[P2P-F] sharing, essence of things, technological determinism, economic determinism, and neoliberalism

Sat Jan 8 17:07:41 CET 2011

> I suppose I am reacting to strongly to this because I find myself 
> struggling with issues regarding determinism. I have - like you and 
> like most sociologists and anthropologists - always made a case for 
> the primacy of the social (should we call this social determinism?), 
> but with the rise of the information age/ the network society/the 
> digital economy this very familiar position started to erode a litte 
> bit. It is an interesting question why /social/ sciences insist so 
> stongly on the primacy of the /social/, or on /social/ determinism. It 
> is like a natural reflex. I wonder if this has something to do with a 
> protection of disciplines. Obviously, if people

I find myself agreeing somewhat with Doug Engelbart, inventor of the 
mouse, who said we shape our tools and our tools then shape us. He talks 
of co-evolution of the human and their tools. We might call this "mutual 
determinism". When he says "shapes us", I presume "us" includes social 
relations.

E.F.Schumacher (Small is Beautiful) went further and I strongly agree 
with him too. He wrote (in Work) that when we adopt a technology (shaped 
by someone else, presumably), we absorb the ideology (mindset, 
value-system) that comes with it. Schumacher believed that many 
technologies come embedded with ideologies, and those who think they can 
import a technology without also importing the ideology that comes with 
it are mistaken. This is probably more "technologically deterministic" 
than Engelbart, but I think E.F.Schumacher is correct, for some 
technologies at least.

In fact, I did an analysis of the Internet, using Schumacher's 
perpective, and found several embedded mindsets/value-systems that 
Internet users are *forced* to absorb, often without realizing it. (For 
the complete piece, see 
http://www.scu.edu/sts/nexus/summer2005/VerzolaArticle.cfm) Let me just 
list three:

1. the universal dependence of Internet technology on the English 
language, down to the microcode inside microprocessors, forces us to 
learn English. If you learn the Anglo-Saxon tongue, you are bound to 
acquire the Anglo-Saxon taste. Learn the language, pick up the culture.

2. the automation mindset: to replace people with machines. This might 
make sense in a country rich in capital (though that's still debatable), 
but less so in countries rich in labor. When we replaced muscle-work 
with machines, we became less physically fit, what would happen as we 
replace mental-work with machines?

3. a built-in bias (in fact, subsidy) for global players and 
globalization.This is best seen in the Internet cost structure of flat 
rates regardless of distance. A 1mb file sent to a colleague using the 
same ISP costs as much as a 1mb file sent to someone at the other side 
of the globe. Yet the latter uses much more network resources (servers, 
routers, communication channels, etc.) than the former. So local players 
are charged higher per unit resource than global players, a subsidy for 
globalization that is built into the Internet, as designed today.

So, do we reject the technology then? Schumacher's 1970s response was 
intermediate/appropriate technology. Today, Schumacher remains relevant, 
through the vocabulary might be different; I would say that we must also 
get involved in the redesign of the technology. This is why the talk 
about an alternative Internet on this list interests me a lot.

I would not bind myself a priori to a fixed perpective that "things" 
determine social relations or that social relations determine "things". 
I would explore these perspectives on a case-to-case basis, and make use 
of whatever new and useful insight can come from either (or both).

Greetings,

Roberto