ideology and technology

Hey! It's me! I'm Ideology

In traditional Marxist analysis of capitalism, technology is viewed as the product of science that participates in the mechanization and automization of production and reproduction. While such perspective of technology still holds in the late 20th and early 21st century world economy, the so-called information revolution that was brought by computational and biological innovations gives technology a new face-a new face that takes technology beyond its materiality. In simple words, technology becomes ideological. In resonance to this ideological view of information technology (IT), there are different views on how we should proceed in the process of class struggle. In Lawrence Lessig's book The Future of Ideas, he argues that information technology, or the internet in particular, is a source for the fight against privatization and domination. But as I would like to argue, such a conception of IT is not enough in either explaining what IT really does or in suggesting the future that IT could bring to our world. Instead, like the way that Marx views technology, and like every technological invocation, the only way to understand IT's existence in society is to examine them as both material condition in the process of production and the ideological condition in which capital strives.

First, let's consider the background in which information technology becomes important. The idea of an information system was first taken into the labs when the US Air Force saw the necessity of creating an extensive communication system to ensure its control over nuclear warheads in the condition of war in the Cold War Era. But besides its usage in war, the idea of a networked communication system was soon adopted by some scientists for mail exchange. It is not until later under the cooperation between some Stanford students, the internet was finally used as a public inter-computer communication interface.
The internet and the idea of a fast, efficient, and easily-accessible information network is exactly what globalization needed. It provides transnational firms and the world market the ability to save time, human labor and transaction costs. Because transnational firms often focus on multiple production sites at the same time in the global setting, the ability to manage and coordinate becomes crucial to their success. Therefore, naturally, the software industry and informatization become the new means that redefine the mechanism of capital production. What is central to capital's survival is, then, the pace of capital informatization.

The role of information technology is therefore to create new networks and provide compatibility to new market frontiers that capital needs. Again, the internet, equipped with its new sense of "space ," is an excellent example of such process. As a platform of production, the internet generates a "common" of information sharing and cooperative innovations. The idea behind the success of this common, as Lessig argues, is the fact that it promotes decentralized creativity. Based on those properties of the internet, the necessary consequence of the informatization of capital is the shift of capitalistic production from traditional industrial production to the production of services. Healthcare, software, media, and the entertainment become the new center of capitalistic production. Essential industries such as agriculture and raw material production also need to undergo the transformation of informatization in order to be able to communicate and interact with other sectors of the economy. Furthermore, even in traditional industries such as crop growing or mining, the focus is no longer production itself but the innovation of new ways of production. The basic consciousness of informatization is the faith in innovation.

Influenced by the informatization of production, the exploitation of the workers also takes on a new form. First, the exploitation of the body shifts to the exploitation of the mind. since the informatization of production becomes a new kind of production by itself, the division of labor also gains a new look. Work is divided into different levels of cognitive tasks ranked by SAT, GRE, IQ, and other educational examination scores. The sores are the circulatory value (exchange-value) of labors that capital uses to determine which working condition each individual belongs. People with the lower scores belong to the realm of data entry in the smaller cubicles whereas people with higher scores belong to the realm of the higher level symbol manipulation in the larger cubicles. Each labor is responsible for one domain that he or she is most specialized in. labor in genera, in the process of informationzation, becomes abstract labor.

Second, human lives become fragmentized. In the pervious aspect of exploitation that was discussed-i.e. the abstraction of labor, it is already apparent that the human life in the setting of informatization is separated into mental lives (the scores and the education) and physical lives (the daily lives and the spare times). Whereas in the industrial forms of production human labors involve both the exercise of the body and the mind, labor in the information age are either physical or mental but never both. Those who are on the front line of production are physically exploited while he workers in the buildings inputting data are mentally exploited. It is arguable that the two kinds of exploitations-the physical and the mental are not separable but in the process of informatization, the two are separated as the physical are more and the more replaced by robotics and machines whereas the mental becomes the new center of human exploitation. This distinction was not made in industrial capital because the mechanization of capital at the time was not welcomed by the workers as they saw machines take away their working opportunities and made working condition worse. However on the other hand, in the information age, the informatization of work is itself a welcomed ideology (at least by the mass majority) because everything starts to seem so easy and exciting simply because people wanted walk away from the ugly image of the factories. They do not realize, however, the fact of exploitation cannot be changed by the form of mechanization. It is from this lag of understanding that informatization quickly sought into every aspect of modern lives. The process of exploitation happens not only in the working places but also at home, in school, on the street, and in the theaters. The best example is television. Television watching not only increases the retardation of the mind but also conforms the workers to the kind of visual stimuli and ways of accessing reality that capitalist ideology wants them to enter. The pitiful result is therefore the cycle of exploitation and the fragmentation of human life. People's lives are split into "outdoor" and "indoor," "with and without monitors." Many aspects of people's lives evolve around the binary system between professional-indoor with monitors, and leisure -outdoor without monitors. However, ironically, many do not seem to realize what they are being deprived of. Hollywood entertainment and the overloading of information keep them busy. The new generations that are more informatized drain themselves into the realm of information such as internet creativity to further informatize themselves. Only such a lifestyle makes sense in the ideology of the informatized capital society.

In Lessig's view, this rend of informatization of the subject is the equivalent to creativity and innovation. He does not seem to realize the ideological aspect of information. But as Althusser told us in his essay "Ideology and ideological State Apparatus," Lessig's conception is incomplete. The lifestyle of work plus entertainment is the ideology of informatized capital. Information will never stand out and raise its voice and yell "hey, I'm an ideology!" Instead, what it does is to interpellate the subjects and proclaim the glory of creativity and multiplicity of sensual experience. Only through a "science" of the production of ideology can one see the real conditions of existence and the imaginary relationship that the ideology of information provides us. From example, it is not well known that the motor company Ford has a division called Tele-seek that is created for the purpose of gathering people's opinion about Ford pick-up trucks in online chat rooms. From the perspective of innovation and the fun of communicating with people through the internet, the ways that information technology reproduces ideological subjects will never be apparent.

Finally, as an accumulation of the two kinds of exploitation mentioned above, the third kind of exploitation goes deeper into the cure of humans-information and all other technology in the information age plays with human desires and generate the illusion of human almightiness through science. With this being said, we can now state that the ideology that dominates the information age is the ideology of technopoly. As literary critics Neil Postman define it, Technopoly is:

A state of culture. It is also a state of mind. It consists in the deificaiton of technology, which means that the culture seeks its authorization in technology, finds its satisfactions in technology, and takes its orders from technology. This requires the development of a new kind of social order, and of necessity leads to the rapid dissolution of much that is associated with traditional beliefs. Those who feel most comfortable in Technopoly are those who are convinced that technical progress is humanity's superhuman achievement and the instrument by which our most profound dilemmas may be solved. They also believe that information is an unmixed blessing, which through its continued and uncontrolled production and dissemination offers increased freedom, creativity, and peace of mind.

In short, technopoly is the belief that essentially all human problems can be solved by technology. This notion depicts exactly the ideology that capitalism in the information age produces. For example, it is not difficult to find advertisement and magazine articles that suggest the almightiness of genetic engineering and nano-technology in the treatment of health problem and prevent death. Some rich people are even convinced that cryogenic freezing technology can make them live "into the future." In those minds of technologists, death and birth seem more like problems in engineering than problems in their own inability to accept the natural cycle and let go. The research of quantum mechanics and nuclear energy also gives people the utopian hope that eventually scarcity of energy will be eliminated. And space exploration, genetic modification, and cloning seem to convince many that we can finally return to the "state of nature"-the end of scarcity. Any experienced and honest scientist will tell you all of these promising hopes are just fairy tales. The hope of treating human problems with engineering is simply unattainable.

However, if we go a step further, the real problem with technopoly is not so much about whether science and technology can really stop death or eliminate all disease, the real problem is about what we are loosing in the mode of production centered around technology. As we know that the process of production is necessarily accompanied by the process of reproduction, in the information age it is with the ideology that technology can accomplish everything that is being produced as the reproductive condition of production. Such ideology exacerbates the consumption of technological products and in turn further generates the hope that technological products will take away all kinds of human sufferings. Therefore, like any mode of production based on exploitation, the real danger of the production based on the ideology of technopoly is in the fact that technopoly "represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real condition of existence." With the deepening of the informatization of production, the real condition of existence also retreat into the realm of the unconscious. Instead, the ideology of technopoly proclaims to people its transcendence and end in itself. It manifests itself in the promise of a bright future-a promise of illusion.

Technopoly not only depends capital's exploitation, it also redefines capital. The fundamental impact that technopoly brings to capital is the blurring between production and reproduction. In traditional industrial capital, capital produces both the material products and the immaterial subjectivity (reproduction) but in the informatization process of capital, all productions become centered on the production of subjectivity. Material production rather becomes secondary. In order to understand this difference, it is easier if we shift back to the discussion of technopoly. From technopoly we see that production of any type of products involve the process of informatization. This process is necessary because in order for the producer to make a profit, the producer has to compete over thousands of other producers that are not physically located in its own geographical area. The process of competition drives all producers, big and small, to the most advance technology possible because only in that they will not get behind and such competitiveness is "the nature" of political economy of capitalism.

Interestingly enough, the most advance technology available is the information technology. IT allows competition to go beyond physical limitation through the "recoding" of the production process. Production as to transform in the form of information to gain markets and maintain its own competitiveness. Therefore, as a result of this material-to-coding process of production, the process of consumption has to become informatized as well. How to make this happen is the magical trick of technopoly. Here I will just give an example of how the trick is done. In the Wall Street Journal last October, the head of the software company Oracle declared that it wants to do a charity to the people of the world. The company wants to help the US government to develop a single database that unifies all the different kind of databases on the Internet. And the trick is that Oracle will do this for free. However, apparently Oracle is only doing this favor for free only because there is a bigger profit lies ahead of the action. Otherwise, as Marx calls it, Oracle would be indulged in an "absurd tautology." What the unification of databases actually does is that it can help Oracle to better discriminate customers in its services. In order for Oracle to e able to create the almighty database, it has to first be able to make more people convert their way of encoding into its way of encoding. Howe does Oracle make this happen? Again, it does it by providing the code for free or providing certain services for free (or at least partially free). This illusion of "free services" gives incentive for the consumers to give up on their ways of doing things. For those who do not give up, they quickly falls into the group of the marginal.

In order to maintain this conforming process, incentives are not enough. Oracle has to convince people that what it does is genuine and beneficial to the human kind. In other words, it wants to establish a moral and ethical ground of what it is doing as well. Therefore, we see Oracle tells the world:

In addition to Linux, Oracle has developed industrial-strength applications that run on clusters of commodity blade services, or grids---grid computing is about resource allocation, information sharing, and high availability. Resource allocation ensures that everyone gets the processing cycles he or she needs and that resources don't sit idle if requests are pending…and naturally, a grid must be high available. With these remarkable milestones in its more-than-25-years history, Oracle remains committed to continual technological innovation.

Therefore, as Oracle we do not welcome software that are incompatible to ours because we need your cooperation to complete our national database project. Naturally, if you make such software, you should be extinguished. With these remarkable milestones in our more than 25 years of discrimination and domination, we remain committed to continual technological innovation for the sake of eliminating incompatibility in our future of profit making.

Therefore what we see in the Oracle example is an interplay between capital and the ideology of technopoly. It provides informatization the value of "availability, compatibility, and innovation." By doing so, people are not only forced to participate in the process of informatization but also willingly participate or convince themselves to participate in the process based on the justification that the ideology of technopoly produces for them. Technopoly not only lure people into informatization, it also provides the moral and psychological ground that people need to make sure they are not only doing it because of the environment but because of something within themselves. However, despite this feedback loop of self-propagation that capital creates, we have seen the exploitation behind this process of capital and value creating process. Consequentially, the key to class struggle in the information age is therefore ideological struggle. What we want is to reveal the system of technopoly.

How to reveal the system is a bit tricky. Althusser showed us that simply walking outside of ideology is impossible. He says, "What thus seems to take place outside ideology, in reality takes place in ideology."
Instead of saying a way of getting outside of ideology, it is better to say a way of subverting ideology. To subvert ideology we need two things. One of the two we already possess and the other we are far from possessing. What we posses is technopoly itself. As discussed, technopoly's survival depends on the formation of a network of sharing and free exchange. In Lessig's words, this network is really a common space in which both capital and non-capital activity can strive. In a deeper sense, the word common is a synthesis of the antagonism between exploitation (capital) and the exploited. Both need the multitude and the freedom that the common provides. The internet, for example, is therefore the material ground for fighting against capital. Specifically, the current against Oracle's database project and the de-privatization of the internet services would be actions possible to be taken within the legal structure of capital society. Lessig, as a lawyer, shows us how the issue of patent law and the ownership of databases are still unsettled in the legal arena and they are certainly worth to fight for. Such actions would be subversive because they are not actions against capital in the sense that they violate the superstructure in which capital functions. These actions are actions that can be taken lawfully and peacefully.

However, on the other hand, it is the momentum of pushing for the legal and lawful fight against capital that we are lacking in the current world. Very often we see people stand in the street protesting against globalization, capitalism, war, and inequalities but rarely we see people living lifestyles that are disobedient to the ideology of technopoly. Whereas the ideology of capital diffuses itself in all aspect of the modern life and modern consciousness, the fight against capital only appear in abstraction. Masses of people have accepted their status of being as subjects naturally interpellated by the calling of capital power either in the way of becoming a capitalist or in the way of responding in rage. As Althusser points out, any "conscious act" against capital is in a way the seeking of an "outside" of the ideology of capital. Because there is not an outside of ideology, the attempt to go outside of ideology is doomed to failure. What people should do instead is to realize that the ideology of liberation is also contained in the ideology of capital. We do not need to look elsewhere for the fight against capital. It happens in every second of our daily lives when we decide what to buy, what to eat, what emotion we should have, what attitude we should have toward others and what our relationships are with nature. Simply put, the power of ideological struggle lies in the awareness of our subjectivity. It is one thing that we are "already interpellated by ideology as subjects" as Althusser calls it, it is another thing that we become "aware" of this fact. When we are aware of this fact or any reality that we perceive in the analysis of the appearance of the world, we not only redefine our subjectivity through intellectual discovery, we also get in touch with the pre-condition of the subject-i.e. the awareness (the being) that is really the foundation of subjects. Althusser is correct in pointing out that:

Now it is this knowledge [the knowledge of the process of how we become conscious, or how we recognize ourselves as subjects] that we have to reach…and from within ideology we have to outline a discourse which tries to break with ideology, in order to dare to be the beginning of a scientific discourse on ideology.

To reiterate Althusser's point, the "scientific discourse on ideology" and the "tries to break with ideology" depends on the extend in which we understand our consciousness-i.e. how we become aware and how awareness interact with the world. Within Althusser's confirmation, now I have the gut to say that it is the practice of awareness that our ideological and material liberation is based on, at least, in our age. With the development of the new science of awareness and the new ground that information technology brings to us, class struggle will be one step closer to liberation.

Postman, Neil. Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology, New York, Vintage Books, pp. 71- 72.
Lessig, Lawrence. The Future of Ideas. N.Y., Random House.