HIJACKING AMERICA

Who Rules?: Politics and Control in the Information Society

‘You can make money without doing evil’

Who rules? It’s not an easy question to answer any more. Once upon a time, not so long ago, the answer was self-evident. It was the state. In the developed democracies it was the government, acting as elected representative of the people, that wielded ultimate and decisive power. For example, as possessors of the only legitimate means of violence, the state was charged, through its military structures, with defending its territory and its political interests. Just as importantly, elected government exercised its legitimate power by taking up its historic responsibilities to its people. A growing function here was to help organize and manage the economy through the creation of the optimal economic conditions to provide jobs and create strong industries. This was achieved in part through the nationalization of key industries and through the protection of economies from overseas competition by means of tariffs and trade restriction. Governments also extended the purview of the state by developing modern social structures that were geared towards the well-being of people, through setting up (in varying degrees) the elements of the welfare state, with the provision of free education, health services and unemployment beneﬁts.

Over the last generation the nature of power and the location of power have changed. War-making – the prime example of state power – has been transformed. The private sector now makes up a growing element of the state’s capacity to project power. In the USA, for example, the Blackwater Corporation has its own army, its own barracks – even its own air force with which to transport either its own personnel or ‘US Special Operations Command’ to conﬂict zones (Blackwater USA, 2007). Nationalized industries and a government role in the shaping or planning of the national economy are now a thing of the past, and the privatization of education, health and myriad social services have become well-established practices. Moreover, neoliberalism has not meant the augmentation of institutional politics as a primary organizing force in life. Rather, it has led to its partial dissipation into the ‘ﬂows’ of power that constitute the constantly evolving networks of the information society. As Scott Lash has observed of this new postmodern power conﬁguration: ‘power is elsewhere’ (2002: 75). But where? Power is still tied to knowledge, as Foucault suggested, and as thinkers such as Daniel Bell took for granted. But, as Lash puts it, in the knowledge society power ‘is now largely informational’ and tied to the commodity (3). Moreover, what Doreen Massey (1994) calls ‘power-geometry’ is no longer so clustered around speciﬁc (and relatively stable) sites such as government and institutional politics as it was during much of the period of modernity, but linked to the commodity and to the market. Accordingly, in a context where the market and the commodity dominate our postmodernity, power is now a ‘thing’ that is contestable and ﬂows through the structures of not only the state – but the corporation too.

Google power

The rapid and phenomenal rise of Google is testament to the nature of power in the information society. Google’s creators are Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Their names may or may not conjure up immediate recognition, but the company they started as a graduate student research project, at Stanford University in the mid-1990s, will. Google is the search engine that is used daily by hundreds of millions of people. So popular has it become, and so deeply has it been inserted into the online life of a sizeable portion of humanity, that Google can, with a modicum of plausibility, provide a measure of what the information society is thinking. It does this through its Google Zeitgeist website, which categorizes the search trafﬁc using the keywords that people themselves use. Google proclaims this rather loftily as ‘a cumulative snapshot of interesting queries people are asking – some over time, some within country domains, and some on Google.com – that perhaps reveal a bit of the human condition’ (Google, 2007). Well, perhaps this goes a bit too far – or, given what we have discussed and analysed in this book, perhaps not.

What we can be more certain of is the social and economic power of Google, and this is reﬂected in the value that capitalism and governments place upon such a ‘weightless’ entity. In the English-speaking societies, at least, to ‘Google’ has become a verb that has slipped into everyday language. We hear it used in instances such as ‘why don’t you just Google instead of ﬂipping through the phone book?’ And moving from the general to the particular, it was publicized that George W. Bush, as president of the USA, and the person who had executive authority over all the satellite and hi-tech communications systems of the US military, used Google Earth, a program that gives access to a photographic map of the whole world, to view his ranch in Crawford, Texas, whenever he felt homesick (Carnevale, 2006). More portentous, perhaps, is the fact that the British prime minister, Gordon Brown, asked Google, alongside other IT behemoths such as Vodafone, to help tackle the problems of development in Africa (Elliot and Boseley, 2007).

Google deals only in information, and its market valuation says something about the centrality of information as a commodity in the information society. When Google ﬂoated an Initial Public Offering (IPO) of its shares in 2004, the corporation was valued by the stock market at 23 billion dollars and many of its (then) 270 California-based employees became overnight millionaires (Webb, 2004). Less than three years later, as the Internet boomed on, Google had a stock-market valuation of 155.9 billion dollars and employed 7,942 people across the world, with no doubt a few more millionaires amongst them (<Yahoo.com,2007>; <Google.com>, 2007).

Compare this with the stock valuation of a corporation such as General Motors (GM). A 2007 Company Report published GM’s market capitalization at 17.26 billion (MSN.com, 2007). It was once an article of faith in the age of Fordist production, prior to the age of information, that ‘what’s good for General Motors is good for America’. No one uses this phrase any longer. Indeed, it would not even make sense to say that ‘what is good for Google is good for America’. Google may have a physical HQ in California, but its virtual presence and its virtual effects are global. If it had to it could relocate with the minimum of disruption – a key advantage of being weightless, and a central aspect of the change that the information society has brought, and of the global power of the corporations that thrive in this new environment.

I use Google as an example only to make the more general point of the unprecedented power of corporate capitalism in the age of information. Google itself makes a tacit acknowledgement of the power it and other corporations wield in one of its mottos, ‘You can make money without doing evil’. The Google website has a list of semi-aphoristic ‘Ten Things’ that describe its corporate philosophy. The quoted line is number six in what seem to be arranged in no speciﬁc order of importance. What this phrase says, in my view, is that corporations have become the new centres of power within neoliberal globalization and that a lot of bad stuff is able to emanate from the boardroom, and traditional political processes are increasingly unable to do much about it. ‘We are different’ is the Google subtext. Nevertheless, to make such a statement with the word ‘evil’ in it as part of a corporate philosophy is unusual, if not unheard of. Why do they do it? A clue may lie in two more of Google’s ‘Ten Things’ that we will now consider.

The ﬁrst is ‘Thing’ number nine that reads: ‘You can be serious without a suit’. On the face of it, this is harmless enough stuff that, as the explanatory text makes clear, lauds the beneﬁts of the casual corporate approach. This is only slightly more offbeat rhetoric than is usual, where open-door communication in a democratic environment is encouraged, where the in-house chef used to cook for the Grateful Dead, and where ‘ubiquitous lava lamps and large rubber balls’ reﬂect a kitschy corporate aesthetic. Page and Brin are too young to have been directly involved in the 1960s counter-culture movement, but we can see here distinct traces of what I described in chapter 3 as the ‘California ideology’ of the early information society, where ‘everybody can be both hip and rich’. Google dips into counter-culture ideology as a way to distinguish itself from the mainstream of corporate America, as being a new kind of business entity that knows the ‘evil’ that ‘man’ is capable of in the search for proﬁt. Again, there is no harm in this. If Google millionaire employees feel that wearing a suit is uncool, then it should not logically affect the bottom line of what Google does.

The second ‘Thing’ (number seven) is naturally aligned to the ethos of number nine, but it crosses over into more empirically testable ground. It states crisply and unambiguously that ‘The need for information crosses all borders’. Now this is a reasonable, if hackneyed imprecation, something that almost everyone who uses a networked computer and thinks about his or her use of it would readily agree with. It goes on to say that: ‘Though Google is headquartered in California, our mission is to facilitate access to information for the entire world’. However, there can be a difference between Google theory and Google practice in the context of neoliberal globalization. And this difference constitutes a symbolic gap that stands for the vacuum at the heart of institutional politics in the world.

It was mentioned brieﬂy in chapter 4 that countries with repressive regimes such as China are continually seeking ways to limit their citizens’ exposure to ‘subversive’ ideas on the Internet. The Chinese government, especially, is on the horns of a particularly acute dilemma here. On the one hand, it is fully committed to the global capitalist system and wants to integrate with the global economy as much as possible to allow it to pursue its ambitious development strategies. This means that the information necessary to connect Chinese development with the wider ﬂows of global capital must ‘cross all borders’, to allow the optimal environment for economic growth. On the other hand, however, along with the mundane ﬂows of economic information that fuel Chinese growth comes freethinking political information, information that is critical of the Chinese system and the Chinese government. What to do? The Chinese government devotes many resources in its efforts to ﬁlter out information it considers dangerous, and attempts to track down those who either read such materials or post their own. To cite just one example, in 2003 a Mr Wang Xiaoning was jailed for ten years for publishing articles the regime considered ‘subversive’. Importantly, and the precedent was set here, the government relied on the local Hong Kong branch of Yahoo!, an Internet search company like Google, to supply Mr Wang’s email accounts from which they were able to physically locate him (Chosun News, 2007). The Chinese government thus became alerted to the fact that it had ‘leverage’ over Internet companies – that is to say, they could be made to ‘cooperate’ if they wanted to continue to do business in their country. And so in 2006 the Chinese government sought and got the help of Google when it requested that the software for its search-engine software be modiﬁed (by Google itself) to screen out material that it did not want its citizens to see. Sensitive materials on, say, Tibet, or human rights or democracy, were duly ﬁltered out by the specially tailored software supplied to the Chinese government. It fell to Andrew McLaughlin, Google’s senior policy adviser, to make the lame excuse to the media when he stated that: ‘In order to operate from China, we have removed some content from the search results available on Google.cn in response to local law, regulation or policy. While removing search results is inconsistent with Google’s mission, providing no information is more inconsistent with our mission’ (Oates, 2006). The press freedom organization Reporters Without Borders (RWB) rightly pointed at Google’s ‘hypocrisy’ concerning its mission statements and its actions and railed at the company’s ‘lofty predictions about the future of a free and limitless Internet [whilst] conveniently hid[ing] their unacceptable moral errors’ (RWB, 2006).

The point here has not been to show that this or that corporation has been hypocritical – hypocrisy has always been a part of the capitalist system. And the point has not been to show that Google is any worse than other corporations in the neoliberal global economy. The issue is that Google and every other business in the global marketplace follow a strict logic whereby they are compelled to take certain actions or suffer the economic consequences. In parentheses this logic was illuminated once more in 2007 when Google announced the launch of its ‘Knol’ application (a truncation of the word ‘knowledge’) as a rival to Wikipedia. From Google’s point of view the reasoning is simple: Wikipedia attracts many millions of eyes to what is a commercial free environment. These eyes are potentially a market and potentially a source of revenue if they can be lured away from Wikipedia. If Knol is a raging success and causes Wikipedia to close or become an obscure corner of the Internet, well, ‘that’s business’ as the saying goes, but at a deeper social level a signiﬁcant (non-economic) cost would be the ethos of collaborative working on the Internet.

Again, this is simply part of the logic of the system, but what is different today in the information society is that corporations are more overtly political entities than they have ever been. Corporations have always backed one political party or another (or both at the same time) in whatever country they do business. Governments could change, left-wing for right-wing, and corporations could mostly live with the consequences. Today, however, corporations are themselves the expression of a particular political ideology: neoliberalism, where increasing power resides in the marketplace. The whole rationale of a corporation is now tied into this particular ideology, and their actions (to gain economic and hence political power) must be oriented towards the preservation of neoliberalism. In this role, corporations are required to act politically every day.

At the global level institutional politics largely leave business alone in terms of regulating the ways in which they do business. This has meant that political as well as economic power has accreted to capital in ways that are unprecedented. This is what the traces of counter-culture philosophy in Google’s mission statement allude to. It says that there are fewer restraints on capitalism than ever before, and more freedom to plunder, to destroy and waste, to make deals with authoritarian regimes, and to consolidate the structures of an increasingly unchallenged power. The reality is that Google’s ‘California ideology’ – rather like the ‘just say no’ slogan that was part of the futile ‘war on drugs’ – can only amount to warm and fuzzy mission statements that simply dissolve when confronted by the imperatives of doing business in our ‘new age’ of neoliberal globalization and networked economy.

To understand this new order of things, what is needed – in place of the acceptance of meaningless platitudes to not do ‘evil’ – is a solid analysis of the present political and economic context. From this, we are able to form a historical perspective that will give some idea why, in the information society, corporations have become so powerful and the strength of liberal democracy so weak.

The idea of politics

To better comprehend power and politics in the information society, we need ﬁrst to have an understanding of how political institutions evolved, and of the philosophies that underpinned them. In his critique of neoliberal globalization, Richard Falk pointed out the irony in the fact that ‘the Marxist account of the relation between economic and political power seems persuasive only after Marxism has lost its capacity to win adherents to its worldview’ (1999: 46). I think that this is right, but I think it also masks a deeper truth that to have a ‘materialist’ view of economy, history and politics is actually a common perspective, whether the holder of this view is conscious of it or not. It is a perspective held by politicians, economists and CEOs as they try to interpret the world on a daily basis. The ideas do have their genesis in the traditions of Marxism, but they go back further to the writings of eighteenth-century philosophers David Ricardo and Adam Smith. What they do is to put in place a secular theory for understanding the world. This was premised upon the idea that history, its politics and its economic dynamics (the ways in which humans ‘create’ their social world) operate upon a material and worldly basis. That is to say, it was not the divine ‘plan’ of God that was unfolding and shaping the affairs of men in an ongoing process of temporal change, but, rather, it was humans and humanly constructed systems, working on the natural world, that propelled change. It was a thesis that of course ﬁtted with the capitalist world view, and saw the production of ‘things’, the building of cities, of creating networks of trade and so on, as the ‘natural’ motive powers of the modern world. The idea of ‘progress’ thus evolved as a measurement of the development of the ‘productive forces’ of society. These are the economic, organizational and technological processes that make ‘acting upon the world’ more complex, more ‘efﬁcient’ and able to extract more ‘value’ from the natural world. History, then, may be seen in large part as the playing out of the multifarious struggles that take place between classes in the context of these material dynamics. And so instead of history being the effect of the actions of individuals, of ‘great men’ such as generals and kings and major politicians, instead it was accepted more as a complex of social forces, encompassing the political, economic and technological that was the energy underpinning social life.

How does ‘politics’ ﬁt into this interaction? We should begin with a deﬁnition of what we mean by the term. A serviceable description comes from David Held, who wrote that:

politics is about power; that is, it is about the capacity of social agents, agencies and institutions to maintain and transform their environment, social or physical. It is about the resources that underpin this capacity and about the forces that shape and inﬂuence its exercise. Accordingly, politics is a phenomenon found in and between all groups, institutions (formal and informal) and societies, cutting across public and private life. It is expressed in all the activities of co-operation, negotiation and struggle over the use and distribution of resources. It is involved in all the relations, institutions and structures which are implicated in the activities of production and reproduction in the life of societies. (1994: 311; emphasis in original)

This is of course a wide deﬁnition, but we can argue from this baseline that certain forms of politics coalesce and institutionalize as society develops. And so, as the modern period of capitalist development began to get under way, the institutions of an emergent liberal democracy began to evolve (in its varying forms) in Western Europe and North America in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Held, 2006: 70–116).

The political and the economic realms are closely intertwined. There existed (and still exists) a deﬁnite interaction (dialectic) between the political and the economic, where one helps to shape and form the developmental contours of the other. In this sense Held’s emphasis on the term ‘capacity’ is insightful. Capacity in this sense connotes a form of power, the power to change either (or both) the political environment or the economic realms. This interaction between forms of power has the effect of creating or limiting agency and choice (Rigby, 1987: 14). Historically, then, the capacity for change within capitalism and institutionalized liberal democracy has for each been more or less augmented throughout the period of modernity, creating a kind of ‘balance’ where no one realm dominated completely. We can see examples of this ‘balance’ or ‘tension’ where the political realm is able to shape the economic through the passing of laws that ‘regulate’ how capitalism operates. This can take the form of laws that mandate the minimum age that a person can be set to work in a factory, say, or the passing of laws that make the production process safer, cleaner and better remunerated. Alternatively, the economic realm can develop the capacity to drastically reshape the contours of the political process. A good example of this is the emergence of imperialism in the nineteenth century. The increasingly critical need for business to expand and invest, and exploit across an ever-widening physical space, compelled the political class of the developing capitalist countries of Europe to implement ideologies and practical policies that facilitated and legitimated Western imperialism (Hobson, 1965).

It is important to note that in the period of modernity the political process was nationally based. Apart from the extraordinary transnational capacity of political power in the context of imperialism (which began to wane by the early twentieth century for the major imperial powers such as Britain and France), political power has traditionally been territorially delimited. The writ of political power in a given developed country, in other words, ran only as far as its borders, where it came up against another institutionalized and territorialized political power with similar limitations. However, within its legitimate sphere of inﬂuence, institutionalized political power in the form of liberal democracy was able to have a sometimes-central role in the shaping of the economy, as we saw in the state’s role in the phase of mid-twentieth-century Fordism and the ‘managed economy’. Thus constituted, the institutionalized, representative politics occurring in the parliaments and congresses of the Western democratic countries came to be seen, by the mid- to late twentieth century, as the essence of what politics is, and as reﬂective of the ‘self-evident truths’ of democracy that US President Lincoln had in mind in his famous speech of 1858. However, this perspective connoted a form of timelessness in the institutional political process that neglects the historical tensions between capitalism and democracy, tensions where the power (the capacity) of one may be augmented at the cost of the other.

For much of the period of modernity these tensions waxed and waned to produce the dynamic basis of historical development. However, this dynamic ensures that things never stay the same, and self-evident truths can be eclipsed by new realities. This happened, I will now demonstrate, in the transition from a modernist society – based upon the interactions of capitalism and democracy – to a postmodern society that is still based upon the interaction between the economic and the political, an interaction that is deeply inﬂected by information technologies.

The message and the medium

A growing vacuum takes over the places that institutional politics used to inhabit. We see the sterile atmosphere of its politics when it tries to use information technologies to ‘connect with the people’, to keep voters ‘in touch’ and show itself to be still relevant to the globalized age of information. Establishment politics got in on the act at a relatively early stage of the evolution of the Internet, with President Clinton and Vice President Gore singing its praises during the late 1990s, and rapidly establishing direct email contact between the people and the White House (president@whitehouse.gov). However, some media and social theorists saw the dangers, as well as the promise, of what was termed the ‘digital Town Hall’ where virtual communities could come together in a virtual agora, named after the Greek place where ‘the people’ gathered. Howard Rheingold, for example, thought that either ‘Virtual communities could help citizens revitalize democracy, or they could be luring us into an attractively packaged substitute for democratic discourse’ (1993: 220). It is the question of control, I think, that decides Rheingold’s conundrum. Does information technology actually empower people to engage in meaningful dialogue with each other and with their elected representatives? Or does it shape the parameters of the communication, to the point where the medium becomes the message, to paraphrase Marshal McLuhan?

David Shenk, writing in his book Data Smog, keeps up the optimistic possibilities, especially on the ‘grassroots lobbying’ front, when he writes that ‘Advances in communication have dramatically transformed lobbying from an elite corporate perk into a facet of ordinary citizenship’ (1997: 134). At the very least, he suggests, ubiquitous computing has meant that politicians are aware of voter concerns. A million emails from, say, members of the National Riﬂe Association, over legislation they do not agree with, will no doubt make certain politicians sit up and take notice. High-speed direct communication means that the layers of mediation that separated politician from voter and president from citizen in the past have, in theory at least, been overcome. A few clicks and a few typed-out lines and your representative – from local councillor to Prime Minister – will have a record of your concerns. As Shenk puts it, ‘this speedier, purer democracy has been an enormous political boon in several important ways. Faxes, cable television, and modems have rendered the infamous smoke-ﬁlled room a thing of the past, transforming . . . America into a thoroughly documented, well-monitored public sphere’ (134). It may be wishful thinking that the secret political deal-making culture is coming to an end, but that’s not Shenk’s primary concern. He is thinking about the reality of too much information ﬂowing in the political realm between voters and representatives on every possible subject, to the point where the ﬂows of political information become what Arthur Kroker and Michael Weinstein call ‘data trash’ (1994). Politics may have moved from those mythical smoke-ﬁlled rooms to a distributed and ‘many-to-many’ broadband-enabled high-speed cyberspace. But what happens to it here? A similar thought occurred to Paul Virilio in his law of ‘dromology’ when he argued that constant acceleration (of political information, of commodities, of cars on the freeways, etc.) leads not to political transparency or economic efﬁciencies – but to gridlock (1991: 65). Political gridlock is not very difﬁcult to imagine in the current political scene. It is almost a cliché to say that institutional politics is now a lifeless realm, from where people stay away in droves. For young people especially, the inheritors of the information society, the politics of men in suits are seen to offer nothing. It is disaffection, moreover, that is evidenced at poll after poll in the Western democracies, where voter turnout continues to dwindle precipitously.

Politicians are of course keenly aware of this and of perceptions of their lack of legitimacy. Accordingly, and following the lead of Clinton and Gore in the 1990s, political parties all have their own ‘attractively packaged’ websites where, in many of them, much expense is devoted to making the party look relevant and connected with voter issues. Moreover, aspiring individual politicians will have their own website, and maybe their own blog too where they can create diaries and put down thoughts on this or that issue and seek voter feedback or ‘dialogue’. These media platforms go into overdrive during election time, and, in many of the Western democracies, the period of ‘unofﬁcial electioneering’ gets longer and longer. As the former Australian Prime Minister John Howard put it, ‘perpetual election mode’ is fast becoming the default position. There may be the appearance of a vital and progressive party and candidate through all kinds of multimedia tricks and wikibased interactivity. But what is the political reality in the context of such a surfeit of information, with politicians seemingly so easily within our reach? David Shenk considers this question and forms the opinion that in his own country, at least, ‘the increased speed of information has helped throw American democracy into a rut by reducing our leaders to followers’ (1997: 135). He argues that the political class now follows the logic of technology in the attempt to make itself as relevant as possible. And in the attempt they, ironically, stall the political process altogether, to the point where political discussion is mostly background noise to the images being projected of the politician and the party.

In this, we see a kind of ‘network effect’ at play where technologies such as the Internet and its various platforms are used primarily because of the powerful logic and ideology that proffers computers and networks as the solution to almost any problem (Roszak, 1986: 51). Instead of a solution, however, there is a further problem that emerges from the informationalizing of the democratic process, and that is the overdetermination that the network effect instils. Politicians and the political process turn to computers because they are believed to be ‘efﬁcient’ in all cases and at all times. Just as the average business now feels it needs to computerize, so too does the politician and the political party. In the case of the political website, or the politician’s blog, the network effect compels them to have an online presence when the actual political value of this is far from clear. Take the fact that in 2007 Hillary Clinton, as candidate for the Democratic nomination for the Presidential elections of 2008, decided to announce her run for the nomination ﬁrst on YouTube. The ‘YouTube elections’ were how some pundits described the candidates’ eagerness to get themselves on to this website so as to ‘connect’ with as many potential voters as possible. From YouTube appeals for individual support there quickly followed the ‘YouTube debates’, where the Democratic and Republican candidates for nomination made an en masse party-based appearance to debate questions from interested netizens. Were these ‘debates’ a form of direct democracy where people could directly question the party candidates? Well, no. The ‘YouTube Debates’ were actually billed as the ‘CNN/YouTube Debates’. Relevancy in the information age is an issue for television companies as well as the political establishment, and a network presence is seen as a way to assure this. CNN organized the YouTube debates, arguably, as a form of marketing its brand with the bloggers and Internet watchers of the world, the ones who are allegedly turning away from the television platform (Markoff, 2004). However, CNN were not prepared to turn this event over to the people, to allow them to ask any questions they liked. As a marketing event (for politicians as well as for CNN), the ‘debate’ could not be allowed to go wrong in any unanticipated ways, with ﬂaky questions, or questions that the candidates had not prepared for. So CNN editors and journalists selected the questions that would be put to the candidates from the many thousands that had already been submitted. The ‘live debate’ was a response to carefully selected and recorded questions. There would be no chance of ‘unstructured’ moments in this highly structured online democracy. Indeed, CNN editor-in-chief David Bohrmann publicly doubted the wisdom of the crowd, by telling Wired magazine that leaving it to the people to ask unstructured questions would allow ‘troublemakers’ to get their inappropriate questions in (Stirland, 2007). In the event, of course, it all went to plan. The ‘idea of politics’ that we talked about earlier in this chapter, it seems, is not going to ﬁnd its institutional expression online. What we get is the ‘attractively packaged substitute’ for politics and for democracy; what Jean Baudrillard (1994) called a ‘simulacra’ wherein the real and the actual gets buried under multiple electronic re-representations. Under these conditions, politics does not make a real connection with ‘the people’ as theorists such as Rheingold hoped it might, but the process actually alienates people even further. Through its multiple technological re-representation, and through its dissemination across the sprawling and unstable Internet, the political message in YouTube-type debates, or through the Internet more broadly, is irretrievably lost through hyper-mediation.

Blogging: political diversity or political echo chamber?

What might be called ‘online political communication’ has always been an aspect of Internet activity. Away from the institutionalized domain that we have just discussed, a growing political activism takes place at the fringes of civil society. Douglas Kellner calls this technopolitics. As a political space, the virtual space of the information society is, as Kellner maintains, a highly ‘contested space’ where differing ideologies and different agendas clash as much as they intersect. On the plane of anti-globalization politics which constitutes the largest and most signiﬁcant political struggles outside the institutional realms, Kellner goes on to state that ‘Signiﬁcant political struggles today against globalization are mediated by technopolitics, that is the use of new technologies such as computers and the Internet to advance political goals’ (2001: npn). The ‘contested space’ of cyberspace is an alternative realm where struggles over more traditional questions such as human rights, free speech, gender issues, economic security and political autonomy are now played out every day. Kellner illustrates some of the positive struggles, struggles that are at the same time novel because of the cyberspace underpinnings that incorporate their local-global dynamics. He cites, for example, the 1995 Zapatista Movement in Mexico that used networked computers (emails and list servers, and rudimentary websites) to raise a global consciousness and support for their local cause. He relates also the computer-based campaigns against global multinationals, such as McDonald’s or Nike, that have inserted themselves into local communities, or the anti-NAFTA groups that sprang up during the 1990s in an effort to stop a neoliberal free-trade agreement that threatened the jobs of workers in vulnerable manufacturing industries across North America.

The issues and struggles that Kellner describes took place in the last decade of the twentieth century, and already seem like they were eons ago in terms of how politics are conducted in the information society. As information technologies have advanced and become more complex, and as the realm of the information society has massively enlarged, so too have forms of political activism developed and become more multifaceted. We saw evidence of the potential power of a progressive technopolitics in 2003, for example, in the weeks and months leading up to the US invasion of Iraq. It was a form of technopolitics that was deeply embedded in the new media landscape that was forming, and it exploited the opportunities that a public thirst for alternative media made possible. As the expected invasion drew near, across the world, hundreds of thousands of activists began to plan an ‘anti-war global day of action’ for 15 February (F15). Linked and informed through websites such as Indymedia.org and MoveOn.org, relevant information was created, shared and uploaded. Much of it offered differing opinions on the impending war from that of the institutional media, which for the most part tended to take the allied governments’ line at face value (see, for example, FAIR, 2007). Moreover, the populations of these countries were subjected to misinformation – such as ‘Operation Mass Appeal’ – by state security services such as Britain’s counterintelligence agency MI6, which used media manipulation to lend credence to mainstream media reporting (Pilger, 2006). A global groundswell for the planned day of action grew almost exclusively through the alternative media itself, with newspapers and television giving almost no indication that such an event was building (Hassan, 2004). It was the ﬁrst ‘global demonstration’ in history and was made possible – indeed could only have been possible – through networked communication and the creation of an alternative public sphere. The BBC (2003) estimated that between 6 and 8 million people took to the streets on that day, whereas one anti-war document stated that up to 30 million people took part in the worldwide protest – citing a plausible ﬁgure of 3 million protesters in Spain alone (Simonson, 2003). Whatever the actual number, it is clear that this ‘virtual politics’ can have real world effects by putting millions of people on to the streets of the world’s major centres of power.

Evolving in tandem with this more complex form of online political activity at the beginning of the new century were more complex technological ways of using the Internet. This was expressed in the rise of user-generated content, made possible by Web 2.0 applications, which in turn allowed the creation of social networking and blogging. In general terms, blogs are usually the result of the work of a self-motivated individual who will post articles of interest to the blog for others – anyone – to comment on. Little technical knowledge is required beyond the mastering of relatively easy-to-use software or ‘blogware’, such as Blogger or Typepad. Articles or news items can be joined through a hyperlink that would take you to the source of the article, or they can be archived and preserved for future use and citing through a permalink. Recently, ‘moblogs’ (mobile blogging) has emerged. This is an even more immediate and media-rich form of blogging where mobile phones and PDAs can be used to upload photos, text or video straight to the Internet. Blogging has become immensely popular. It has been calculated, for example, that the ‘blogosphere’ is growing by one personal web page every second. By January 2006, there were an estimated 57 million blogs, a 6,000 per cent rise from three years previously, and a phenomenally intricate 1.5 billion links interconnecting them (Technorati, 2006).

Blogs are so simple to create and maintain that, inevitably, they will reﬂect every whim and obsession that people have. Many blogs are devoted to scouring the Internet for weird and wonderful things: links to pictures, streaming audio and video, stories, new gadgets and so on. This trend might be classiﬁed as ‘general interest’ blogging that people can read, comment on or ignore at their leisure. However, many, if not a majority of blogs would go under the rubric of ‘culture, news and politics’. This realm of the blogosphere is even more chaotic and dispersive than that of the emergent global civil society. With thousands upon thousands of blog sites sprouting weekly, political comment, ideas and analysis can range from the ﬁrst rate to the vacuous, and from the liberal humanist to the neo-Nazi racist. There is no ‘ethic’ or set of rules that exist to uphold standards – and, if there were, they would be impossible to supervise or enforce. And who would have the right to pronounce on universal principles across a global diversity anyway?

The point is that they are being embraced by millions of people who spend their time creating them, reading them and thinking and acting on what they have created and read. In some ways blogs are having a discernible effect on both the political process and mainstream media whose institutional structures they threaten – or at least are perceived to threaten. Repressive regimes such as those of Iran and China get very uneasy at the thought of free and unregulated communication emanating from within their borders. And with good reason: it was estimated that in 2005 there were about 50,000 bloggers in Iran. One of them, Arash Sigarchi, was jailed for fourteen years for what a BBC report termed ‘charges of spying and aiding foreign counter-revolutionaries’ (BBC News Online, 2005). Mainland Chinese authorities, for their part, have been busy blocking Blogger- and Typepad-enabled blogs to stop would-be Chinese bloggers from reading overseas blogs or creating their own. Moreover, in addition to using a specially written edition of the Google search engine to censor what its people can see, hear and read on the Internet, it was reported (in a blog) that this blocking capability was supplied to the Chinese government courtesy of US corporation Cisco Systems (RConversation, 2005).

Like the ‘beehive’ that is Wikipedia, the blogosphere generates its own self-organization. For example, most political blogs have sidebars, or what are termed ‘blogrolls’, where readers can view links to dozens, sometimes hundreds, of other blogs that share the same interests. At another level of organizational complexity, clusters of like-minded bloggers form in cyberspace to create political pressure groups. One such group is the Paris-based Reporters Sans Frontières, or, in English, Reporters Without Borders (<www.rsf.org>). Their website provides free access to a publication called Handbook for Bloggers and Cyberdissidents. This ‘manual’ gives advice on how wannabe political bloggers can get to work. Information such as ‘how to set up and run a blog’, ‘how to blog anonymously’ and ‘technical ways to get around censorship’ are offered. Julien Pain contributes an essay, ‘Bloggers: The New Heralds of Free Expression’, to the handbook and in it he writes that:

Blogs get people excited. Or else they disturb and worry them. Some people distrust them. Others see them as the vanguard of a new information revolution. One thing is for sure: they are rocking the foundations of the media in countries as different as the United States, China and Iran. (2005: 5)

Reporters Without Borders see blogging, naturally enough, as the basis for a potential revolution in journalism. They see it functioning as a kind of journalistic rhizome where honest and truthful reporting has the ability to undermine the corporate media together with the political status quo whose interests it principally serves. As Pain (2005) goes on to argue: ‘blogging is a powerful tool of freedom of expression that has enthused millions of ordinary people. Passive consumers of information have become energetic participants in a new kind of journalism’.

It was a kind of journalism that came to the fore during the lead-up to the Iraq War in 2003. In the weeks and months prior to the widely expected US invasion in March of that year, the ‘Baghdad Blogger’, whose blog name was ‘Salam Pax’, animated the blogosphere and the wider institutional media with his accounts of daily life in the Iraqi capital, where journalists were unable to operate freely. After the invasion he still kept up his posting to his blog, <dear_raed.blogspot.com>. So popular did his blog become, especially his description of the ‘shock and awe’ phase of the US bombing, that he was hired by the Guardian newspaper to write a fortnightly column (McCarthy, 2003). Much blogging is from a liberal, left-of-centre political perspective. However, there is no shortage of diametrically opposed blogs. Again during the 2003 Iraq War, a blog called <blogsofwar.com> attracted a large following for its alleged revealing of the ‘truths’ that the left-leaning ‘liberal press’ would not print about the war.

Blogs can catch politicians lying, they can expose their hypocrisies, they can pick holes in their policies, and they can humiliate them through uploading videos of embarrassing gaffes, through the posting of compromising documents and so on, much to the doubtless amusement and/or disgust of thousands of people across the world. Blogging has an impact, clearly. But, as a new form of politics, what are we to make of the phenomenon? Does blogging represent the ﬂowering of a limitless diversity of political opinion and political choices – and therefore represent a viable alternative to the shallowness of institutionalized politics? A striking fact that one can easily discover is that many blogs simply repeat what is said in other blogs. In other words, if the surface of the blogosphere is scratched, an impression can quickly be formed that political bloggers are a collection of politics nerds who spend their time reading and swapping each other’s postings. As the blogosphere expands exponentially, this perceived pattern of political repetition has been seen by some to point to something beyond simple ‘information overload’ or ‘data trash’ – as yet another problem for democracy.

In his 2001 book, Republic.com, Cass Sunstein makes the point that in the near future technology will have ‘greatly increased people’s ability to “ﬁlter” what they want to read, see, and hear . . . [and] you need not come across topics and views that you have not sought out. Without any difﬁculty, you are able to see exactly what you want to see, no more and no less’ (3). It is a new kind of media use that threatens to make redundant any general interest media that cover a whole range of topics in the one newspaper or magazine. Sunstein has a name for this media consumption. He calls it ‘The Daily Me – a communications package that is personally designed, with each component fully chosen in advance’ (7). He notes that this kind of technology was hailed by many as a triumph of individuality, convenience and control. Sunstein sees this as a form of consumer power – the ‘growing power of consumers to ﬁlter what they see’ (8). Ostensibly this does seem like a good thing. You read and see what you want, when you want. No nasty surprises as might happen on old broadcast television, where a graphic vision of, say, a car bomb going off in some far-off city, with many innocents killed and injured, is unexpectedly shown. In this new kind of media consumption, serendipity, or chancing across an interesting article, or hearing a point of view that you were not previously familiar with, becomes increasingly less likely as ﬁltering software becomes more sophisticated. As Sunstein put it, however, such a development is a false kind of social power that puts private control in conﬂict with public democracy. The shared experiences that help constitute a ‘mass society’, where people have a similar perspective on the world and fairly similar forms of knowledge through which to inform this common world view, are in danger of degenerating into a kind of social fragmentation within cyberspace (10–13). Through the technological ability to be exposed only to what you want to be exposed to, opinions, views and ideas ring as if in an echo chamber. As Sunstein puts it: ‘New technologies, emphatically including the Internet, are dramatically increasing people’s ability to hear echoes of their own voices and to wall themselves off from others’ (49). Moreover, there is the tendency to listen out only for ‘louder echoes of their own voices’ (16). This presents a major problem as far as a vibrant and diverse democratic functioning is concerned. Fragmented communication, ghettoized communication, ‘niched’ communication, leads to a narrowing of opinion. We may feel ‘free’ and secure within our own digital bubble, but as Sunstein argues:

Freedom consists not simply in preference satisfaction but also in the chance to have preferences and beliefs formed after exposure to a sufﬁcient amount of information, and also to a wide and diverse range of options. There can be no assurance of freedom in a system committed to the ‘Daily Me’. (2001: 50)

There are shades here, I think, of Marshal McLuhan and his thesis on narcissism. In his Understanding Media, McLuhan famously characterized technologies as ‘extensions’ of ourselves. He develops this idea further to suggest that so wholly do they become part of us, that we come to be dependent upon them. For McLuhan this can easily spill over into a technological obsession. Indeed, this is something we might recognize in our own time with some people’s apparent obsession with mobile phones, Internet surﬁng and so on. Furthermore, as these technologies are in a sense ‘part’ of us, acting as ‘extensions’ of ourselves, this obsession can lead to an obsession with ourselves, what McLuhan calls a ‘Narcissus ﬁxation’ (1964: 19). Here, immersed in our own technologized media world, what McLuhan terms the ‘private point of view’ forms part of this ﬁxation and the individual becomes ‘quite shut off’ and ‘ceases to be sensitive to the diverse and discontinuous life’ (ibid.).

Writing in the 1960s, McLuhan could not foresee how his ‘global village’ thesis would come to pass so dramatically through economic globalization and the information society. Sunstein, however, did preﬁgure by a couple of years the rise of the blog. He did not use the term in Republic.com because in 2001 the term had not yet been coined – but forms of blogging were beginning to make themselves salient. He identiﬁed websites where ‘news and views’ could be personalized, and the user could get a digest of the kinds of things that he or she was interested in, then could share these with like-minded others through email. The term he used for this process was ‘collaborative ﬁltering’, where people, as well as sophisticated websites like Amazon.com, are able to pander to your private opinions and tastes (25).

‘Collaborative ﬁltering’ can be seen as another pre-blogging term for blogging, and is something Sunstein took up in 2007 in an updated Republic.com 2.0, where he devotes a whole chapter to the subject. He writes that political blogging is but a small percentage of the vast and growing total, but nonetheless they ‘seem to be having a real inﬂuence on people’s beliefs and judgements’ (2007: 138). According to Sunstein, there are genuine beneﬁts to be had from blogging in the political realm. For example, thousands of keen-eyed bloggers can act as fact-checkers (a bit like the Wikipedia community) on the claims of politicians or the media. Political bloggers are also able to highlight issues and force them on to the institutional agenda, issues that might otherwise have been forgotten or buried in an ocean of information. However, as yet, the evidence of the blogosphere’s ability to inﬂuence the agendas of the public stage is, Sunstein concludes, ‘all too little’ (146). He believes that the wiki-based technologies of blogging simply make the echo-chamber effect much more efﬁcient. Political bloggers, he observes, are ‘primarily interested in cherry-picking items of opinion or information that reinforce their preexisting views’ (143). Recall here my description of ‘blogrolls’ where like-minded bloggers advertise each other’s sites.

Sunstein’s main point is that as a forum for ‘deliberative democracy’ the blogosphere does not work. The echo-chamber effect, he argues, fragments the public sphere and polarizes political opinion. To strengthen his case, he cites the ‘Colorado Experiment’ from 2005, whereby in a controlled laboratory situation the polarization of political opinion within selected groups became strongly evident. The experiment consisted of ten groups of six American citizens, with each group consisting of people with either ‘liberal’ or ‘conservative’ opinions. They were asked to discuss between them three of the most contentious issues of the time: same-sex marriage, afﬁrmative action and whether the USA should sign the Kyoto climate-change agreement. Participants were asked their opinion after ﬁfteen minutes of deliberation, and then asked to try to reach a public verdict prior to the ﬁnal anonymous statement. The results indicated that in ‘almost every group, members ended up with more extreme positions after they spoke with each other’ (60–1). So, not only was the polarization effect strengthened, but also the opinions within the polarized groups tended to become more radical. Sunstein suggests that ‘it is entirely reasonable to think that something of this kind ﬁnds itself replicated in the blogosphere every day’ (145). He cites further evidence that suggests that the blogosphere is indeed comprised of discrete political ghettoes: a study conducted during the 2004 US elections found that out of the 1,400 blogs surveyed, fully 91 per cent of the links (the ‘blogrolls’) were to like-minded sites (Sunstein, 2007: 149).

Blogging, or general online communication, can put millions of people on to the street, as we saw in the positive perspective – or, conversely, it can become a highly efﬁcient echo chamber where opinions, ideas and strategies for political action are discussed in an increasingly narrow context, and where the tendency is towards ever more polarized and extreme opinion. As technological expressions of politics, or ‘technopolitics’, what can we take from this positive–negative summary? Unfortunately, it is not possible to give deﬁnitive answers or clear-cut predictions. Why? Because it is in the nature of the media – and in the nature of society – to militate against such a neat packaging of postmodern political reality. This is even more the case in the context of social/technological acceleration. For example, Wikipedia tells us that although blogging was fairly widespread from 2001, it did not become mainstream until 2004, when easy access to wiki software created the explosion in user-generated content. In the space of just a few years it has made an impact, intellectually and practically, as we have seen. However, this rapid acceleration should tell us something. The information society is still evolving. It is evolving in ways that we cannot predict because the logic of the information society, the rationale that drives it, is anarchic and based upon the disorder of competition. Blogging (political and otherwise) rose rapidly to become global phenomena. But if no one had conceived of it a decade ago, who’s to say that it won’t rapidly fall into abeyance over the next few years, when the new ‘killer app’ sweeps the planet as the latest techno-fad? Who, indeed, can argue against the strong likelihood of this happening? Change is a constant within capitalism, but capitalist change, or what Joseph Schumpeter called ‘creative destruction’, has become digitalized, and is expressed in the information that ﬂows through the network at speeds that increase with every new microprocessor that is the latest ‘system benchmark’.

Economy and politics are about social power, and power is now attached to the bits and bytes that comprise the network trafﬁc. As Castells puts it, ‘relentless adaptation’ and the ‘multiple strategies (individual, cultural, political) deployed by various actors’ are what constitute the question for dominance in the information society (Castells, 1999). Power moves and stops, dissipates and concentrates, but in the context of a constantly moving dynamic where nothing stands still for very long. We discussed the power of Google at the beginning of this chapter. Google is presently top of the globalization/ICT heap with shares worth over $700 apiece and rising; it is the current darling of Wall Street. It is also the current favourite at the highest political levels, as we saw with the British government initiative to have Google involved with solutions for poverty in Africa. It has come a long way in a few short years. But Google could easily fall prey to the power ﬂows of an uncertain and volatile economic/political system. ‘Conﬁdence’ in the Google business model could evaporate in the wake of a political decision or technological development. Who knows? As for the institutional political realm itself, there is precious little sign that it has fallen out of love with a free market, or with globalization based on a free-market premise. This means that its self-marginalization from the loci of economic (and hence social/political) power will remain – and probably increase. Global and local political institutions still invest inordinate power in both the market and information technologies as the solutions for societies’ ills. They do this in the face of very little supporting evidence, and do it at the expense of democracy, negating society itself, through its elected representatives, taking responsibility for humanity and its future. For example, global warming is possibly the most important challenge that faces us. But it is not to be tackled through the application of science and the mobilization of political will to prioritize action and to take the rational and logical measures necessary. Instead, humanity is to confront this impending catastrophe through the application of a market in carbon trading. In other words, we are entrusting our collective future to the irrational and illogical dynamics of capitalist competition (Monbiot, 2007).

Evidence of our unreﬂective faith in information technology as a social panacea was demonstrated in the Australian election of late 2007. A central policy platform of the opposition Labor Party was to launch an ‘education revolution’ if elected. The basis of this ‘revolution’ was to hand a laptop computer to every high school student in the country, which they could connect to a (proposed) ‘high-speed broadband network [that would] ensure our global competitiveness in business and education’ (Australian Labor Party, 2007). Exactly what (and on what evidence) a laptop and broadband connection would do to revolutionize education was not explained, only asserted. Nonetheless, Labor was elected on a landslide.

The question begs: what keeps society (global and local) together? Fear might be a reason. Fear of the pace of change (and so we tend not to challenge it, even as it accelerates); fear of our economy collapsing (so we don’t question ‘the experts’); and fear that our politicians don’t really know what they are doing any more (Giddens’s observation that we live in a ‘runaway world’). In an information society governed by the volatility of market competition and driven by the hyperspeed of networked computers, and in the absence of an effective politics at the local or global level, the ‘fear factor’ makes some sense. Consider the opinion of Tony Judt (2007), writing on the logic of contemporary capitalism in the New York Review of Books:

Fear is re-emerging as an active ingredient of political life in Western democracies. Fear of terrorism, of course; but also, and perhaps more insidiously, fear of the uncontrollable speed of change, fear of the loss of employment, fear of losing ground to others in an increasingly unequal distribution of resources, fear of losing control of the circumstances and routines of one’s daily life. And, perhaps above all, fear that it is not just we who can no longer shape our lives but that those in authority have lost control as well, to forces beyond their reach.

And fear is at the centre of the supposed solutions for the crises of Western democracy: neoliberal globalization and information technologies. For example, the fear engendered by the Cold War is at the core of the computing logic that helped create the Internet. And fear of the threat of rising interest rates, of rising inﬂation, of rising prices for a barrel of oil, of a return to the generalized crises of the 1970s and so on, is the gel that binds globalization; not promise, or progress or hope. This baleful scene is a far cry from the rather more positive visions of someone such as Daniel Bell who foresaw the possibility of progress carrying the information society forward through knowledge workers and expert systems that were ‘managed politically’ in the context of a functioning and committed democratic polity (1973: 18–19). It is a scene that is also in stark contrast to those boosters of the information society for whom all kinds of social, material and democratic beneﬁts would ﬂow. They see the information society fundamentally in terms of pure technological progress. None of those we have discussed – and they are salient and typical of the tendency – view the information society as the offspring of a particular political/economic system. I have tried to propose another reality, one that is constructed through a political economy prism. It presents us with a reality quite different from the ‘dreams’ of progress and efﬁciency. We see their opposites.

Some conclusions

In this book I have attributed a speciﬁc logic (its causes and its effects) to the phenomenon we call the information society. This comes from the inevitable realization (for me) that the information society did not simply ‘evolve’ as some ineluctable process – or did not suddenly ‘appear’ due to the revolutionary invention of, say, the microprocessor that allowed the development of the desktop computer in the early 1980s. It, of course, has a pre-history comprising a whole set of human-made decisions, institutional transformations and political and economic imperatives that created the necessary context for the insertion of this particular logic and the creation of our current society.

And it is a logic, as we saw, that stems from the conjunction of neoliberal globalization and the revolution in the development and application of computer-based technologies. This has been the key point. These interrelated processes are two sides of the same coin, and have developed rapidly to become indispensable to each other. There would have been no neoliberal globalization without the amazing transformation in our relationship with computer technologies – and the ubiquity of computers and our dependency upon them would be at a relatively low level today without the massive ideological boost given by the rise of neoliberal economics. Notwithstanding the polished and seemingly ideologically neutral surface of the information society, with its wondrous applications and gadgets, it is nonetheless deeply inscribed by the logic of neoliberalism and the free market. Consequently these are, ﬁrst and foremost, applications and gadgets developed not for human need, but as commodities for sale in a marketplace. Usefulness and saleability are therefore not necessarily mutually compatible considerations in the development of a computer-based product.

A reply to this might be: so what? This is a capitalist system and a neoliberal world. This is just how things are, you might be tempted to say. And indeed, many do, and they see, or are tutored to see, the information society as an essentially natural way of making a natural system more ‘efﬁcient’,‘productive’ and more ‘ﬂexible’ to the point where we will all eventually have easier lives. Such a common response has its own possible explanations, as the preceding chapters have tried to show. First, as an ideology, neoliberalism has become so powerful that it has indeed become more or less naturalized as the normal and inevitable state of human affairs (Harvey, 2005: 19–31). That the organization of life through increasingly arbitrary market competition is largely accepted as the optimal form is given a veneer of credence by the fact that there are now no systemic challenges to neoliberalism. Socialism and communism have been mouldering in history’s dustbin since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Even the moderate social democracy of the kind articulated by labour and workers’ parties around the world since 1945 has either withered on the vine of continual marginality, or the parties have simply transformed themselves into neoliberal parties. The British ‘New Labour’ transmogriﬁcation over the 1990s is the signal example.

Second, the information society itself reinforces the neoliberal world view. What Jeremy Rifkin (2000: 22) terms the ‘economy of speed’ made possible through computerization ensures that not only are productive processes accelerated, but that society is also. The world moves so fast, and is propelled by ever-increasing volumes of information, that we tend not to see the past any more as a guide to the present and the future, or see the future as the effects of acts in both the past and the present. We live more and more in the present itself. We spend our time, increasingly, in ‘multitasking mode’ where all we are capable of thinking about, or concentrating on, are the task(s) that are immediately to hand. And so the damage, cognitive and social, political and economic, wrought by what Simon (1971: 40–1) termed the ‘poverty of attention’, is only now coming to be recognized through a closer focus on the temporal dimension of the information society.

Having our attention diverted by the multifarious choices that the information society lays before us every day, at work or at home or at play, means in the ﬁrst instance that we become necessarily less reﬂective. We simply have less time to devote to doing nothing other than thinking through a problem or an issue with the attention it deserves. So we have a less than ‘full’ picture of, say, how the global economy works, what the stock market is for, why fuel prices and interest rates are so volatile – and we are less able to usefully consider what might be done about it. The effect is that we are not only less reﬂective, but also less critical. To be less critical, to be less able to deliver a critique of an issue – or the world that surrounds us – makes us necessarily less politically powerful; it drains us of political agency, of the intellectual ability to see the concrete economic and social reality of the world, and be able to individually and collectively propose better ways and better solutions to problems that confront us.

The value of the political economy approach that this book has taken is that two primary features of the information society and its neoliberal undergirding are revealed behind the ideological mask. The ﬁrst is negative and the second positive. On the negative side of the ledger is the fact that neoliberal capitalism and the information society are increasingly devoid of any institutional political control, leaving the market to decide how society is comprised. The more positive idea emerging from our analysis is that this free-market version of capitalism, notwithstanding a complete lack of any serious rivals, is not a natural or inevitable or permanent state.

Lack of political control, as we saw, was a conscious application of neoliberal ideology. Arguments made by political philosophers such as von Hayek, and implemented by professional politicians such as Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, to ‘let the market decide’ how society is organized, away from the allegedly corrupting, bureaucratic, slow-moving and inept hands of government were a response to the crises of the post-war regime of worldwide Fordism. Having begun in the 1970s, the process of neoliberalization has become universal today. In the USA, for example, the most advanced capitalist country on earth, Naomi Klein observed in 2007 that ‘the state has lost the ability to perform its core functions’ (417). As to the government of the day in the USA, Klein goes on to write that ‘the state still has all the trappings of a government – the impressive buildings, presidential press brieﬁngs, policy battles – but it no more does the actual work of governing than the employees at Nike’s Beaverton campus stitch running shoes’ (418). This is Giddens’s undemocratic ‘runaway world’, the world we all now inhabit under neoliberal globalization. Volatile and chaotic imperatives shape this reality, and it is a reality that touches all of us through the ubiquity of networked information technologies. With every passing day and month and year we pass through uncharted waters with no one at the helm, with no political leadership to shape the market and globalization to the forms of human need and a sustainable future. This is the reality of the information society.

The fact that this need not necessarily be so should be obvious through the political economy perspective. What it has shown us is that the questions of the information society, and the negative effects of speed, are essentially political and therefore must have, at least in the ﬁrst instance, political solutions. Politics has not gone away, notwithstanding the withdrawal of political institutions from actively participating in the democratic shaping of the global economy; it simply reappears in other forms such as in the World Social Forum, or the growing activity of NGOs, and the ongoing vibrancy of what Douglas Kellner terms ‘technopolitics’. And so the question posed in chapter 7, ‘“ Who rules?” the market or democratic institutions?’, will increasingly arise in these early years of the twenty-ﬁrst century, as disaffection with neoliberal globalization mounts (Klein, 2007). If political institutions willingly abrogated much of their power in favour of the supposed ‘laws’ of competition, the solution therefore must be to take at least some of this power back and return it to the only really legitimate place – to the parliaments and congresses of representative democracies. But how?

The perspective shown here reveals no easy answers, only pathways of possibility. We can begin the journey by thinking about the information society more reﬂexively, as I have tried to do through comparing its boosters with its critics. To see the fundamental ﬂaws in the ideas of those who embrace market-driven information technologies does not mean that we reject computers and try to live our lives without them. Already, for most of humanity, this would be an impossible task anyway. It means being yet more reﬂective and analytical, in spite of the imperatives of ‘social acceleration’, and it means a conscious effort to be intellectually aware of the deep and abiding links between the information society, as it is presently constructed, and neoliberal globalization. This then becomes a critique that focuses on the nature of neoliberal globalization, with its manifest propensity towards inequality, volatility and the undermining of the basis for social cohesiveness. We can add to this what I see as a major and in many ways unprecedented effect of the network society, that is, the social acceleration that has evolved due to the nature of capitalist competition and the ‘need for speed’ generated by it. Information technologies have been found by business to be ideally suited to speeding up almost every realm of life, from education, to work, to our family and private life. We need to realize that this conjunction of computer-based technology and free-market economics has created a networked society, but it is a society that is going nowhere in respect of human ideals of progress and sustain-ability. This does not mean that computers per se are to blame. It is the random and chaotic ‘laws’ of the market that are. However, we can reﬂect upon this more deeply to realize that in fact computerization may be one of the greatest technological resources that humans have ever developed. It’s just that we don’t control their use democratically or develop their potential towards social needs. As a result, the immense potential of computers is unrealized.

The information society today is political insofar as it functions in a democratic vacuum. Until the vacuum is ﬁlled by a politics that is oriented towards controlling this society we will continue to accelerate towards destinations unknown, to an existential emptiness, where the past and its lessons rapidly disappear and the future is a permanently dark horizon. It is inside here that the loop of reasoning always returns us again and again to the political question. And so we have an intellectual and political responsibility to think it through once more, looking for insights and for cracks in the ediﬁce of current reality – to seek more positive spaces where we envision different ones.