Re: <nettime> Technopolitics of the future

Felix Stalder wrote about David Harvey's idea of separate but interrelated "activity spheres":

"One cannot understand the shape and dynamics of the state without its relation to capital and vice-versa, or, increasingly, without eco-system pressures. While these domains are related, they also follow their own dynamics, but in that movement, they transform the others as well, or are held back by them. [...] The task, it seems, is to bring these bits and pieces, the cultural, the technocratic and segments of the economy, in such a relationship they can pull the rest into a different direction, and phasing out those sectors, particularly of the economy, that cannot or do not want to adapt."

Felix, I agree that David Harvey's idea of distinct but interacting 'activity spheres' is the best way to track and understand change in capitalist democracies. I haven't listened to the recent lecture, but Harvey developed the idea at least a decade ago, in both The Enigma of Capital (the chapter "Capital Evolves") and A Companion to Marx's Capital (the chapter "What Technology Reveals"). I often used the image of coevolving spheres to introduce the Three Crises seminars, because it's close to the cybernetic concept of circular causality within complex adaptive systems. Harvey writes that "Uneven development between and among the elements produces contingency in human evolution (in much the same way that unpredictable mutations produce contingency in Darwinian theory)." And he adds: "The danger for social theory is to see one of the elements as determinant of all the others."

Of course when you get close to it there are difficulties. First, how do you define the broad categories, and how do you sift through actual phenomena to fill each category with relevant content (i.e. particular technologies, production processes, organizational forms, regulatory systems, consumption norms, political ideologies, cultural trends, etc.)? And then how do you then interrelate these actual phenomena, in order to track and predict changes in the entire system? Sociologists typically do it by setting up tables where specific and seemingly disparate contents are presented as the elements of a system, which in time gives way to another system, with a different arrangement of contents, after some kind of break or crisis (cf Freeman and Louca's table from The Economics of Industrial Innovation, excerpt here: https://brianholmes.files.wordpress.com/2012/06/1st_session.pdf, p. 8). The approach is a bit clunky, but I learned a lot from it. Since the 1990s, computers have opened up the possibility for agent-based modeling of change in social-ecological systems (https://sci-hub.se/10.1002/wcc.647). In these models, the production processes of certain environmental phenomena, like CO2 concentration in the atmosphere, are categorized and quantified as rigorously as possible; and then, specific policy choices or cultural trends affecting one or more human populations are fed into the system, to see how the environmental outputs change. It's extremely interesting and rhetorically effective too, as recent IPCC reports have shown. However I have not yet seen an agent-based model that can represent the dynamics of what Felix calls a "total social crisis." Something like Adam Tooze's seriously wonky Chartbook, dedicated to analyzing specific elements of what he calls "the polycrisis," is still a better way to grasp technopolitical dynamics (https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/chartbook-165-polycrisis-thinking).

The lack of an intuitive representation is the biggest problem. Can the citizens of capitalist democracies even see what's going on? Biden inaugurated the current administration by talking about "cascading crises," and has gone on to perform a number of coordinated interventions on system dynamics, all of which constitute an attempt to deliberately set up the next technopolitical paradigm. One of these is to spur the electrification of transportation by means of research funding (especially batteries), the construction of supporting infrastructure (transmission lines, charging stations) and tax incentives for both producers and consumers. These production policies are correlated with ideological and cultural outreach to minority groups, elements of the white working classes and highly educated progressives, all of which have to be added to the urban middle class vote in order to retain political power. Finally, in an attempt to reshape the international environment, the administration has pursued the economic decoupling from China that was started by Trump, and it has used the Ukraine war to rebuild the Nato alliance system in view, not only of the current proxy war with Russia, but also as a way to push back against Chinese expansionism. If we could see all this as a comprehensive policy in the face of a total social-ecological crisis, then it would be possible to ask questions and demand reorientations - that is, actually engage in the political process. Otherwise the primary motivating force for system change will remain war, as it was for the emergence of Keynesian Fordism, and again for Neoliberalism (which only consolidated internationally in the wake of the Gulf War). Indeed, in the history of capitalist democracy so far, major changes still seem to pivot on war.

It's clear to me that the only viable option is to turn climate threats into a motivating force outside of war. Right now the major powers - US, EU and China - are engaged in a kind of mixed condition, between war capitalism and response to climate change. I'm not sure whether a Ukrainian victory will damp down or ramp up the war component. But I do think, even today, that war is far from the single determinant of what's going on, even in the technocratic EU. It is, however, the best existing way to place complex processes of change under the tight control of political authority: a situation that could easily become disastrous.

The Technopolitics group in Vienna developed a timeline of change in the information society that was able to spark a lot of discussions (https://www.technopolitics.info/). I wasn't around for any of those and I wonder whether anything like the Timeline project is continuing today. From a distance what it seemed to leave out was exactly the role of major crises, and the interventions that somehow temporarily resolve those crises - but maybe that came out very strongly in the discussions, I don't know. A visualization can produce a purely contemplative sense of understanding and intellectual mastery, but it can also help an individual, a group or a social movement to situate their own small actions at strategic places within a wider tableau. I'm curious if anyone has encountered convincing and actionable visualizations of the present crisis.

best, Brian

On Mon, Nov 7, 2022 at 1:02 PM Felix Stalder <felix@openflows.com> wrote:

On 27.10.22 20:50, Brian Holmes wrote:
> Indeed. The point is now to think those politics, and make their
> possibilities recognizable.

I think it's pretty obvious that we are living in a period that is
characterized by what one could call, with a nod to Durkheim, "total
social crises". Meaning, they are not longer restricted to a single
sphere -- so neatly separated in the modern liberal thinking -- but play
out across the full-range of social domains. Thus any analysis needs to
able to understand their interplay.

But what are these domains? David Harvey's recent talk on "Marx’s
Historical Materialism"

http://davidharvey.org/2022/01/new-podcast-david-harveys-anti-capitalist-chronicles

summarizes that very clearly, differentiating among seven sets of
relations (though there is more than one way to slice the pie):

- technology
- nature
- relations of (re)production (waged and unwaged labor)
- mental conceptions
- relations of everyday life
- political (class) relations
- and systems of governance.

All these sets have what Marx calls a "metabolic relation" to each
other, meaning they are dependent on one another and their concrete form
can only be understood to through their interdependence. One cannot
understand the shape and dynamics of the state without its relation to
capital and vice-versa, or, increasingly, without eco-system pressures.

While these domains are related, they also follow their own dynamics,
but in that movement, they transform the others as well, or are held
back by them. Geo-egineering, for example, is a technological response
to eco-system pressures in order to preserve relations of productions
and class relations. Black Lives Matter aims to transform mental
conceptions in order to dismantal racist/colonialist systems of governance.

Take, for example, the pandemic. It's zoonotic origin indicates a deep
problem with our relations to nature. In response, massive technological
development (mRNA vaccines, deepening of digitization etc) was
coordinated by the government. At the same time, changes in everyday
life (lockdown, masking, 'distancing', etc) were introduced, and mental
conceptions started to shift. Of course, a massive economic crisis could
only be averted by government intervention and the boundaries between
productive and reproductive labor shifted.

While you could say the feedback loop built into the "metabolic
relations to nature" triggered the pandemic, it's actual dynamics can
only be understood by taking into account the dynamic relations between
the different domains. The relation between the state and capital was
evident both in the state's willingness to finance the vaccines, and in
it's commitment to enforce patent monopolies. The importance of mental
conceptions became evident in the public reactions to the vaccines. The
point is, one cannot reduce on sphere to the other. There is no
structure - superstructure relationship.

Neoliberalism (or liberalism more generally) is ideologically unable to
address such total phenomena, because of its constitutive commitment to
separating the domains.

In the 20th century, in the West, there have been, as far as I can see,
three ways of reacting to such 'total crises'. Fascism, Keynesian and
'war efforts'.

At the moment, all three approaches to 'total politics' are bein persued
at the same time. The fascist writing is on the wall, it's, at the core,
an us-vs-them zero sum game. "We" prosper because "they" suffer. The
green new deal is a modernized form of Keynesianism, but more holistic
(or 'total') by focussing on the interrelation between all the domains.
What Europe is trying to do is a kind of 'war economy', in relation to
the actual war but also as a way to speed up the energy transition.
While I agree with the direction, I doubt that a technocratic approach
can work, not the least because it cannot shape many of the domains that
are actively involved shaping the problem. If people freaked out because
of a vaccine that was perceived being forced top-down, just wait for the
energy restrictions imposed.

But then again, the transformation of the mental conceptions, the
understanding of a transformed relationship to nature, are also quite
far developed.

The task, it seems, is to bring these bit and pieces, the cultural, the
technocratic and segments of the economy, in such a relationship they
can pull the rest into a different direction, and phasing out these
sectors, particularly of the economy, that cannot or do not want to adapt.

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