Capitalism and technology, working for
each other, like the two-headed monster Janus and also like a transnational
condominium, have both created various machines that enslave us all by
transforming human life on earth. What follows is a brief historical sketch of
how capital and technology brought this about.
Beginning in the mid-1970s through the early 1980s in the
West, the capitalistic process assigned value to information (and knowledge):
that is, capital valued information as a form of labor and merchandise.
Briefly, within the capitalistic process, what is valued is what can be
exchanged: that is, a form of merchandise is what has exchange-value. Once this
process began to value words and ideas, as distinct from material goods, the
new time of capital, armed with the new labor-power of (information), began to
free itself from the time of concrete labor. As a result, capitalism became
less concerned with organizing space into functional sectors than with
subsuming the totality of time under its own laws of unequal exchange.
This new process ruptured the pact between capital and labor, which was actually an agreement among labor, management, and the state; that is, with the cooperation of labor and management, the state arbitrated and regulated productivity, wages, and profits. Before this new system was set in place, the production of consumer goods developed mass consumption (in other words, supply worked to create demand). In this model, US domestic workers became consumers of the merchandise they produced (to quote Henry Ford: "Our workers should also be our customers").
However, by the mid-1970s, the saturation of domestic markets for consumer goods led to the expansion of capital into third-world countries. This expansion was necessary so that these goods could be produced and consumed by a third-world urban work force that was both abundant and ready for work, but that was not organized and thus not expensive. These new modes of production, consumption, and distribution led to the establishment of Free Production Zones (so-called FPZs) and Export Processing Zones (so-called (EPZs) within the context of the new international division of labor and the imperial transnational capital.
Capital became extremely fluid, eroding to a certain extent the boundaries and functions of the traditional nation-state: no restrictions on first-world investment and transfers of capital, as third-world governments were eager for first-world revenues, and first-world transnational companies were eager for cheap third-world labor. A truly symbiotic relationship, which in turn has led to this contradictory phenomenon: The condominium that comprised (first-world) imperial agents and (third-world) local elite needed at the same time a weak nation-state in relation to capital (to not impose restrictions on the fluidity of capital) and a strong nation-state in relation to labor (to guarantee a needy domestic labor, by, among other tasks, imposing taxes and other measures, like overpricing, punitive to the poor). In the early 1990s, GATT (General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs, transformed into WTO, World Trade Organization) and NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) simply formalized a situation that had existed since the mid- to late 1970s, and even then, the provisions and regulations came nowhere near acknowledging the extraordinary optimum transfer of capital, goods, and people that had prevailed before. This would explain the confused impassioned debates about NAFTA, WTO, and especially the one in 2000 in the US about the admission of China into WTO, which were quite confused across ideological divides with strange bedfellows-- like labor unions and conservative Republicans.
To repeat: This new system of capital started working for the free circulation of humans, merchandise, and information. People whose profession involves producing, analyzing, and circulating money, words, codes, data, audio, video, and images (the dot.com crowd, editors, writers, movie producers, media-content providers, designers, investment bankers, currency traders, and even sales-people, thanks to e-commerce, e-Bay, and others (Let's not forget that sales used to depend on "face-time") can live and work anywhere in the world, so long as they are wired, for institutions not necessarily located where they live and work.
As an example: I’m a freelance writer who generates content for new media around domestic US and the world. I also do basic research for cultural institutions, like museums and book publishers. The bulk of my everyday work consists of writing essays and reviews and reading books, manuscripts about to be published, so-called journals of opinion in politics and the arts, (sometimes quite jargony) academic journals, daily and weekly newspapers, and dogged research--through hyperlinks--that I do mostly online: This essentially means that I can do most of my work anywhere in the US and the world--as long as I have a computer with access to the Net. I send and receive projects as attachments on respective web-based e-mail, which can be accessed anywhere in the world as long as I can get to a computer with an Internet connection. I download or upload materials from and into my online workstation (http://www.fusionone.com) and then work on them, so I really don’t have to worry too much about misplaced floppies or crashed hard drives.
In fact, I consider myself more or less dead if I’m offline for more than twenty-four hours. My clients electronically deposit my checks into my online debit bank account. And when I travel around the US and the world I simply carry my ATM cash card that also doubles as my VISA card. I communicate with friends and relatives mostly by e-mail, which is the only reliable way to contact me, as I might be anywhere in the world at anytime. My e-life, as it were, lived on speed, is an admixture of user IDs, passwords, e-airline tickets, e-boarding passes, airline name tags, airport outlets for my laptop, and multiple time-zones.
This new process ruptured the pact between capital and labor, which was actually an agreement among labor, management, and the state; that is, with the cooperation of labor and management, the state arbitrated and regulated productivity, wages, and profits. Before this new system was set in place, the production of consumer goods developed mass consumption (in other words, supply worked to create demand). In this model, US domestic workers became consumers of the merchandise they produced (to quote Henry Ford: "Our workers should also be our customers").
However, by the mid-1970s, the saturation of domestic markets for consumer goods led to the expansion of capital into third-world countries. This expansion was necessary so that these goods could be produced and consumed by a third-world urban work force that was both abundant and ready for work, but that was not organized and thus not expensive. These new modes of production, consumption, and distribution led to the establishment of Free Production Zones (so-called FPZs) and Export Processing Zones (so-called (EPZs) within the context of the new international division of labor and the imperial transnational capital.
Capital became extremely fluid, eroding to a certain extent the boundaries and functions of the traditional nation-state: no restrictions on first-world investment and transfers of capital, as third-world governments were eager for first-world revenues, and first-world transnational companies were eager for cheap third-world labor. A truly symbiotic relationship, which in turn has led to this contradictory phenomenon: The condominium that comprised (first-world) imperial agents and (third-world) local elite needed at the same time a weak nation-state in relation to capital (to not impose restrictions on the fluidity of capital) and a strong nation-state in relation to labor (to guarantee a needy domestic labor, by, among other tasks, imposing taxes and other measures, like overpricing, punitive to the poor). In the early 1990s, GATT (General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs, transformed into WTO, World Trade Organization) and NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) simply formalized a situation that had existed since the mid- to late 1970s, and even then, the provisions and regulations came nowhere near acknowledging the extraordinary optimum transfer of capital, goods, and people that had prevailed before. This would explain the confused impassioned debates about NAFTA, WTO, and especially the one in 2000 in the US about the admission of China into WTO, which were quite confused across ideological divides with strange bedfellows-- like labor unions and conservative Republicans.
To repeat: This new system of capital started working for the free circulation of humans, merchandise, and information. People whose profession involves producing, analyzing, and circulating money, words, codes, data, audio, video, and images (the dot.com crowd, editors, writers, movie producers, media-content providers, designers, investment bankers, currency traders, and even sales-people, thanks to e-commerce, e-Bay, and others (Let's not forget that sales used to depend on "face-time") can live and work anywhere in the world, so long as they are wired, for institutions not necessarily located where they live and work.
As an example: I’m a freelance writer who generates content for new media around domestic US and the world. I also do basic research for cultural institutions, like museums and book publishers. The bulk of my everyday work consists of writing essays and reviews and reading books, manuscripts about to be published, so-called journals of opinion in politics and the arts, (sometimes quite jargony) academic journals, daily and weekly newspapers, and dogged research--through hyperlinks--that I do mostly online: This essentially means that I can do most of my work anywhere in the US and the world--as long as I have a computer with access to the Net. I send and receive projects as attachments on respective web-based e-mail, which can be accessed anywhere in the world as long as I can get to a computer with an Internet connection. I download or upload materials from and into my online workstation (http://www.fusionone.com) and then work on them, so I really don’t have to worry too much about misplaced floppies or crashed hard drives.
In fact, I consider myself more or less dead if I’m offline for more than twenty-four hours. My clients electronically deposit my checks into my online debit bank account. And when I travel around the US and the world I simply carry my ATM cash card that also doubles as my VISA card. I communicate with friends and relatives mostly by e-mail, which is the only reliable way to contact me, as I might be anywhere in the world at anytime. My e-life, as it were, lived on speed, is an admixture of user IDs, passwords, e-airline tickets, e-boarding passes, airline name tags, airport outlets for my laptop, and multiple time-zones.
In fact, the one period when I flew across time-zones so
frequently, I ceased to believe in jetlag: I flew so often that I inhabited my
own time-zone. (A few months ago, a friend who works for National Public Radio,
spent a week in the North Pole. She e-mailed me from up there. In response, I
asked her what her time-zone was. She e-mailed back: My time-zone is whatever I
want it to be. Of course! I thought.) During that period, I woke up one morning
in Tokyo, had lunch in the afternoon in Hong Kong, and slept that night in New
York. And my New York brick-and-mortar apartment is on the fortieth floor, with
a sweeping view of most of the West Side of Manhattan and New Jersey, so that
sometimes at night when I’m dozing off in front of the TV by the living-room
window, I have the illusion of being on an airplane over the city, descending
and watching an in-flight movie. In his Global Souls: Jetlag. Shopping
Malls, and the Search for Home, Pico Iyer describes similar experiences of
a life lived on speed, but I’m getting ahead of myself. There’s more on speed
to come.)
Whereas in the previous model of capital, time and bodies were bound to the space of labor production, these days, time and bodies have been liberated from the space of production. In a sense, as Paul Virilio has pointed out: It doesn’t matter where our bodies are, because when we’re plugged in, we’re in teletopia, and the body’s sphere of influence, on one register, is reduced to the production or the zapping of signs. So information (knowledge) became a production factor that can be quantified: in other words, it became a commodity.
Capital and technology have worked together to produce a teletopia where the duration of time and the extension of space have been superseded by the absolute speed of the time of capital, the speed of time-light (that is, the time it takes to transmit data: the speed of light—which is 678 million miles per hour). At the beginning of the Third Millennium, the condominium of capital-technology has liberated human life completely from the boundaries of space and abolished the need for travel all together.
From this point on, the task of capital is to assure an optimal mobilization of information and, from daybreak to sunset, and also overnight, to work against the viscosity of a complex social body that might hamper this mobilization (for instance, social movements, radical intellectuals, the homeless, and so on).
In 2000, the New York Stock Exchange [NYSE] and NASDAQ announced that they will stay open during evening hours--they close now at 4:00 EST. Given Capital’s new regime, I was surprised that it took this long for these primary US stock exchanges to decide and think about staying open in the evening. It’s only a matter of time before the exchanges stay open 24/7. Human bodies will sleep of course, but at their own peril, since the machines of Capital will stay awake forever. A friend who is a web developer as well as a stock trader told me recently, "History is gone!" And I agreed, because since Capital operates with speed and overexposure, history--including what subvents it, memory-- is more or less elided. In fact, history becomes a luxury that only the underexposed can afford.
At this point, and for some time now, we have the exceptional fluidity of people, wealth, and words. We must understand the phrase "cultural capital" in this double sense of capital and knowledge. The market law of commodities, then, controls the diffusion (and even the realm itself) of ideas. (As an aside, the Internet has deposed academia--particularly in the US--as the privileged "space" for the production, circulation, and consumption, and discussion and debate of knowledge and ideas. These days, the kind of knowledge that academics produce is but a blimp within the flow of information and knowledge that course through the Internet everyday. In a sense, this academic knowledge has lost some of its stock value, has gone through a "correction," to deploy stock market parlance. And with various virtual universities being set up these days by book publishers and private-sector entrepeneurs--Harcourt General, the textbook publisher, 2000 set up its own "university," where, of course, most of the required reading will come from books featured on its online catalogue. So that very soon, behind each virtual university will be the ghosts of, say, 200 professors, or FTEs, in university administrative parlance.)
To digress somewhat in a long parenthesis: Let me just restate all this within the framework of one of the industries I used to work in, book publishing, in which editors and publishers are more or less cultural brokers and producers of stocks of knowledge in the intellectual stock exchange: The cost of producing information (knowledge, in this case bound in book-form), measured in the time necessary to its formulation and comprehension (writing, acquisitions, rewriting, editing--the editorial department's function), must be minimized (composition--the production department's function), while its exchange value is increased by the multiplication of references, allowing it to reach a broad public (publicity, advertising--the marketing department's function). End of parenthesis.
To pick up my thread: Before this new system of capital emerged, the traditional laborer moved everyday from the "space" of home to that of work, and vice-versa. of labor. Now we no longer make distinctions between "home" and "work." We’re all enslaved completely by time and capital, free to invest in ourselves, with the various machines at our disposal to produce valued time, that is, money as time saved and stored through labor. Recall Ben Franklin: "Time is Money and Money is Time") We've all become new "human capital," now producing valued time in order to consume the time valued. Time valued is simply what is commonly known as leisure time, (free evenings, vacations days-off, leaves of absences), but which is now enslaved by capital as well, since we spend money during our so-called leisure time.
This human capital is the "civil servant" par excellence of time and capital: The old factory is now dispersed throughout the city, and work in the factory and life in the city now become indistinguishable. Time has completely colonized space, has invaded even domestic space: Pace, the freelancer or consultant working at home, in the so-called "home office," plugged into the computer, the Wi-Fi, into the Internet, and so on; and the staff member attached to an institution who "takes work home" or is "working at home" and so on.
Capital has thus created the worst prison of all: It has locked time up. First, Capital liberated time from the space of production, and only then was Capital able to capture time and allocate it to Capital's own laws of production and consumption. Time subsequently became the only factor in the production and consumption of commodities. In the dot-com world, for instance, information (data, codes, video, audio, texts) is the ultimate commodity. Structurally, Time also became the only factor in the production and consumption of Time: For instance, I had to buy some time out on furlough (with the time that I had saved) in order to be able to think, type, cut and paste, rewrite, edit, and print this essay on my machine.
Capital has provided the Time used to produce and save Time, the saved Time subject to the law of commodities. One is rich because one has more saved time (that is, money), and one is poor because one has less saved time (that is, money). According to this paradigm, the poor or the homeless or the unskilled or the unemployed have no valued time, no stored time, but only naked "real or actual" time that no employer wants to buy, sometimes even at a discount: in other words, the homeless or the unemployed or the unskilled have only their own naked time to waste.) However, both the employer and the employed are enslaved by time and capital; both are incorporated into the machine of transnational capital: The former simply has more money at her disposal to buy more machines to enable her to produce and to save more time in order to enjoy (to consume) more time, and so on and so on.
Whereas in the previous model of capital, time and bodies were bound to the space of labor production, these days, time and bodies have been liberated from the space of production. In a sense, as Paul Virilio has pointed out: It doesn’t matter where our bodies are, because when we’re plugged in, we’re in teletopia, and the body’s sphere of influence, on one register, is reduced to the production or the zapping of signs. So information (knowledge) became a production factor that can be quantified: in other words, it became a commodity.
Capital and technology have worked together to produce a teletopia where the duration of time and the extension of space have been superseded by the absolute speed of the time of capital, the speed of time-light (that is, the time it takes to transmit data: the speed of light—which is 678 million miles per hour). At the beginning of the Third Millennium, the condominium of capital-technology has liberated human life completely from the boundaries of space and abolished the need for travel all together.
From this point on, the task of capital is to assure an optimal mobilization of information and, from daybreak to sunset, and also overnight, to work against the viscosity of a complex social body that might hamper this mobilization (for instance, social movements, radical intellectuals, the homeless, and so on).
In 2000, the New York Stock Exchange [NYSE] and NASDAQ announced that they will stay open during evening hours--they close now at 4:00 EST. Given Capital’s new regime, I was surprised that it took this long for these primary US stock exchanges to decide and think about staying open in the evening. It’s only a matter of time before the exchanges stay open 24/7. Human bodies will sleep of course, but at their own peril, since the machines of Capital will stay awake forever. A friend who is a web developer as well as a stock trader told me recently, "History is gone!" And I agreed, because since Capital operates with speed and overexposure, history--including what subvents it, memory-- is more or less elided. In fact, history becomes a luxury that only the underexposed can afford.
At this point, and for some time now, we have the exceptional fluidity of people, wealth, and words. We must understand the phrase "cultural capital" in this double sense of capital and knowledge. The market law of commodities, then, controls the diffusion (and even the realm itself) of ideas. (As an aside, the Internet has deposed academia--particularly in the US--as the privileged "space" for the production, circulation, and consumption, and discussion and debate of knowledge and ideas. These days, the kind of knowledge that academics produce is but a blimp within the flow of information and knowledge that course through the Internet everyday. In a sense, this academic knowledge has lost some of its stock value, has gone through a "correction," to deploy stock market parlance. And with various virtual universities being set up these days by book publishers and private-sector entrepeneurs--Harcourt General, the textbook publisher, 2000 set up its own "university," where, of course, most of the required reading will come from books featured on its online catalogue. So that very soon, behind each virtual university will be the ghosts of, say, 200 professors, or FTEs, in university administrative parlance.)
To digress somewhat in a long parenthesis: Let me just restate all this within the framework of one of the industries I used to work in, book publishing, in which editors and publishers are more or less cultural brokers and producers of stocks of knowledge in the intellectual stock exchange: The cost of producing information (knowledge, in this case bound in book-form), measured in the time necessary to its formulation and comprehension (writing, acquisitions, rewriting, editing--the editorial department's function), must be minimized (composition--the production department's function), while its exchange value is increased by the multiplication of references, allowing it to reach a broad public (publicity, advertising--the marketing department's function). End of parenthesis.
To pick up my thread: Before this new system of capital emerged, the traditional laborer moved everyday from the "space" of home to that of work, and vice-versa. of labor. Now we no longer make distinctions between "home" and "work." We’re all enslaved completely by time and capital, free to invest in ourselves, with the various machines at our disposal to produce valued time, that is, money as time saved and stored through labor. Recall Ben Franklin: "Time is Money and Money is Time") We've all become new "human capital," now producing valued time in order to consume the time valued. Time valued is simply what is commonly known as leisure time, (free evenings, vacations days-off, leaves of absences), but which is now enslaved by capital as well, since we spend money during our so-called leisure time.
This human capital is the "civil servant" par excellence of time and capital: The old factory is now dispersed throughout the city, and work in the factory and life in the city now become indistinguishable. Time has completely colonized space, has invaded even domestic space: Pace, the freelancer or consultant working at home, in the so-called "home office," plugged into the computer, the Wi-Fi, into the Internet, and so on; and the staff member attached to an institution who "takes work home" or is "working at home" and so on.
Capital has thus created the worst prison of all: It has locked time up. First, Capital liberated time from the space of production, and only then was Capital able to capture time and allocate it to Capital's own laws of production and consumption. Time subsequently became the only factor in the production and consumption of commodities. In the dot-com world, for instance, information (data, codes, video, audio, texts) is the ultimate commodity. Structurally, Time also became the only factor in the production and consumption of Time: For instance, I had to buy some time out on furlough (with the time that I had saved) in order to be able to think, type, cut and paste, rewrite, edit, and print this essay on my machine.
Capital has provided the Time used to produce and save Time, the saved Time subject to the law of commodities. One is rich because one has more saved time (that is, money), and one is poor because one has less saved time (that is, money). According to this paradigm, the poor or the homeless or the unskilled or the unemployed have no valued time, no stored time, but only naked "real or actual" time that no employer wants to buy, sometimes even at a discount: in other words, the homeless or the unemployed or the unskilled have only their own naked time to waste.) However, both the employer and the employed are enslaved by time and capital; both are incorporated into the machine of transnational capital: The former simply has more money at her disposal to buy more machines to enable her to produce and to save more time in order to enjoy (to consume) more time, and so on and so on.
Where once we derived our dignity from labor, we now wish to
partake in the luster of capital. We desire our own imprisonment by capital, as
it were.
We’ve become desiring machines of
capital and time and technology.
This human capital engages in the optimal maximization of time and is highly skilled at what is commonly called "multi-tasking." This human capital, jetting around the globe to network, wears a cell-phone attached with an earpiece and speaks into an attached mike while speaking to her contacts, speaking into the air, as it were. She carries a laptop while looking for an open outlet during a layover at the airport--that maximum space of transition that also collapses temporal intervals. Sometimes you see her at cafes working on her laptop while also talking on her cell-phone while also drinking a cafe latte. In all these "spaces," she works in an "environment" that has no relationship whatever to real time as such: In other words, there is now a distinction between "present time" (the time present to the viewer on the screen of the computer monitor) and "real" time.
This human capital engages in the optimal maximization of time and is highly skilled at what is commonly called "multi-tasking." This human capital, jetting around the globe to network, wears a cell-phone attached with an earpiece and speaks into an attached mike while speaking to her contacts, speaking into the air, as it were. She carries a laptop while looking for an open outlet during a layover at the airport--that maximum space of transition that also collapses temporal intervals. Sometimes you see her at cafes working on her laptop while also talking on her cell-phone while also drinking a cafe latte. In all these "spaces," she works in an "environment" that has no relationship whatever to real time as such: In other words, there is now a distinction between "present time" (the time present to the viewer on the screen of the computer monitor) and "real" time.
As an example: I have a friend who lives in New York. He's a broker who trades in foreign currency for a small brokerage firm on Wall Street. He has a Quotron in his home study in Park Slope in Brooklyn. He tells me that sometimes he's up around 3 AM checking the trades in London, Paris, and Frankfurt. At around 7 PM in New York, the market in Tokyo is open, since the time-zone there is about fourteen hours ahead of New York's. Sometimes he intervenes right there and then to trade and transfer currency. Time in Tokyo and London and Frankfurt is present to him on the screen of his monitor, where he lives, in his real time in Brooklyn. Our point here will soon be moot: As I mentioned before, both the New York-Dow Jones and Tokyo-Nikkei will soon overlap for a few hours on weekday evenings to undergird the speed of Capital--pity the stockbrokers whose bodies will be asleep during those hours!
I ran into a human capital one Saturday August 2000 night at LAX--as I arrived in Los Angeles for the Democratic National Convention--in front of the Tom Bradley International Terminal (TBIT in popular parlance, where time-zones collide and fuse into one another: TBIT is the gateway for flights into the US from southeast Asia and the gateway out there from the US; so the few times I’ve been there, some people are having breakfast; some are having lunch; and some are having dinner). A thirtysomething, she had just jetted into LA, back "home" as it were, from Taipei, where she'd been for ten days. She had only three mid-sized pieces of luggage, and I can recognize a laptop case when I see one. We chatted as we waited for the G-Bus shuttle to connect us to the subway. She told me that she could afford to travel that light--even overseas--for extensive periods of time because she packs "travelers clothing," the kind that you wash in your hotel room and that dries in under five minutes. "I fly so often that I don’t believe in jetlag anymore," she told me-- as the shuttle pulled up--somewhat jauntily, heartily, and, it seemed to us, triumphantly.
Capital’s capture of Time is exemplified by life in the
contemporary metropolis, which I discuss in Chapter 1.
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