Like this:

“I want to see you not through the Machine,” said Kuno. “I want to speak to you not through the wearisome Machine.”

“Oh, hush!” said his mother, vaguely shocked. “You mustn”t say anything against the Machine.”

“Why not?”

“One mustn’t.”

“You talk as if a god had made the Machine,” cried the other.

“I believe that you pray to it when you are unhappy. Men made it, do not forget that. Great men, but men. The Machine is much, but it is not everything. I see something like you in this plate, but I do not see you. I hear something like you through this telephone, but I do not hear you. That is why I want you to come. Pay me a visit, so that we can meet face to face, and talk about the hopes that are in my mind.”

– E.M. Forster, “The Machine Stops”.

Adam Curtis’s new series, All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, looks at the impact of computer technology on our understanding of politics and society. Here’s my reading of the first film in the series.

Curtis’s essential thesis is that the emergence of the techno-utopianism of Silicon Valley – the so-called “Californian ideology” – is the effect of a new distribution of power, a new means of control, and not a form of liberation. The liberationist view of the internet is, in fact, an ideological mystification, in plain old Marxist terms. Curtis focuses on the intersection of two figures, Ayn Rand and Alan Greenspan, who first met in the 50s. Curtis’s film shows, very effectively, how Rand’s extreme form of free market liberalism and the utopianism of Silicon Valley intersect in the economic policies pursued by Greenspan in the 90s, when new forms of computer modelling made possible unprecedented ways of calculating, and hedging against, risk. The effect of this was to increase short term speculative venture capital by the banks and the shadow banking industry, leading to the disastrous property bubbles in the Asian Tiger economies.

What Curtis describes, via Greenspan, Rand and Silicon Valley utopianism, is a shift in political control, stemming from a new distribution of capital. Both Randian individualism and techno-utopianism, in which people engage with one another directly, without the need for the intervention of state power or politicians, are symptoms, ideological mystifications, of this new distribution. The Californian ideology envisaged a world in which hierarchical, disciplinary power systems (i.e. the state) would be dissolved in favour of dispersed networks in which power would emerge from the ground up, from the people.

A short detour into Deleuze and Guattari is necessary here. In A Thousand Plateaus, they describe the shift from “machinic enslavement” to “processes of subjectification”. Think of the kind of state apparatus required to build the pyramids. This is what Lewis Mumford called a “megamachine”, an impersonal, authoritarian machine in which people, literally, are the components. But this system of power is replaced, in modernity, by what D+G call “subjectification”. This happens when political control is delegated more and more to relations of interpersonal dependency, e.g. the family. Within this domain of social subjection we tend to believe that we have escaped the dominion of the impersonal machine, so that we can finally engage with one another as human beings. We control the machines, we are no longer enslaved by them: “the human being is no longer a component of the machine but a worker, a user. He or she is subjected to the machine and no longer enslaved by the machine” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 457).

Curtis mentions a very interesting piece written by a woman called Carmen Hermosillo, who used to post on message boards in the 90s under the username “humdog”. One day in 1994 she posted a message explaining that she was leaving the online world and why. I quote her here at some length:

“it is fashionable to suggest that cyberspace is some kind of _island of the blessed_ where people are free to indulge and express their Individuality. some people write about cyberspace as though it were a 60′s utopia. in reality, this is not true. major online services, like compuserv and america online, regularly guide and censor discourse. … i have seen many people spill their guts on-line, and i did so myself until, at last, i began to see that i had commodified myself. commodification means that you turn something into a product which has a money-value. in the nineteenth century, commodities were made in factories, which karl marx called “the means of production.” capitalists were people who owned the means of production, and the commodities were made by workers who were mostly exploited. i created my interior thoughts as a means of production for the corporation that owned the board i was posting to, and that commodity was being sold to other commodity/consumer entities as entertainment.” (http://alphavilleherald.com/2004/05/introducing_hum.html)

This is interesting because it suggests that the internet is not simply a new means of control, but a new means of extracting surplus value from the workers/users. Industrial capital used the factory to do this, but there is a limit to how much value you can squeeze and out of people in that way, because people can only engage in productive labour for a part of their waking life. With post-industrial capital, the means of extraction are no longer restricted to the workplace, but have, with the help of computers, migrated to those spheres not traditionally associated with production: leisure time, consumption, activities associated with the reproduction of labour power.

Now, Curtis points to something very interesting in this regard. He says that, following Greenspan’s innovations at the Fed, economic figures began to suggest an anomaly: while profits were going up, productivity was staying the same. In other words, we can see the beginnings of a crisis of accumulation which eventually came to be expressed in the financial crash of 2008. What accumulation means, in Marxist terms, is that profits are re-invested into the means of production (the factory, machines) so as to generate more profits through increased production. But financial capital sidesteps production, it makes money directly out of money, through speculation.

Does this mean that it also manages to sidestep the extraction of surplus value from workers? Of course not. As Marx said, living labour is the sole source of value. What has happened – and I’m straying from Curtis here – is that the site of surplus value has migrated from the traditionally productive sphere to the spheres of leisure and reproduction. Christian Marazzi gives the example of Ikea furniture, which you have to assemble yourself at home. Is this process of assembling work or leisure? Andre Gorz’s classic book Critique of Economic Reason ties in nicely with Curtis’s thesis here, in that it maintains that surplus value must increasingly come from non-productive sources because productive labour is being performed more and more by computerised machines. Many aspects of the online constitute these new means for the extraction of surplus value, new forms of capital accumulation beyond the traditional industrial sphere. An example is how software companies release early versions of their software to be tested by users. Once again, is this testing a form of unpaid work, leisure or what?

Thus, with the rise of computers, we find that the ideological justifications for systems of explicit political dominance are finally exhausted. The ensuing ideological reflex produces the anti-state fantasies of self-organisation found in Rand and the exponents of the Californian ideology. But these are mere symptoms of a new form of political control, occurring through subtle processes of subjection rather than through overt enslavement. The system of control is no less technological, of course, and we are still components in a machine, but our engagement with that system produces in us a sense of personal freedom of expression and self realisation of the kind Hermosillo describes.

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