Pursual of US hegemony institutes cybernetic capitalist control.

The origins of cybernetic capitalism, then, lie at the apex of the American national-imperial state, forged during the Second World War. Indeed, the dawning of the cyber-capitalist age might be dated to 21 seconds past 5:29 am—local time in New Mexico, us—on 16 July 1945. At that moment, ‘Trinity’, the first atomic bomb, was detonated in the desert. Plutonium atoms were torn apart in a nuclear reaction, releasing an immense amount of energy in the form of heat, light, sound and radiation, making the earth tremble, melting the desert sand into green radioactive glass and sending an immense mushroom cloud seven miles up into the sky. This rigorously calculated incident was a crucial moment in world history: techno-scientific forces now enabled people to reorganize the building blocks of matter. Twenty-three days after the Trinity blast, the us used their terrible weapons on the people of Japan. Three warplanes were sent to Hiroshima. The first carried the payload—the atomic weapon, ‘Little Boy’. The second was filled with scientists, equipped with sensors and instruments to measure the blast. The third carried photographers, to record the event. Hence science and surveillance literally flanked the world-historic atom-bombing mission. On their return the scientists fed their data into computing-machines, to calculate the success of their abominable human experiment. The atomic explosion was only possible because nascent computing-machines—ibm’s Harvard Mark i—were available to crunch the vast number tables for the Manhattan Project. Computing-machines and nuclear weapons were born together, in the womb of war. The first general-purpose digital computer, eniac, was activated four months later, in December 1945; its first task was a mathematical test to ascertain the practicability of thermonuclear weapons, more terrible than the fission blasts that had annihilated Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The rise of the digital device brought into retrospective focus the analogue technologies that had preceded it, which literally bore an analogy to some natural phenomenon: for example, a hammer is analogous to a fist, an airplane wing to a bird’s pinions. Digital computing, by contrast, was fundamentally discontinuous, built on the binary of 1 or 0, ‘all or nothing’, on or off. The radical break of the digital had a place in the broader social pattern of increasing abstraction. Digital computers did not emerge from the history of labour and craft, but rather at the command of capital and the state. They could not exist at all without technological transformations that depended in turn upon the intensely abstracted theoretical work of intellectually trained computer scientists in us research laboratories. As with the cybernetic mode of practice more broadly, this cohort of elite scientists and engineers had its origins in wwii, when the us mobilized massive government-sponsored research projects, run by both the military and civilian arms of the state, with the intensive involvement of some of the major corporations. If the origins of the military-industrial complex could be emblematized by any one person, the American engineer Vannevar Bush (1890–1974) is the likely candidate. Dean of the mit School of Engineering, founder of Raytheon, director of the war-time Office of Scientific Research and Development and an initiator of the Manhattan Project, Bush’s presidential report, Science, the Endless Frontier, with its telling colonial metaphor, was one of the founding documents of cyber-capitalism. While dedicated to war, the new research laboratories provided spaces for intellectual inquiry, allowing for free-wheeling, interdisciplinary and inter-institutional research and large-scale collaborations. They shifted the trajectory of technological development, from incidental and piecemeal results of individual creativity and practical tinkering—as exemplified by someone like Nikola Tesla—to institutions designed to transform social practice. These techno-scientific projects would move beyond the conquest of nature—the dream of the early-modern scientific revolution—to aim at its reconstitution: the reorganization of social life at a higher level of abstraction. Thus if capitalist modernity was more abstract than the various feudal and customary societies it displaced, the cybernetic transformation would take this to another stage. The ‘leveling domination of abstraction’, to use Adorno and Horkheimer’s phrase, involved levelling in two senses: leveling as in flattening—such as the colonial destruction of deep social relations and place-based practices—and levelling as in adding new layers, with the reconstitution of social relations by more abstracted practices. With the atom-bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the us announced its arrival as the supreme superpower of the capitalist world. But the landscape it confronted was one of global rebellion and upheaval. On the day of Emperor Hirohito’s unconditional surrender, the August Revolution began in Vietnam, with Viet Minh taking over Hanoi, beginning a struggle for independence that would take thirty years of war. Two weeks later, Indonesia declared independence, after three centuries of Dutch domination; within a month, Gandhi and Nehru were demanding the removal of all British troops from India. Anti-colonial movements fired up, attacking the older imperial-industrial powers and asserting their sovereignty just as power was being abstracted away from direct control of territory. These struggles—against older empires and us hegemony alike—were not cybernetic in essence, but were soon to be confronted with this more abstract layer, for us counterinsurgencies served as a crucible for developing techniques of communication and control. The collapse of older orders of colonialism was matched by attempts to weave a more abstracted form of imperial power atop this rapidly changing global order. Cybernetic technologies were rapidly deployed against perceived enemies abroad, above all the ussr and Third World anti-colonial movements, as well as workers and radicals in the rich world. Yet the abstracting power of the techno-sciences was not Washington’s to keep. In 1949 the Soviet Union detonated an atomic weapon. In the same year, the Chinese Communist Party emerged victorious from the bloody civil war; within fifteen years, Beijing had acquired nuclear weapons of its own. Not long after it would begin a calamity-ridden quest for wealth and power that has been triumphant, with the country assuming the position of an aggressively nationalist world power. Today, it is in the grip of what I have called ‘cybernetic capitalism with Chinese characteristics’, as an active and unpredictable struggle for hegemony over this more abstract stratum gets underway. Cybernetics ascendant Emerging from the nexus of military-imperialist, capitalist and techno-scientific intellectual forces entangled at the summit of the us state, the cyber-capitalist sector has retained its elite ‘steersman’ character even as it has penetrated the wider economy, colonizing and reconstituting less-abstract forms. Analytically, it can be conceived as a thin layer, spread unevenly across the capitalist world-system, overlaying older patterns of social practice—Fordist production, the print media, subsistence farming, informal labour—transforming but not necessarily eradicating them. Thus, for example, while the postal service as a means of communication was overlaid by increasingly higher forms of abstraction—the telegram, telephone, moving image, radio, tv, teletext, fax, internet, virtual reality, artificial intelligence, gps—it persisted; today, however, while it can still convey hand-written letters, it does so through systems thoroughly reorganized by computer-controlled logistics. Initially after 1945 the older forms remained preponderant; cybernetic capitalism could co-exist with other modes—indigenous ways of being, traditional beliefs like the universalizing religions, modern forms such as the post-Westphalian nation-state. Moving forward to the present, it is no longer emergent, but the globally dominant social formation, with the older forms in part reconstituted on a more abstract level, with tensions, conflicts and contradictions appearing between the various levels. Many aspects of this transformation are discussed under the rubric of ‘neoliberalism’. No doubt the brutal drive to put profit über alles has had devastating ramifications for society, subjectivity and the planet’s ecology; yet the focus on production and exchange should not occlude other aspects, such as communication, inquiry, organization and technology. Neoliberal transformations are underpinned by cybernetic changes that laid the foundations for a global market to operate, via instantaneous communication and rationalized logistics. The intellectual fathers of the neoliberal doctrine were quick to grasp this. Following the lead of neo-Malthusian ecologist Garrett Hardin, Hayek celebrated the ‘mutual adjustments’ of cybernetics’ regulatory function as an instantiation of the invisible hand: ‘This foundation of modern civilization was first understood by Adam Smith in terms of the operation of a feedback mechanism by which he anticipated what we now know as cybernetics.’ At the same time, this view failed to grasp the radical discontinuity of cybernetic capitalism. Plainly Smith, or Hayek for that matter, couldn’t imagine the vast amount of surveillance data amassed behind an individual Facebook profile, enabling the automation of real-time psycho- and geo-targeted advertisements to ‘nudge’ consumer behaviour. If this was not the liberal market utopia they had in mind, that is indeed the point: the rupture represented by cyber-capitalism means that it was previously unthinkable. Wiener’s claim about the new age of cybernetic communication and control proved prophetic. Networked computing-machines have spread intensively and extensively in world-historic ways, their abstraction processes cutting into the very basis of human sociality, hacking away at more grounded forms of existence. Expanding outward and downward from the military-industrial complex, driven by the quest for new markets, cyber-capitalism now operates through a material ensemble of social practices, meanings and technological apparatuses—a vast, globe-spanning conglomerate of multiple layers of systems and standards, machines and management, labour and legalities, commodities and communications, ideologies and interoperability, products and protocols. From this cybernetic layer come multiple feedback loops that reorganize less-abstract levels of social existence, undermining and unsettling taken-for-granted ways of being and doing in the world, overlaying them with technologically mediated, power-concentrating, inequality-intensifying, labour-automating, financially speculative, energy-intensive forms that are above all profoundly abstract. One aspect of continuity has been the relation of cyber-capitalism to the summit of the military-industrial complex. The reference may evoke images of olive-drab generals and Eisenhower’s famous speech, yet the material-power structure it denotes has not gone away but rather extended its tentacles deep into everyday life and globalized across the world. A comprehensive update today would rebrand it as the national-security, techno-financial, entertainment-surveillance complex. The invention of the internet, a collaboration between darpa, the Pentagon’s r & d department, corporations like ibm, think-tanks like rand and highly trained techno-scientists at mit, Stanford and elsewhere, is a case in point. Aerospace and weapons companies like Raytheon, Boeing and Lockheed Martin have been integral to cyber-capitalism’s success. The tech giants remain tightly linked to the military-industrial complex.