[Prev][Next][Index][Thread]
Never Mind the Cyberbollocks...
---------------------------------------------------------
· · · · · · A E C F O R U M - "M E M E S I S" · · · · ·
· · · · · · · (http://www.aec.at/meme/symp/) · · · · · ·
---------------------------------------------------------
NEVER MIND THE CYBERBOLLOCKS...
Richard Barbrook
Hypermedia Research Centre, University of Westminster
When The Ice Melts
As this century draws to its close, the rapid development of
hypermedia has rekindled a sense of optimism within the developed
world. For almost two decades, we have been facing a failure of
imagination and creativity. Despite the end of the Cold War,
western societies haven't even been able to protect their
existing welfare provisions let alone advance further towards the
good society. As expressed in the nihilism of post-modernism, we
have lost faith in the universal values which were to be realised
through the 'grand narrative' of history. Rejecting praxis,
commitment and hard thinking, intellectuals have instead
proclaimed the triumph of fatalism, apathy and triviality. All
that was left for us to do was "play with the pieces" inherited
from earlier and more inventive times.
Suddenly, after the long night of neo-liberalism, the arrival of
the Net has signalled the recommencement of the emancipatory
project of modernity. As the process of digital convergence
accelerates, divisions between different professions are being
broken down. The structural rigidities of Fordism are being
replaced by more flexible and informal methods of working. People
are acquiring new skills and creating innovative forms of
artistic expression. With cheaper global communications, they are
discovering how easy it is becoming to work and play together
across time and space. Even the right of every citizen to
disseminate their own media is in the process of finally being
realised.
Hard Work
Hypermedia is being developed through the collective effort of
many millions of people. Despite its hi-tech basis, the
construction of cyberspace in part depends on some very
traditional forms of working. For instance, large numbers of
semi-skilled manual workers have to dig holes in the road so that
the fibre-optic grid can be built. Other people need to labour on
assembly-lines making the computers needed for receiving,
manipulating and transmitting information. Yet, at the same time,
hypermedia also is facilitating the emergence of innovative ways
of working. Much of its content is being produced by digital
artisans. By spending many long hours in front of their screens,
these artist-engineers are creating the aesthetics and writing
the code for the new hypermedia products and services. Their
design skills and cultural imagination are now at the centre of
the process of making hypermedia part of everyday life.
As with other sectors of cultural production, digital artisans
are faced with the problems of working within a late-twentieth
century capitalist economy. They have to negotiate their way
through the maze of interlocking corporations, state regulations,
copyrights, health & safety issues, legal contracts, tax demands
and so on. At this stage of modernity, we only seem to be able to
work together successfully through the mediation of reified
social relations. Yet, hypermedia does facilitate more flexible
ways of organising our labour. The Net itself is the result of a
synergetic miscegenation of state, corporate and d.i.y.
initiatives. The importance of artisan labour within the virtual
economy demonstrates how hypermedia is helping to break down the
previously rigid polarisation between commercial and community,
state and market, proletarian and bourgeois.
The digital artisans do not labour simply to support themselves
financially. Their days and nights of creative effort are slowly
integrating hypermedia into the daily lives of everyone within
the developed world. At some point in the near future, the hype
over hypermedia will disappear. A minority of people are already
sending e-mail, using CD-roms and browsing the Web on a regular
basis. Over the next few years, many more will be using the Net
and other digital technologies for work, entertainment and
education. As Buckminster Fuller said, a good technology is
successful when it has become transparent. The skilled work of
the digital artisans is slowly transforming hypermedia into an
essential part of our everyday lives. They will have succeeded in
this task when people use hypermedia without noticing how strange
and wonderful these new tools are. One day, hypermedia will be as
prosaic and banal as the electric light, the washing machine or
the vacuum cleaner.
Mystical Positivism
Yet, at the very moment when hypermedia is becoming an everyday
tool, there are increasing numbers of people who are turning
digital convergence into a new religion. For them, hypermedia is
no longer simply a useful and beautiful tool for work,
entertainment or education. Instead, it is the focus for their
mystical fantasies. Confusing science fiction with science fact,
they believe that new silicon forms of life are being born and/or
that humans are about to be transformed into cyborgs. Like
earlier attempts to fuse science and religion, this new cyber-
faith does contains elements of insight into the contemporary
condition. From fractal geometry to evolutionary progress,
digital technologies do simulate aspects of the natural world.
>From consumer goods to medical technologies, humans do live in
symbiosis with their machines.
Yet, the new believers are not really interested in how nature
can inspire the making of good hypermedia or how we can invent
technologies for better living. Even John Perry Barlow's crazy
scheme to declare the independence of cyberspace is far too
utilitarian for them. Instead, they want to be present at the
apocalypse itself - the end of time, the world and the human
race. For intellectuals, artists and ordinary punters alike, this
millenarian vision can be both romantic and intoxicating. If
they're really lucky, they won't just witness the dawning of a
new epoch, but also might even get absorbed by the Net into the
Godhead or be turned into immortal post-humans!
Ironically, one of the key concepts of this new cyber-faith is
the old enemy of religious belief: Darwinism. Back in the
nineteenth century, evolutionary theory didn't just discredit the
literal truth of the holy texts. It also provided a rational
basis for understanding the human condition. From Spencer on the
right to Marx on the left, Darwinism acted as an inspiration for
social thinkers to examine human society without being trapped
within the confines of religious belief. Yet, nowadays, it is
evolutionary theory itself which is being used to proclaim the
imminent arrival of the God-Man. Nowhere is this clearer than in
the popularity of the concept of the meme - the cultural form
which self-replicates using human society like DNA reproducing
itself through a species. Because this theory already uses the
computer virus as an analogy, the existence of memes has become a
central article of faith for the cyber-mystics. For what are the
new Gods emerging from digital convergence but memes embodied in
silicon and metal?
The Fallacies of Memetics
Although we may still hunger for spiritual meaning, it is almost
too easy to debunk the positivist mysticism of memes. Firstly,
the meme theory is dud philosophy. As Feurbach pointed out, all
religion inverts reality. The creative powers of the human
species are projected onto a divine being which we then bow down
to worship. As Christianity and other religions went into
decline, this swapping of subject and object has been rehashed by
all the most dubious trends in social theory. Over the last
seventy years, psychoanalysis, neo-classical economics, Leninism,
structuralism, semiotics, post-modernism and technological
determinism have been used to deny the Promethean powers of human
labour. Whatever their formal differences, these various
ideologies are all profoundly anti-democratic. Crucially, they
deny that ordinary people - although limited by their
circumstances - can influence their own destiny. Instead, the
advocates of these theories claim that we're simply passive
objects of impersonal forces outside our control, such as the
unconscious, market forces, ideologies, structures, languages,
discourses or technologies. In all these theories, there is no
dialectic between free will and necessity.
The meme theory is yet another attack on human subjectivity. Our
complex social development is first simplified into technological
progress, then reduced to culture, and finally explained away
through the biology of memes. Our creativity and imagination as
humans is once again denied. Translated from bio-babble, meme is
simply another word for the all-powerful idea, ideology or sign.
It is the Platonic deity reborn. Yet again, we're supposed to
believe that we're simply empty vessels manipulated by mysterious
outside powers. As Feurbach said, when illusion becomes sacred,
truth is rejected as profane.
Secondly, the meme concept is bad science. It is the revival of
the discredited theory of Lamarck in a new form. Because people
will no longer believe that learnt behaviours can be actually
embedded in our genes, we're now told that the development of
human societies can be explained by a hybrid of DNA and memes.
Yet, like the unconscious in psychoanalysis or utility in neo-
classical economics, the concept of memes is completely
unprovable. No one has ever seen a meme. You cannot examine one
under a microscope. You cannot measure its impact on the social
world. Lacking any credible scientific evidence, acceptance of
the meme theory can only be a pure act of faith. Yet, on this
flimsy assertion, we're called upon to reject all previous
research into the development of human societies. Although social
science may not appear as positivist as biology, at least many
people working in this field have recognised the fundamental
specificity of the human species. Unlike other animals, we not
only possess consciousness, but also are capable of acting
collectively to change our own circumstances.
Lastly, the meme concept is reactionary politics. Earlier in the
process of modernisation, other versions of biological
reductionism - Social Darwinism and Nazi race science - were used
as a pretext to reverse social progress. Although great human
suffering was justified by these ideas, we're now once again
being called upon to believe in biological reductionism. Despite
the denials of the Californian ideologues, the theory still
contains a strong smell of fascism. In the USA, some sections of
the white 'virtual class' dream of embodying their racial
privileges in a cyborg form. For others, the meme theory promises
a more subtle justification of their social position. Using
memetic theory, they claim that unregulated trade between
competing companies is the same thing as the circulation of genes
between members of a species. As in Spencer's Social Darwinism,
any attempts to alleviate poverty or correct other market
failures can then be denounced as contravening the immutable laws
of nature.
Whether in its racist or neo-liberal variants, the popularity of
the meme concept thus expresses a deep fear of the emancipatory
process of modernisation. Even when hidden behind sci-fi
fantasies of artificial intelligences or post-humans, this theory
denies the ability of people to invent themselves in ways which
go beyond the particular situations in which they find themselves
in. The process of modernity has often been cruel and wasteful,
but it has also involved a liberation of our Promethean powers.
Despite wars and genocides, we have been able to civilise our
societies in this century through introduction of universal
suffrage and the creation of welfare states. The rapid
development of hypermedia is a sign that this process of
enlightenment is not over. For instance, it is now conceivable
that one of the founding principles of republicanism - media
freedom for all citizens - is on the verge of being achieved
through the two-way communications made possible by the Net. By
escaping into sci-fi fantasies, the adepts of the cyber-faith
avoid facing the difficult problems of how the democratic
potential of hypermedia can be realised in practice. It is much
less strain on their brains to regurgitate mystical mantras than
to think hard about how we can provide access for all to the Net,
build a fully two-way communications system, invent systems of
payment for digital work, decide who has property rights in
cyberspace, debate the role of state regulations over the virtual
world and so on. The building of the infobahn will never be
accomplished by divine revelation. It can only be achieved
through the pragmatic application of our collective imagination
and effort.
In The Beginning Was The Deed
Given that the meme concept is nothing more than hip bio-babble,
what is interesting about this theory is why anyone would want to
believe in such an intellectually dubious proposition in the
first place. The meme concept is therefore important as an object
of social anthropology rather than as a credible way of
understanding human history. Alongside the Californian ideology,
the positivist mysticism of memes is a discourse designed to
sooth the existential confusion of the 'virtual class'. In the
USA, the development of the digital economy has exacerbated the
racial polarisation between the largely white professionals and
the mainly black 'underclass'. The removal of this archaic social
divide will only come about through the difficult task of
reviving the New Deal in the USA, especially its policies for the
redistribution of wealth. In contrast, the new cyber-faith offers
a much lazier way of dealing with the guilt of privilege suffered
by the 'virtual class'. Like Christianity in earlier times,
positivist mysticism promises to resolve all earthly problems
through magical means: the birth of the God-Man. By postponing
any solutions to the apocalypse, this theory has the advantage of
allowing its adepts to avoid actually doing anything practical to
improve the everyday lives of people. It even allows members of
the 'virtual class' to vote for Newt Gingrich and his "kill-the-
poor" policies with a clear conscience.
The reactionary basis of positivist mysticism is often hidden
behind radical rhetoric about the imminent arrival of the cyber-
utopia. The belief in the imminent paradigm shift is one of the
enduring cliches of modernity. Over the past two centuries, each
successive generation has believed that it was on the brink of
entering a new world. The continuous process of change within
modernity gives the illusion that we're always about to make the
great leap forwards. However, for inhabitants of the developed
world, the truth is rather more prosaic. The hoped-for revolution
has already taken place! We're no longer peasants scratching a
subsistence existence in the countryside. Instead, over the past
two centuries, we have turned ourselves into wage-workers living
within an urban consumer society. If we wish to be poetic, we can
commemorate the actual moment of our liberation from serfdom and
slavery as dating from 14th July 1789: the storming of the
Bastille. But this crucial historical event was only the birth of
the emancipatory project of modernity. Being the heirs of the
French Revolution, we face the more pragmatic problems of
realising and universalising its abstract principles in practice.
As Hegel pointed out, we have to make the rational into the real.
The meme concept can only obscure this long-term process of
enlightenment. Hypermedia is important not because it is giving
birth to the God-Man, but because it is helping to actualise the
principles of 1789. For instance, the French revolutionaries
promised that every citizen would have the opportunity to
exercise media freedom. For the first time, this right could
finally be realised within the developed world through the spread
of hypermedia. But, this goal can only be achieved by overcoming
many practical difficulties, including the rebuilding of the
telecommunications networks and making the ownership of computers
more widely available. Above all, the digital artisans will have
to design useful and beautiful hypermedia which will allow people
to work, learn and play together. Memetic theory can contribute
nothing towards the resolution of these practical problems.
Instead, we need to examine what are the political, economic and
social obstacles to building a democratic and inclusive
cyberspace - and how we can then overcome them. The refusal to be
duped by false promises of the memetic nirvana is an important
step towards ensuring that hypermedia is used to improve the
daily lives of everyone. The emancipatory project of modernity
has recommenced - and it is our task to contribute towards its
realisation in practice.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Maximum respect to Andy Cameron for the dialogue in Gladstone
Park.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------------
· · · · to subscribe to the Forum just mail to · · · · ·
· · memesis-request@aec.at (message text 'subscribe') · ·
· · · · · · · send messages to memesis@aec.at · · · · · ·
----------------------------------------------------------
Follow-Ups:
