Friday 16 June 2017

Are digital technologies making politics impossible?


BEYOND THE DIGITAL
An edited version of a failed entry for the 2017 Nine Dots Prize. https://ninedotsprize.org
The winner of the prize is James Williams.


Are digital technologies making politics impossible?


Yes. No. Maybe, but only if the multitude of citizens let that be the case.
Current political macro-narratives converge through short-termism – asphyxiating rather than life-giving – into a globalisation that fails to deliver progress in the lives of citizens. This can be faced down by a multiplicity of micro-narratives integrating digital technologies into an eminently possible politics in the long-term service of equality among citizens.
The power needed for this endeavour – for when politics is redesigned, the primary tool is power – will develop from a burgeoning discourse of dissent, based in a thorough-going critique of the binary-bias of digital and other technologies, both contemporary and historic, thus making for an eminently possible politics.
These are language matters, both the question and the answers and the arguments they generate. An historical grounding tracks the Cartesian worldview into contemporary politics, where the reliance on a simple 1/0, on-off view, is wholly inadequate to a possible politics in times of great complexity and accelerating change.
Common understandings vary and change over time and place as to what digital technologies are. A narrow view focuses on social media and computer technologies, including current ones such as facebook, on-line search engines, Instagram, snapchat and twitter. New ones are imminent. To answer this question, such a narrow view will be broadened into elements beyond social media as manifestations of digital technologies and into areas of human endeavour where binary philosophies bring the digits 1/0 to bear and challenge politics daily.
A discourse of dissent enables an approach to making politics possible and progressively successful, served by digital technologies, rather than in thrall to them.


Are digital technologies making politics impossible? Yes.
A binary orientation, an on/off paradigm, impinges on all fields of human activity, thus all aspects of politics. For example, the rate of corporation tax is an on/off switch governments use to seduce global capital to come to rest as on/off marks on digital machines. The Ireland/Apple story is a telling example of digital technologies making fiscal governance impossible. Though all countries use the binary on/off tax rate switch as a vital political tool, it is an ironic instance of the hypocrisy at the heart of current financial practices. Citizens witness the shimmying of electronic impulses on machines as money and wonder at the actual meaning of wealth. Already the binary 'corporate tax rate switch' is trumpeted as a foundation of Trumpconomics, where the market is the driver and continues to value goods and financial instruments sellable on a short-term basis and little else. At the heart of this economic activity are new consumer digital technologies, data-laden, distracting, wisdom-deficient and generated by the drive to monetise everything.
To bet/to fold is another binary choice. Digital technologies enable an explosion in gambling in seemingly virtual money, echoing John Maynard Keynes:
Speculators may do no harm as bubbles on a steady stream of enterprise. But the position is serious when enterprise becomes the bubble on a whirlpool of speculation. When the capital development of a country becomes a by-product of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill-done.
Problems created by ourselves, not by digital technologies, are rooted in the market/government binary, where global business corporations erode the authority of social power structures in dealing with problems such as climate change controversies and the increasing insecurity citizens experience in the enterprise/speculation binary of casino-capitalism.
For an instance of digital technologies making politics impossible, consider the alleged hacking by Russian agents that affected the US Presidential election. All the key words of power, govern and truth are invoked, such that the outcome of a very close election is influenced by a digital technology action that maims the wishes of the voting public, rendering politics impossible. Impossible, yes, while still occurring. Politics are changing and remarkable consistencies persist. The Trump/May era eerily echoes the Reagan/Thatcher era.
In the field of digital technologies, we experience an acceleration of the presence of machines (smart (?) fridges) and processes in all aspects of our lives. We witness a convergence of devices, driven by consumption/entertainment, rather than debate/fairness, affirming spectacle rather than experience, such that citizens' sense of power and control is diminished.
Power does not reside in states alone. It resides in corporations, that are fluid and convergent, hierarchical and rapacious, driven by short-termism and financial profit. Corporations own the digital technologies, developed in close conjunction with the militaries in the Great Powers: USA, Russia, China and Europe, with Israel, Pakistan and North Korea as attendant players in research, development, sales and deployment. International relations themselves are presented in binary fashion, offering macro-narratives of great powers paired off against each other. The on/off political technology switch approach once again makes politics impossible.
This runs deeper than software and connectedness. It is a hardware matter, wired into the way the world works, long before the current acceleration of digital technologies based on the binary number system.
The world is hard-wired into binaries, based on body/mind, as critiqued by Daniel C. Dennett:
the persuasive imagery of the Cartesian Theater keeps coming back to haunt us—laypeople and scientists alike—even after its ghostly dualism has been denounced and exorcized.
The world is working through the latest stage in the Future Shock described by Alvin Toffler. The next stage may be more cataclysmic, as the rate of change accelerates and the lead-time for new technologies tightens. Built-in obsolescence is a daily reality, not a social science myth, since speculation rather than enterprise, as described by Keynes, became applicable to retail and all market activities.
It also now applies to the social order and to the way politics is outpaced by digital technologies. It affects us at species level, in reproductive science, and thus in our gender identity, creating new challenges to our efforts to explain the world to ourselves. These are language problems. We do not have the words yet and, what words we have, we struggle to string together cogently.
Politics is the binary technology we use when we address matters that impoverish us. Perhaps the greatest binary, the zero-sum 1/0 that most bedevils us, is haves/haves not, as an accelerating experience of inequality makes politics impossible.
The most chilling digital on/off, is the thesis of political technology that asserts that science and technology will solve all problems, including political ones, using a commitment to limitless economic growth while exploiting natural resources. Wolfgang Streeck writes
Capitalism promises infinite growth of commodified material wealth in a finite world, by conjoining itself with modern science and technology, making capitalist society the first industrial society,....
It's all 1s and 0s and the sums do not add up. Ones and zeros do not enumerate the complexity citizens experience and yet digital technologies permeate all aspects of their lives. And make politics impossible.
The world is disabled from responding to the challenges of climate change. Scientists dispute scientific results and become climate change deniers. The environmental catastrophe poisoning the planet rests upon the 1/0 digits of economic growth and climate change and their connectedness. Simple binaries, bound together by data not wisdom, compromise our capacity to control personal information and protect our private lives. The sense pervades us that we are under the control of anonymous digital powers, which, though seemingly varied, are actually convergent. These powers do not rely on direct violence. They wield extensive and intensive pressure that ultimately force individual's lives into a monetised disconnectedness.
Yes, digital technologies make politics impossible.


Are digital technologies making politics impossible? No.
When Alvin Toffler was asked why he wrote Future Shock in 1970 he said he felt that the US government was blind to large technological and social changes. These changes included a sexual/biological revolution (the birth control pill); globalisation at a human level (commercial jet travel); the information tsunami rolling out (television universalised). He said:
.. change was going to accelerate and that the speed of change could induce disorientation in lots of people.
This disorientation leads to the experience of impossibility in politics.
Yet politics continues, and, as it were, what we experience today, is simply politics as is (the case). It is not digital technologies making politics impossible. No. It is us.


Are digital technologies making politics impossible? Maybe, but only if the multitude of citizens, let that be the case.
BBC Panorama journalist, Declan Lawn said:
The problem is that we are getting worse at going against the dominant consensus. Fewer and fewer of us are anti-authoritarian enough and difficult enough to go with our gut and challenge the narrative. These days journalists are not rewarded for being difficult. A culture does not exist in which a journalist can render an alternative narrative without being dismissed as a loonie leftie or an alt-right conspiracy theorist.
This is a plea for a discourse of dissent.
It was ever thus, where change and uncertainty are the given order, amplified in today's circumstances of faux news, such as appears on the website Waterford Whispers News (WWN), where spoofing and dissenting ring together, in a digital world that makes beneficial politics possible. Maybe.
I argue that false news can be a manifestation of dissent. Referring to news as 'fake' now presumes that all news before the digital era was 'true'. We are not naïve enough to accept that.
The digital behemoth Amazon wonders how many of its on-line customer reviews of books/films/products are fake. Perhaps this is the next thrust forward in human development, whereby our imaginations are emboldened to dissent from knowledge/facts/truth presented to us by such corporations, residing in the binary form: we know/you don't.
The automatic link between digital technologies and progress needs to face the 'hang on a minute' moment of stern critical address, from a discourse of dissent, which develops multiplicities rather than binaries, such as Tory/Labour, China/USA, 1/0. The 'hang on a minute' discourse can be applied, as a critical language tool, for instance, in financial affairs, to ask the question how might the word 'profit' be re-launched to include below the line costs, public and environmental costs when private enterprise speculates its way to profits. It can also test faux news.
The pace bursts Alvin Toffler's speedometer, as change proceeds with ferocious acceleration, constantly outstripping citizens' capacity for thought and action. Thus the difficulty digital technologies pose to politics.
Might history offer us some hope. At the end of the Second World War, a number of cosmopolitan institutions emerged; the IMF, UN, World Bank and the start of the EU, which, though massively flawed, brought a leavening of humane values into world affairs.
Can we, with full awareness of the ironies involved as Brexit comes to pass, invoke the EU Maastrict Treaty concept of 'subsidiarity', whereby power devolves to levels close to where their impacts are, in an urge for proximity? Not easy. Consider another digital behemoth, Google, and the efforts by Duck Duck Go to push against it by offering a less invasive search engine. Not easy. Can we seek possibilities in multitudes, such as the push-back by people in India when Facebook attempted to 'be' the internet there?
We need more such multitudes, people who share the fact of their existence and close aspirations of well-being for themselves and loved ones. The term 'multitude' has a history reaching back to antiquity, but took off as a political concept when it was espoused by the likes of Machiavelli and Spinoza. A multitude does not enter into a social contract with a sovereign political elite, rather that contract is itself a multiplicity in perpetual negotiation, always in the direction of power disseminating, and that includes digital technologies, which are material and social-practice sites of corporate power. This is much more than share-holder democracy. It is a post-digital political technology such that individuals retain the capacity for political self-determination.
We are beyond chaos theories here. We are on carousels rather than seesaws; in perpetual motion rather than in the binary balance, which offers an elite 1 and the rest 0.
It is never the fault of technologies. It is our ownership and use of them.
A multitude of sources – Éluard, Rilke, EM Cioran, Derek Mahon, Patrick White, Octavio Paz and many others – are cited for multiple versions of the lines:
There is another world,
And this is it.
The answer to the question of digital technologies and a possible politics rests in our hands.


Conclusions. Beyond 1/0 and onto irrational multiples.
Now is the time to move on from the binary system. Like number systems of the past, it has out run its usefulness. It is inadequate to the philosophical, political and digital challenges of the day. The problems we face are ill-defined, thus we are less than clear what the question really is, with even less an idea of what the solution might look like. These are days of the primacy of process, with all the uncertainties that brings. We can relish them and move past the urge for security offered by binaries. They are chimera, readily manipulated by oligarchs. We can change our relationship with digital technologies, from a posture of thrall to an agency of use.
For politics to be possible now and into the future, a leavening of dissent needs to be present. We need citizens who say 'hang on a minute' and just plain 'no' when proposals are presented. The automatic assumption of congruence between betterment (progress) and digital technologies is a binary fallacy. Be it 5G, 6G, 7G or beyond, telecommunications, other digital technologies and politics, are best served by citizens asking “hang on a minute. Who benefits?”
We can imagine our way past 1s and 0s, such as Government/Market. When it comes to broadband for rural areas “the market will only take you so far, it then falls to government”, according to an OfCom spokesperson. Other binaries need re-enumerated: urban/rural; private loss/public cost; governors/governed. Make your own list.
It is not simply digits. It is all numbers, rational and irrational. It is language. New.
Beyond the digital.



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