The American military network ARPAnet was
conceived as a way to maintain uninterrupted communications in the event of nuclear
war. Ancestor of the Internet and foundation of the Global Information Infrastructure,
ARPAnet springs from exactly the same source as the "push-button war" that
lay behind it: the change of scale provoked by the early 20th century discoveries
in physics, within an industrial society capable of organizing the productivity –
including the scientific productivity – of thousands of agents. Here, no doubt, is
the real birthplace of the information society: a society massively penetrated by
the sciences and technologies of information and telecommunications, using them to
carry out the design of the planet or at least, that of its components (with design
replacing politics). A society whose governmentality entails the knowledge of the
real, that is to say, the transformation of reality into information. A society whose
governmentality unfolds between its smallest common denominators (atomic, electronic,
magnetic, genetic, chemical) and its largest common denominators (climate, planet,
solar system), by way of laws, formulas and norms that determine its productivity,
means, and possible destinies.
The decline of mechanical and electromechanical industry (still dependent on labor
power) and the appearance of digitally commanded machines and interconnected networks
of computers marks the dawn of the great transformation in governmental technologies,
based on cybernetics, informatics and electronic networks. The army and transportation
were at the forefront of this epochal shift. Indeed, the Second World War never really
ended until the close of the Cold War; and up to that point, the Soviet Union and
the OECD states intensively pursued their military and economic efforts to win the
conflict that opposed them. In the 1960s, a great many of the military systems that
are still operational today (and some that have since become obsolete) were under
development in the United States and the USSR. The UK-USA pact that would lay the
foundations for the development of ECHELON dates from 1947, and the first COMINT
satellites (COMmunications INTerception) date from 1968. The information-analysis
and psychological warfare capacities of the ECHELON system reach back to 1940, finding
their earliest form in the Foreign Broadcast Intelligence Service (FBIS), able to
collect 500,000 words a day in 15 languages in order to evaluate the effectiveness
of American propaganda, to act on enemy propaganda, and to deliver daily reports
and analysis to over 500 government officials. The concept of GPS (Global Positioning
System) dates from 1965, and the first feasibility studies, from 1972. ARPAnet and
other communications systems (for example, the Ground Wave Emergency Network: GWEN)
were developed in the 1970s to respond to the risk of a nuclear offensive. Later,
the American Department of Defense abandoned the idea of any directly military use
of ARPAnet, though it still granted subsidies to computer manufacturers for the inclusion
of TCP/IP in their protocols.
In the transportation sector, an information and telecommunications management company
like SITA corp gradually set up interconnected networks of computers connecting airports
and airlines throughout the world from the 1950s onward, for air traffic control
and seat reservation. The planes themselves, in advance of trains and automobiles,
gradually filled up with computers, electronics and interconnected networks (today,
according to the INRIA, about half the value of a civil airplane lies in its electronics
and software, and certain mass-produced automobiles contain more computer technology
than the lunar lander used by Neil Armstrong 30 years ago). In France, the RATP urban
transport authority built a star-shaped network connecting a dual-processor computer
to a hundred smaller computers spread across the territory in the mid-1970s. In the
financial world, the SWIFT international money transfer system (Society for Worldwide
Interbank Financial Telecommunication) was operational in 1977, connecting 239 banks
in 15 different countries. The initial network architecture was centralized at 3
world switchpoints in the United States and in Europe (Brussels and Amsterdam) connecting
the national concentrators that served as gateways to the system.
In the late 1960s the social and productive impact of interconnected computer networks
was already being predicted. Systems engineers from industry and space research,
from 1964 onwards, responded to the request of the California governor to think about
ways to avoid the smog generated by urban commuting. They proposed to bring work
to employee's domicile, or in other words, to partially transform private homes into
"offices" equipped devices for the elaboration, communication, and management
of information (D. Bess, "What the Space Scientists propose for California,"
Think, 32/4, July-August 1969). The screen, becoming interactive, would abandon
its simple function as entertainment or propaganda, it would leave behind its role
as a pure instrument of control to become a powerful work and organization tool permitting
interaction between isolated employees, clients and managers.
It was on this basis that it would later serve as a tool of sociability, just as
the telegraph and telephone, initially conceived as commercial or military instruments,
media of exchange and control, were "diverted" from their primary use to
become tools of personal communication for sociability. This sociability has only
a marginal influence on science and technology, on information management and telecommunications,
which remain fundamentally military and commercial. Nonetheless, certain aspects
of social inventiveness can be integrated to the techniques of corporate or military
management (affinity groups, cooperative or group-based organization, mobility, flexibility),
to marketing or propaganda techniques (hoaxes), to productive organizations (for
example, Open Source Intelligence – OSINT – forms the basis for much of the geospatial,
climatic, and logistical information gathered by the American administration).
Parallel to the establishment of these working tools, sophisticated weapons and manipulation
systems growing out of the cooperation between universities and armies opened the
door to new climatic, tectonic, psychotronic, biological and chemical warfare technologies,
which we now find listed in the Space Preservation Act (2001); but also to new coercive
techniques founded not only on propaganda and repression, on economic aid, development
and humanitarian assistance, but also on the chemical and electromagnetic manipulation
of the human body. The most terrible of the American biological operations is said
to be the massive spread of AIDS through vaccination campaigns in various Central
African countries (1976) and in New York (1977), in order to selectively reduce the
threat of the "P-bomb," or overpopulation (Leonard G. Horowitz, La guerre
des virus: Sida et Ebola, 1998). The first American military actions on the weather
probably date from the 1970s in Vietnam, followed by the gradual installation of
a program for climate control and transformation. Today this program is being developed
through the interlinkage of weather information systems (COOP-M and NOAA in the US)
and local actions of ionospheric heating through electromagnetic bombardment from
arrays of antennas located on several places on the planet (HAARP in Alaska, Arecibo
in Porto Rico...). The early research into electrical, then electromagnetic, manipulation
of human behavior dates from the 1950s (Mkultra, Pandora) and fits squarely into
the mainline development of information science (with the exception of Norbert Wiener,
the early cyberneticians were all neurophysiologists).
Since the origin of information science and technology, the programming/deprogramming/reprogramming
of life has been its implicit objective. One can hardly doubt that this objective
is on the verge of being attained today, opening the door to a variety of commercial
derivatives. The advancement of systems like GPS, the development of biometrics and
genetic identifiers suggests that beyond the control of flows and of all multiple
identities, there may today exist capacities for the remote control of things and
living beings, and for chemical and electromagnetic interaction with them at a distance.
The new version of the Internet protocol, IPv6, will increase the number of addresses
– 340 billion billion billion billions – allowing every person to be given an address,
but also every object, as the latter are increasingly expected to communicate among
each other and with human beings. The computerization of complex societies seems
well underway toward the implantation of microchips in human flesh, not only allowing
gains in systems security through the surveillance of organic components, but also
permitting remote control: "prevent voluntary muscular movements, control emotions
and actions, produce sleep, transmit suggestions, interfere with both short-term
and long-term memory, and both produce and delete an experience set" (Scientific
Advisory Committee, U.S. Air Force, 1996).
Having massively invaded all the spheres of society, information science and technology,
with its biological and chemical prolongations, now gives rise to a total governmentality.
This governmentality does not just contradict the spirit of the Enlightenment by
concentrating and augmenting the power of domination exerted by a global aristocracy.
It suppresses the very possibility of Enlightenment. The level of bio- and psycho-political
management allowed by information science and technology, the level of systemic integration
that they make possible, suggest that a political autonomy or constituent power today,
of whatever nature, can only become critical by segmenting the infosphere, by developing
non-capitalist markets, by setting up revocable hierarchies.
THE CAPACITY TO MAKE HISTORY
Humanity is not located on the same scale as the basic qualities of matter (physical,
biological and chemical), although it is a prolongation of them. What the communist
poet Eluard called "the realization of man's vital desires, those of body and
imagination" cannot serve as a horizon of action on the scale of these basic
qualities, without in the same blow authorizing the development of technical systems
that will determine them. In this case, humanity submits its own scale (reflexivity,
knowledge of ends, sociability) to the scales of the basic qualities (physical, chemical,
biological), which then appear as its truth and its end. It is true that the human
species does not know what its reflexivity is or what its ends are, or what its political
subjectivity can be. And perhaps it must not know this. But in the absence of any
sign of a solidarity of the species or a community of human race (without even yet
speaking of interspecies solidarity), in the absence of any self-constitution of
the species (which would not necessarily designate finalities or desired destinies),
the constituent power of technological systems – those expressions of the transcendence
of the scale of primary qualities – and the constituent power of the individuals
who govern them, are what determine our possible destinies. In less abstract language:
the governmental power exerted over the planet and the species by a caste actively
working toward its own immortality is reinforced and multiplied by the integrated
technological systems that allow for the analysis of complexity, increasing the capacity
for the accumulation of capital, augmenting the capacities of action on information-reality,
and even tending toward the administration of future "human resources"
via genetic sorting and non-mammalian reproduction.
The world as normed by globalized technological systems and by the strategies of
a shadowy planetary government will on the average be more predictable, more certain
and better insured than ever in the past, whatever the cultural and functional diversity
of that government may be, and whatever the treachery or accidents that may occur
(a good example are the American, Russian, German, Israeli and Pakistani secret services,
who all knew that something was being prepared for late 2001, or the institutional
speculators who were alert enough to sell their stocks in American air carriers shortly
before September 11). Thus world government reduces uncertainty, it reduces the capacity
to "make history" opened up by a multiplicity of autonomous or sovereign
actors.
If what is fundamentally at stake in humanity is making history, and if this capacity
is paradoxically reduced by the development of technological systems, then the segmentation
of these systems, the limitation of the productive and normative interdependencies,
would appear to be the precondition of politics today. Social democracy is entirely
contained within the proposition that workers or employees should not destroy their
productive instruments, that it is essentially a matter of changing their use or
style of management. Social democracy is finished. By reinforcing dependencies, the
normalized and normalizing technological systems have destroyed the range of autonomies.
They have reinforced the powers of control, standardization and transformation of
populations. At stake today is the (re)creation of sovereign autonomies outside planned
futures, outside psycho-politics as it is staged in the media on the four corners
of the earth, outside salaried labor depending on the worldwide organization of production,
on globalized commercial and financial circuits.
Can nation-states be the site of sovereign autonomies? Today, an autonomous state
would be necessarily hostile to the world government (New World Order). It would
have to declare war, willingly or not; and the treatment of North Korea is exemplary
in this respect, whatever else one may think of that country. Unless it is prepared
to accept the heaviest sacrifices, a state can no longer withdraw from planetary
dependencies and interdependencies. "The democratic option is often quite fragile
[in Africa]. Even where pluralist elections are organized, the citizens are well
aware that the real stakes escape them" (World Report on Human Development,
PNUD, 2002). And is it any different in other countries?
Would a planetary parliament (necessarily dependent on world infrastructures, norms
and technical procedures) be capable of exercising any constraint over world government,
or even of achieving self-constitution? Speech and debate can only peripherally organize
human or planetary complexity... unless they use technological systems which are
currently under firm control.
Autonomy must therefore be situated at other levels. To be autonomous today is to
have the capacity to cut off a network. Creating silence, in other words, cutting
off noise (antennas, media) is now a precondition for the appearance of political
speech. And breaking off circulation (supermarkets, transportation, banks, information)
is a precondition of the self-determination of production. Autonomy seeks to reduce
the systemic continuity and interdependence among all positions on the planet; in
other words, it seeks to segment networks. Refusing that global seed supplies and
the molecular components of the real (biological and chemical compounds) be held
under the control of a handful of firms. Refusing that a telephone call from Paris
to London should transit via Tokyo or New York, or that the exchange of grain between
South Africa and Zimbabwe should pass through Chicago. Breaking the SWIFT circuit
that rings the earth with financial flows which insure – in the literal sense of
the word – the governmental centrality of a world economy controlled by a handful
of investment funds (Fidelity, Barclays, ABN Amro...) and a few government agencies,
or in other words, stopping the functioning of the world bank-transfer system, and
therefore of international exchanges. But what corporation, what producer dependent
on the raw materials, on the human, financial or industrial resources of another
country, could possibly wish to do such a thing?
In reality, autonomy gradually constructs an organizational mode of its own. In the
sphere of trade as well as of seed supplies (which now tend to be normalized and
controlled on the world level by a limited group of firms backed by international
regulatory bodies), social and productive autonomy is inventing its own techniques
of production and its own non-capitalist markets. Autonomy with respect to systems
such as SWIFT consists in the still-embryonic development of non-bank money – by
para-national monetary organizations in Argentina (El Grand Trueque), Mexico (Tianguis
Tlaloc), Senegal (Doole), Thailand (Bia Kud Chum), Ecuador (SINTRAL), or by local
and traditional economies, networks of cooperatives, microcredit and "tontine"
banks – while autonomy with respect to world control of seeds and animal reproduction,
and therefore of agricultural production, consists in the food sovereignty proclaimed
by Via Campesina, the autonomous production and circulation of seed. Though limited
today, these autonomous markets and techniques are liable with time, and in response
to the increasing pressure of world government, to grow in volume, complexity and
legitimacy, exceeding the levels of affinity groups and the informal economy, without
entering the order and norms of the capitalist system. The change in scale of autonomous
struggles, markets and organizations (groups, movements, communities, affinity networks)
undoubtedly entails the capacity to invent procedures (open source, copyleft, time-money)
but also to establish revocable hierarchies, so as to escape both the black box of
spontaneous egalitarian organizations (which always hide informal, charismatic or
insider influences) and the creeping normalization of meritocracy organizations.
(Bureau d'études,
2003) translation : Brian Holmes |