AS THE CENTRAL CAPITALIST institutions collapse, an echoing vacuum is appearing. As long as they retained any authority, these institutions fulfilled a stabilising function; what is coming instead will be a state of institutionalised turbulence whose dynamic is extremely difficult to predict. Certain trends are abundantly clear, but when so many trends and countertrends interact, there are so many parameters and the level of abstraction is so high that even the most sophisticated guesses become a sort of intellectual meteorology: reliable only at very short range. Despite this, there is every reason to gather such qualified prognoses as are possible, most appropriately by trying to identify and analyse the social tensions that will characterise informational society.
Political and cultural debate within informational society will take place against a background of entirely new circumstances. The debate about equality that took place under capitalism will appear hopelessly tied to a bygone age, where status and power were primarily distributed according to an arbitrary system. Neither family background, wealth, gender nor skin-colour will have any decisive significance in informational society, where individual status and power will instead depend upon the individual’s capacity to acquire and manage information, upon social intelligence, receptivity and flexibility. The liberal ideal of equality: equal opportunities for everyone to realise their life’s project, has therefore already been realised in practice (while the socialist ideal of equality: equal rewards for all regardless of context, must be regarded as discredited and consigned to history with the collapse of the communist utopia).
But at the very moment this realisation takes hold, it will be clear that informational society is in several respects more unequal and static than any other. What we call “the new sociology” is devoted to describing these conditions. The system is characterised by great permeability on all social levels, and consequently great mobility for the individual, but these porous structures are, in return, much stronger. The mechanisms of meritocratic classification will become increasingly refined, each and everyone with enough talent and initiative to constitute a threat will automatically be promoted to a privileged position within the network hierarchy and incorporated into the elite. And it is difficult to imagine any political activism aimed at the inequality of the brain, or the fact that talent is rewarded. It is, after all, only “natural”!
The new patterns of this class division under informationalism will contribute, together with network society’s increasing opaqueness and the collapse of traditional left-wing ideology, to creating a seedbed for a dramatic increase of violence in society. The consumtarian protest movement will suffer a chronic lack of leaders – because potential talents are constantly absorbed into the netocracy – and will have little ideological sophistication. Its thinking will be contradictory, its actions erratically sporadic and impulsive. Social discontent will be blind. Consumtarian rebels will lack the old workers’ movement’s education and discipline, and will have no long-term objective. They will have no ambition to unite the consumtariat around a common cause, either within or outside the system, and no-one will believe in either organised revolution or revisionism: a sort of gradual netocratisation of the consumtariat through political struggle and hard work. What remains will be a sort of revolutionary aesthetic, a romanticisation of resistance as such, an intoxication of spontaneous, confused, collective destructiveness. But that will be all.
In this context it is important to remember that the consumtariat, in contrast to the old working class, lacks any solid conviction of a brighter future. A consumtarian rebel could never enflame his colleagues by claiming that the future belongs to the underclass; there is thus no notion that violent expressions of discontent would be progressive in any sense whatever. Instead, the consumtarian rebel is more likely to flaunt his regressivity and his hatred of both present and future. The consumtariat’s revolutionaries will therefore have no ideological connection to either the old workers’ and trade union organisations, or the peasant revolts of feudalism. They will take from these precursors at most only their rhetoric. Consumtarian rebels will instead take their ideological inspiration from the closed guilds of the Middle Ages and the puritan revivalist movement of the Enlightenment; a desire for isolation from their surroundings in expectation of the end of time and the collapse of the universe.
Early precursors to these consumtarian protest movements are already emerging in the transition between capitalism and informationalism, in the form of various headline-grabbing doomsday sects. These sects recruit their members from and are most attractive to the underclass of mass-medial society, which incorporates both the last remnants of the traditional working class and the expanding consumtariat. Doomsday sects are not a geographically localised phenomenon, and are appearing in disparate parts of the world – some that have attracted attention have been based in the USA, Switzerland, Japan, Russia and Uganda – which means that their appearance cannot be explained with reference to specific national cultures. They are, instead, a global phenomenon, an early example of consumtarian counter-culture. While the ambition of the netocracy is to conquer the world, these groups are turning their backs on hostile surroundings and are willing to cause damage before it is time to meet the group’s own, self-chosen, physical destruction.
This distanced attitude towards their surroundings, this construction of a parallel reality is something which seems quite natural to the citizens of an increasingly medialised society, where the boundaries between the “reality” that was so carefully protected under capitalism and the fantasy promulgated by the media are increasingly difficult to discern, and progressively less interesting to maintain. The news is entertainment, directed and presented according to the aesthetic of entertainment; politics has, in the words of talk-show host Jay Leno, become “show business for ugly people”, a sort of tv-drama about sensationalised social problems. Supply is usurping demand thanks to increased welfare and refined advertising; trademarks give a product an admittedly fictitious but no less powerful personality in an economy where entertainment is a central value; lifestyle is replacing life. This development is being strengthened by the fact that the netocracy is consciously turning its back on “reality” and taking refuge in its electronic tribes.
The arrival of informationalism and the breakthrough of the interactive media constitute yet another great step towards what Jean Baudrillard has called “hyper-reality”. There is every reason for a lot of people within both the netocracy and the consumtariat to prefer fiction to reality, because the former allows far greater choice when it comes to the construction of a social identity. There is a gradually increasing Disneyfication of our entire environment; old ruined castles are renovated and turned into places for stressed city-dwellers to go on outings, unprofitable farms are becoming theme-parks with an agricultural theme (so-called “agritainment”); cruise ships, hotels and entire destinations are being planned for longer or shorter stays in carefully realised fantasies, and so on. People are, to a great extent, becoming actors in their own lives, playing the “role” of themselves more or less convincingly. Reality is becoming an ever more subordinate part of hyper-reality, just as nature is becoming an ever more subordinate part of culture. There is no longer any actual reality, just virtual arenas in which performances are staged. The virtual environment is therefore becoming entirely synonymous with “the environment”.
By the end of the 1990s, the Internet had reached distant villages in India and Latin America where there was still no running water. The netocracy has grand colonial ambitions, which is why the consumtariat need not worry about not getting access to exciting new technology and all it offers – quite the reverse! The underclass’s only real chance to express discontent with its subordinate position will be to refuse to take part in the role-play of informational society. The aesthetic of passive resistance will then become a self-selected act of exclusion, while the strategy of active resistance will be violent demonstrations, inspired by the Luddites of early industrialisation who smashed the machinery that was undermining the value of their manual skills and destroying the preconditions for their traditional way of life. The threat of violence is the only thing that will make the dominant class listen.
Consumtarian rebels will therefore establish reactionary cells for the production of countertrends in an effort to achieve both technological and social exclusion. They will be following the path of the revivalist movement rather than the workers’ demonstrations of 1st May, trying to break out rather than reform from within. Their answer to technology and sedative entertainment will be violent resistance. The effects will be dramatic, but this is not to say that the drama will be effective, since the consumtarian rebels will be far too lacking in resources. A genuine informationalist class-war will only be possible when consumtarian rebels get support from outside their own ranks, which will only happen when the only partially apparent unity within the netocracy splits at the seams. As a result, powerful, anti-netocratic networks will spring up for the first time: an unholy alliance of the consumtariat’s revolutionary desperados and netocratic class-traitors, and it will be between these alternative, power-hungry hierarchies and the genuine netocracy that the informationalist class-struggle will be acted out in the form of irregular, explosive and potentially violent confrontations.
One inescapable precondition for this struggle is, then, internal netocratic conflict which is fundamentally ideological in form. This conflict is inherent right from the start, and concerns the infernally thorny question of immaterial rights. Just as the aristocracy once accepted its historical fate and co-operated with the bourgeoisie that was taking its power, so the bourgeoisie is now smoothing the way for the netocracy by helping to legalise the ownership of ideas. In order to understand the background to this virtual issue of ownership, it is necessary first to be familiar with four key concepts in this context: copyright, patents, encryption and firewalls. These four functions form the basis for what is called “the new economy”, and therefore also the basis of the netocracy’s appearance and assumption of power.
Copyright means the exclusive right to exploit, or control the exploitation of every form of immaterial right. A patent is the exclusive right, or control over the right, to exploit a certain invention over a certain limited period. Copyright and patents were fundamental functions even within the late-capitalist economy. With the breakthrough of informationalism, these rights apply, to an increasing extent, to digitally produced, stored and distributed information. The first digital products to be protected with the help of copyright and patents were software for computers and music stored on CDs, but with the growth of the informational economy, the value of digital information has grown phenomenally. This development means that the sale of ideas and design constitute a steadily growing proportion of the value of the economy as a whole.
This in turn means that the question of the copyright and patenting of digital products is becoming ever more central in informational society. It is a survival issue of the highest priority: the growth of an informational economy will be hampered and delayed if there is a lack of laws and rules in this area that are in tune with the times, and a judicial apparatus which is capable of implementing them. Enormous resources all over the world are therefore being expended on strengthening the legal protection of the right to exploit ideas. Legislation and police activities in different countries are being co-ordinated and standardised. One leads to the other: the fact that the informational proportion of the economy as a whole is constantly growing leads to an acceleration of these processes within business law, which in turn leads to increased informational growth. The growing netocracy and its allies, such as venture capitalists and specific political interest groups, have good reason to unite to protect their immaterial rights: their own survival is directly connected to the success of the project.
In countries like Russia, China, India and Argentina, there was no initial inclination to respect copyright and/or patents, because these judicial constructions only seemed to favour the already highly developed economies of western Europe, North America and Japan. Instead, these countries developed a strategy of imitating ideas and digital products which had originally been developed elsewhere. Without compensating the owners of the copyrights and patents, they mass-produced and sold cheap pirate copies of computer programmes, music and drugs, for example.
But a combination of heavy pressure from European, American and Japanese interests on the one hand, and the development of the countries in question in the direction of an informational economy on the other, has led to a radical U-turn on the issue. Globalisation has thus led to the political establishment all over the world uniting around the matter of protecting immaterial rights. The price exacted from anyone who chooses to remain outside this consensus is far too high, namely exclusion from the informational economy. For this reason, local authorities in China, Russia, and other places are cracking down on pirate-copying with considerably greater energy than before, at the same time as they are developing their own systems of copyright and patenting. Netocratic entrepreneurs and their capitalist investors can start to breathe easily again.
But within business and politics there is still not a complete understanding of what the Internet and technological development will mean. Culture on the net has its own dynamics, its own driving-forces, which are often at odds with late-capitalism’s interest in the ownership of ideas. This means that the whole global system for copyright and patent agreements is starting to be eroded from beneath. On the Internet people all over the world can set out digital information on their homepages; this might be text, images, music, film, programmes, and so on. They can exchange this information between themselves as they choose, without any intermediaries or regulation, and without having to take into account any legal limitations or someone else’s claims to copyright or patent. The people eagerly encouraging and carrying out this activity are netocratic class-traitors. The traffic in pirated information increased phenomenally during the 1990s. Neither national nor supra-national police organisations have any real chance of controlling or, still less, prosecuting this sort of activity, because it takes place in virtual space and therefore lacks any geographical basis.
The defenders of immaterial rights are also fighting in an increasing ideological headwind. A prohibition against copying physically tangible products – tables, cars, boats – is easy for almost everyone to accept. Someone who has constructed and manufactured a product also owns the right to control both product and construction, this is hardly controversial. But in contrast, it is not at all obvious to the new net-citizens that a comparatively small group of software-producers should earn large sums of money by selling expensive digital information which is incredibly easy and cheap to copy and distribute.
The special conditions that pertain within the informational economy mean that the production costs, storage and distribution of digital products are practically negligible, a fact which would benefit the whole of the net community if the right of ownership of information was dismantled. An unavoidable analogy is how the workers in the factories of early capitalism accepted the feudal right to ownership of land as being natural, but gradually began to question the fact that capitalism’s means of production, the factories and their inventories, should belong to the bourgeoisie. We are all too aware of what violent and bloody conflicts this struggle for the means of production led to. There is no reason whatever to believe that the informational class-struggle will be any calmer or more peaceful.
The problem for anyone protecting restrictive copyright-legislation is that the increasingly dominant mobilistic ways of thinking are negative to the very idea that a certain combination of ones and zeros could belong to any particular person or organisation, which means that this ownership will in time come to seem more and more “unnatural”. All this legislation and all attempts to implement it will be regarded as the protection of illegitimate special interests, which will in turn lead to the fragile alliance between netocratic entrepreneurs and capitalist investors coming under severe pressure. Those protecting the right to immaterial ownership will be forced to fall back on a collapsing political structure: the nation state, which will have no economic or even practical capacity to call out the police whenever immaterial rights of ownership are transgressed.
How could any police force or group of politicians set about closing web-sites that operate from some isolated island off Africa or in the Pacific, or even from a nation without control of its virtual domains (the Soviet Union’s domain name .su was, for instance, quickly snapped up by opportunistic hackers after the collapse of the Soviet Union)? Besides, there is every reason to question what moral right the informational economy, which is increasingly avoiding national taxation, might have to demand any protection from the state. As a result of this development, netocratic entrepreneurs will be forced to construct new systems to protect their desirable information. They will encrypt the ones and zeros before distribution; they will build increasingly sophisticated firewalls, virtual walls, around their activities to protect against eventual break-ins. The netocrats will educate their own guards and create their own networks carrying constantly updated information about electronic pirates and traffickers in stolen goods. In this way they will make themselves independent of the state and will accelerate, ironically enough, their own acquisition of power.
The conflicts of the informationalist era will therefore not take place between nation states fighting over tracts of land of questionable value. Instead we can see how ideological and economic conflict between different netocratic groups, in more or less loose alliances with consumtarian rebel movements, is developing. The dividing-line runs between the netocracy which is protecting what it regards as its rightful ownership of the information that forms the basis of the group’s power and status, and netocratic class-traitors who regard every form of hindrance to the spread of information as immoral, and instead see the maximal expansion of the organisational non-zero-sum game as the core-value of the new age. One clear example of this sort of internal netocratic conflict was the frenetic struggle to be the first to present a complete map of the human genome. The two sides consisted of an international consortium of academic research institutes, HGP, which claimed to be working for the general good and without profit-motivation, and a purely commercial company, Celera, whose business plan is to restrict and make money from specific patents in the genetic arena.
But because the central value of the informational economy does not lie in information itself, but in the sorting and combination of information, the most powerful netocrats need not concern themselves with ownership of copyrights and patents. Nor do they need to invest time and effort in the construction of encryption programmes or firewalls. The ability to network and get an overview of large amounts of information which is sought after by everyone cannot be copied or stolen; the owner is threatened by nothing but the possibility that someone else will prove themselves more talented. And this will form the basis for the growth of an alternative netocracy, an elite which will base its power and status upon entirely different factors than copyright and patents (and therefore ownership of the means of production).
This new group, the eternalists, will sympathise and collaborate with the industrious members of the same class, the nexialists, only when it is in the interests of the group itself. In other cases, when opposition splits the netocracy, it might well betray its own class and make common cause with the consumtariat, rather like academics with leftwing sympathies in late-capitalist society at least on occasion tried to make common cause with the working class against the class in power, to which they themselves de facto belonged. The academic left will have a successor in the eternalistic netocracy which regards certain of the ruling elite’s actions as immoral and offensive. This is an attitude it can afford to adopt even when the situation in question does nothing to enhance its own interests.
All of this, together with the new view of the relationship between production and consumption, gives a clearer picture of how the class-conflicts of informational society will manifest themselves. The most fundamental form of consumtarian resistance will be to refuse to produce desire, by boycotting both adverts and technology, and by withdrawing from the informational economy as far as possible. The activist form of resistance will be to attack the key functions of the netocratic entrepreneurs, the nexialists: copyright and patents. Revolutionary resistance will find expression in both virtual and physical violence. Every form of protective wall around highly valued information will become a target.
What the struggle is ultimately about is no longer control of production, but control of consumption. One characteristic of the netocrat is that he controls his own desires and exerts strong influence on others’, while the consumtariat’s production of desire is directed from above. The consumtariat will become resistant to the power of the netocracy at the moment it no longer accepts this state of things. The cheerleaders of “the new economy” believe, or pretend to believe, in the emergence of a collective, joyous realm where social tensions will be dispelled by the winds of change and everything will be resolved to the good thanks to large amounts of information. This is far too naïve an attitude, probably often a simulated one. On the contrary, tensions will increase in the electronic class society which is developing under informationalism. History is not dead, it is being resurrected in the present in an entirely new guise. And in the same way as this resurrection of history demands new players, any credible observation of informational society demands new observers.