@ is for Activism: Dissent, Resistance and Rebellion in a Digital Culture

by Joss Hands

Overview

@ is For Activism examines the transformation of politics through digital media, including digital television, online social networking and mobile computing.

Joss Hands maps out how political relationships have been reconfigured and new modes of cooperation, deliberation and representation have emerged. This analysis is applied to the organisation and practice of alternative politics, showing how they have developed and embraced the new political and technological environment.

Hands offers a comprehensive critical survey of existing literature, as well as an original perspective on networks and political change. He includes many case studies including the anti-war and global justice movements, peer production, user created TV and 'Twitter' activism. @ is For Activism is essential for activists and students of politics and media.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780745327006
Publisher:	Pluto Press
Publication date:	02/20/2011
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Joss Hands is Reader in Communication, Film and Media and Co-Director of the Anglia Research Centre in Digital Culture at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

Activism and Technology

The history of technology is the history of human development. It is no accident that we define epochs by the substance of their dominant technologies. It is through technology that our material, social, cultural, political and economic life is constructed. The process of making sense of the organisation of the human world thus depends on how we understand the role of technology in society, and so in the first instance demands a consideration of the nature of technology itself.

While the computer on which I write these words is readily defined as a product of technology, what does it have in common with the hugely disparate range of artefacts also identified as such: a garden rake, a stepladder, a windmill, a kidney dialysis machine, a cruise missile, and so on? Are they tied together by identity, by association of certain qualities, or even by an arbitrary grouping? There are many possible responses to this question that I cannot possibly cover here, but two fundamental options frame the more nuanced positions and debates, and have profoundly important implications for everything that follows.

Firstly, we can see technology as having an essence, which is universal and appears in all specific technologies, defining everything we refer to as technology, and makes it conceivable as the expression of a deep technological nature. This nature will be revealed by any technology regardless of the intention behind its construction, whether it is a kidney dialysis machine or a cruise missile.

Secondly, we can see technology as a product of human society and culture – as socially constructed, broadly speaking. Technology is thus not so much an essence as it is a descriptive category of things that we make. Here the dialysis machine and the missile can be seen as things in their own right. Such a view sees technology as variable, malleable and responsive, and thus begs the question of whether there is really a universal category of 'technology' at all? However, this does not rule out the possibility that, even where individual artefacts have distinct qualities, purposes and effects, they share a technological character. We can argue that the dialysis machine and the missile are both extensions of human capacity; they are objects that manifest a practical knowledge of technical process and produce sets of desired aims. But the nature of these aims, and the contexts in which they occur, can be profoundly different.

Martin Heidegger is the greatest advocate of the first view, seeing the challenging of nature as defining and framing an essence of technology. Such is the significance and influence of his views, including on the nature of digital communication technology, that it is worth exploring them in some detail here.

To put as simply as possible, Heidegger advocated a view of technology that can be defined as broadly essentialist – that is, technology is characterized as having a particular essence. Uncovering this essence is the task Heidegger sets himself in his seminal essay, 'The Question Concerning Technology', which entails an elaborate journey into the etymology and use of the term. Heidegger makes the bold claim that the essence of technology is 'by no means technological' (Heidegger, 1993: p. 311). By this he means that technology is not defined by any technological object or device, or by a particular range of predicates attached to one, but rather by the way in which technology, as a verb, is a way of being and a way of thinking, and thus reveals the world in its light. His approach is at best highly demanding, and at worst impenetrable; nevertheless, it is important at least to explore the concepts he creates, which have proved so influential in later thinkers.

Heidegger begins by clearing away what he sees as the obscuring clutter the word has accumulated over the centuries, and performs the necessary task of giving the term its universal sense. He does this by returning to the Greek word, techne. While being at the root of the word technology, it is not distinct from the creativity associated with art. It comes from the Greek techinikon which belongs to techne and which 'is the name not only for the activities and skills of the craftsman but also for the arts of the mind and the fine arts. Techne belongs to bringing-forth, to poeisis; it is something poetic.' (p. 318). This bringing-forth Heidegger describes as a process of revealing, of unconcealment. In their essence, craft and art are therefore both a kind of teasing out, a working with the world in bringing forth its potential. Thus, 'it is as revealing, and not as manipulating, that techne is a bringing forth' (p. 319).

However, modern technology reveals not in the Greek mode of techne, but rather, 'The revealing that rules in modern technology is a challenging'. Modern technology draws from nature in an unreasonable and hostile manner, demanding it 'supply energy which can be extracted and stored as such' (p. 320). Heidegger draws a distinction between a windmill that uses the wind without exhausting it and the use of coal, which requires using up what is available. Digging materials out of the earth, and ripping apart nature to do so, involves a form of violence, and he defines such a relation as a setting-upon. Thus, once we start to dig coal out of the ground the truth about the earth is revealed not as a bringing-forth but as a 'challenging-forth'. So the truth of our world is revealed as violent and exploitative. This is characteristic of the whole of modern technology upon which we are completely reliant. Humanity thus regards the world as needing to be ordered and made available to be used for our desired ends, and therefore 'everything is ordered to stand by, to be immediately on hand' (p. 322). So it is the case that 'whatever is ordered about in this way has its own standing. We call it the standing-reserve' (p. 322).

Heidegger uses the example of an aircraft waiting on a runway, in which it is not simply an object, but is revealed as standing-reserve. This is clearly discernable in every aspect of contemporary life, the most obvious being the 'on-standby' LEDs on most household electronics. Such lights signify the alert status of devices, which, while not actually functioning, are standing ready to be used. According to Heidegger, this standing-ready is not a benign condition but in itself displays an ordering which filters throughout the whole infrastructure of the supporting technological system. The readiness-to-hand of a device thus reveals it as standing-reserve.

This begs the question of where humankind fits into the equation. Is this essence of modern technology something that is brought into being by humans, or through humans, or in spite of humans? Heidegger answers this by saying, 'only to the extent that man for his part is already challenged to exploit the energies of nature can this revealing that orders happen'. What he means by this is that 'man' is himself challenged-forth in a world in which we speak of 'human resources' (p. 323). Persons are born into a situation wherein they are challenged to perform as standing-reserve, whether it is as farmers or aircraft engineers – a result of their ineluctable relationship as subjects relating to objects, in which humans are captured from the outset; it is beyond their control. Persons themselves are captured by this relationship, and thus revealed as standing-reserve: we are thus 'enframed'.

Scientific thinking more generally is also part of this dynamic, wherein '[m]odern science's way of representing pursues and entraps nature as a calculable coherence of forces' (p. 326). Thus, for Heidegger, there is no distinction between 'pure' scientific knowledge and technological change; they are part of the same way of thinking. So he is able to claim that physics 'is the herald of enframing' (p. 327). Such a scenario conjures up a vision in which observing and knowing the world is intertwined with an autonomous technology, beyond the control of humanity and destined to entrap us through its inner logic.

Heidegger's argument inevitably has huge significance for issues around digital technology and communication in a mediated and globalized world. Given the essence of modern technology as enframing, it seems inevitable that the latest manifestation of technology will reveal the world in much the same way. Theorists addressing this topic, and who are sympathetic to Heidegger, do indeed tend to take this line. For example, Darin Barney draws the connection between the notion of standing-reserve and information in what he refers to as 'the standing-reserve of bits' (Barney, 2000: p. 225).

This is not simply to think about the effects of certain information technologies, but to think of them as a way of revealing. Barney argues that 'below the surface of every effect and application of network technology is a gathering of binary digits that stand as representative of some aspect of human existence'. Thus all aspects of human existence 'must be reducible to the form of bits' (Barney, 2000: p. 207). In short, the capacity of information technology, and in particular of network communication, to reduce all communication, knowledge and understanding into binary code renders any kind of understanding that does not reduce to such calculative means redundant, and thus either subsumed or sidelined. So he argues that 'networks enframe the world as a standing-reserve of bits and, in so doing, perpetuate modern conditions of uprootedness and calculative thinking' (p. 225). His justification of this position is found in Heidegger's conviction that technology reveals the world as a challenging that sets upon the world, and that this is no different with network technology, which 'sets upon the world and demands its service as a standing-reserve of bits, a gigantic database' (p. 209). In a crude sense, we can envision a world absorbed by Google in which everything is broken down to become ready-to-hand at the demand of the keystroke. Thus, when we type terms into the ubiquitous search engine it is not us 'using' Google; rather, Google is enframing us in its logic. What we experience by using it is thus the challenging-forth of the standing-reserve of bits. Within this action, then, inevitably lurks danger: the path of enframing, and the reduction of culture, ideas, knowledge and human beings themselves to standing-reserve.

While some of the excesses of technological exploitation are certainly recognisable, how then can we possibly expect to be able to help ourselves? Are we not destined to keep exploiting the planet, reducing everything to standing-reserve until there is nothing left to exploit? Heidegger really has no answer to this; he talks about a 'freeing chain' (Heidegger, 1993: p. 331) in which we open ourselves to the essence of technology, and in which can be found the 'saving power'; but this is never fully explained, and as Andrew Feenberg writes, Heidegger's argument makes 'the most arbitrary and confusing leaps from theme to theme, often proceeding by punning ... rather than logical argument' (Feenberg, 2005: p. 21).

By addressing the problem of technology's essence in such a bold way, Heidegger makes it a very difficult task to distinguish between technologies, such as the cruise missile and the dialysis machine. So it is that, both being products of a mechanised production process, both challenge nature to reveal itself as a challenging-forth – the former most obviously destructive, the latter penetrating the human body and turning it into an object to be manipulated. Both enframe, and in terms of liberation, both offer only the same illusive saving power to be found in contemplation of their essence as instances of modern technology.

Darin Barney encounters the same problem in thinking about information technology and networks in this Heideggerian way. His conclusion is that there is little evidence, at present, that information technology reveals anything other than enframing. If, as he argues, 'technologies harbour a saving power because in considering them we are confronted with tangible proof of how far we have strayed from our genuine essence' (Barney, 2000: p. 232), then the only realistic answer seems to be a reversal, combined with our 'affirming that the essence of being calls for limits on the use of technology' (p. 233). Yet this suggests that the saving power is merely the potential for technology to reveal the need to escape technology. The human disaster of mass starvation, poverty and misery that such a withdrawal would provoke does not need too much elaboration. Indeed, in Heidegger's case this view arguably contributed to his turn to fascism, which incorporated an idealised view of the pastoral life and the fantasy of a pure and long-lost mode of living. This view also dismisses all hope that there might be some technological solutions to technological, or any other, problems, or that technology could actually be a source of liberation. Barney confirms this by dismissing efforts, such as participatory technological development, to develop technology outside the mode of enframing. There is thus the danger that, with Heidegger, we paint ourselves into a technological corner from which we cannot imagine a different vision of the world, other than through an abstraction of essence so obtuse as to be an empty gesture.

How could any activist, political party, social movement, or even individual, hope to provoke any real social change within this framework? Because the notion of dissent in such a technological universe cannot go further than the attempt to dismantle the apparatus itself, it is thus inherently reactionary and conservative. For critical theory to be predicated on such a view would, firstly, render it mute with regard to differentiating between technologies, levelling the difference between cruise missiles and dialysis machines. Secondly, it would condemn it to a permanent state of reaction and un-nuanced conservative hostility to technology, predicated on the notion of a mythical golden age in which craftsmen brought forth their products in poeisis. The rather grim outcome of this train of thought necessitates an exploration of other perspectives that have more potential to nurture a subversive or democratic intervention in technological development.

If, as the second broadly social-constructivist view suggests, artefacts are to be viewed as products of specific contexts, of particular historical moments, then perhaps technology can offer a much broader potential. Perhaps it does not have to lead to domination and alienation – not to enframed beings but liberated ones. Yet if all we have are the artefacts themselves, the specific products of particular circumstances, then can we really talk about technology as a broad category at all? As I asked earlier, what do a dialysis machine and a cruise missile really have in common? If they had no underlying essence it would seriously hinder the capacity for any kind of theory of technology. It would render technology a neutral category that reflected simply the specific circumstances of an artefact, and thus hinder any social or political strategies to direct technology as a whole towards a liberatory potential.

The solution has been to think about the common characteristics that are indeed shared, even though all elements need not always apply to every artefact, thus providing a broader category of technology, but with an element of flexibility. This view is captured by what Val Dusek calls the 'consensus definition', which he describes as 'the application of scientific or other knowledge to practical tasks by ordered systems that involve people and organisations, productive skills, living things, and machines' (Dusek, 2006: p. 35). In this interpretation, technology can still be a useful category, but not a straightjacket. It sees mutability, but not an infinite mutability, in technology, and so offers a more complex and nuanced reading of the relationship between technology and society. It recognises the significance of technology in constructing the kind of society we live in, but also includes the contextual details of how this technology comes to be, and of its localised nature. Thus the nature and impact of technology are variable within the context of its construction and application. This means there is a much more interactive relationship between technology and society; indeed, we can view them not as separate entities at all, but as elements in an overall picture of an evolving social fabric. So we can recognise that both a dialysis machine and a cruise missile share the quality of being mechanical tools for manipulating nature, which defines them as technology in the broad sense of the term. Yet they still show distinct variation in the kinds of manipulation that they undertake, and the outcomes they achieve – namely, intervening for the outcome either of preservation or destruction.

(Continues…)

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Copyright © 2011 Joss Hands.
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Table of Contents

Introduction
1 Activism And Technology
2 The Digital Author As Producer
3 Protocol; Norm; Imperative: Networks As Moral Machines
4 Power-Law-Democracy
5 Mobil(E)Isation
6 @ Is Also For Alter-Globalisation
7 Constructing The Common: Cooperation And Multitude
Notes
Index