Ping Pong 46: A Quest for Unity
The last rant posed the very modern problem of - how does one govern a country where technology has started to become confused with bodies? The issue here is that it becomes very difficult for any state to plan anything effectively. In the course of any five or ten year plan, the world will have changed, and the plan may well no longer affect what was intended. States, with their long term plans and their promises to aid their people risk becoming moribund. A perhaps necessary but problematic ‘big brother’ which endlessly interferes with people’s growing abilities to do new things. The only way out of this situation is for a state to embrace whatever technological change is going about. But this is in a sense merely to move the problem, or rather to split it. For there are two quite distinct ways in which a state can embrace such bubblings up of change. On the one hand it might embrace it as an external observer. It might therefore see its role as one of allowing a free market of change to hold sway, and dominate. On the other, it might want to very directly take control of the process that produces the technologies, and become their ‘big friend’ which takes up the good ones and ensures that these are the ones the nation adopts. However both these solutions are fraught with very real problems, problems which I will consider in detail in this rant.
The first of these solutions is clearly the free-market approach. The state backs off from technology, and allows the inventors and the companies to assume control. However at this point three problems immediately emerge. Firstly there is a problem about financing invention. To invent costs money, as does setting up complex production processes. Money which large companies need to recoup from the general population. They need therefore to ensure both that their product is not prohibitively expensive to produce, but also that once produced, it has a chance of ripping through a population, and becoming an industry standard. Technologies that will dominate will then be those that can meet these two requirements and not necessarily the ones that are most effective or best for the job: We live in a world where Betamax loses out to VHS, and Apple Macs to PCs and Microsoft.
Secondly there is a very odd feature about every invention. Because they change exactly what a human can do, it is very difficult to contain them within an existing a paradigm, and so rather difficult to choose between competing inventions. After all, all seem to change what one is and how one might be, so how does one choose between these different worlds of possibility? The only rational way to choose is to rely on others. But then of course one is caught up in either reviewing all the evidence (gossip on the internet or the one off remarks of a reviewer) or attempting to master the actual technological specifications that makes these elements different. Choice becomes then either an act of the herd (we all chose, so it must all be alright), or the province of the single specialist (who then passes down their knowledge to others). So that in a world of shifting technology, one loses the ability to choose, at exactly the same moment as large companies lose the ability to actually produce the best product. The world actually skews and warps in attempting to be all things for all people.
Thirdly the above two aspects of technology create paradigms that the wider society is likely to ape in different ways. On the level of government, a choice is seen to exist between the single inspiring leader or the mass will of the people. These two are then presented not only as polar opposites, but also as the only two possible ways to understand governing (the idea of a collective responsibility of a group of people or a parliament is quietly lost). Running the country becomes then either about one individual (or close cabal) making difficult decisions which we might like to loathe but we ought in any case to respect (this is the ‘difficult choice’ model); or else it is about mindlessly following the whims of a fickle populace. A politician must either lead or court publicity, and heaven help him/her if s/he attempts something else. It is perhaps the most promising thing about Obama that he is (in his public words and actions at least) straining against this fetter of government. He actually appears to want to listen to those whom he does not agree with. He assumes that they might have something useful to tell him. He therefore rejects both the mantle of the great leader or the simple populist (although he can clearly play both these cards at other times). Exactly how much can be changed might well come down to his ability to hold this middle position against the sheer incomprehension of the media, the political elites, and probably the people… (Can we do it – well perhaps it is certainly worth a try).
On a slightly different level, the paradigm of technology which endlessly bubbles up and changes the rules, was of course a paradigm that infected our understanding of finance and the free market (where it really had no place). The entire credit system therefore became caught up in the delusion that property was like technology, an ever enriching investment. The fact that it is not (which is why of course it had traditionally been a stable investment) was drown under a babble of desperate hopes and shifting greed. And of course we had to learn the hard way once again the difference between the shifting world of technologies and the actual word of land, property and real money.
The capitalist response to technology is a curious one. Technologies do indeed spread through populations, and yet they are never quite right for the people that use them (or better, they could always be more appropriate to their needs). Humans are therefore constantly being actually bent in the direction of the technology (and not merely enhanced by it), and in constant need of encouragement to allow for the worlds of change they find themselves locked within. Government then develops to become this encourager, and Finance develops to make changes profitable. A noble aim perhaps, but perched on the abyss that technology actually opens – the abyss that no one can know where a sequence of changes lead – a perching that makes such promises problematic and ultimately valueless.
The second response to the splitting of humans into technology, was what was loosely referred to as communism. The old communist sought to embrace technology very directly (or did in communism’s inception), and claimed to want to use it to free humans. However the problem then became twofold. How does the embracing of technology affect humans who are so embraced by it? And secondly how can a state ensure that the society remains technical?
The problem with the first is the problem (found also as mentioned above in capitalist societies), of ensuring that the people bend to the technical. However if one orientates the entire process around the technology (and not the people) the process of course becomes a very dark one. One loses sight of the actual population in technological statistics. Their life or death ceases to really matter (it is merely another mechanical fact), when set against the overall advancement of a people. Humanity dragged in the direction of the machine (and hooked into a state as a machine) is caught in the darkest of paths, as it loses sight of anything that it is, and everything that makes it different and special.
This is dark enough, but then the state adds to the problem by being very quick to define the axis on which it should embrace a technology. That is, it is the problem of the technical (as mentioned in the last rant), that it moves in three dimensions at once. In the first dimension technology is always spreading through a society, and ensuring that or enforcing people to adopt it: Technology has then a length. But it also has a breadth. Any one technology will always be improving what it can do, and creating more efficient ways in which to do the same series of tasks. These two dimensions were the ones which Marx understood and mapped out. However the technical also has a depth. New technologies at times fall upon a system and change all the rules. That is they take a new, a different aspect of humanity, and augment that aspect, a move that may (or may not) have all kinds of effects on the process that already existed. It is of course this last dimension that is the one that will eventually prove so difficult to plan for.
The problem for communisms was that the only real place that one could ape technology (and so embrace it), was in bureaucracy. Party secretaries came then to dominate the system. However, this reliance on bureaucracy has three fatal weaknesses. Firstly a bureaucracy is blind to its actual unintended effects. The Bureaucrat sees the office and sees the forms and the facts and figures in that office, and need not see anything else. A world translated into statistics is indeed a world, but a world removed from the real one. One is caught in the problem that all governments are caught in, that the collection of statistics actually changes the process that one monitors. These processes become then merely about producing the figures that the bureaucrat requires. That is, the process which is meant to monitor the process from outside actually becomes the goal of the process itself. The process configures around the bureaucrat, and therefore loses sight of what it was originally meant to be about. A warping which of course infuses all government figures, whether they are collected by the people’s commissars or Ofsted.
Secondly the merest existence of an elaborate (and well rewarded) bureaucracy warps the system in two ways. On the one hand it is clear that the most ambitious of people are likely to want to be bureaucrats. One therefore creates a society where ambition and the desire to monitor one another are caught up together (just as capitalism confuses the market and ambition). On the other hand, once these people are in these jobs then beyond acts of petty judgement there is really rather little for them to do. The point about their tasks is that they are controlled from outside and therefore anyone can do them. This of course not only breeds corruption (as people know the system and seek to avoid it) but also nepotism (if anyone can do a job then what about my son or niece?) and petty interference (one has to do something after all). An elaborate bureaucracy becomes then a system which is warped in the direction of people who no longer care much about that warping or where it leads.
Thirdly it is very clear that bureaucracy even at its best cannot fully reflect the world of technology. One can certainly very easily plan for the first dimension of the technical. One can therefore plan how a technology ought to spread through a population. One might also be able to allow for how that technology will improve (and create contingency plans for it in fact). However, bureaucracies have real difficultly with that third dimension which by definition is very difficult to plan for or allow for. As such, the bureaucracy can only respond to this challenge in one of two ways. A bureaucracy can take an opinion on a technology; Some can be ruled in and other ruled out. For example the old USSR therefore only approved of some technologies and some theories, and ignored or persecuted or attempted to delimit (if not control) ‘incorrect’ technologies; that is, ones that undermined it (like China and the Internet). The only other possibility is for a bureaucracy to withdraw as much as possible from the technological world. It might therefore confine what it is to grand plans, and to the political system, and leave then a free for all in the actual development of technological processes (modern China). It therefore simply accepts the fact that it will look irrelevant or marginal, but trusts to the prosperity of the people that they will not challenge its avowed position.
Technology’s great challenge is therefore that it seems to undermine our sense of humanity as an integral system, and yet does not then meet or match very well with the two systems of government that have traditionally also undermined human integrity. In a sense of course the question must be asked why should it? Why should one undermining be the same as another? There is no reason. But in the absence of that reason, it is rather difficult to govern effectively the jack-in-the-box world which technologies spring from. Or even worse, humanity becomes transected in a threefold series of inhuman(e) elements, elements which compromise us in different places, and from different directions, and which never resolve or give us anything very stable (let alone comfortable). This political reality demanded a new ‘solution’ and it is that problematic and ultimately very flawed ‘solution’ (first worked out in the domain of the philosophical) to which the next Rant will turn.
