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My argument would be that while the timing is different, programming might not be all the different from other professions in its claims to exclusive mastery based on knowledge of protocols shorn of certain material and practical dimensions. In this regard, is it all that different from architecture? What might need explaining is rather how software intervened in, and transforms, all the professions. Most of them have been redefined as kinds of information-work. In many cases this can lead to deskilling and casualization, on the one hand; and to the circling of the wagons around certain higher-order, but information-based, functions on the other. It is not that programming is an example of “neoliberalism,” so much as that neoliberalism has become a catch-all term for a collection of symptoms of the role of computing in its current form in the production of information as a control layer.
Hence my problem with the ambiguity in formulations such as this: “Software becomes axiomatic. As a first principle, it fastens in place a certain neoliberal logic of cause and effect, based on the erasure of execution and the privileging of programming” (49). What if it is not that software enables neoliberalism, but rather that neoliberalism is just a rather inaccurate way of describing a software-centric mode of production? The invisible machine joins the list of other invisible operators: slaves, women, workers. They don’t need to be all that visible so long as they do what they’re told. They need only to be seen to do what they are supposed to do. Invisibility is the other side of power.13 To the extent that software has power or is power, it isn’t an imaginary fetish.
To what extent is information the missing “complement” to the commodity? There is only one kind of (proto-) information in Marx, and that is the general equivalent—money. The materiality of a thing—let’s say “coats”—its use value, is doubled by its informational quantity, its exchange value, and it is exchanged against the general equivalent, or information as quantity. But notice the missing step. Before one can exchange the thing “coats” for money, one needs the information “coats.” What the general equivalent meets in the market is not the thing but another kind of information—let’s call it the general nonequivalent—a general, shared, agreed-upon kind of information about the qualities of things.24
Putting these sketches together, one might then ask what role computing plays in the rise of a political economy (or a post-political one) in which not only is exchange value dominant over use value, but where use value further recedes behind the general nonequivalent, or information about use value. In such a world, fetishism would be mistaking the body for the information, not the other way around, for it is the information that controls the body.
Thus we want to think bodies matter, lives matter, things matter—when actually they are just props for the accumulation of information and information as accumulation. “Neo”liberal is perhaps too retro a term for a world which does not just set bodies “free” to accumulate property, but sets information “free” from bodies, and makes information property in itself. Perhaps bodies are shaped now by more than one kind of code. Perhaps it is no longer a time in which to use Foucault and Derrida to explain computing, but rather to see them as side effects of the era of computing itself.25
I have always dissented from part of this narrative. I think the category of the “immaterial” is meaningless, and modifiers such as “cognitive” and “semio-” don’t really capture what is distinctive about the forces of production and reproduction in our times. I also think it best not to assume in advance some sort of collective or class unity when really one is talking about quite different experiences and implications within the production process. Thus, in A Hacker Manifesto I was careful to see the hacker and worker as different figures that need to find ways of combining their interests through cultural, political and organizational means.
Nevertheless, I think Italian and French writers such as Virno, Boutang, Lazzarato and Berardi are at least asking the right questions and trying to capture in a conceptual net some of the features of this stage of commodification. It would appear that Stengers also accepts part of the shared terrain here. She draws attention to those working in computation who invented a form of resistance to the appropriation of what was common to them, of which Richard Stallman and the Free Software movement might be the most conscious element.14 “It was as ‘commoners’ that they defined what made them programmers, not as nomads of the immaterial” (85).
Is this still capitalism, or something worse? Haraway was already grappling with a new language for it in her “Cyborg” text. Whatever it is, it produces a new worldwide proletariat, new distributions of ethnicity and sexuality, and new forms of the family. Haraway was writing about an earlier moment in Silicon Valley, when it was still a major center for chip fabrication, using mostly women of color as an industrial workforce. Much of that production has moved on, leaving toxic Superfund sites behind, but the global, distributed labor of making these digital means of production still exists, on an expanded and globalized scale.18
The word precarity had not yet been coined, but Haraway was already describing it. Work has in a paradoxical way been feminized.19 On the one hand, women get to work; on the other, the work is precarious, powerless and toxic. The vector has the ability to route around any stoppage or strike that workers might deploy as leverage.20 “The success of the attack on relatively privileged, mostly white, men’s unionized jobs is tied to the power of the new communication technologies to integrate and control labor despite extensive dispersion and decentralization” (39).
Historical Underdosing: To live in a period of time when nothing seems to happen. Major symptoms include addiction to newspapers, magazines, and TV news broadcasts.
Historical Overdosing: To live in a period of time when too much seems to happen. Major symptoms include addiction to newspapers, magazines, and TV news broadcasts.
[...] it's not healthy to live life as a succession of isolated little cool moments. "Either our lives become stories, or there's just no way to get through them."
I agree. Dag agrees. We know that this is why the three of us left our lives behind us and came to the desert--to tell stories and make our own lives worthwhile tales in the process.
"Anyway, I remember I was working on a hamburger franchise campaign, the big goal of which, according to my embittered ex-hippie boss, Martin, was to 'get the little monsters so excited about eating a burger that they want to vomit with excitement.' Martin was a forty-year-old man saying this. Doubts I'd been having about my work for months were weighing on my mind.
"'God, Margaret. You reallyhave to wonder why we even bother to get up in the morning. I mean, really: Why work? Simply to buy more stuff? That's just not enough. Look at us all. What's the common assumption that got us all from there to here? What makes us de_serve_ the ice cream and running shoes and wool Italian suits we have? I mean, I see all of us trying so hard to acquire so much stuff, but I can't help but feel that we didn't merit it, that ...'
"But Margaret cooled me right there. Putting down her mug, she said that before I got into one of my Exercised Young Man states, I should realize that the only reason we all go to work in the morning is because we're terrified of what would happen if we stopped. [...]"
"All of this was to try and shake the taint that marketing had given me, that had indulged my need for control too bloodlessly, that had, in some way, taught me to not really like myself. Marketing is essentially about feeding the poop back to diners fast enough to make them think they're still getting real food. It's not creation, really, but theft, and no one ever feels good about stealing.
"But basically, my life-style escape wasn't working. I was only using the real Basement People to my own ends — no different than the way design people exploit artists for new design riffs. I was an imposter, and in the end my situation got so bad that I finally had my Mid-twenties Breakdown. That's when things got pharmaceutical, when they hit bottom, and when all voices of comfort began to fail."
"[...] you know all of this sex gossip and end-of-the-world nonsense, I wonder if they're really only confessing something else to each other."
"Like?"
"Like how scared sick they all are. I mean, when people start talking seriously about hoarding cases of Beef-a-Roni in the garage and get all misty-eyed about the Last Days, then it's about as striking a confession as you're ever likely to get of how upset they are that life isn't working out the way they thought it would."