Empire (53 page)

involve the manipulation ofknowledge and information. Laboring

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processes can be conducted in a form almost entirely compatible

with communication networks, for which location and distance

have very limited importance. Workers can even stay at home and

log on to the network. The labor ofinformational production (of

both services and durable goods) relies on what we can call
abstract

cooperation.
Such labor dedicates an ever more central role to communication ofknowledges and information among workers, but

those cooperating workers need not be present and can even be

relatively unknown to one another, or known only through the

productive information exchanged. The circuit of cooperation is

consolidated in the network and the commodity at an abstract level.

Production sites can thus be deterritorialized and tend toward a

virtual existence, as coordinates in the communication network.

As opposed to the old vertical industrial and corporate model,

production now tends to be organized in horizontal network enter-

prises.24

The information networks also release production from terri-

torial constraints insofar as they tend to put the producer in direct

contact with the consumer regardless ofthe distance between them.

Bill Gates, the co-founder of the Microsoft Corporation, takes this

tendency to an extreme when he predicts a future in which networks

will overcome entirely the barriers to circulation and allow an ideal,

‘ friction-free’’ capitalism to emerge: ‘‘The information highway

will extend the electronic marketplace and make it the ultimate

go-between, the universal middleman.’’25 IfGates’s vision were to

be realized, the networks would tend to reduce all distance and make

transactions immediate. Sites ofproduction and sites ofconsumption

would then be present to one another, regardless ofgeographical lo-

cation.

These tendencies toward the deterritorialization ofproduction

and the increased mobility ofcapital are not absolute, and there

are significant countervailing tendencies, but to the extent that they

do proceed, they place labor in a weakened bargaining position.

In the era ofthe Fordist organization ofindustrial mass production,

capital was bound to a specific territory and thus to dealing contrac-

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297

tually with a limited laboring population. The informatization of

production and the increasing importance ofimmaterial production

have tended to free capital from the constraints of territory and

bargaining. Capital can withdraw from negotiation with a given

local population by moving its site to another point in the global

network—or merely by using the potential to move as a weapon

in negotiations. Entire laboring populations, which had enjoyed a

certain stability and contractual power, have thus found themselves

in increasingly precarious employment situations. Once the bargain-

ing position oflabor has been weakened, network production can

accommodate various old forms of non-guaranteed labor, such as

freelance work, home work, part-time labor, and piecework.26

The decentralization and global dispersal ofproductive pro-

cesses and sites, which is characteristic ofthe postmodernization or

informatization of the economy, provokes a corresponding central-

ization ofthe control over production. The centrifugal movement

ofproduction is balanced by the centripetal trend ofcommand.

From the local perspective, the computer networks and communi-

cations technologies internal to production systems allow for more

extensive monitoring ofworkers from a central, remote location.

Control oflaboring activity can potentially be individualized and

continuous in the virtual panopticon ofnetwork production. The

centralization ofcontrol, however, is even more clear from a global

perspective. The geographical dispersal ofmanufacturing has created

a demand for increasingly centralized management and planning,

and also for a new centralization of specialized producer services,

especially financial services.27 Financial and trade-related services in

a few key cities (such as New York, London, and Tokyo) manage

and direct the global networks ofproduction. As a mass demographic

shift, then, the decline and evacuation of industrial cities has corres-

ponded to the rise ofglobal cities, or really cities ofcontrol.

Information Highways

The structure and management ofcommunication networks are

essential conditions for production in the informational economy.

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These global networks must be constructed and policed in such a

way as to guarantee order and profits. It should come as no surprise,

then, that the U.S. government poses the establishment and regula-

tion of a global information infrastructure as one of its highest

priorities, and that communications networks have become the most

active terrain of mergers and competition for the most powerful

transnational corporations.

An adviser to the Federal Communications Commission, Peter

Cowhey, provides an interesting analogy for the role these networks

play in the new paradigm ofproduction and power. The construc-

tion of the new information infrastructure, he says, provides the

conditions and terms ofglobal production and government just as

road construction did for the Roman Empire.28 The wide distribu-

tion ofRoman engineering and technology was indeed both the

most lasting gift to the imperial territories and the fundamental

condition for exercising control over them. Roman roads, however,

did not play a central role in the imperial production processes but

only facilitated the circulation of goods and technologies. Perhaps

a better analogy for the global information infrastructure might be

the construction ofrailways to further the interests ofnineteenth-

and twentieth-century imperialist economies. Railways in the dom-

inant countries consolidated their national industrial economies,

and the construction ofrailroads in colonized and economically

dominated regions opened those territories to penetration by capital-

ist enterprises, allowing for their incorporation into imperialist eco-

nomic systems. Like Roman roads, however, railways played only

an external role in imperialist and industrial production, extending

its lines ofcommunication and transportation to new raw materials,

markets, and labor power.
The novelty of the new information infrastructure is the fact that it is embedded within and completely immanent to the
new production processes.
At the pinnacle ofcontemporary production, information and communication are the very commodities produced; the network itselfis the site ofboth production and circu-

lation.

In political terms, the global information infrastructure might

be characterized as the combination ofa
democratic
mechanism and

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299

an
oligopolistic
mechanism, which operate along different models of network systems. The democratic network is a completely horizontal and deterritorialized model. The Internet, which began as a

project ofDARPA (the U.S. Defense Department Advanced Re-

search Projects Agency), but has now expanded to points through-

out the world, is the prime example ofthis democratic network

structure. An indeterminate and potentially unlimited number of

interconnected nodes communicate with no central point ofcon-

trol; all nodes regardless ofterritorial location connect to all others

through a myriad ofpotential paths and relays. The Internet thus

resembles the structure oftelephone networks, and indeed it gener-

ally incorporates them as its own paths ofcommunication, just as

it relies on computer technology for its points of communication.

The development ofcellular telephony and portable computers,

unmooring in an even more radical way the communicating points

in the network, has intensified the process ofdeterritorialization.

The original design ofthe Internet was intended to withstand

military attack. Since it has no center and almost any portion can

operate as an autonomous whole, the network can continue to

function even when part of it has been destroyed. The same design

element that ensures survival, the decentralization, is also what

makes control ofthe network so difficult. Since no one point in

the network is necessary for communication among others, it is

difficult for it to regulate or prohibit their communication. This

democratic model is what Deleuze and Guattari call a rhizome, a

nonhierarchical and noncentered network structure.29

The oligopolistic network model is characterized by broadcast

systems. According to this model, for example in television or radio

systems, there is a unique and relatively fixed point ofemission,

but the points ofreception are potentially infinite and territorially

indefinite, although developments such as cable television networks

fix these paths to a certain extent. The broadcast network is defined

by its centralized production, mass distribution, and one-way com-

munication. The entire culture industry—from the distribution of

newspapers and books to films and video cassettes—has traditionally

operated along this model. A relatively small number ofcorporations

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(or in some regions a single entrepreneur, such as Rupert Murdoch,

Silvio Berlusconi, or Ted Turner) can effectively dominate all of

these networks. This oligopolistic model is not a rhizome but a

tree structure that subordinates all ofthe branches to the central root.

The networks of the new information infrastructure are a

hybrid ofthese two models. Just as in a previous era Lenin and other

critics ofimperialism recognized a consolidation ofinternational

corporations into quasi-monopolies (over railways, banking, elec-

tric power, and the like), today we are witnessing a competition

among transnational corporations to establish and consolidate quasi-

monopolies over the new information infrastructure. The various

telecommunication corporations, computer hardware and software

manufacturers, and information and entertainment corporations are

merging and expanding their operations, scrambling to partition

and control the new continents ofproductive networks. There will,

ofcourse, remain democratic portions or aspects ofthis consolidated

web that will resist control owing to the web’s interactive and

decentralized structure; but there is already under way a massive

centralization ofcontrol through the (de facto or de jure) unification

ofthe major elements ofthe information and communication power

structure: Hollywood, Microsoft, IBM, AT&T, and so forth. The

new communication technologies, which hold out the promise of

a new democracy and a new social equality, have in fact created

new lines ofinequality and exclusion, both within the dominant

countries and especially outside them.30

C OMMONS

There has been a continuous movement throughout the modern period to

privatize public property. In Europe the great common lands created with
the break-up of the Roman Empire and the rise of Christianity were

eventually transferred to private hands in the course of capitalist primitive
accumulation. Throughout the world what remains of the vast public spaces
are now only the stuff of legends: Robin Hood’s forest, the Great Plains
of the Amerindians, the steppes of the nomadic tribes, and so forth. During
the consolidation of industrial society, the construction and destruction of
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301

public spaces developed in an ever more powerful spiral. It is true that when
it was dictated by the necessities of accumulation (in order to foster an
acceleration or leap in development, to concentrate and mobilize the means
of production, to make war, and so forth), public property was expanded
by expropriating large sectors of civil society and transferring wealth and
property to the collectivity. That public property, however, was soon reappropriated in private hands. In each process the communal possession, which
is considered natural, is transformed at public expense into a second and
third nature that functions finally for private profit. A second nature was
created, for example, by damming the great rivers of western North America
and irrigating the dry valleys, and then this new wealth was handed over
to the magnates of agribusiness. Capitalism sets in motion a continuous
cycle of private reappropriation of public goods: the expropriation of what
is common.

The rise and fall of the welfare state in the twentieth century is one

more cycle in this spiral of public and private appropriations. The crisis of
the welfare state has meant primarily that the structures of public assistance
and distribution, which were constructed through public funds, are being
privatized and expropriated for private gain. The current neoliberal trend
toward the privatization of energy and communication services is another
turn of the spiral. This consists in granting to private businesses the networks
of energy and communication that were built through enormous expenditures
of public monies. Market regimes and neoliberalism survive off these private
appropriations of second, third, and nth nature. The commons, which once
were considered the basis of the concept of the public, are expropriated for
private use and no one can lift a finger. The public is thus dissolved,
privatized, even as a concept. Or really,
the immanent relation between the public and the common is replaced by the transcendent power