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Twitphilia & Twitanoia: Controlling Technology
Twitter from a revolutionary perspective... A problem I see with this, particularly as a radical political activist, is that there still exists the very real possibility (in the conceivable future) of a very totalitarian and fascistic crackdown on revolutionary organizing and dissent. Twitter is not wholly responsible for this, of course, but it is a part of the larger technical communication apparatus which evermore seems to be recording all publicly expressed opinions and the networks of friends who may share those opinions. With this in mind, I wonder if radicals are exposing themselves too carelessly and I wonder if their use of computerized mass communication systems actually serves the greater good in the long run. Many of the people who use Twitter probably don't care one wit about the greater good -- some may not care about anything, even themselves. But even amongst those people who do care about their fellow beings, and the global environment, etc., a question remains... Are they imbibed with a true understanding of the world's problems and do they have the focused skills to do anything about them? General Technological Problems I'll get back to a more Twitter-specific analyis in moment, but first I want to point out that several dire problems of civilization continue to get worse despite our technological know-how and our advanced communication systems. In part I believe this because destructive forces/actions often trump sustainable activities like the europeans invading the new world. For a couple more examples to make my point... it only takes one person (or organization) dumping poisonous dioxins into the local water supply for that supply to be wholly and completely ruined -- even if everyone else in the community was very conscientious about living sustainably and not doing such things. Similarly, in the the extreme possibility, it would only take a small group of people launching nuclear weapons to bring about an unspeakable catastrophe -- even if the vast majority of people in the world had no desire for such an event to transpire. Even without great numbers, our technological capabilities have made it possible for a smaller group of committed individuals to greatly change things for the worse (my apologies to Margaret Mead). So all social justice movements and environmentalist groups would be rendered completely irrelevant if they were overpowered by the advanced weaponry of a much small group (or if that group created and released an imminently destructive force upon the environment). A second problem, related to the previous, has to do with Thoreau's famous axiom that "there are thousands hacking at the branches of evil to one who striking at the root." As we sail today on our technological Ship of Fools this has never been more true. People form groups and write passionately about not kicking puppies, rising tuition costs, and stopping spousal abuse -- and all of these things may be very important -- but pre-eminent bodies of scientists and Nobel laureates have warned us that humanity all but faces extinction in the next 100 years. Hundreds of millions are starving RIGHT NOW, wars ravage the lands of millions more, and this hardly begins to touch on the hundreds of millions more who are literally toiling their lives away in sweatshop factories. These problems have become more prevalent during the advancement of techno-industrial civilization and yet some of us still cling to the discredited idea of progress. You'll have to forgive me if I've gotten a little riled up, but here I sit in front of my computer listening to Crass songs with a visceral feeling of disgust and hypocrisy. But regarding my hypocrisy... that doesn't mean I can't or shouldn't recognize the problems and at least I recognize my complicity while owning up to it. More On Twitter (& computer networks in general) As mentioned earlier, Twitter is the latest advancement of George Orwell's "memory hole" concept. For the majority of proles this will never matter but, evermore, our ideas and networks of friends are permanently recorded on massive hard drives in the bowels of massive skyscrapers. The problem with this isn't so much that you'll fail to get a job because of some risque old Myspace picture but, rather, that you might have expressed an idea that a future regime doesn't like -- or perhaps you seem to have associated too closely with someone who expressed those ideas. It's like the problem with widespread surveillance camera's... The problem isn't that they reduce crime or make us act like puritans -- the problem is that an extremely repressive regime may someday come to power and then have total control over the surveillance apparatus previously installed. But let's assume somehow that we will never ever get a (more) repressive government... There are still other social ramifications associated with the use of Twitter and computer communications in general. Earlier I mentioned the idea of a small group wielding immense technological power over the general masses and this concept still applies even if they aren't intending to use that power for our immediate and utter annihilation. The endless promotion of consumerism, for example, is a problem in itself. You or I may or may not be susceptible to various forms of mass marketing, but the masses obviously are. The increased prevalence of personal computers has been ushered in with even greater levels of consumption. Marketing has never been a more exact science, delivery of products has become streamlined, and product production has been facilitated by internet communication systems. In the U.S., and abroad, consumerism has reached new heights and will likely survive all but the worst of economic collapses -- and at that point this article will seem hackneyed and passe. If humanity as a whole continues to consume as much as we can, as fast as we can... the environmental consequence are sure to be devastating. The prudent conservation of a few will matter very little. Moderate conservation will matter even less if we are still using computer networks that inevitably work to promote consumerism to our fellows. Defensive Arguments of Technological Neutrality One will argue that articles such as this one prove the potential good computer networks like Twitter can do. However... not only are we still faced with the widespread typical uses of such a system, there is still the possibility that this article is too tame (along with any similar articles that actually get read). This article might be too mild and fall ideologically short of the necessary critical assessment of our circumstances. Your less than humble author is, after all, still immersed in this system and is something of a product himself in that regard. Humans are the most domesticated animal and I worry that all those cartoons in my youth may have made me, and consequently this analysis, too tame. This brings me to my next point... what is the broad psychosocial effect of this long immersion in these technological systems of media and communication? We can't just assume that the effects of the last 50 years of media immersion will stop being consequential simply because we now sit in front of monitors instead of televisions. For example... the standards of beauty created by the television studios won't simply cease to be our standard of beauty today. And that's a very physiological effect on our innate sexuality. More to the point... the ideological indoctrination will not cease to have an effect now that hordes of Joe Bloggers give us the same ideological perspective that has always been promoted by the corporate state in the schools, history books, and television studious. Sure, you can find ideological niches of liberation and social critique in some online circles but the shallow, the mundane, and the reactionary are still the norm -- even on Twitter. The Technological Bias on Twitter and Beyond One of the greatest ideological biases of out time regards the blind aforementioned faith in technological progress. Since the aftermath of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and since the widespread acceptance of personal computers into the majority of American homes, technological criticism has become evermore lost in a virtual sea of advertisements for the latest gadget or pill. One can hardly find a truly qualitative critique of technological advancement unless they look very thoroughly and with formal philosophical studies in their background to guide their assessments (of course why would anyone want to look for such a thing anyway?). Most of the critiques conclude that technology is a neutral tool and if we try a little harder to be moral then everything will be fine with it. Obviously I disagree and find that assessment to be overly simplistic. On twitter such discussions are bound to be limited because most of the users have accepted the use of computers in our daily lives and have completely brought into the pro-tech paradigm. But one of my most telling online experiences regarding the technology debate took place around the wikipedia article about technology. There were two pictures on the page which I attempted to change in an effort to challenge the neutrality claims of the other editors. One was of an astronaut floating serenely in space (as the headline image) and the other was a picture of an idyllic old-fashion windmill with a nuclear power plant in the background. Respectively I tried to replace these with a photo of a mushroom cloud and a picture of the melted down husk of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. I feel like I made a strong case for these edits since e=mc2 and it's weaponized results were more significant than high altitude orbiting (and even contributed to space travel) while the Chernobyl image balanced the other benign, neutral, and positive images on the page. Not surprisingly, these edits didn't stick, but I do they illustrated the lack of neutrality and the positive spin put on technology. A Closing Look at Twitter (If you've read this far, congratulations -- I'm surprised your technologically stunted attention span held out for this long. I'd be even more surprised if you retained any recollection of the points I was trying to make. It's somewhat improbable that you found this article at all.) Twitter strikes me as little more than a large recorded chatroom. How anyone could possibly read all the links posted from even 100 average users is beyond me (perhaps they're already cyborgs and don't know it). I suppose one wouldn't have to read all the links but then it just seems like one could search more directly for the information they're interested in without having to wait for some to tweet about it. Twitter might serve some limited good in specific situations but, overall, it just seems to be the newest medium for dishing out pop culture drivel (and I don't care what Aston Kutcher is doing today or what CNN says is news). The only thing that would change my mind about Twitter is if this article about it brought 10,000 unique visitors to my blog -- and I dare you tweeters to make that happen! I'd still probably end up being a little skeptical of the whole thing. Tweet Away, |
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friends dont let friends
friends dont let friends twitter... except for this -
http://twitter.com/anarchistnews
lol. who did this? seriously.
logos-word-idea-breath was a
logos-word-idea-breath was a sound wave, a vibration, that might have reached ears and been absorbed and then, perhaps, have been echoed by a variation of that original wave-meaning. or the word might have echoed in the sky and the surrounding earth. in some sense it would have created a whole. these zeroes and ones that are flying across fiber optic cables are not vibrations. they are impulses. they are awlays already constructed to be devoured within a wall-less and bottom-less chasm that cannot create an echo. that chasm is nihilism, the end game of 24 centuries of fucked up western petaphysics. it went off the rails when mind was divorced from body (Plato) and then will was constructed as the seat of meaningful subjective action (god's will, augustine, and then, with nietzsche, the "will to power"). it is quite likely that the human participation in the fundamental vibrations of reality will be completely eclipsed by a world of impulses: a bio-engineered cyborg will "evolve" (laughing) that can calculate in ways exponentially supeior to natural human minds. every experience humans can have will be simulated and intensified. it will be like nothing that is possiible for you to imagine.
using this shit seems ok if it can lead to its eventaul destruction.
I'd say discussing
I'd say discussing "technology" at large would be quite meaningless, since it involves everything from shoelaces and potting to nuclear bombs. Of course, most machines are today created in the interest of capital, but the same can't really be said about the internet, which was more of an academic toy before anybody figured there could even be something to sell. This means the basic structure of the internet is somewhat non-capitalist and, more importantly, anti-hierarchical. This doesn't mean capital hasn't colonized the crap out of it and centralised it to death of course.
The problem with Twitter, Facebook, Google and their friends is that they are centralized and run by companies. The whole internet doesn't have to be. I run my own web servers with my own home page, blog and e-mail, for example.
Also, the software I'm using for all this is free (or, if you prefer market jargon, "open source"), meaning it's free to copy, modify and so on (and not just free as in "free beer"). And, it's developed by communities, not (only) big corporations.
The services provided by Twitter could be decentralized to form sort of a social mesh outside corporate control, and not relying on any singular failing point. It would be robust and very hard to track, and it would mimic the way real-life (I'm not a fan of the notion of stamping out technically augmented communication as somehow less real) social networks work.
I never really understood the American anarchist's primitivist stance.
Classifying shoestrings in
Classifying shoestrings in the same category with fiber optic cables or nuclear bombs is quite simplistic. One does not require the same type of research and social infrastructure that the other two require. Perhaps it would help if we differentiated between hi-tech tools and simple tools? To get advanced technological tools you have to organize society in such a way that certain members of that society can be allowed to focus on nothing else but adding on to the technological texts of the previous technocrats. And to get to that point you have to go down some extreme steps beyond the primitivist cultures of, say, the pre-American aboriginals. Instead of living in a close knit community with regular interaction with your family, you have to send the children to schooling institutions so that the next potential technocrats can be weeded out from those who will have to toil in the fields and mine the materials that those technocrats will require. And the monotonous drilling in of the ABS's and 123's hardly compares to the immediate real-world education of a primitive child who is going to get direct knowledge about plants and animals and the cycles of nature, et cetera. I could go on, but perhaps I've made my point (which others have made more thoroughly elsewhere)? Primitive societies and "civilized" societies are fundamentally different -- just as shoe-strings and nukes are hardly in the same category.
As for the internet system we are using, if you want to extrapolate from it's origins, it was it was designed by the defense department (DARPA) who feared a disruption of communications in the event of a nuclear war. That's hardly a benign origin and it was hardly just an "academic toy". It does however adequately place the "harmless" scientists in the proper context.
I'd also like to point out that the internet would not work without a central authority because that's needed to compel people to allow wires across the land in which they dwell while allowing satellites to float over their heads. It's like saying the railroad could work without imposing it into peoples lives who didn't want it. Also... the software isn't really free if you consider all the institutions that had to be funded originally to send all of those programmers to grammar school and if you consider all the grants they receive from governments and corporations. So there are hidden costs you're not taking into account and centralized directives required to get this network established around the world.
http://nihilo0.blogspot.com
http://radicallinks.blogspot.com
heidegger made the
heidegger made the distinction between the correct definition of technology ("technology is a neutral tool; it involves a means-ends relationship; it is uniquely human) and an essential definition (it is the way of being in the world in modernity--that is a preoccupation with control and interloccking everything in endless, cybernetic frameworks. sticking with the former definition conceals the latter. if shoe strings and nuclear bombs are both technology then modernity and primitives (or any other human groups) are equally technological. absurd.
the essence of technology includes, especially, the determination that we WILL become more technologically oriented--the demand for control WILL relentlessly deepen. i don't think anybody challenges that; it's not a matter of choice; it is ocurring daily. where does that compulsion come from? cetrainly it goes hand in hand with capitlaism, political centralization, classism, speciesism, etc. but the inexorable will to technical domination of everything lies at a fundamental, metaphysical level. that's not saying anything deep, merely that the basic way we understand ourselves is in terms of a subject-object dichotoomy. subjectivity is allegedly the only really true thing and objectivity is something less significant that is available for endless manipulation by subjectivity.
even if this spliting of reality into two fundamentally different parts had any truth to it you'd still have to ask what they both have in common such that they are both real. leaving out that basic unity is the nihilism that will kill this culture. i would say the sooner the better, but i can't really hope for that kind of destruction. anyway, the historical unfolding of nihilism will play itself out no matter what i think.
anyway, the depersonalized, efficient, and "message-receiver" style of internet discourse seems to me to be the quintessence of technicized communication. (in addition to the valid point nihilo made about the internet.)
maybe anarchism, especially, but not exclusively, of a primitivist bent, can get its shit together to make something out of the considerable mess that the death of this civilization will bring.
mikerobe
I remember reading that the
I remember reading that the production of a single computer generates more toxic waste than the production of an SUV.
The seamen eating all the Dodo birds of Maritius were not evil or immoral, simply hungry.
Unlooked for results are the bugaboo of human acts.
As to cooperation in this brainwashed culture, I don't hold my breath. Most are semiliterate and respond with the old violence when confronted with any idea which does not affirm their tribal more's.
I do hope we might climb out of the darkness, though we would not be the first species to go extinct upon this planet if we cannot learn that we are all the same bunch.
Good analysis.
Don Smith
Excellent article, well
Excellent article, well researched and articulated!
We have a very similar love - hate relationship with social networking sites. But. To be fair. Our aim is to subvert the technology and perhaps send a different message. Whether subversive, creative or just another voice other than theirs.
What is also perceived as 'theirs', the network, is also contestable.
We use it similarly as this blog-site to re-engage with communities, groups and individuals far and wide.
Our website is a blog for Sonic Travellers. All kinds.
We would like to ask you for permission to post this article up on our site and tweet it as well.... Hopefully it will aid in getting more traffic to your site and many different opinions and voices heard, even if only in brief tweet forms.
regards
Johnny-
www.radioplateaux.org
Thank you. Of course, by
Thank you. Of course, by all means, repost the article and tweet away!
It's obviously ironic that an anti-technology meme should be spread by means of the latest technological devices, but I feel that if these ideas work towards dismantling techno-industrial civilization then that would be a much better option than if the technological system failed because it wiped us all out. The system will, indeed, eat itself. The question is whether or not it will eat us in the process as well.
The people who are the most connected with the the technological infrastructure are some of the people who need most to reassess their association with it. These are the people I'm trying to engage and I'm more than willing to discuss the topic civilly with people who disagree with me about it. I think the people who disagree should encourage this discussion because it's usually not a horrible idea to examine and defend your values.
So again, yes! Please help keep the conversation going. Also... if you would link to the article in my blog (as well as to this page), that would be appreciated. Cheers!
that's it exactly--"an
that's it exactly--"an anti-technology meme." that ideas could be stripped down to a self-replicating language virus is exactly what i had in mind in speaking of how the essence of technology has taken over language. twitter it, blog it, replicate it--it only matters to itself. it is the steadily rotating recurrence of the same. that everything should be sucked into this is the essence. so i take twitter to be much more than a way to distribute "the latest cultural drivel." it is a kind of convulsive self-importance where the only thing that matters is that each little bit of subjectivity--taken as the reality--be affirmed.
some of the surveillance shit in these technologies is duly noted.
i agree with you: it will "eat itself." and it will eat "us" insofar as us are the homo sapiens techno who cannot live without it. others will survive. i plan on it if that 100 year prediction comes sooner. at this point i am betting it will. anyway i am teaching my daughter and her friends some survival skills.
pax anarchista
"I have revived my account
"I have revived my account in an effort to increase my web presence and spur discussion about radical politics. I continue to network with other radicals and enjoy sharing and spreading useful and interesting information."
"A problem I see with this, particularly as a radical political activist, is that there still exists the very real possibility (in the conceivable future) of a very totalitarian and fascistic crackdown on revolutionary organizing and dissent."
Aww how cute, so the author maintains a twitter account to "increase my web presence", but also is fully aware of the the negative aspects, so it's then okay for them to still have an account?
This garbage is like a racist saying theyre fully aware of the negative aspects of racism, and so it's ok for them to be racist. Total apologist trash.
Actually... it's more like
Actually... it's more like saying: "I know the risks but I'm willing to take them." The ridiculous comparison with a racist and racism just seems like someone trying to manifest Godwin's Law. It's more like someone saying... "I know the Nazi's are dangerous but I've decided to shelter people from them and campaign against them anyway." So it's not a logical comparison this person has made but it's a very typical and expected way of whipping up emotions and negative sentiment. Moving on...