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

[Roberto Verzola]

Hi Michel,

> 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 <http://lasindias.net> on language-based phyles)

Indeed, the Internet looks multi-lingual. It is in fact said that in a
few years, there will be more Chinese language users than English on the
Web. But this is the visible language that end-users see.

However, HTML, C++, Java, PHP, Perl, etc. down to the assembly language
of CPUs and their microcode -- the hardware language inside those CPUs
-- all use English mnemonics. (I keep in my library a curious book ISBN
5-8206-0030-4 in Russian, about Unix. Throughout the book are Unix
keywords including standard directories and filenames in English.) One
has to learn some rudimentary English to master the technology. The
technology itself plants the desire to learn the language. (By the way,
Schumacher's book was entitled Good Work, not Work as I wrote in my
earlier post.)

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

Yes, but all those who are using the Internet for local work are being
forced to subsidize global communications. The bias/subsidy for
globalization is there all the time, without additional effort, whether
a user is aware of it or not, because technology itself masks the fact
that long-distance communications actually costs more per unit resource
than local communications -- even on the Internet. If Internet charging
reflected this distance-dependent costs we would even be more inclined
towards local communications than international ones. A long-time ago, I
kept asking ISPs, why not charge by distance? The typical answer I got
was that it was much harder to implement. Perhaps, as you say, it is
"not inherent" in the technology, but it is so deeply embedded that it
is as good as built-in. And the flat charging leads to the bias/subsidy
I'm pointing out.

I agree with you that we can work to overcome these. But the fact that
we have to suggests that the design itself contains a built-in bias.
This is the reason I'm all for an alternative Internet. But its
designers must be very conscious about the biases they are building into
the alternative technology.

There is actually a mature technology that has the opposite bias (for
localization) which is also so embedded in the technology that it forces
the use of the local language and the focus on local interactions. This
is low-power FM. That LPFM is not more widespread than it should is due
mainly to the institutional bias against it, in favor of the Internet.
The detailed comparison I made between the Internet and LPFM (the
technology for most community radios) can be found here, p.169:
http://rverzola.files.wordpress.com/2008/01/infoeconomy-verzola.pdf.

Another example of building in a bias: I've been hoping that China would
make a DVD player with a built-in burner (for sharing) and browser (for
browsing HTML files mirrored on DVD), to encourage copying as well as
local swapping of discs, a face-to-face social interaction, in contrast
to the impersonal anonymous exchanges on the Internet.

Greetings,

Roberto

>
> 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 
> <mailto: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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