Flawless translation of some concerns I deeply share by Brian Holmes,
thanks Brian for putting it  forward! passing it the the
networkedlabour list:

Orsan

On 23 May 2014 07:47, Brian Holmes <bhcontinentaldrift@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> In 2008, a fellow named Mark Leonard published what was probably the most
> useful book of the year, entitled "What does China think?" With great
> concision he went through the country's think tanks, one by one, with a five
> or six page summary of the people, the problematics and the major statements
> issuing from each. The book begins with the idealism of China's New Left. It
> ends with generals plotting grand strategy (of which, for them, military
> strategy is only a small part).
>
> On this list, with all our collective knowledge, contacts and capacities to
> learn, we ought to do a similar analysis of the tech companies in the Bay
> Area (and perhaps other major technology development hubs). How do the
> network elites see the future? How do they believe they can direct the
> global development forces which are already managed, day in day out, by the
> computational routines embedded in their products? What are their politics
> and geopolitics? And how do they "think" via cables, software, devices and
> infrastructure design? A deep and detailed understanding of what is being
> discussed by such elites today would be far more useful than the superficial
> critique so commonly produced on the blogosphere and conference circuit (let
> alone the bickering that Felix denounced).
>
> As some of you know, I'm convinced that for better and for worse there will
> be a new economic growth wave rising in the next few years, in response to
> the current dead-end and generalized climate of fear and uncertainty. This
> is common sense among corporate elites, so they are quite interested in the
> subject. Following a suggestion by Örsan Şenalp, I have been looking at the
> latest writings of Jeremy Rifkin, an American tech and business guru who has
> set up shop in the EU and advises European governments, particularly
> Germany. I am listening right now to the talk he gave in the Google authors
> series. I recommend it. Beyond the deflatable hype about the "zero marginal
> cost" of production in a totally networked p2p economy, it is clear that
> tech elites and the governmental sectors they have in their pockets foresee
> an intensification and systematization of the wired and wireless economy,
> based on the multiplication and interconnection of microprocessors and
> analytic software apps (that's the famous "Internet of Things," hats off to
> Rob van Kranenburg for proposing to study its philosophy). Major economic
> and social consequences can in effect be expected from this interconnection.
>
> On the one hand, you're a thing: everything you do on the networks is
> tracked, surveilled, compiled, analyzed. Fair enough, on nettime we've had
> that aspect covered for years. On the other hand, every humble material
> thing is an entity in a network ontology: and far beyond the
> one-size-fits-all fantasy of ubquitous RFID chips, what's emerging is a new
> logistics system for global distribution of energy, raw materials and
> manufactures (some of it is already built and operational). You can also
> throw in a new generation of assembly-lines robotics (including industrial
> maker-bots) and a new personal transport system (the driverless car, in
> which Google itself is so deeply invested). As Florian Cramer pointed out in
> a reply to Van Kranenburg, this kind of pervasively networked system not
> only opens up tremendous possibilities of horizontal cooperation (between
> persons, businesses and institutions) but also, huge security holes like the
> Heartbleed OpenSSL disaster: so the networked elites are very interested in
> how to govern the system they are creating.
>
> Think a little bit about the Heartbleed-type problem, to the 10th power. The
> infamous book by Eric Schmidt and Jared what's-his-name, the Washington
> security goon, is no accident. In American history, we lived through the
> capitalist development of the giant mass-production corporation, epitomized
> by the Ford Motor Co., from 1900 to 1940; and then, after those kinds of
> productive forces issued in the most devastating war imaiginable, we lived
> through the government orchestrated systematization of mass production, in
> the postwar "Fordist" period from 1945 to 1973. There is a dialectic here:
> the initial development of a productive system is followed by a major cisis;
> then that productive system is reworked, rationalized and integrated to a
> social order (or at least, the capitalist version thereof).
>
> Under the long shadows of 9/11 and the 2008 crisis, the Bay Area elites,
> whether at Google, Cisco, HP or Apple, seem to be moving toward a fragile
> and probably untenable consensus that "something similar" will happen again.
> In other words, somehow, somehow, the US will find a social and governmental
> synthesis that allows techno-economic development to be guided by and for
> giant US corporations. And somehow (this is where the "thinking" gets
> extremely magical) this synthesis will be libertarian, user-friendly,
> horizontal, wild-west, and so forth.
>
> As for Rifkin, he represents a more pragmatic East Coast version of the
> Californian Ideology (and he actually grew up in Chicago). Like many
> so-called progressive American intellectuals, he found a better reception
> for his ideas in Europe, where, since the days of Bernstein and early German
> social democracy, a left ideology is considered a necessary mask on
> capitalist development. Rifkin's ideas about the smart electric grid and the
> Internet of Things now appeal to both the German and the Chinese
> governments. They appear to believe that recent technological developments
> can be fused into a new productive order, manifested in the extension of
> railways lines and development corridors across the entire Eurasian landmass
> (the giant free-trade/logistics project that the Chinese call "The New Silk
> Road"). They want to put German hi-tech, European consumption, and Asian
> manufacturing capacity together, and mitigate climate change along the way.
>
> The green capitalism widely denounced on the eco-anarchist left coalesces
> here, in the concept of a Euro-Sinic (or perhaps, Euro-Sinical) production
> system whose green ideology would cover massive Chinese infrastructure
> investments, with Germany replacing the US as the key banker and
> technological and scientific partner. This perspective thinks big, on the
> scale of Eurasia. The aim is to use capitalist modenization to guide the
> largest part of the world's population through the devastating first half of
> the twenty-first century, as inequalities grow worse and climate change
> takes hold. Of course the Euro-Sinical program itself will accelerate those
> same contradictions...
>
> How do the Bay Area elites situate themselves within this emerging
> world-picture? What is their consensus, and where does it fall apart? Who
> has the greatest power to set the agendas? And to what degree do these tech
> elites remain unconscious and merely reactive? I do not claim to know the
> answers, certainly not in the necessary detail. The facile "critique" of
> this or that form of evil-doing is definitely blocking us from even grasping
> how Google thinks, and how Apple-Cisco-HP-etc thinks, and how they get
> together and think with BofA and Wells Fargo and Citi and the NSA and the
> DoD and so forth.
>
> In short, I see two mistakes, dear nettimers. One is failing to see that the
> Bay Area elites and their interlocutors are fully engaged in the titanic
> project of imagining, designing and governing a pervasively networked social
> system on a global scale. The second one is the failure to see that they are
> not alone, and that similar problems are being dealt with by potentially
> more organized and more powerful forces, who do not think in purely
> communicational and financial terms, but instead deal also with large-scale
> industry.
>
> best, Brian
>
>
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