Enclosure in the computer age: the magic of control
Intellectual property law is the modern counterpart of the brutal land enclosures of previous centuries. Computers and the internet have brought managerial control, commodification and rent-extraction into the most intimate areas of life and work. Finance shifted from productive investment to investing in debt – and collapsed in 2007/8. Meanwhile ordinary people’s worlds shrank. But other worlds are possible. At the heart of the storm, computer programming remains an old-fashioned craft industry, defying all efforts to eliminate it.
As inequality increases, those who enjoy the unequal share of power use it to extend their control of the possibilities for wealth creation. Rent (income one enjoys as reward simply for owning something) becomes more lucrative than any wealth one could possibly achieve by making something. Even simply possessing an option to make something can be more lucrative, and certainly less troublesome, than exercising that option. We have seen this tendency let rip in the decades since capitalist firms overcame their original reluctance to use computers.
In Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Thomas Piketty pointed out that, in an unequal society, entrepreneurs tend overwhelmingly to turn into rentiers. Even supposed exemplars of creative capitalism, such as Bill Gates, derive vastly more of their income from rent (fees derived from intellectual property) than they ever did from the creative work on which their businesses are based.1 Creators who fail to assert intellectual property rights need to be content with vastly fewer material rewards (as is Daniel Bricklin, who invented the spreadsheet two years before US law was changed to allow general ideas such as his to be patented).
The latest expansion of rent-extracting powers by the ‘haves’ has been described as ‘the new enclosures’.2 The comparison is often made in a slightly tongue-in-cheek way, as if the brutal land enclosures that took place in England in the 16th century and peaked in the early 19th bore only a metaphorical resemblance to the present expansion of intellectual property law. But the dynamics are the same and the effects every bit as destructive – and they operate on a global scale. Old and new enclosures both followed from sustained lobbying by elites who at first enjoyed only slight success, but then, as their power grew, became able to dictate the political agenda and enjoy state aid with its enforcement.
We easily forget that the capitalist concept of the basic means of production, the land (as someone’s property, with a fence round it) is a recent and very odd part of the human story. As late as 1902, Petr Kropotkin was able to describe region after region in Europe and Russia where collective ownership and management of land continued to be the rule, the particular self-management methods in each case, and their often striking achievements (for example, a radically more efficient plough, developed in the 1890s by a network of peasant communities in southern Russia).3
The sheer shock of encountering the capitalist approach to the land was described by witnesses to the formation of the early North American colonies. The people of the Mohawk basin (now upstate New York) felt there was plenty of land for everyone and were generous with it – but were startled and then outraged when the Europeans put fences around their plots to keep others out, even when they were doing nothing with it.4 George Washington built up his fortune this way, buying and importing bonded paupers from England to fence and defend the 60,000 acres he acquired in the Shenandoah and Ohio valleys, even before the territories had been formally colonized. His biographer Joseph Ellis ascribes Washington’s extraordinary ‘appetite for acreage’ to a pathological obsession with status and terror of losing it. Later on, from 1784, he fought and won a two-year court case to evict a group of poor settlers who had innocently supposed the land to be unclaimed.5 Similar scenarios have been enacted all over the colonized world.
Enclosure is good for profits but bad for productivity. Over centuries it becomes normalized but the shocking fact was still fresh and self-evident in England in 1516, when Sir Thomas More saw land that had supported thriving human communities turned over to sheep. In Utopia, he wrote:
Your shepe that were wont to be so meke and tame, and so smal eaters, now, as I heare saye, be become so great devowerers and so wylde, that they eate up and swallow down the very men them selfes. They consume, destroye, and devoure whole fields, howses and cities… Noble man and gentleman, yea and certeyn Abbottes leave no ground for tillage, thei inclose all into pastures; they throw down houses; they pluck down townes, and leave nothing standynge but only the churche to be made a shepehowse.6
Positional considerations can militate in favor of keeping land out of production altogether, and it is not just wealthy landowners who do this.
Robin Jenkins (who farmed in Portugal in the 1970s, as the country began to modernize after the Salazar dictatorship) noticed how peasants who had found factory work around Lisbon airport hung onto their little pieces of land as insurance, in case their relatively well-paid jobs disappeared. The land, which had been wonderfully productive before, generally went to weeds.7 At the other end of the wealth spectrum, 45 per cent of Cambodia, including nearly all its coast, disappeared in 2007/8 into the hands of overseas investors, who suddenly needed alternative ways of investing their money after the global financial crash. As The Guardian reported, most of this land was then fenced off and did nothing; a few people continued to work there, as security guards.8
Strengthened intellectual property laws are argued for nowadays on the grounds that they supposedly lead to higher productivity. The same argument was used to justify enclosure of land – but this was easily exposed as a fantasy, even in the place it was assumed to have been most successful: 18th/19th-century England. Economic historian Robert Allen has shown that the big gains in agricultural output during the Industrial Revolution owed little to enclosure. Peasant farmers’ yields increased at nearly or the same rate, as they adopted the newer methods (something peasants were supposed not to do).9 Any inferiority in yields was more likely due to relative lack of capital. And long ago, in the 1920s, the pioneering social historians John and Barbara Hammond had showed that the promise of increased yields was often mere cynical propaganda-cover for driving recalcitrant but productive peasants off the land. Since Otmoor, near Oxford, was violently cleared of its people in 1815, it has produced almost nothing10; it is now a nature reserve, yet its biodiversity remains lower than when it also supported hundreds of humans.
As Kropotkin said, ‘to speak of the natural death of the village communities in virtue of economical laws is as grim a joke as to speak of the natural death of soldiers slaughtered on a battlefield’.11
These transformations were effected by people a long way away who often did not bother to go and look at what was happening, or even inspect their new property. That kind and degree of power, to transform a landscape from a distance, and make people vanish, had only happened previously in fairy stories.
THE SUPERNATURAL ENTERS EVERYDAY LIFE: THE MAGIC OF COMMODITIES
Positionality sheds light on the logic, and the magic, of commodities: phenomena that are now so omnipresent that we fail to notice their sheer oddness.
From a capitalist’s point of view, a commodity is a pure, idealized, clearly defined, standardized, desirable something, with the potential to be summoned up in any quantity, the same every time. Hence, a printed book, or a plastic toilet seat, or an antibiotic pill, or a bullet is a commodity. Natural products like potatoes, timber, iron ore and grain can also be treated as commodities, after a fair amount of work has been done to standardize them – so that, for example, the buyer for a large catering firm can pick up a phone and order ‘potatoes’ or ‘carrots’ in any quantity he needs, at a suitable price, without any fuss about their particular provenance or qualities, and switch from one supplier to another quickly.
As Karl Marx says in the section of Capital that discusses ‘the fetishism of commodities’, a commodity is ‘a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.’12 And the queerest, most metaphysical thing of all is its price. The price is acutely, agonizingly sensitive to opinion but, whatever the commodity’s other qualities, in the last analysis, that is the only thing about it that matters.
Somewhere, the commodity’s price has been described as its ‘little, beating heart’, like that of the fairy Tinker Bell in JM Barrie’s Peter Pan, which will stop beating if children stop believing in fairies. Maintaining a product’s credibility really is a matter of life and death, and it absorbs a great deal of a capitalist’s energy and resources.
The ideal commodity is one that can be turned out in any quantity as if by turning a handle, and which the populace will line up eagerly to buy as fast as it can be sold. As we will see in Chapter 8, microchips have proved to be something dangerously close to being the ideal capitalist commodity.
There is naturally intense competition to control the means to produce commodities. When it becomes possible to create new means of producing commodities (for example, machines) there is also intense competition to own the ideas that define them, as well as to decide what gets produced, who turns the handle, how fast, and so on. In this fashion, ‘intellectual property’ turns thought itself into a positional good. If I have an idea and patent it, you cannot have it, even if you think you can.
Work becomes a positional good (a scarce source of paid employment, for which people compete) and a commodity (precisely defined, and in an ideal capitalist world the people who do it are also interchangeable commodities). The whole set-up is a power landscape, with pinnacles and mountains from which the lucky few direct operations.
POWER OVER THE FUTURE: THE MAGIC OF INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY
Commodification goes hand in hand with intellectual property (IP: patents, trademarks, copyright), enforced by national laws and international treaties. The value and power of IP have soared since the computer’s entry into the capitalist economy, especially since the 1980s, in terms of the range of things to which IP can be asserted, as well as its importance to Western economies. This is in part because more and more of the procedures that once lived in workers’ heads and hands could be replaced by ones that were written down, and therefore capable of becoming someone’s property.
This was largely an effect of the tendency described in the last chapter, for the power of business lobbies to grow as wealth shifts in their direction, so that they can persuade law makers to shape the law even more in their favor. A famous example: the Walt Disney company lobbied successfully in 1998 to have the US copyright term extended to 100 years, to prevent the copyright on their lucrative Mickey Mouse character expiring in 2003. This had far-reaching effects on the US entertainment media industry: its subsequent effort concentrated much more on the development of franchisable characters and formats, and a preference for sequels rather than new stories.13
In June 2006, it was reported that the ‘intangible’ assets of US firms were worth around $6 trillion – two-thirds of their total value. Much of this consisted of IP in the form of patents (whose licensing raised $100 billion a year) and trademarks that had become so valuable that they supported a rapidly growing bond-market of their own, valued at around $106 billion. When the Dunkin Donuts brand changed hands that year, its new owners were able immediately to recoup the $1.7 billion cost of their purchase by issuing bonds backed by the brand. ‘Securitizing’ intellectual property in this way raises its importance still further, as a key source of investment capital.14
Intellectual property has become one of the world’s strongest-growing commodities: according to the World Trade Organization, licensing fees and royalties made up 6.4 per cent of world exports in 2011 and were worth $270 billion, having grown by 13 per cent since the previous year. Nearly all of this went to the US and Europe ($108 billion and $115 billion respectively).15
However, its effect on what people pay for things (and therefore on the economy that depends on their paying as much as possible for things) is very nearly 20 times greater. According to the US Patent and Trademark Office, in 2010 ‘IP-intensive industries’ were worth $5.06 trillion to the US economy, and a similar amount to that of the European Union. They employed 27.7 percent of all US workers – and these were increasingly better paid.16 In terms of patents, the top four of these industries were all in the ‘computer and electronic product manufacturing’ category, with pharmaceuticals and chemical products coming in just behind them. In terms of copyright and trademarks, the motion picture and video industry dominated. The category ‘Lessors of nonfinancial intangible assets’ – firms that administer licenses, overseeing branding- and rights-deals and so on – earned $24.5 billion in 2007, but employed only 25,500 people in 2010: a good business to be in.
The US-based sports-shoe company Nike illustrates another aspect of the rich countries’ retreat from actual production to rent-extraction via IP. By the late 1990s, Nike had not only moved production but also its design, accounting, shipping and marketing to its network of major suppliers and investors in the various states and special regions of the ‘Greater Southern China Economic Region’ (GSCER). Nike’s own role was redefined as ‘brand proprietorship’17 so that the company can take an even greater share of the proceeds from its products, while contributing less and less to their creation.
Thanks to computer-aided design (CAD), which produces data that can be owned, IP can be asserted all the way down to the point where needle touches cloth or leather, irrespective of who owns the sewing machine, or did the design. The same system makes it possible for fashion clothing manufacturers to specify, get quotes for, and outsource separately every bit of fabric, zip-fastener, button, stitch and seam of a garment, even as it is being designed, and fine-tune the design to balance its appearance with its profitability, squeezing the supplier’s already-slim margins to the limit.
The computer-aided design and manufacturing (CAD/CAM) systems that are used to design garments even have access to libraries of ‘Standard Minute Values’ for each operation, such as putting a dart into the waist of a blouse, or adding a patch-pocket, which makes it easy to calculate the precise amount of labor-time the whole garment ‘should’ require. Almost nothing is left to the supplier’s discretion, and less is required from the suppliers in the way of expert advice – all that’s wanted is a price, and a low one. The lists of cutting and sewing instructions are emailed to suppliers in Vietnam, China, Cambodia, Thailand, Indonesia or Malaysia (or some poor enclave in a wealthy country) who then ‘blind tender’ for the work, hoping that their quote will be cheapest. Importers can, and do, switch manufacture across continents at a moment’s notice.18 The result is massive under-pricing by anxious suppliers, with the costs borne by mainly female workers.
In ways like these the market has extended itself, almost as a by-product of the computer industry. After all, it was electronics firms that pioneered from the 1980s onwards the practice of shifting jobs and then entire plants and processes, swiftly, to wherever work can be done most cheaply, and then designing jobs and processes so that they could be relocated in this way. By 2000, electronics was ‘the most globalized of all industries’19 and computers and the internet were being used to globalize everything else as well.
IP DOESN’T WORK WITHOUT A STRONG STATE
Just how much this regime owes to the power and willingness of governments to enforce IP law is clear from the proliferation of inter-governmental agreements (starting with TRIPS – the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights – concluded by the World Trade Organization in 1994). Countries have to sign up to these agreements, and enforce them under their own laws, as a condition for credit, aid and trade deals.
The IP system’s dependence on state power is also evident from the almost comical way the prices of patented goods fall the moment they leave the protection of Western IP law. To take one of innumerable possible examples, the leukemia drug Gleevec costs $70,000 per year in the US, but only $2,500 in India.20 This is because India declined to sign up to the relevant international agreement. Under India’s own IP laws, new processes are patentable, but not the products themselves – so if manufacturers can find other ways to make them, they can do so. This has made India literally a lifeline for millions of people who would never be able to afford Western prices for essential drugs.
Intellectual property rights are one more way in which unequal power ends up stifling innovation and the spread of ideas. Evidence of this is the rising importance of ‘preventive’ or ‘submarine’ patents – patents taken out by manufacturers on potential processes and products that, if they were to come to market, might damage sales of their own product lines. Enormous creativity and effort is poured into research, simply for the purpose of preventing anyone using its results. In their 2008 book Against Intellectual Monopoly, Michele Boldrin and David K Levine say that anything between 40 per cent and 90 per cent of all patents issued in the US were neither used by the patentees nor licensed to others; they were ‘submarine patents’, existing solely to protect an existing product-line from possible competition.21
If technology is a true evolutionary phenomenon, as economist Brian Arthur suggested (in Chapter 1), this is as if at some point in the early Cretaceous period, 145 million years ago, jealous gods with major interests in dinosaurs and tree ferns had patented mammals and flowering plants to prevent their further development – abruptly truncating the story of life on Earth 90 million years later, when an unexpected meteorite made the dinosaurs and tree ferns extinct. This isn’t as far-fetched as it sounds: US companies have had the right since 1952 (under Section 102 of the US Patent Act) to patent traditional uses of life forms found in other countries (and therefore, in effect, the life forms themselves).22 If the current legal regime had been in place between the 1940s and the 1990s, it would probably not have been possible to develop computers. As Donald Knuth, a revered authority on computer programming, wrote in an open letter to the US Patent Commissioner in 1994:
When I think of the computer programs I require daily to get my own work done, I cannot help but realize that none of them would exist today if software patents had been prevalent in the 1960s and 1970s.23
This is what Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, said on the same subject in 1991:
If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today’s ideas were invented, and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today.24
Confronting the conundrum of his own dependence on progress-inhibiting intellectual property rights, he concluded that: ‘The solution to this is patent exchanges with large companies and patenting as much as we can.’
Thinking back to 1946 (and Chapter 1), one imagines that John von Neumann would have had to sign a non-disclosure agreement with Eckert and Mauchly before looking at the ENIAC computer, preventing him from disseminating the computer specification on which the ‘new economy’ is built. We should be wondering what other technologies we might have had, if the Western countries’ post-War interlude of egalitarianism and openness had been defended with a will.
IP law, like the original enclosures, is imposed by elite power, purely extractive in function and, as we begin to see, environmentally destructive.
COMPUTERS AND THE MAKING OF MONEY
Money would never be a problem if it were created and maintained by the community that uses it (which is the case in traditional societies, as David Graeber has explained,25 and could be the case everywhere, according to Ann Pettifor26). But that would require equality or something approaching it.
Rising elite power achieved the ‘liberalization’ regime that enforced the intellectual-property regime described above. Its larger achievement was to grant commercial banks more and more power to define and create the money that people must use to buy commodities. This is done by issuing bank credit – ‘stroke of the pen money’. Contrary to popular belief, and even some economists’ belief, banks really do create money out of thin air when they give someone a loan or increase their credit-card limit. ‘The process,’ wrote Canadian economist John Kenneth Galbraith in 1975, ‘…is so simple that the mind is repelled. Where something so important is involved, a deeper mystery seems only decent.’27
Banks gained greater freedom to do this as power and wealth brought them greater lobbying power and the very latest computing science. It suited elites to have money created this way, rather than by raising wages. Moreover, consumer credit earns extremely good interest and, even more seductively, the computers appeared to make it possible to protect investors against defaults by securitizing debt according to sophisticated mathematics, and then to make even more money by trading the securities on the financial markets. In the US, bank credit rose from 21 per cent of GDP in 1980 to 116 per cent in 2007: this was the real basis of the economic boom over that period.28 In the UK, bank credit rose from 36.2 per cent of GDP in 1980 to 136 per cent in 2000, and 212 per cent in 2008.29
By the 2000s, 80 per cent of the money in circulation consisted of bank credit, and easy credit had become a long-term substitute for wage increases. Household debt in the US rose to 70 per cent of disposable income in 1985, and to 122 per cent in 200630 – reflecting the growing wealth gap between rich and poor. Between 1982 and 2004, world financial assets increased 32-fold, while average incomes only rose 3-fold – barely keeping pace with inflation.31
The disaster that unfolded in 2007/8 was the result of harnessing the enormous power of computers to an entirely unfounded belief system, in which prices are the only signals markets need in order to regulate themselves. More and more powerful computer systems provided more and yet more information about prices, delaying but also amplifying the crash that eventually happened. Prices give no better idea of the state of a market than the speeds of nearby cars on a motorway do of the conditions ahead. Drivers can see each other’s speeds just as easily as dealers can see the prices of commodities, but accurately predicting the likely changes in those speeds and prices is beyond the capabilities of any conceivable computing system.
This awkward fact had already been proved in 1963 by the French mathematician Benoit Mandelbröt, who is now best known for his discovery of ‘fractals’ (the snowflake-like, tree-like and other shapes found in nature, which have ‘fractional dimensionality’: neither one-dimensional line nor two-dimensional plane).
While working as a researcher at IBM, Mandelbröt analyzed the movements of the prices of bonds in the US cotton market over the previous hundred years. He found that prices could change dramatically and suddenly, in obedience to an entirely new class of equations, which helped to give rise to a new science known as Complexity Theory. As the German economist Tobias Preis points out,32 Mandelbröt’s work exposed the fundamental flaw in liberal economics – but this did not discourage others from trying computerized, mathematical approaches, which opened the way to an enormous expansion of derivatives trading, following the publication in 1973 of Fischer Black and Myron Scholes’s algorithm for the pricing of options.
Before Black and Scholes’s work, derivatives had been a small fraction of all investments, essentially the contracts known as ‘futures’, which offer the right to buy commodities like coffee, wheat and copper at some point in the future at a pre-agreed price. Futures are benign insofar as they help such industries keep their cash-flow steady, pay their workers and plan for the future. Black and Scholes’s algorithm allowed almost everything else to be priced in the same way, including personal debt. It was what made the ‘hedge fund’ possible, and a world economy in which financial assets completely eclipsed the real ones that they supposedly represented. By 2007, the global derivative market was estimated to be worth $750 trillion compared to global output of $60 trillion.33 The credit-default market in 2008 was worth another $55 trillion – roughly the same as the cash value of the world’s entire productive output.34
The power-shift towards finance became self-reinforcing. Financial institutions deployed their increased lobbying power successfully against the legal barriers between speculative and retail banking (introduced in the US in the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act to protect against exactly this kind of speculation bubble, and repealed by the Clinton government in 1999; in Britain the barrier was demolished earlier, in the so-called ‘Big Bang’ of October 1986). This drew creative effort and investment into the monetary system itself, and away from the productive economy for which monetary systems in theory exist.
Scholes, and his and Fischer Black’s collaborator, Robert Merton, were awarded the 1997 Nobel Prize in Economics for their work (Black had died the year before, and Nobel prizes are not awarded posthumously). The very next year, 1998, the company they had formed to exploit the algorithm failed and had to be bailed out with $4.8 billion of public funds. Further collapses followed, including that of Enron in 2001 until, in 2007/8, the whole market failed, after the collapse of the sub-prime mortgage market, which had been built on the Black-Scholes approach.35
Fischer Black’s nephew, Michael Black, now a moral theologian at the Dominican Blackfriars Hall in Oxford, also rose high in corporate finance and witnessed the way his uncle’s work played out there in the 1990s and early 2000s. He describes Black-Scholes as ‘probably the closest the world has ever come to a universal standard of financial value’, but only from the privileged vantage point of those who had the power to apply it. He says: ‘the real money in corporate finance didn’t lie in creating value but in defining it’36 – and that is what Black-Scholes, plus computers, allowed an opportunistic financial elite to do for more than three decades.
The ability to define value, and to move money instantly to seize momentary opportunities and evade risks, led to a computer arms-race in the world’s financial centers which brought their computers close to literal meltdown long before the figurative, financial meltdown happened in 2008 – as described by Donald MacKenzie in a study of the computer systems at Canary Wharf, hub of the British financial industry, earlier that year:
The credit market is… one of the most computationally intensive activities in the modern world. An investment bank with a big presence in the market will have thousands of positions in credit default swaps, CDOs, indices and similar products. The calculations needed to understand and hedge the exposure of this portfolio to market movements are run, often overnight, on grids of several hundred interconnected computers. The banks’ modellers would love to add as many extra computers as possible to the grids, but often they can’t do so because of the limits imposed by the capacity of air-conditioning systems to remove heat from computer rooms. In the City, the strain put on electricity-supply networks can also be a problem. Those who sell computer hardware to investment banks are now sharply aware that ‘performance per watt’ is part of what they have to deliver.37
These events and discoveries have given some impetus to the new discipline that attempts to build an economics based on the one really ‘hard currency’ we know of: energy. We will touch on this again when we look at the energy cost of the kind of computers we have now, in Chapter 9.
THE WORLD GETS SMALLER AND HOTTER
All of this escalation and intensification of positional power has made the world much, much smaller – but not in the attractive way evoked by the phrase ‘global village’. The aspects of computerization that have made the world more village-like have also provided cover for serious physical restrictions on people’s movements which, perversely, intensify the energy costs of simply getting from A to B.
‘In a more unequal society, everyone is less free to choose where they live’, says Danny Dorling.38 His 2007 study Poverty, Wealth and Place in Britain, 1968 to 2005 showed that even the winners in an unequal society are quite severely restricted as to where they can and can’t go.39 The ‘exclusive rich’ are to a large extent byproducts of computerization (overwhelmingly, their fortunes come from the finance sector, and from the high-tech industries that support it). Because they are so rich, and others are so poor, they must use more and more of their personal resources to compete for diminishing numbers of desirable locations, and to avoid the growing numbers of undesirable ones. Islands of respectability and safety become smaller and more isolated. Getting to them can be as serious a business, and as energy-intensive, as travelling around an occupied country.
At the same time, poorer people are confined to ever smaller localities which, as discussed in the last chapter, are also further and further from their work, so commuting times and emissions escalate. Living space is more and more constrained as ownership is intensified. In Britain, new houses have actually shrunk in size, at the same time as their prices have risen.40 How small one’s world can become was illustrated by a 2008 report from the UK’s Joseph Rowntree Foundation, whose authors interviewed a representative group of young men who were effectively confined to a bleak area just 200 meters square on the fringes of the impoverished town of Peterborough.41 They felt unsafe outside that area, and could seldom afford to go far beyond it.
The pressure works its way right to the bottom of the pile and more and more of the people there end up in prisons, which are a form of housing, after all (as Dorling points out in his 2014 book, All That Is Solid42). Not only are there more prisons in more unequal countries, with more of the people in them for longer; they are also more closely packed (two and three prisoners to a cell intended originally for one). Prisons are also some of the most energy-intensive buildings, according to a UK report in 2010,43 and the transportation and other systems that support them amplify their impact.44 A new sub-industry (‘escorting services’) provides the fleets of energy-hungry armored vehicles, known as ‘sweatboxes’, that are now familiar sights on British motorways, moving prisoners to and fro, the length and breadth of the country between courts, police stations, hospitals and prisons at all hours of the day and night. They are operated (as many prisons now are) by transnational outsourcing firms such as GEO, Serco, Sodexho, Wackenhut and G4S. Many of these new transnational giants rose from humble beginnings, cleaning washrooms and delivering school meals, with the trend to use computers to commodify areas of service work that had not been commodifiable before.
As a society becomes more unequal, risk increases. People must divert energy from productive and enjoyable activities to protecting themselves against possible future harm – which includes failure to seize opportunities as they arise, and inability to respond to threats. People become more vigilant at every level of society and levels of trust fall.45 More and more resources are invested by individuals, firms and nations in their readiness to compete. As unequal societies become very unequal, powerful firms can externalize some of their ‘readiness costs’ by employing casual staff, or even putting staff on zero-hours contracts, so they do not even have the option of working for anyone else, and have to exist somehow at their own expense until and unless the employer needs them.
As inequality increases, societies invest more in the ultimate form of ‘readiness to compete’: up-to-date armies with lavish military training facilities and intensive weapons research. Computerization plays the same role here that it does in the financial sector, creating an illusion of infallibility based on ever more exhaustive data gathering, to serve ever fewer yet more powerful decision-makers: a cycle of enhancement that absolutely fails to predict real-life threats, yet which no general or politician dares to abandon.
Military effort is overwhelmingly carried out in the wealthiest states, which have most to defend; the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) says that ‘high-income countries account for about 75 per cent of world military spending but only 16 per cent of world population’.46 Among these high spenders, the ones that have the highest expenditures relative to GDP are all highly unequal ones: the US (which alone accounts for 43 per cent of world arms spending), Russia and Saudi Arabia; the very-unequal UK spends a slightly lower proportion of its GDP on weapons, but in 2014 it still ranked sixth in the world.47 and was the world’s second-largest exporter of armaments (just ahead of Russia).48 As mentioned in Chapter 4, military activity now accounts for around a fifth of all human environmental impacts, which is not surprising when one compares the fuel-consumption of modern tanks and fighter aircraft with that of their Second World War equivalents.49
The same forces are at work for individual people and firms. Choices become more and more serious and irrevocable as one’s world becomes more unequal – and this goes for everyone, from the precarious government minister with his nuclear deterrent, to the precarious worker with her mobile phone. Homelessness can become a real possibility for people who never thought it could touch them. The superficial ‘ordinariness’ of everyday life conceals a multitude of uniquely different melodramas. Outwardly, we and our neighbors seem to share a ‘level playing field’; inwardly, each of us inhabits his or her own private landscape of threats and possibilities, where an otherwise trifling diversion of just a few meters can involve two thousand meters of descent. Preserving one’s options, fear of commitment to some particular option, account for all manner of otherwise inexplicable behavior, and even get in the way of survival.
CLOSING THE TECHNOLOGICAL FRONTIER (OR TRYING TO)
The positionality/commodification spiral tightens the screw on the source of innovation itself: self-directed work. It creates conditions that could never produce the technology it has chosen to stake its future on, or even do anything of lasting value with it.
An entrepreneur hands serious hostages to fortune if he depends more than his rivals do on particularly skilled workers, who might go off ill, have babies, die, demand better pay, or go and work for another employer. The smart money is on those entrepreneurs who can eliminate skilled jobs or organize them in such a way that almost anyone can do them – reducing a job to a relatively easily learned list of routine elements and turning the computer into a potentially lethal weapon. As Ursula Huws has pointed out, this vast extension of hierarchical power over the workplace has blurred old distinctions between public- and private-sector work.
In the early days, governments often saw computers as a way of providing new services (like Britain’s Giro bank, launched in 1968), but subsequently they deployed them to commodify services that already existed, breaking the link between service and need, and between the person providing a service and the person served. Activities like teaching, service, retail and even care work could be subjected to the same kind of analysis and control that Frederick Winslow Taylor had introduced to car plants in the early 20th century. These functions might then be sold off to private firms, but even if they weren’t, a radical change took place in the balance of power within the workplace. Ursula Huws writes:
Although it is often associated with privatization, this form of commodification does not necessarily involve a change of formal ownership. It nevertheless brings about enormous changes in the nature of the work… Using principles of ‘scientific management’ fundamentally unaltered since they were developed in the 19th century by the likes of Babbage and Taylor, work processes are analyzed and broken down into standardized units. Once these standardized units have been defined, performance indicators can be identified and standard protocols or quality-control procedures introduced.50
Once jobs are broken down in this way into lists of simple specifications, the individuals who do them become in theory interchangeable ‘human resources’.
Rule-driven systems removed workers’ discretion from tasks like, for example, approving an overdraft or a loan, or a claim for sickness benefit. As discretion disappeared from the workplace, so did the male workers: jobs in high-street banks, for example, became predominantly women’s jobs, with commensurately low pay and status.
Rule-driven systems made it easier to introduce new rules, for example, specifying exactly what items of identification and surety a would-be borrower (or tenant, or job applicant, or visa applicant) must have, before their request could be considered. If the person lacks a necessary piece of paper, a box cannot be ticked, so the loan, visa, tenancy, benefit payment or whatever cannot proceed, no matter how desperate the person’s situation and no matter how much sympathy the worker on the other side of the counter feels for them. In this way, harsher rules can be introduced in the safe knowledge that they will be ruthlessly enforced, even without sadists or psychopaths to enforce them.
In the service of unequal power, the computer has become a pervasive presence, and its direction of development has been turned through 180 degrees. It has become a control mechanism, intensifying inequality by eliminating the kind of informal, autonomous work that produces significant innovation.
Frederick Taylor and his successors have given routinizing a bad name – but routinizing is part and parcel of doing any job well, and when it is the worker who creates the routine it is a source of satisfaction and even pleasure. Craft workers have always devised jigs, stops and other assemblies to eliminate the need for constant, conscious attention, to prevent error and delay, and to assist accuracy and speed. Scientific instruments, tapestries and top-quality pork pies would be impossible without this kind of thing. Craft industries are full of routine procedures that have to be mastered and internalized; once mastered you can talk and think about other things while doing them, and sometimes even sing. And when you control your own routines, working hours are not so bad and sometimes good.
Even today, people like lawyers, writers, entrepreneurs and financiers, and of course the computer programmers (especially the ones who provide the free software that the lawyers, writers, entrepreneurs and financiers would be sunk without) know all about long days that nonetheless are some kind of fun, so the phenomenon cannot be brushed off as a nostalgic invention.
It’s a nice irony that while computerization has made it possible to routinize more and more kinds of work, computer programming itself has remained highly resistant to routinizing by employers, so that programmers have been able to keep control of their own techniques and culture. Those who write about programming for other programmers often draw attention to its similarity with older craft traditions.51
The craft of programming hasn’t survived because programmers are particularly well organized (they are not!) or because employers didn’t try to take control. During the late 1970s and 1980s business leaders were told that ‘4GLS’ (fourth-generation languages) and ‘CASE tools’ (Computer-Assisted Software Engineering) would make it possible for managers to do their own programming and free them from reliance on temperamental and hard-to-manage programmers. Some analysts, like Phil Kraft and Joan Greenbaum, felt certain that programming would become a deskilled, routinized occupation, like so many other professions.52
But this didn’t quite happen, to a large extent because of capitalist industry’s inability to let go of the first architecture that came to hand – the one drafted by John von Neumann in 1946 (see Chapter 1) – and the constant changes that have been needed ever since to overcome inherent inefficiencies, so that the machines and systems people work with continually change in little, messy ways that ‘break’ previous code. The problem has been compounded by the constant game of push-and-shove whereby software companies seek to ‘own’ the programming process, by bringing out different proprietary languages and development tools, which also then have to be updated at every touch and turn. How capitalism got itself into this fix is examined later, in Chapter 11.
WHO DECIDES WHAT FOR WHOM
What makes the difference between the satisfying, life-affirming routine of the Edwardian wheelwright or 21st-century geek, and the deadly, mind-and-body crushing routine of the auto-worker, is who has done the routinizing, and for whom. The issue here is autonomy (where decisions are made on one’s own say-so) versus ‘heteronomy’ (where they are made ‘in the name of someone else’, to translate the term literally). Heteronomous decisions are made by, or in the hope of pleasing, another person, or entity – possibly even a supernatural one, or one so remote that it might as well be supernatural. For the Greek economist and philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis, capitalism and Soviet communism both failed catastrophically, if in different ways, exactly because they were both defined by heteronomy – a principle whose purest expression is cruelty and violence.53
Under heteronomy, the worker follows orders or else; no wonder the work is miserable. Autonomous workers, on the other hand, define their own routines, use them as and when they find them useful, and adapt them to the situation without anyone else’s say-so. Risk-taking is inherent to the task, but the risks are small ones. David Pye, a designer-craftsperson and teacher at the Royal Academy of Art – and one of the few writers to distinguish between craft and design – called this ‘the workmanship of risk’: work where one is constantly testing a boundary between what’s OK, what’s excellent, and what’s a mess because you’ve pushed your luck a bit too far. Computer programming is full of that kind of thing. Pye said:
all the works of men [sic] which have been most admired since the beginning of our history have been made by the workmanship of risk, the last three or four generations excepted.54
Pye was not harking back to some golden age of handicrafts; he envisaged a continuance of the long-established trend in workshops, for workers to use the latest technologies in support of their craft. Exactly the same concern was articulated in a more highly charged political context by people like Howard Rosenbrock and Mike Cooley in the 1970s during worker-led initiatives for ‘socially useful production’,55 and in the 1980s within the Greater London Council’s Technology Networks.56 Alas, David Pye’s world had little overlap with the workplace struggles taking place around him in Britain in the 1960s and 1970s.
Pye observed that whereas plenty is written and said about the design of the artefacts and buildings around us, their overall design is not as important to our enjoyment of them, as their texture and their surface qualities, which we experience at close range, and which are the results of the work process itself. ‘Design begins to fail to control the appearance of the environment at just those ranges at which the environment most impinges on us’.57
Risk management is central to autonomous craft, and to the character of its results: parsimonious use of materials, little waste, high functionality, great elegance. The importance of autonomous control of risk is evident, for example, in the work of a virtuoso potter, who can raise the clay on the wheel to a point where in other hands it would collapse in a messy heap, but it also holds true in quite other situations, such as the Finnish education system (mentioned in Chapter 4) where the national inspectorate has been abolished, teachers enjoy great autonomy, and the country achieves the best education results in the world.
Finland may give us the merest foretaste of the sorts of developments we might expect when inequality – and the positional, heteronomous forces that flow from it – go into retreat. Pye suggested that these developments could reach deep into our material world, transforming it utterly – a theme I’ll come back to in the final chapter.
1 Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Harvard University Press, 2014, p 444.
2 James Boyle, ‘The Second Enclosure Movement and the Construction of the Public Domain’, The Political Economy of Intellectual Property Rights, 2010, 1: 425-466.
3 Petr Alekseevich Kropotkin, Mutual Aid, a factor of evolution, Extending Horizons Books 1955 (originally 1902), p 194.
4 Fintan O’Toole, White Savage, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005.
5 Joseph J Ellis, His Excellency: George Washington, Vintage, 2004, p 156.
6 Quoted by Simon Fairlie, ‘A Short History of Enclosure’ in The Land magazine, nin.tl/enclosurehistory
7 Robin Jenkins, The Road to Alto, Pluto Press, 1979, p 111.
8 Adrian Levy & Cathy Scott-Clark, ‘Country for Sale’, The Guardian, 26 April 2008, nin.tl/Cambodiaforsale
9 Robert C Allen, The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective, Cambridge University Press, 2009, pp 63-79.
10 John Hammond, Lawrence LeBreton & Barbara Hammond, The Village Labourer Vol 1 Guild, 1948, p 83.
11 Kropotkin, op cit, p 182.
12 Karl Marx, Capital: a critique of political economy, vol 1, Progress Publishers, 1978 edition, p 71.
13 Alan Story, Colin Darch & Debora Halbert, The Copy/South Dossier Issues in the Economics, Politics, and Ideology of Copyright in the Global South. Copy/South Research Group, 2006, p.27 nin.tl/CopySouth
14 The Economist, 17 June 2006, p 33 – report on study by Baruch Lev of the Stern School of Business, New York University.
15 Intellectual Property and the US Economy, US Patent and Trademark Office, March 2012, p viii.
16 Ibid.
17 Xiangming Chen, ‘The New Spatial Division of Labor and Commodity Chains in the GSCER’, in ed Gary Gereffi & Miguel Korzeniewicz, Commodity Chains and Global Capitalism, Praeger 1994.
18 Gereffi & Korzeniewicz, op cit, Chapter 9 by Appelbaum, Smith & Christerson; Doug Miller, Towards Sustainable Labour Costing in the Global Apparel Industry, University of Northumbria, 2010.
19 UNCTAD Trade and Development Report 2002, quoted by KMG Astill, Clean up Your Computer – Working Conditions in the Electronics Sector, CAFOD, Jan 2004, p 8.
20 Thomas Bollyky, ‘Why Chemotherapy That Costs $70,000 in the US Costs $2,500 in India’, The Atlantic, 10 April 2013.
21 Michele Boldrin & David K Levine, Against Intellectual Monopoly, Cambridge University Press, 2008.
22 F Bowring, ‘Manufacturing scarcity: food biotechnology and the life sciences industry’, Capital & Class, 27:1, Spring 2003, pp 107-144.
23 Programming Freedom newsletter, Feb 1995, no 11.
24 Bill Gates, ‘Challenges and Strategy’, memo to Microsoft executive staff, 16 May 1991, nin.tl/Gatesmemo
25 David Graeber, Debt: the first 5,000 years, Melville House, 2011.
26 Ann Pettifor, Just Money: how society can break the despotic power of finance, Commonwealth Publishing, 2014.
27 John Kenneth Galbraith, Money, whence it came, where it went, Houghton Mifflin, 1975.
28 Mary Mellor, The Future of Money, Pluto Press, 2010, p 140.
29 Pettifor, op cit, p 33.
30 Mellor, op cit, p 60
31 Ibid, p 66
32 Tobias Preis, ‘Econophysics in A Nutshell’, Science & Culture, 76, no 9/10, 2010, pp 333-7.
33 Mellor, op cit, p 93.
34 Ibid, p 119.
35 Preis, op cit.
36 Michael Black, ‘The Sins of Financiers’, Oxford Today 26, no 2, Trinity Term 2014: 42–44.
37 DA MacKenzie, ‘End-of-the-World Trade’, London Review of Books 30(9), 2008.
38 Danny Dorling, ‘The trouble with moving upmarket’, The Guardian, 18 July 2007.
39 D Dorling, J Rigby & B Wheeler, Poverty, wealth and place in Britain, 1968 to 2005, Joseph Rowntree Foundation, 2005, nin.tl/DorlingRigbyWheeler
40 ‘No more shoddy “Noddy” boxes’ says RIBA in call for bigger and better homes’, Press release, Royal Institute of British Architects, 4 July 2007, nin.tl/RIBArelease
41 Keith Kintrea, Jon Bannister, Jon Pickering, Maggie Reid & Naofumi Suzuki, ‘Young People and Territoriality in British Cities’, Joseph Rowntree Foundation, 2008, nin.tl/territoriality
42 Danny Dorling, All that is solid: the great housing disaster, Allen Lane, 2014, p 13.
43 Chris Irvine, ‘Hospitals and prisons worst offenders in carbon emissions’, 1 Jan 2010, nin.tl/CO2prisons
44 Tracy Huling, ‘Building a Prison Economy in Rural America’, nin.tl/ruralprison Accessed 29 July 2014.
45 Richard G Wilkinson & Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level, Bloomsbury 2014.
46 Elisabeth Sköns, ‘Military Expenditure’, in SIPRI Yearbook 2004, sipri.org/yearbook/2004/10 Accessed 28 March 2014.
47 S Perlo-Freeman, A Fleurant. & ST Wezeman, Trends in World Military Expenditure 2014, SIPRI, 2015. Full SIPRI database available at: sipri.org/databases/milex
48 Aude Fleurant, Sam Perlo-Freeman, Pieter D Wezeman, Siemon T Wezeman & Noel Kelly, ‘The SIPRI Top 100 arms-producing and military services companies’, 2014, nin.tl/SIPRIdatabase
49 See: Patricia Hynes, ‘War and the True Tragedy of the Commons’, Truthout, 28 July 2011, nin.tl/PHynes2011; Global Peace Index, visionofhumanity.org; Campaign Against Arms Trade, caat.org.uk
50 Ursula Huws, Begging and bragging, Working Lives Research Institute, London Metropolitan University, 7 June 2006.
51 Pete McBreen, Software craftsmanship: the new imperative, Addison-Wesley, 2002; Tom Love, Object Lessons, SIGS Books, 1993.
52 P Kraft, Programmers and Managers, Heidelberg Science Library, Springer, 1977; and Joan M Greenbaum, In the Name of Efficiency, Temple University, 1979.
53 C Castoriadis & DA Curtis, The Castoriadis Reader, Blackwell, 1997, Chapter 3.
54 David W Pye, The Nature and Art of Workmanship, Cambridge University Press, 1968.
55 Mike Cooley, Architect or Bee? Hogarth, 1987; and Mike Cooley, ‘From Judgment to Calculation’, AI & Society, 21, no 4, 2007, 395–409.
56 Adrian Smith, Socially Useful Production, STEPS Working Paper 58, University of Sussex, 2014 Available at steps-centre.org
57 Pye, op cit, p 62.