Imaginary Futures

Richard Barbrook gave a fascinating, erudite lecture of amazing breadth at the British Computer Society this week, on why "America today is everywhere else tomorrow". I was expecting to be sceptical of much of his thesis, and it did seem to concentrate on the American story at the expense of the Russian story. But I found his analysis of technology's role in the Cold War quite convincing, and agree that we are reinventing a future first recognised in the 1960's.

Richard started by identifying that the future of the world began at the 1962 World's Fair, where the convergence of telecom, media and computing - and the idea that it would reshape society - was first promoted. Every computer company advert since then has been about creating "one world" of freely flowing information. Marshall McLuhan in 1964 asked why these technologies in particular were the ones that would define the future. In so doing, he invented the "information society" and "knowledge economy" concepts so beloved by politicians today. Some selective quoting from Wikipedia will explain McLuhan:

According to McLuhan, the advent of print technology contributed to and made possible most of the salient trends in the Modern period in the Western world: individualism, democracy, Protestantism, capitalism and nationalism.
...
Visual, individualistic print culture will ... be brought to an end by what McLuhan calls "electronic interdependence," when electronic media replace visual culture with aural/oral culture. In this new age, humankind will move from individualism and fragmentation to a collective identity, with a "tribal base." McLuhan's coinage for this new social organization is the global village...

(Visual culture is mass publishing: newspapers, TV, movies. Aural/oral culture is personal publishing: email, instant messaging, even blogs. As for the global village, think ... well you're surfing the Web already, what more to know? "Surfing" comes from McLuhan too :-)

So McLuhan started the intellectual analysis of what the coming electronic age would mean for society. Meanwhile, the favoured view in American political circles was provided by ex-Trotskyist James Burnham, who said in The Managerial Revolution (1941) that the next step after liberal capitalism wasn't communism (as the Russians liked to believe) but managerial capitalism - big business working for big government. This aligned with Schlesinger's The Vital Center (1948), which promoted pragmatism, technocracy and regulated growth, i.e. neither free markets nor totalitarianism but a Third Way. And what better Third Way than the Great Society of JFK and LBJ: welfare, universal suffrage and NASA.

Meanwhile, in the USSR, their vision was that the somewhat rubbish central planning of the time would evolve into "cybernetic communism", where a "unified information system" of computers in every home, shop and factory would track every purchase and shipment, enabling perfect electronic central planning. (Richard claimed this was the first vision of the Internet, which I suppose it is if you squint a bit.) Touching faith in man's ability to control what he cannot was exhibited by Oskar Lange's The Computer & The Market: "The electronic computer does not replace the market. It fulfills tasks which the market never was able to perform".

In other words, the Russians knew their economy was materially behind America's, but claimed the destiny of communism would be a far more advanced economy in the future. After Sputnik, this was not exactly what America wanted to hear. So (D)ARPA's Internet research wasn't really about survivable decentralised communications; that was merely the technology. It was about the American political system and its McLuhan-esque post-industrial society producing a unified information system first. That would mean America had the best vision of the future, and in Richard's words, "would be the one that owned time, and therefore controlled space".

Expanding the WW2 tradition of "warrior scientist bureaucrats", the Department of Defense funded not only MIT and BBN but social scientists too. They were tasked with showing that the American present and the American future were materially better than the Russian alternative. Bell's The Coming of Post-Industrial Society described the future as "a giant university", where the icon of industrial society - the entrepreneur - is disfavoured in comparison with the icon of post-industrial society - the academic. (Though I'm not sure the USSR had many entrepreneurs, so this seems like tilting at windmills.) Among endless charts of American economic progress, RAND's Herman Kahn listed, in 1971, 100 future inventions: video recording, satellite broadcasting, home education and interconnected home computers are all there.

I was very pleased to see Richard reference J.C.R. Licklider, who's trumpeted in Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet as the unassuming multi-disciplinary psychologist who conceptualised networked computing.

Richard also spoke about how the proxy Cold War in the southern hemisphere was the only place where American-v-Russian visions of post-industrial society could be promoted. The Vietnam War was a case in point, where American computers planned the war and computed body count metrics to identify success and setback. But the war was won on TV by guerilla peasants who didn't own TVs but knew enough to storm Saigon's presidential palace twice so cameramen could get it on film. Thus, the American inventors of the information society lost the war because of information, no matter how much data their IBM mainframes could crunch.

Now we're living in what was once the future, and the Internet is everywhere. But Richard says we don't have the information society we were promised. We've got the raw connectivity but not the "awareness" and "intimacy" that McLuhan envisaged. Consider Sun's technology-focused tagline, "The Network is the Computer"; it reduces the human element to zero. George Santayana said, "Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it", but Richard did a great job of transposing history and future, and I like his version more: "Those who do not remember the future are condemned to repeat it". So the clarion call is: "We must invent new futures in our own interests". I guess he means futures not controlled by the softelecomedia corporations and their content partners: Apple and Disney; Microsoft and NewsCorp; Comcast and Time Warner; Sony and Sony.

And if not by big business, then not by big government either. TIME this week characterised "the end of ideology in Europe" in terms that Burnham would recognise:

In the 50 years after World War II, the state of Europe demanded men and women with ideas vital enough to remake a broken Continent and rebuild its broken economies. That work fit for heroes, one might suppose, is done. Europe is prosperous and free; it needs leaders less than managers.

But we in the West have far less control over our own futures than we are used to. TIME immediately continues:

Yet ... this comfortable idea is an illusion. Europe faces urgent challenges: integrating its growing Muslim population into civil society, coping simultaneously with a declining working-age population and rising expectations of social protection, meeting the economic challenge of Asia, reinvigorating its rotting scientific base.

McLuhan thought technology would reduce social fragmentation and end the nation-state, but there's more fragmentation than ever. The politicians' response? Fight for the middle ground. They assume "we" are unified enough to define "our" interests. But we're not. We're old versus young. We're going to be fighting ourselves in twenty years time. And when our living standards - the bedrock of the West's triumph in the Cold War - start to fall, thirty years hence, look out.