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

Sun Jan 9 05:40:22 CET 2011

Dear Roberto,

I think we can see technology design as a terrain of struggle, i.e. as a
compromise between owners and initiators, designers and engineers
themselves, and the wider public of users who transform either the usage or
the tool itself.

THis would mean that for each of the neoliberal effects that you are
mentioning, I would place counter-trends which are actually potentially
emancipatory,

i.e.

1) the internet is multi-lingual and can be used as a counter-force to
anglo-saxon language domination (the stress by david de ugarte and
lasindias.net on language-based phyles)

2) the internet reintroduces the importance of creative living labour and
the possibility to redesign the whole production process through shared
design, giving a whole new meaning to automation in the service of local
productive communities

3) the internet can be a tremendous force for relocalization and
re-empowering local communities (see
http://delicious.com/mbauwens/P2P-Neighborhoods)

This is just to mention your three points,

The effects you mention are therefore not inherent to the technology, but to
socially dominant usage, which depends on the balance of forces in the wider
society

Michel

On Sat, Jan 8, 2011 at 11:07 PM, Roberto Verzola <rverzola at gn.apc.org>wrote:

>
>  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
>
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>

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