Why It's Still Kicking Off Everywhere (19 page)

USC professor Manuel Castells foresaw that the combined impact of the social network and the individualistic self would facilitate a clear break with the old forms of organization, including parties, unions and permanent campaigns: ‘The emergence of mass self-communication offers an extraordinary medium for social movements and rebellious individuals to build their autonomy and confront the institutions of society in their own terms and around their own projects.'
¹⁴

Castells realized that the new technology has changed the relationship between the collective and the individual within protest movements. It allows activists to assemble fast and zap the enemy, without any greater commitment to each other than doing this.

But it also propels people into long-term occupations of physical spaces—from Bahrain's Pearl Roundabout to Tahrir, Syntagma and the Occupy Wall Street protests. And it focuses their struggle on the creation of new meanings and narratives, beyond the head-to-head confrontations with the old order on its own terrain.

However, changing the method of struggle is only one impact of network technology. Equally important are the new modes of economic activity it has thrown up—methods that were born amid the altruistic hacking and eco-communities that grew out of the 1960s, but which have now become deployed into the mainstream economy.

The key concept here, says Shirky, is ‘collaborative production': people working together on a shared project, with no managers, and sometimes no direct intent to produce profit. It was pioneered in the Open Source software and hacking movements.

At one level, this is just the same as what keeps a Sunday league soccer team going—the voluntary contribution of skill and time to something bigger than the participants. But what open-source programmers did was to move this kind of collaboration into space formerly occupied by profit-seeking corporations. In 1994, when version 1.0 of Linux was released, the most successful company on earth was Microsoft. Microsoft's business model was based on providing—at an eye-watering markup—what the Linux community was to provide for free: an operating system to run your computer. Now, Linux runs every computer in the Google empire and half of all Internet servers. And although people make money out of it, they do not do so in the same way as Microsoft did.

Linux, and other open-source software projects such as the Perl programming language, were created using ‘distributed collaboration'—hundreds of people correcting, improving and documenting other people's work, voluntarily, for the greater good of mankind (and, of course, to annoy Bill Gates). Linux's only condition was that nobody was allowed to commercialize the product.

Out of the Open Source movement came the ‘wiki': a user-editable website which leaves an audit trail of changes, designed to facilitate collaborative work among groups without any prior role-designation or command hierarchy. As a tool it looks like nothing special. But its first two global uses were to prove revolutionary: Wikipedia and WikiLeaks. Wikipedia was not only a commercial challenge to the encyclopaedia business: it expanded the supply of in-depth and dependable knowledge, and reduced the price to zero.

And not just knowledge of stable and finished episodes. Shirky points out—and I have personal experience of this—that the Wikipedia page devoted to the London bombings of 7 July 2005 was at all times during the first twenty-four hours more reliable and comprehensive than reports from the mainstream media. I can attest to the fact that the mainstream media noticed this immediately: it was a talking point among my colleagues in press and broadcasting that the “new” version of news was the dispassionate assembly of the facts, easily eclipsing confused rewrites of online “articles” as the detailed events filtered out.

The second big wiki—WikiLeaks—has yet to finish exploding in the faces of dictators, spies, torturers, crooks and politicians. But leaving aside its political impact, what's important here is the creation process itself: what Shirky calls the ‘unmanaged division of labour'.

This process did not appear out of the blue; it can trace a direct lineage to the liberation movements of the hippy Sixties. In her brilliant cyber-memoir, technology writer Becky Hogge describes how survivors of the LSD fraternity in California ‘quit drugs for software', seeding a techno-revolution that would create the mouse, the pixel, the Apple Mac, the Internet, hacking and free software.
¹⁵
Their goals were made explicit in two famous statements by Stewart Brand, the visionary founder of the Whole Earth Catalog: ‘Like it or not, computers are coming to the masses'; and ‘Information wants to be free'. This would open up a forty-year battle, still ongoing, between those trying to monopolize, censor and commercialize information technology and those who want it to be open, uncensored and free.

And it's a battle over fundamentals. The rise of the profitless enterprise, of unmanaged collective labour, of free information and the massive scalability of collaborative work: each of these issues challenges a core belief in management theory. Likewise the rise of the networked individual, the multiple self, the ‘leaky self and the collective consciousness may challenge some basic assumptions of liberalism, which has assumed the self to be singular and self-contained.

However—and this is the crucial point—none of this should be challenging for those who dream of creating a more equal and just society.

But it seems that it is. First, because networked activism challenges the old methods—parties, trade unions, leaders, hierarchies. Second, because open-source technologies and collaborative production raise an even more fundamental question: what
type
of economy is to be the starting point for the transition to sustainable and equitable growth, and on what timetable?

Marx, technology and freedom

Karl Marx dominated the radical agenda of the late nineteenth century for good reason: he was the most modern and most pro-capitalist of the revolutionaries of the age.

His polemics with rival nineteenth-century leftists don't get so much attention these days—but they have become relevant. Both on the issue of networked individualism, and the role of stored knowledge might play in human freedom, Marx had already asked the pertinent questions.

On individual freedom, Marx's argument amounts to this: any project to deliver a classless society, with wealth distributed according to need, must be based on the most advanced technologies and organizational forms created by capitalism itself. It can't be based on schemes originating in the heads of philanthropic bosses or philosophers. And you can't return to the past.

So in the 1840s, as the workers' movement became obsessed with model factory settlements set up by utopian visionaries like Robert Owen, Marx laid into the utopians. In the 1860s, when workers all over the world tried to set up cooperative shops and factories, Marx became a robust critic of cooperation. And he never ceased to pour scorn on the back-to-the-land socialists who wanted to return to rural communes and low growth.

Capitalism, Marx argued, was headed in the direction of big enterprises, which the capitalists would own collectively via the stock markets. Co-ops and utopian villages were a distraction. You had to find a way to take control of this big stuff—finance, industry and agribusiness—and create enough wealth so that, when you redistributed it, it would eliminate human need. Only then, said Marx, could you begin to address the alienation and unfreedom at the heart of human existence.

Capitalism itself, he believed, had created a social group whose material interests would force them to seize the means of production: the proletariat, owning nothing but their own capacity to work. However, there was nothing in the lifestyle of the workers themselves that could foreshadow the freedom they would create.

It is often forgotten that Marx's goal was not ‘class solidarity' or ‘proletarian power' but the liberation of individual human beings. In 1843 he wrote a passage that has become newly relevant in the context of social networks:

Every emancipation is a
restoration
of the human world and of human relationships to man himself. Human emancipation will only be complete when the real individual man has absorbed into himself the abstract citizen; when as an individual man, in his everyday life, in his work, and in his relationships, he has become a species-being.
¹⁶

Marx believed this truly social life—‘species-being'—could not be attained without abolishing capitalism. Indeed, the whole thrust of the book this passage comes from (
On the Jewish Question,
1843) was that the nineteenth-century goal of political and civil rights was really a form of self-enslavement: the individual with his ‘human rights' alone against the world.
¹⁷

Because Marx believed capitalism could only atomize, only alienate, he concluded that this ultimate ‘human emancipation', in which people would express their freedom through communal interaction, could only happen after it was gone.

The actual history of organized labour was to be one long refutation of this theory. First, from the late nineteenth century, workers did develop highly sophisticated subcultures in which they attempted to develop civilized and communal lifestyles. Second, the most skilled gained possessions and a material stake in the survival of the system itself. On top of this Marx himself moved away from this initial, humanistic version of communism, settling on a theory that stressed the clash of technology against social relations, rather than humanity versus alienation, as the dynamo of the coming revolution. Finally, after the 1960s, the old manual workforce began to decline and fragment, leading theorists like André Gorz to propose its disappearance as any kind of revolutionary force.

What none of the critics dared suggest, however, was that it might be possible to achieve this ‘species-being' under capitalism.

The technological and inter-personal revolutions of the early twenty-first century pose precisely this question. Namely, is it now possible to conceive of living this ‘emancipated' life as a fully connected ‘species-being' on the terrain of capitalism itself—indeed on the terrain of a highly marketized form of capitalism, albeit in conflict with it?

I don't know the answer, but merely to pose the question is exhilarating.

Strangely, it turns out, Marx himself posed the very same question. In a notebook known as the ‘Fragment on Machines' (1858), he explored the potential impact of automation. What if, Marx asked, you took ‘labour' out of the process of making things and did it all through intelligent machines? The machines, he speculated, would become repositories of a ‘general intellect', calling into question an economic system based on wages and profits, since neither could be properly allocated through market mechanisms.
¹⁸

Those who want to turn Marx into an anti-humanist detest this fragment, just as they detest his pre-1845 writings about alienation. The reason is clear: it opens up a whole new dynamic of social change based on the clash between free information and economic systems. It creates the possibility that the real ‘contradiction' in society is not so much about economics but about shared human knowledge versus ‘intellectual property rights'. It opens the possibility that the new society can be created within the old, in a struggle over information and power.

For orthodox Marxism, of course, these debates were marginal—and who knows what substance the man himself was on the night he scribbled these thoughts down. But the political theory that influenced the events of 2009–11—‘autonomism'—had theorized very clearly the idea of a struggle between the ‘general intellect', the suppressed human being and capitalist legal norms.
¹⁹
Its figurehead, Franco Berardi, put it like this, in a manifesto issued at the height of the Occupy Wall Street movement:

There is only one way to awake the lover that is hidden in our paralyzed, frightened and frail virtualized bodies. There is only one way to awake the human being that is hidden in the miserable daily life of the softwarist: take to the streets and fight.
²⁰

And that is the significance of 2011. It was the year people realized that instant collaboration could extend out of Facebook groups and wikis and into the public squares of major cities; that amateur news could be more reliable than the professionally produced propaganda of TV networks. And they rediscovered what the Berkeley rebels of 1964 had found out before them, that the act of taking a space and forming a community within it might be just as important as the objective of the struggle itself.

And if all this challenges orthodox Marxism, it also challenges social democracy, which in the late nineteenth century embraced a watered-down version of Marxism. In social democracy, of course, the working class is not the ‘subject' of history, but it nevertheless remains the ‘object' of politics: to be delivered to in return for votes. For social democracy it's the capitalist state that does the delivering; but it shares with Marxism the essential premise that conditions predominate over consciousness. Since capitalism can only produce the alienated, helpless human being, social conditions have to be changed from above, by benign state intervention.

For both social democracy and Marxism, the challenge amounts to this. If you are an anti-utopian and want to build a socially just society starting from the most modern and advanced forms of capitalism, what exactly is that most advanced form? What if it turns out not to be Microsoft, or Toyota, or another highly profitable corporation, but instead this emerging, semi-communal form of capitalism exemplified by open-source software and based on collaboration, management-free enterprise, profit-free projects and open-access information?

What if—instead of waiting for the collapse of capitalism—the emancipated human being were beginning to emerge spontaneously from within this breakdown of the old order? What if all the dreams of human solidarity and participatory democracy contained in the maligned Port Huron Statement of 1962 were realizable right now? Yeah: what then?