<nettime> Technopolitics now

[Brian Holmes via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

Years ago we had a long-running debate on nettime about technological
development and political-economic crisis. Armin Medosch got that ball
rolling. The keyword was "technopolitics." Recently I learned, with great
pleasure, that the Technopolitics Group still meets in Vienna.

They must have a lot to talk about now.

Armin used to do interviews for Austrian public radio, and the thing that
really blew his mind was a researcher named Carlota Perez. She wrote about
how technological revolutions happened through great surges of investment.
We had all just witnessed the internet being built in that way, and how it
transformed all of social life. Looking back in history you could see other
such moments - like state-led investment in the US, Germany and Britain
during and after World War II, leading to radar, nuclear power, early
computers etc. Perez is fundamentally an institutionalist, and she wanted
to look beyond the combination of government-sponsored research and stock
market frenzy to see how technology is absorbed and channeled by societies,
not only through government regulation but also through labor struggles,
organizational forms, educational and cultural developments, international
relations and so on. This was a Pandora's Box of social history, and once
you opened it, all sorts of other butterflies flew out. Armin was
fascinated up to his untimely death, and I went on in the same vein for a
few more years after that.

While we were all so interested in this, the next revolution just didn't
happen. We got the Global Financial Crisis and the increasingly sickening
world of social media. Then later, during the Biden administration,
institutionalists like Mariana Mazzucato briefly kindled the hope that
government policy and stock market avarice might together lead to a green
energy transition.

Instead we got AI.

During the early-middle 2010s when the technopolitics discussion was at its
most intense, my thinking diverged considerably from the folks in Vienna,
who maintained a lively thing as they still do today. I was a bit gloomy, a
bit preoccupied with this damn country which I had just moved back to, the
USA, and I couldn't see how to separate the American military push for
global hegemony during WWII from the forms of socio-technical development
that spread out across the world during the postwar years. I also
remembered watching TV clips of breathless investors gathering at the
French military airport of Bourget right after or maybe even during the
first Gulf War in 1991, when the US government's Stars Wars program bore
its deadly fruit of new computerized weapons that could be sold on
international markets. The first Gulf War, which brought some 30+ nations
into coalition against Iraq, was broadly understood as the biggest
international police operation ever. It subsequently opened the floodgates
of globalization, by making the post-Soviet international order safe for
cross-border investment - safe for neoliberalism, safe for the great surge
of the internet, in short. It seemed clear to me that cycles of
technological development not only produced feeding frenzies and desperate
crashes in the stock market, but were also correlated at the major turning
points with hegemomic transitions, where one country or bloc stood against
another in a contest to determine the future course of global development.
Ultimately I came to think that every turn of the technopolitical screw,
especially the major ones, had to reach some kind of crisis-point which was
not only economic but also military, social, political and ultimately
psychic, as people struggled to understand the transformations, articulate
their protagonism or resistance, and especially, deal with the consequences
of their own radicalization (whether to the left or right or into some
mythical or religious world or wherever). Yet these subjective and social
crises did not necessarily shape the technopolitical outcomes. For example,
what did we get out of the crash of 2000 that sank the blue-sky phase of
the dot-com boom, amidst the social surge of the counter-globalization
movement? I remember reading the headlines of that crash as I walked across
the anarchist green of a big No Border campout in Strasbourg. Well, another
world was not ultimately possible, but we did get surveillance capitalism,
when Google realized that the data exhaust from search could be recycled
into an advertising bonanza, at the price of mass psychic subordination
looking a lot like the dystopian images of The Matrix. So it seems that
even after the crisis, not everything comes up roses.

And just what do y'all think we're gonna get out of AI?

Currently there are a couple-three big wars going on, fascism is emerging
throughout the Western world, there's a nut case in charge of the US, the
post-WWII international order has been destroyed leaving the EU as an
orphan, China has emerged as the most efficient, rational and charismatic
actor on the world stage, the Israelis go ahead with their genocide on the
Palestinians, and while everyone worries about whether Russia is on the
verge of staging drone attacks on NATO members the headlines are full of
hard-to-verify stories about possible planetary doom due to rogue AI agents
infiltrating whatever (like your search bar, your bank account, your local
power plant, your government bureaucracy or your child's tender dreams).
OK, right, sure, all of that might maybe seem like distant details of other
people's problems or a fascinating read with your newspaper and morning
coffee, if you don't live in the US with social services being pillaged,
health and environmental regulations shredded, Zionist operatives kicking
your friends out of museums and universities, and federally sponsored
militias in black vans grabbing people in your neighborhood, while the
neighbors scream, pound on the tinted windows and throw stuff at the masked
thugs.

More or less every third evening in Chicago, Claire and I, the doddering
retirees, spend the entire night just enumerating whatever batshit crazy
things have happened in recent days, coming inevitably to the conclusion
that the social universe in which our entire lives were shaped has well and
duly collapsed, leaving the present moment as a precipice whose beckoning
abyss remains totally invisible - but obviously very very deep.

And don't even get me started on what we always talk about, namely climate
change.

I wanna say that the combination of domestic political conflict, a great
surge of investment in tech, spreading war and open competition for future
global hegemony under threat of floods, fires and droughts, this is the big
one, this is the game-changing crisis, this is technopolitics at its most
extreme. As fundamental as tech may be in this - and I have no doubt about
the status of AI as a fundamental innovation on a par with atomic weapons
and nuclear power - still the turning point in world history is
techno-POLITICAL, involving every market mechanism, cultural form, social
institution and international power-balance, and disrupting, tearing apart
and reorganizing every psychic system at its core. I also think that the
current US aggression on Iran represents a kind of unconscious American
muscle memory, whereby military force is supposed to combine with a
capitalist technology surge to sweep the table clean of contenders, install
newly controllable organizational forms and rebuild global hegemony on
revitalized foundations - including crypto-currency as the perfect coin for
global oligarchies. To be sure, Trump is neither Roosevelt nor Reagan, this
is a senile bid for world hegemony, the Iran war is a fiasco based on
strategic stupidity and narcissistic blindness, and the world is every day
in every way reorganizing itself around China, with a kind of death-drive
hope that a new pole of global governmental rationality will at once spur
capitalist growth and somehow deal with climate change at the same time
(sure, I hope so too). But the fact is, the crisis is wide open, and we
don't even know where AI will land in everyday social uses, much less how
the global balance of prosperity and harm is going to shake out, or how El
Niño will progress this year, or practically anything about what happens
next.

The incredibly pertinent discourse of technopolitics should now be trained
on exactly this question.

I don't know about y'all, but I experience this period through intermittent
and broken rays of intense spiritual clarity piercing a dark and roiling
sky of melancholy and abject depression. Chaos is the ideal atmosphere for
social innovation at the grassroots and I throw myself into whatever I can,
which ends up being a lot, due to local cultural organizing work with
Watershed Art & Ecology as well as cartography, writing, vibe coding and
lingering global collaborations. Since I read all the economics and
international relations bullshit during the 2010s I can kind of parse
what's happening at the national and global levels - but I'm a taker for
new analytic interpretations, so please, if you have them or have read
them, let's hear about it. The theory of global change is difficult,
especially when you can't just idealize it but instead have to reckon with
innumerable facts on the ground, in the air and over the ether. Still, if
you are or ever even were a theorist, even of the Sunday afternoon armchair
variety, this is probably the most interesting and challenging total social
fact you are ever likely to live through.

Technopolitics under smoke-filled skies is also an intimate reality, a
continually shifting constellation of "everything everywhere all at once"
as a great kung-fu film put it a few years ago. And so my final question
is, How ya dealin' with it folks? What does technopolitical chaos mean in
your own lives and endeavors?

once again, with feeling,

Brian
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