"The schizoid attitude of the public toward technology - an attitude that mingles fear with hope - should not be dismissed lightmindedly. This attitude expresses a basic intuitive truth: the same technology that could liberate man in a society organized around the satisfaction of human needs must inevitably destroy him in a society organized around 'production for the sake of production.'" - Murray Bookchin, Post-Scarcity Anarchism -  Worried about the Year 2000 (Y2K) computer problem? Personally, I can't wait. From the first time I heard about what it would do, I liked the sound of Y2K. And the more I learn about it, the more I find to like. Because the Y2K problem will strike a symbolic blow against computers - and computers are the most visible form of modern technology used to subdue and monitor regular people.
Computers, like all so-called labor-saving devices, never really end up saving the average person any toil. This is because the time that workers save by using a computer or another technological toy swells the profits of their bosses, the tiny minority who own the corporations and governments which currently rule this planet. If technology makes an employee's work go faster, their employer does not allow them to go home early and collect the same pay. Either the employer finds something else for the employee to do with their time, or they fire them.
In fact computers and other "high" technology have two main purposes, neither of which is saving you work. The first is to keep you occupied. Home computers keep the middle class consumers who can afford them at home playing in virtual reality or "communicating" with people over the Internet. This keeps them from getting out and observing the condition of the world around them, and from communicating with their immediate neighbors. If people didn't spend so much time at a computer screen, they might become aware of problems like crime or pollution as more than just abstract concepts - they might even try to change things.
Like other technological toys produced specifically for the consumer market (such as portable CD players or cellular phones) computers also give their owners a false feeling of being connected to the larger socioeconomic system. As long as they have their little electronic toys, a person can feel that they have a stake in an economy which exists completely oblivious to their interests, which in fact utilizes a dense web of advertising and pop culture in order to manufactuare their very desires for high-tech commodities.
The second main use which computers are put to is security, a more obvious form of social control than consumerism. In this modern, capitalist world, security means the secure administration of individual property. When utility companies put control over an area's entire water, heat and electric system under one centralized computer, they are making it much more difficult for you to escape from their monopoly over these services. Without paying your tithe to their system, you are not even privy to the ancient technology of indoor plumbing.
But the system of security over property is far more complicated than this monopoly of capitalists over utilities. Computers have been amazingly useful in storing and organizing information for bankers, stock brokers and economists. By contrast, ATM machines seem like a rather clumsy way for citizens of our high tech nation to access their money holdings. That's why Iriscan, a company which sells iris recognition technology, is colluding with Nationwide Bank, the largest bank in the U.K., to push for use of people's retinal patterns for identification. Nationwide CEO Brian Davis claims that the company is simply concerned with, "ways to improve the service we can provide to our customers." However, Iriscan candidly admits that they soon hope to see their high-tech wares used for identification in health care, social services, travel, prison, and even "portable systems for on-scene recognition of individuals for police and military use."1 Certainly our government will have few objections to keeping records of all its citizens' fingerprints, retina patterns or even DNA. This would make it much easier for them to track and monitor our behavior.
Don't think that I'm being paranoid here and imagining evil intentions that the government doesn't have. It's not about good and evil, per se, but about the general philosophy of modern government and society. If you look around you will realize how widespread the current obesssion with security has become. Just look at the new high-tech electronic lock system on the Wesleyan dormitories. This complete waste of money has only limited security potential, but vast (if so far untapped) potential for tracking students.
Of course, we all know from watching spy movies that if the government or anyone else really wants to keep tabs on you, they can use phone taps, microscopic cameras, radio microphones, or satellite technology to listen in on everything you say and track every move you make. Espionage isn't just one use that such "high" technology is readily suited for - in many cases it was originally designed for that purpose.
Then there's the costs to the Earth's environment imposed by humanity's obsession with high-tech gadgets. Though the overall effect is hard to gauge, just looking at the computer industry gives us an idea. The average personal computer consists of about 55 pounds of plastics, metals, glass and silicon. In the process of making this computer, approximately 139 pounds of waste will be produced while 7,300 gallons of water and 2,300 kilowatt-hours of energy will be used. The entire process of making computer circuit boards pollutes the world around us with airborne particulates, acid fumes, volatile organic compounds, toxic lead and copper waste, and solvent wastes. In the end the average pesonal computer will probably use about 9,200 kilowatt hours of energy in the course of its lifetime. There are approximately 120 million other computers owned and operated in the United States (300 million worldwide). When a computer's lifespan is over (this usually takes about four years), the computer becomes "obsolete" and joins millions of others which have already been disposed of. It is estimated that by the year 2005, about 150 million personal computers will have been sent to landfills in the United States. The waste from this obsolete technology will occupy around 300 million cubic feet, equivalent to a football field size stack of computer junk about a mile high.This kind of environmental impact might be justifiable, if computers were as humane and useful an invention as, say, vaccines. But they aren't. Computers pummel us with radiation, while simultaneously helping to make our lives more routinized, more alienated, and easier to manipulate and control.
These are the reasons why I wholeheartedly support the Y2K computer problem. If the most apocalyptic predictions come true, we will all get to see the false logic which first produced computers destroy itself. Perhaps then more people will begin to see that the way that capitalism applies modern technology is not only unnecessary, but anathema to a happy, healthy lifestyle.
Of course we must remember that if Y2K really shuts down the computer systems essential to social control, our corporate overlords will be fully prepared either to start them back up or to use their cronies in the government and the military to enforce social control through more violent means. That is why anyone who supports the organization of a new society based upon egalitarianism, community, and democracy should make preparations to use the chaos of the Y2K shut down to band together and seize control of whatever computer systems are most affected. If Wall Street and the Pentagon are suddenly powerless, then by all means we should take these centers of social control by storm. But even if the only major shut downs are scattered systems of food distribution or heat and water, it behooves the affected communities to at least attempt to take control of these systems and re-structure them in a more humane (i.e. egalitarian and decentralized) way. And it behooves the rest of us to aid them in this declaration of independence with any help that we can offer.
The necessities of life do not need to be distributed by central planners, either in the government or the corporate boardroom. They certainly do not need to be controlled and limited by a central computer. To liberate control of your community's resources and necessities from the control of the central government is the first step to re-organizing for a better society.
I do not have very high hopes for the Y2K revolution, at least not in America where most people are so alienated from one another, so well sated with consumerism, and so politically apathetic. But whatever happens on January 1st, 2000, it behooves the radical community at large to realize what an enormous consciousness raising event this date could be. No matter what the short term chaos, protecting computers and other forms of capitalist technology is most definitely not in the interests of anyone who supports sane and egalitarian social change. There is no Y2K "problem." Only beautiful possibilities.
1 All information dealing with IriScan and Nationwide comes from the article "Big Brother Grows Up: Biometrics, surveillance, and the repression of dissent" by Nicholas Allen Freeman (Slingshot newspaper, Berkeley, issue #61, Summer 1998). 2 All information about the environmental effects of computers comes from Live Wild Or Die newspaper, issue # 7, Summer 1998. |