[p2p-research] Prospect Magazine: After Capitalism

Mon Apr 13 06:23:12 CEST 2009

Dear Andy,

I'm not assuming any bad faith on your part, as I said in my previous reply,
I recognize you have given a lot of serious thought about this, and again,
most of what you say about what is happening, I have no beef with. But try
as I might, I cannot equate even the current China with Nazism and
Stalinism, though there for historical reasons, the term might be applied as
a weakening of the previous 'total' regime.

In the West for me, recognizing the attempts at control, and especially your
analysis in the paragraph below, I'd call it indeed a new version of the
national security state.

For me, it's an insecure model, partly realisable because it also is
acceptable to many people (most people accept CCTV), most internet users
have no beef with privacy matters etc..). There has been a drift, and it is
a dangerous one, we agree on that, and I would call it indeed a national
security state or some such thing.

Unlike Ryan's point, though I broadly share the optimism, I would leave the
future 'open' and not derive it from the technology alone, and future
developments will depend on the social struggles developing in the coming
years, when the social rage caused by the meltdown will come to fruition. It
could lead to more reforms, or to authoritarian setbacks. If the latter
occurs, but only then, real dangers of neototalitarianism could occur.

By the way, the p2p approach I advocate is not about being passive in the
face of such dangers, but to actively link technology with conscious social
ideals and interests, so as to embed them more strongly in society, and made
authoritarian trends increasingly dificult to maintain,

The state and those that benefit from unequal societies have always tried to
tamper with democracy, with an ebb and flow of these tentative attempts
depending on the strength and mobilization of civil society,

Michel

Also, the growing speed and power of networks of all kinds (activism,
reactive and "terrorist" networks, capitalist networks) is seriously
threatening to the state.  Networks have speed which states can't match.  To
try to match it, states speed up.  The only way states can speed up is by
simplifying procedures and eliminating checks and balances and other
"subtleties".  Another temptation is to cut down open space per se, so as to
deny it to networks.  Still another, that as effective, successful state
action becomes increasingly difficult (e.g. identifying perpetrators of
"crimes"), states sacrifice precision for clumsier forms of "effectiveness"
(criminalising "preparatory" action, loosening evidential standards,
performing collective punishment, declaring certain groups to be deviant in
advance of any action).  I see it as a kind of "statist integralism" -
states lashing out against their future irrelevance by acting-out.  (This is
actually similar to the origins of classical totalitarianism, which fed off
a similar declining or besieged status of certain strata or regimes).

On 4/13/09, Andy Robinson <ldxar1 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Ryan (and maybe Michel), I assure you guys it's not hyperbole on my part, I
> have serious conceptual reasons for what I'm saying.  Please don't assume
> bad faith.
>
> I'd also add that I'm referring specifically to America (under Bush),
> Britain and a few other cases here (Israel, maybe Australia, to some degree
> Italy and Spain but without the capacity to really realise the model), as
> well as perhaps a few cases of dictatorships (e.g. China, Iran), NOT to the
> whole of western Europe - Sarkozy, Rasmussen, Karamanlis and their ilk would
> certainly LIKE to realise this social form but will have to smash some very
> strong and impressive social movements to manage it.  There are some sectors
> of the EU which seem to aspire to turn the whole of Europe into an instance
> of this model, but this remains a future matter.
>
> The dispute seems to be twofold - first of all, I'm using the term
> "neototalitarianism" to mean the reproduction of totalitarian traits in all
> but a few spheres - exceptions being the maintenance of media freedom,
> multiparty systems, some rights protections.  Secondly there is a
> substantive dispute over how intrusive or powerful the regime is, or can
> become (and whether this is relevant to its designation).
>
> Taking the first point first.  You guys seem to be saying that these
> exceptions are actually fundamental to the concepts concerned, that
> something can't be totalitarian without for instance prohibiting all
> dissident speech.  In a sense, fair enough - it's about fixity of language
> vs conceptual slippage or expansion - but the choice of terms does not
> negate the concept - perhaps you would rather use the term "national
> security state" or "control society" or whatever; then simply  translate my
> term "neototalitarianism" as the same concept under a different name.
> Personally I think my name for it is good for three reasons - firstly the
> big similarities in spite of the differences, secondly that the ethical
> position of dissent and of the subject is similar in this form as in
> totalitarianism, and thirdly that the strategic field for dissent is very
> similar, i.e. that writings on resistance in totalitarian regimes seem to me
> to be rather closer to the situation of residual dissent in Britain today
> than writings on social movements in liberal-democracies or authoritarian
> regimes.  I think there are A LOT of similarities.  I have in mind things
> like the terror arrest regime, ASBOs, the prohibition of "harassment" (taken
> to mean offensive speech), the corrosion of professional autonomy across a
> range of spheres, "control orders", various imprecise legal categories,
> flooding city centres with police and "wardens", the ID database and ID card
> plans, expanded police impunity, etc.  Also the way the government has fused
> with the police, security services and managers, and the ways civil society
> and micro-institutions of the state have been turned into organs of state
> policy.  Personally I'm very afraid here.  I remember
> authoritarian-degenerated liberal-democracy from the 1990s, and it just
> doesn't FEEL like that any more, it feels a lot more sinister.
>
> I have to say I'm perplexed as to why, given the other similarities, the
> neototalitarians haven't shut down the independent press, opposition
> parties, and human rights protections.  Part of the reason is that they
> don't need to - they aren't sufficiently threatened to want to.  But a
> classical totalitarian might shut them down anyway.  Another part is that
> their plausibility is increased if pliant opposition media, parties etc are
> allowed to operate.  But this is more what one would expect an authoritarian
> regime seeking democratic legitimacy to do.  Actually I think they've got
> more clever this time - they divide political groups, the media and "civil
> society" into those which accept the dominant ideology and those which
> don't.  Those which do, are tolerated and allowed to operate largely
> unharassed, though with a threat over their heads (c.f. the raids on the
> Tories' offices in the Commons in Britain, and on Democrat Congressmen in
> America); those who don't, and who look big enough to be any kind of
> irritant, are subjected to a prolonged campaign of demonisation and
> harassment - either they're banned (e.g. al-Muhajiroun), their leaders or
> spokespeople are locked up (e.g. SHAC) or their infrastructure is disrupted
> (e.g. Indymedia).  Dissidents aren't necessarily shut down but are made to
> feel under siege and under threat.  If you aren't part of the (very
> right-wing) "consensus" you're made to feel like an enemy of the people.
>
> On the second point.  I'm not sure that classical totalitarian regimes were
> actually as total in their power (in terms of thought control, censorship
> etc) as you seem to be assuming.  As I've said before, nearly everyone in
> Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia was listening to foreign radio
> broadcasts.  Information was getting in and out through samizdat dissident
> networks.  So I wouldn't want to make EFFECTIVE total thought-control a
> criterion of totalitarian regimes.  On the other hand, the classical
> totalitarianisms do ATTEMPT total control of information, which
> "neototalitarian" regimes would seem not to.  Actually I wonder if they
> don't regulate flows by other means instead - they channel and plant
> information instead of visibly censoring it.  What reaches the conformist
> reader/viewer is usually very close to what the information managers want to
> reach them, so they seem to settle for this.  What I would observe however,
> is that the public (mainstream) space is flooded with manufactured
> information which is propagandistic and tautological.  In particular,
> reports on responses to alleged threats (terror raids, number of
> prosecutions or ASBOs or crime reports, number of children excluded from
> school or number of schools using some control technology or other) which
> are read off as evidence of the scale of the threat/problem and therefore of
> the necessity of the response; and statements from police, security services
> etc, distributed directly through the media without critical comment (e.g.
> the rather implausible "4000 Pakistani-trained terrorists in Britain" story
> - which is directly taken from a statement by the head of MI5 - one does not
> even need to look for a conspiracy to recognise this as a planted story!)
> In the British case, there is also a strong tension between what the British
> government wants to do and what the European Court will let it.  It's a bit
> like the way the threat of foreign sanctions makes it hard for Southern
> regimes to maintain full-scale dictatorships nowadays, the way people like
> Gnassingbe are forced to hold elections whether they like it or not.
>
> Here's how I'd link it to technology.  First off, information technology
> can be used in two ways.  This is clearly shown in the workplace
> applications studied by Zuboff - information technology can be used to
> create a totally mapped and surveilled space, or it can be used to speed up
> and enable horizontal connections.  So while the potential is there for it
> to be used in the kind of way peer-to-peer networks and the Open Source
> movement use it, it also has the potential to be used in nightmarish ways
> such as the cameras watching every corner of major cities and the massive,
> instantly checkable databases set up by the police.  This sinister potential
> feeds into the fantasies of the "deep state", the agents within the state
> who want something like totalitarianism (the term they use is "full spectrum
> dominance"), while the emancipatory potential feeds their fears - every open
> space or network is something that can be used by terrorists, subversives,
> criminals (their tropes are very revealing here: the Internet is portrayed
> as a terrifying space overrun with child-abusers and abducters, bomb-makers
> and identity thieves, down to misattributions like the "Facebook Killer").
> So the new frightening world of netwar and cybercrime becomes the imputed
> "cause" of the crisis, and the same technologies turned the other way become
> its solution.
>
> Also, the growing speed and power of networks of all kinds (activism,
> reactive and "terrorist" networks, capitalist networks) is seriously
> threatening to the state.  Networks have speed which states can't match.  To
> try to match it, states speed up.  The only way states can speed up is by
> simplifying procedures and eliminating checks and balances and other
> "subtleties".  Another temptation is to cut down open space per se, so as to
> deny it to networks.  Still another, that as effective, successful state
> action becomes increasingly difficult (e.g. identifying perpetrators of
> "crimes"), states sacrifice precision for clumsier forms of "effectiveness"
> (criminalising "preparatory" action, loosening evidential standards,
> performing collective punishment, declaring certain groups to be deviant in
> advance of any action).  I see it as a kind of "statist integralism" -
> states lashing out against their future irrelevance by acting-out.  (This is
> actually similar to the origins of classical totalitarianism, which fed off
> a similar declining or besieged status of certain strata or regimes).
>
> Actually, in the last instance I suspect Ryan is right -
> horizontal-inclined technologies and techniques have gone too far for the
> state to really reimpose control.  Equally, the old feudal aristocracy had
> seen its day by the eighteenth century - this didn't stop it causing all
> kinds of horrors in its swansong.  I don't think the state is going to
> surrender, or even let itself "wither away" through hybridisation with the
> growing networks.  It's going to fight to the death, and it's going to use
> every means at its disposal to do it - including those it has previously
> held back to maintain legitimacy or to integrate itself with other social
> forces.  Not every state will do this, to be sure, since a process of
> hybridising may well be a more stable strategy for the state to survive for
> a time, but at certain places and times, "statist integralism" will wreak a
> terrible toll.  The nightmare Michel refers to will only come to pass if the
> project is generalised, and actually overruns the capabilities of networks.
> But the people who run regimes like Britain's are constantly trying to do
> this.
>
> bw
> Andy
>
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