squares dodged them. They have more than that in common, they share a techno-determinism which tends to be uncritically optimistic. I would like to seperate this from that smug and crass element of Gaullism which likes to pose a wise European scepticism against an exclusively American brash optimism: techno-determinism is not exclusively American. Instead it has an uncanny resemblance to the individualist optimism that comes from the theorizing of the free-market by von Hayek for example. This too raises difficult questions about the nature and possibilities of social democracy. Socialism has usually been characterized as an Enlightenment project with a fundamental belief in human reason and the perfectability of humans; while a reactionary view of the world was based on the notion of original sin. Modern social democracy seems to see the world as a pretty shitty, and that therefore controls and regulations are needed to protect the weak. My doubts about it remain that it hasn’t done much of a job of it.

This techno-determinism has something else in common. I’ve said that non-reductionism was an important strand of that weave of flim-flam the Californian ideologists have created. In its uncritical embrace of the new however this strand is revealed as flimsy.

This flimsiness is revealed in the embracing of Marvin Minsky’s notions of Artificial Intelligence. Aside from the argument that there are limits to the number-crunching which would be involved, the most effective critique of AI comes from the mathematician Roger Penrose, someone with great confidence in mathematics but who says mathematical understanding is non-computational as is understanding in general. As an example of what he is arguing he quotes Godel saying that no system of computational rules can characterize the properties of natural numbers and then points out that children can grasp the notion of them.

It is hard to say whether the especially heavy dose of fuzzy and dodgy analogizing by Kevin Kelly on this question is because he can see the reductionism there or not. Whatever way, the chapter of Out of Control entitled ‘Machines with Attitude’, focussing on the work of Marvin Minsky and Rodney Brooks, is a tour de force of flim-flam. We are jumped from quote to quote: – from the philosopher Daniel Dennett, “The idea that the brain has a centre is just wrong. Not only that, it is radically wrong.” – to an approving reference to “the bureaucratization of the brain” – to the collapse of the USSR being soley ascribable to the instability of any centrally controlled complexity to “There is no ‘I’, for a person, for a beehive, for a corporation…” (this a knowing nod in the direction of post-modernist orthodoxy) – to the really specious analogy filched without acknowledgement from quantum physics (whose practitioners have warned against such analogy) it is very likely that intelligence is a probabilistic or statistical phenomena.

With the reader suitably softened up from this scatter gun of analogies, up pops Marvin Minsky to tell us “You can build a mind from many little parts, each mindless by itself.” Followed by Kelly telling us “Singly, each is a moron; but together, organized in tangled hierarchy of control, they can create thinking.” Kelly then has a few problems with this “hierarchy of control” but soldiers through that, warning the anarchists they would be wrong to be disappointed by this necessity and by the use of tangle which he has previously used in a string of metaphors, “the web of life, the tangle of the economy…” He bypasses the reductionism inherent in Minsky with the concept of complexity: “Complexity must be grown up from simple systems that already work.” ‘The Californian Ideology’ points out that the new multi-media technologies make up something greater than its parts, but this does not mean that this is true of the world in general or of natural sciences.

In his superb attack on the genome Project in The Politics of DNA, Richard Lewontein analyses why so much biochemistry research is focussed on the bits and pieces. It is easier to do, to get results than examining the working of the central nervous system for example that can only be understood as a whole. The bits and pieces do not necessarily add up.

With Roger Brooks’s alternative of many small robots, Kevin Kelly says, “So difficult was the task of co-ordinating a central world view that Brooks discovered it was far easier to use the real world as its own model…With no centrally imposed model, no one has the job of reconciling disputed notions; they simply aren’t reconciled. Instead, various signals generate various behaviours. The behaviours are sorted out (suppressed, delayed, activated) in the web hierarchy of subsumed control.” Then in a brazen piece of reader flattery he says “Astute observers have noticed that Brooks’s prescription is an exact description of a market economy.” It is not just flattery but that most dangerous of analogies and time-worn ideological props, that the capitalist free market is a Natural state of affairs.

The virtues of the market economy have already been implied by the fetishizing of “decentralization” as a Good Thing in itself. In the world of lazy and dodgy analogizing, the righteous celebration of diversity, difference and multiplicity; the creative potential of the non-linear and some of the insights of quantum physics; and the structuralist critique which kicked away so many of the props of White-man-centricity, has been hijacked by that relativism which says that nothing is better than anything else, one which has always been a handy tool for those doing very well with the way things are. The notion of de-centralization can be proclaimed by post-modernism as an at-last reflection of the multiplicity of human life. In reality it has been used to kick way the vestiges of class struggle in the social democratic mode, i.e. regulation of the conditions of exploitation and an element of redistributive taxation. For the relatively powerless there is no one to negotiate with anymore, governing institutions are consciously made ad hoc. It reminds me of a self-critical pamphlet from the socialist libertarian movement and entitled, The Tyranny of Structurelessness.

This de-centralization has its objective base not in post-facto, dusted down monetarist economics, but in real globalization, especially that of money. It is the global movement of capital made ever easier by the developments of communications technology which consistently undermines any aspirations to a Global ecology. The free movement of capital is seen as one of the essential constituents of that de-regulated free trade ideology which rules the world from various centralized locii of financial power. Ricardo may have been rubbished as all classical economics has been by the free marketeers, but his theory of comparative advantage has been constantly re-used by its ideologues. In fact the theory of comparative advantage assumes that factors of production, including capital, are immobile. The present interpretation is that capital can be mobile, labour not. There are no regulations on the movement of capital: there are an ever-increasing raft of them when it comes to labour. Turn the rafts over, drown the fuckers as the Italian state has it. With decentralization the forces of lazy analogy have also been hard at work. In the latter years of the Cold War planning was made synonymous with centralization and the state. In the West planning continued and continues apace, the planning by large capitalist concerns called corporations. They have anthroplogical, technical, sociological, economic philosphical talent working on it constantly. They have always planned. The difference now is that:

- the role of state as planner has been reduced to the production of infrastructure when and if required by these corporations; – the corporations also have the gurus of the Californian ideology on the team. On the team partially on their own terms, as consultants. Thus Stewart Brand and Peter Schwartz’s ‘Global Business Network’ for example.

In the polemic one of the sharpest arguments is how much of the technology which celebrates its free birth and development in fact originated with state spending. In both the USSR and the USA this took place largely through defence budgets. I think this argument could be widened without becoming fuzzy. Free markets have always depended on the state to bail it out when major fuck ups take place. The de-regulation of the S&L banking set-up in the USA lead to massive scandals and losses. The state, using a large chunk of that taxation that is anathema to free-trade ideology, rescued it In The Public Interest. Something similar seems to be happening now in the UK with the de-regulation of pensions.

How anyway does the free market component of the Californian ideology look in relation to its own history and present. They may hold Bill Gates up as a baddie but the fact is that he is a monopolist, and a successful one, in the heart of their world. Mr Murdoch’s very recent move into Telecoms with MCI is also indicative. The regulation of US ‘national interest’ between the rights of big capital and its monopolizing and the cutting edge that real competition should provide is at present all being determined in the US legal system. There are no regulatuions but it is here that the arbitration of the respective rights of dynamic corporatist capitals and a dynamic technology is taking place on a case by case basis. The recruitment policy of Microsoft, the baddie, has also been copied by Californian ideologists who profess to see him as an anemy. Microsoft scoured India for the best and cheapest programmers and instituted a hierarchical system with an elite of mega-programmers to point these saps on their way. In the true traditions of the Californian ideolgy they could dress as they liked and worked which hours they liked as long as they did the hours and kept to their subservient role of serving the meta-programmers.

The Californian ideologists have been more interested in the programmers of the ex-USSR and their ideas. There is a programming cottage industry in the low-wage Ukraine. There are also ideas. If the difference between the USSR and the USA in the Cold war period could be characterized (as it is so often is) as between the empiricists and the theoreticians, the empiricists are now reaping the benefit of the theoretical brilliance of Russian computer experts financed by the very defence budgets which helped finish off the “state-socialist” USSR. Many of these brightest and best of the ex-USSR state are employed by Californian hi-tech industries for that theoretical brilliance which enabled them to stay up with the USA in the space race even though the US government had banned them from access to super-conducters.

In a thoroughly snide interview of Kevin Kelly by Peter Yorke in The Guardian (one which makes me instinctively sympathize with Kevin Kelly) there is one revealing section with deals with the basic question of empowerment and the net, one which many people have raised.

PY: “Won’t a lot of people be left outside these new media?” KK: “There will be a large number left outside and it’s unfortunate, we should bring them in. No one argues about that. Let the rich buy technology now, to make it cheaper for the poor. The issues are not the haves and the have-nots but the haves and the have-lates.” He goes on to say that what is important is shrinking the time-lapse.

All the evidence is that a whole range of hard and software which began as being very expensive has got cheaper and cheaper. It may also be true that in many cases it is the rich who have been conned into buying all sorts of dubious up-dates. On the other hand what Kelly is saying sounds suspiciously like ‘trickle-down’ theory, that socio-moral get-out clause of hard-line free market economics, which asserts that if the bounds are removed from the rich getting much richer (bounds like health and safety requirements at work as well as minimum wages) wealth will be generated which the poor will (again there is a time-lapse) eventually benefit from. All the evidence here is that this is not the case.

I don’t want this to stand as a dodgy analogy but there is a similar question to be asked which is, why should those doing very, very well out of how things are want this situation to change. Some people who are very clever do have an edge right now and a lot of them are in California. What is implied by the Californian ideologists’ techno-determinism is that this technology is different, that this technology cannot help but be progressive and democratic.

In the absence of public or autonomous initiatives wotking to make it so, this is wilfully optimistic. It ignores the fact that though there may be legendary small outfits in Silicon Valley the industry is still dominated by large capital. Time-Warner, Viacom-Blockbuster, Rupert Murdoch, telephone companies, they’re all in there. More specifically, IBM has not gone bust. Predictions of Microsoft being ‘in trouble’ in relation to Netscape sounds like whistling in the wind from the Jeffersonian ideologues.

In the Financial Times of 2nd Febuary 1996 it was announced that Visa International and MasterCard International have agreed to collaborate in creating a system to ensure the security of credit card transactions on the net. The system will be called Secure Electronic Transactions. The software code will be made freely available. “This is the first step in making cyberspace an attractive venture for banks and merchants,” said Mr Edmund Jensen, president and chief executive of Visa International. The report also says that until now Visa had been working with Microsoft on the project, and Mastercard with Netscape. They are now all working together.

In the early issues of Wired magazine, encryption was seen as the cutting edge of rebellious libertarian work in the new technologies, creating the means for genuine privacy from the state I do not want to try and describe Kevin Kelly’s chapter on E-money, he gets into terrible difficulties with the potential use by organized crime, but to say that a means of safe payment on the net is precisely what is required for full commercial exploitation of it. It is here that a ‘trickle-down’ notion of the Net runs into difficulties and the price of information likely to be prohibitive without social democratic and autonomous initiatives.

My suspicion of social democracy remains for the reasons I have given and also because it is been elitist in the sense of managing and representing its clientele in a way which allows them little input. What it might be able to offer is some protection and resources to make autonomous initiatives flower and make the new technology truly a tool for liberation.