Andrew Ross: Industrial Divides

Let me begin with an unproven assertion. All of us here probably want our computers to go faster, and yet most of the people who work with computers already want them to go slower. Information professionals like ourselves are used to thinking of themselves as masters of our work environment, and as competitors in the field of skills, resources, and rewards. Our tools are viewed as artisanal, and they can help us win comparative advantage in the field if they can access and extract the relevant information and the relevant results in a timely fashion. In such a reward environment, it makes sense to respond to the heady promise of velocification in all of its forms: the relentless boosting of chip clock speed, magnification of storage density, of faster traffic on Internet backbones, of higher baud rate modems, of hyper- efficient data-base searches, and rapid data-transfer techniques. These tools are rhetorically aimed at the compression of space as well as time. No longer bound by quaint, regional customs like travelling by Gophers, popping up whimsically all over our national maps, our vehicles are now oceangoing Navigators and global Explorers, although they are still called 'browsers,' as if to suggest that we are still in the local bookstore or branch library. If we ourselves are not whizzkid designers of these technical environments, most of us know people who are. A common repertoire of industrial, design and Internet user lore binds us together and reinforces our (pre) professional esprit de corps. But that shared culture also tends to disconnect us from the world of work where people want computers to go slower, even though these two worlds often overlap, and sometimes in the same office space.

In the other world, the speed controls of technology are routinely used to regulate workers. These forms of regulation are well documented: widespread workplace monitoring and software surveillance, where keyboard quotas and other automated measures are geared to time every operation, from the length of bathroom visits to the output diversions generated by email. Occupationally, this world stretches from the high-turnover burger- flippers in MacDonalds and the offshore data entry sweatshops in India and the Caribbean to piecework professionals and adjunct brainworkers and all the way to the upper level white collar range of front-office managers, accountable to inflexible productivity schedules. It is characterized by technological disemployment, the global outsourcing of low-wage labor, and the replacement of decision-making by expert systems and smart tools; it thrives on undereducation, undermotivation, and underpayment; and it appears to be primarily aimed at the control of workers, rather than at tapping their potential for efficiency, let alone their native ingenuity.

Some of you will object, quite rightly, to my crude separation of technological environments. Many 'first worlders' resent the pace of upgrading, enhancement, and boosting; they perceive this fierce tempo as augmenting, and not reducing, their labor; and they are self-critical about their addiction to the principle of the accelerated life. Likewise, many 'second worlders' see upgrades as the basis of the industrial adjustment that saves their jobs, and information technology skills as their passport to occupational mobility, higher income, and social status. In addition, my crude separation encourages the view that it is technology that determines, rather than simply enables, this division of labor. The latter objection is surely correct. It is capitalist reason, rather than technical reason which underpins this division, although technology has proven to be an infinitely ingenious means of guaranteeing and governing the uneven development of labor and resources. The first objection is a little more tricky because it involves a conflict between how people perceive technological speed and how they respond to it. While there is much talk about the widening gulf between information 'haves' and 'have-nots,' the information rich and the information poor, it is less easy, though by no means impossible, to say whose work and time is unequivocally regulated, and whose is unequivocally assisted by technology. One of the risks here is that you will end up believing that it is the designers and programmers and developers who are free from surveillance and who are thus personally responsible for the decision-making that shapes the regulatory capacity of the technologies. In other words you end up with the fallacy of Designer Determinism, which is just as misleading as that of Technological Determinism.

Let me therefore revise, or qualify my original assertion. I don't want to reject it because I believe it barely needs to be proven that for a vast percentage of workers, there is nothing to be gained from going faster; it is not in their interests to do so, and so their ingenuity on the job is devoted to ways of slowing down the work regime, beating the system, and sabotaging its automated schedules. Complicity with or resistance to acceleration is an important line of demarcation. But equally important is the principle of speed differential, because this is the primary means of creating relative scarcity. Commodities, including parcels of time, only accrue value if and when they are rendered scarce. Time scarcity has been a basic principle of industrial life, from the famous tyranny of the factory clock to the coercive regime of turnaround schedules in the computer-assisted systems of just-in- time production. It is a mistake again to hold the technologies responsible: the invention of the clock no more made industrialists into callous exploiters of labor than it made Europeans into imperialist aggressors (and in any case, tales about centuries of resistance to factory clock time occupy an immense portion of labor history) Capitalism, on the other hand, needs to manufacture scarcity; indeed, it must generate scarcity before it can generate wealth.

Ivan Illich pointed this out in his own way in his 1974 essays on Energy and Equity, when he noted that the exchange value of time becomes a major economic component for a society at a point where the mass of people are capable of moving faster than 15mph. A high speed society inevitably becomes a class society, as people begin to be absent from their destinations, and workers are forced to earn so much to pay to get to work in the first place (in high density cities where mass transportation is cheap, the costs are transferred on to rent). Anyone moving faster must be justified in assuming that their time is more important than those moving more slowly. 'Beyond a critical speed' Illich writes, 'no one can save time without forcing another to lose it.' If there are no speed limits, then the fastest and most expensive will take its toll in energy and equity on the rest: 'the order of magnitude of the top speed which is permitted within a transportation system determines the slice of its time budget that an entire society spends on traffic.' Illich's analysis of time scarcity is, of course, drawn from the model of transportation and not communication technologies. In our time, this distinction, arguably, has become less important, because cybercommunications are increasingly a means of near-instant transportation for information commodities of all descriptions, while they have reduced the need for transportation in the case of information homeworkers, and encouraged WWW users to see themselves as casual globetrotters. It would be a mistake to take this conflation of transport and communication services too literally, although it is part of the vision of the corporate sponsors of new media technologies to embrace many different industrial sectors in a bid to service all of our needs through 'one-stop communications' The introduction of each new mass technology--telegraph, railway, electrification, radio, telephone, television, automobiles, airtravel--has always been accompanied by a spectacular package of promises, guarantees, and assurances that it will fulfill all of our democratic ideals, delivering life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness at a discount price, and restoring all of our lost community into the bargain. Increasingly, however, the concentration of multiple industries into single, transnational conglomerates has meant that the control over these comprehensive but illusory promises is invested in companies that have the power, in principle, to reach out and touch us in many different aspects and zones of our waking lives.

Perhaps that is why our new media hardware cannot afford to advertise any single function through its design in the way it used to do. In the Machine Age of high progressive futurism, design observed the principle of 'form follows function.' In the case of of art moderne, streamline design conveyed the sense of a world moving fast, even when it was stationary. This design aesthetic applied not just to fast-moving vehicles but also to domestic objects like pencil sharpeners and kettles. The whole world was moving in one direction--forwards. This design aesthetic has not been applied to technologies in the Information Age. The casing designs for information hardware have retained the chunky, robotic iconography of office equipment, and have not generally sought to simulate the physical sensation of unidirectional speed, opting instead for the comfort-oriented ergonomic designs of recent years. No different are the designs for laptop computers, which emphasize their compact mobility in a circumspect, low profile way; there is no outward sign of what these sleek dark boxes are actually used for. For those who do not possess them, or who do not live in the world of high- speed communications, they have the sinister look of stealth technologies, aggressively associated with defence, security, and inaccessibility. We are far removed from the blithe, self-promotional impulse of Cadillac tailfin styling. Which is to say that these new machines are not graphic billboards for the good life. They appear as status symbols of access, inscrutable gateways to an invisible world of wealth, power and knowledge, even carnal, that is always just out of reach. Predictably, mass audience ISP salesmanship often employs the voyeuristic rhetoric of the circus peepshow or sexclub barker, promising salacious experiences that lie just beyond the black curtain. Sign up for Internet access and it will all be yours, uncensored, or, as Ken Wark has satirized the techno-sublime equivalent: buy more RAM and you will be free!

The selling of the Information Age has rested on many such promises of hidden delights but has also appealed to anxieties about being left behind, without a stake or address on the frontier when the bonanza finally arrives. Two years ago, telephone giants like MCI and AT&T ran a series of bizarre advertising campaigns informing us that when the Information Superhighway finally does get built, their company will be the one to serve you. This was blue-sky futurism at its most perverse, and probably betrayed more about corporate anxieties than about those of consumers. Today, it is the TV manufacturers that are banking on the more familar, domestic architecture of the television set to deliver access in the form of Web TV. Most mass customers still have no idea what it is they are getting themselves into. The benefits of being able to surf around the WWW are much more difficult to conceptualize than were the benefits of watching football game live on TV or of travelling quickly and comfortably from Utrecht to Bruxelles. It is no surprise then that the design inscrutablity of the cyberbox--its refusal to communicate any messages about its function, rather like the monolith in 2001--can be viewed as a commercial asset, because it suggests unrestricted, albeit indefinite, returns to the consumer, and not as a liability, connoting insufficiency, obsolescence, or inertia. In this sense the cyberbox is the physical embodiment of the flexible, multidirectional global vision of the transnational corporation; it is never out of place because it can be anywhere, it can do anything; nothing in the material world is lost in its translation of space, and what is lost in the way of temporality is gained by always being in more than one place at the same time. The history of corporate design can shows us in shorthand how we got here. Consider the historical progression of corporate logos, which have moved away from the typographic solidity of block capitals, in the age of incorporation and national capitalism, to the celebration of speed and mobility suggested by sans serif lettering, at the dawn of postindustrialism, and finally to the widespread use of globes and orbital pathways in the logos of today's age of transnationalism.

This progression has not stood in the way of the widespread, and apparently anachronistic, use of the automobile age metaphor of the Information Superhighway, or Infobahn, which functioned for a number of crucial years (I don't believe it does any longer) as the most persuasive point of reference for describing the new communications networks. One is tempted to think of the use of this metaphor and all its accoutrements--ramps, regional backbones, testbeds--as an example of what McLuhan called rearview mirrorism, whereby the forms of an older technology are reflected in the content of the new. My instinct is to suggest a less formalistic explanation. In the US at least, the metaphor was introduced at a time, in the early 1990s, when government was being petitioned to fund some portion of the infrastructure. Some legislators, many public interest groups, and most small companies saw this form of sponsorship as the only way of ensuring that the telecom giants would not build and dominate an entirely privatized system of networks from the beginning (as the railroad robber barons had done in the 19th century). One model was the interstate highway system, a public works project constructed in the name of national defence and General Motors, and powerfully overseen in the Senate by the father of Al Gore, who subsequently became the most vocal proponent of the Information Superhighway, spouting the rhetoric of the National Information Infrastructure and the Global Information Infrastructure at every available moment in the first term of the Clinton administration. To cut a long story short, the Internet, which was earmarked for obsolescence as an obscure academic backwater, has actually become the Information Superhighway for all intents and purposes, and the corporations that had been promised the role of gatekeepers and toll-collectors have been obliged to re-orient and re- channel all of their development strategies through the Internet. Talk about the Information Superhighway is scarce these days.

There is another story to tell, however, about the decline of the Information Superhighway concept, and the rise of more ecologically- resonant images and metaphors associated with the Web. It is an obvious story in which biological triumphs over the mechanical, in which the organic, interconnected world of natural, self-regulating communities replaces the rigid, linear structure of a mega-machine civilization built for privatized mobility at the price of hard-energy overconsumption. The bad ecological associations are discarded, along with the framework of centralized control that had been the hallmark of a Fordist system of production epitomized by the automobile industry. The metaphor of the World Wide Web could not be more consonant with the eco-friendly iconography of todays' global corporations.

One has only to look to the leading Internet philosophers--the organic intellectuals of the Net--to see how their native boosterism blends seamlessly with the ethics and structures of modern corporate life. Kevin Kelley (and not Nicholas Negroponte) is the most obvious example, not only because his ideas are consonant with the Wired empire, but also because they carry on their back a rich history of countercultural memories culled from the early Whole Earth Review and Co-Evolution Quarterly. It is important to read Kelley's book, Out of Control, with one eye on the countercultural past and one on the corporate present. That way you will see how the anarchist, libertarian values of decentralization, communitarian self-regulation, biosocial engineering, and relative autonomy within organic connectedness have become integral to the newly greenwashed corporate philosophies of our day. Kelley's hymns of praise to the biologizing of the machine, to the death of centralized, top-down control, to webby nonlinear causality, to the superorganic consciousness of swarmware, and to the evolved distributed intelligence of parallel computing read like a subtle inventory of public relations jargon for any large telecommunications company.

Nowhere in Kelley's 500 page book is there any mention of the second world which I began this lecture talking about--the low-wage world of automated surveillance, subcontracted piecework, crippling workplace injuries, and the tumors in the livers of chip factory workers. Nor is his book an exception. There is a complete and utter gulf between the public philosophizing of the whizzkid new media designers, artists and entrepreneurs and the global sourcing of low wage labor enclaves associated with the new information technologies. Boosters like Kelley speak of an ethic of intelligent control that is emerging from the use of the new media. The term is stunningly accurate, because it evokes a long history of managerial dreams, on the one hand, and automated intelligence on the other. How you feel about this ethic may depend on which side of the division of labor you find yourself. Again, the problem lies not with the technologies themselves, nor with the speed at which they operate.

I say this because I believe it is possible to have an affordable, sustainable media environment (boasting a diverse range of media, from publicly-supported to the small bohemian independents) without electronic sweatshops just as you can have a sustainable world of fashion without garment sweatshops. But as long as we keep one realm of ideas apart from the experience of the other, people simply will not make the connexions between the two. This, I hope, ought to be part of our work here, part of the task of opening the doors of perception.