CHAPTER FIVE CYBERCULTURE: A CULTURE OF SPEED

Cyberculture is the culture that has emerged, or is emerging, from the use of computer networks for
communication, entertainment and business

(Wikipedia definition, 2008)

Précis

As an ecology—as an environment that increasingly dominates the space and times that
individuals and societies live within—the network society ‘naturally’ produces its own cultures.
Such cultures are formed through the digitally produced signs and symbols that surround us;
through the streams of binary information that flow at an ever-accelerating rate through the
Internet; and through the networked totality that comprises the network society. This is called
cyberculture. But what is it? What does it reflect? And where are people placed within the
network society in respect of their cultural autonomy? This chapter tries to answer these
questions by first looking briefly at the ‘pre-history of cyberculture’. Here the assumptions that
underpinned the development of modern computer science are discussed. It is shown that
theorist/engineers such as Norbert Wiener with his work on cybernetics, and J.C.R. Licklider’s
conceptually-related work on ‘mancomputer symbiosis’, transformed the discipline of computer
science and provided the building blocks upon which the Internet and the network society
would be constructed. The vision of these men was to build a computer-driven society where
humans are in control and where, to paraphrase Licklider, men will set the goals and computers
will do the work.

The chapter goes on to argue that because of the effects of the unique networking capacities of
computers, we need to look again at the dynamics of technological determinism. To a
significant degree the shape and form of cyberspace (and therefore cyberculture) is ‘determined’
by the instrumental and commercial logic of the network system, as it is currently architectured.
The effect is that ‘cyberculture’ is in fact a ‘speed driven culture’ and reflects the narrow logic
of the neoliberalized global economy. An example of this is discussed through ‘game culture’, a
preeminent form of cyberculture that has been argued by some to be antithetical to the mores of
capitalism and the ideology of conformity. It is shown, however, that ‘game culture’ as well as
cyberculture more generally, reflects the values and imperatives of a networked, global, and
neoliberalized capitalism almost exactly.

The mythology of cyberspace is preferred over its sociology.

Kevin Robins (1996)

On a general level, and emerging from the early influential books on the subject, from media
and from the global advertising of ICT corporations, the neologism ‘cyberculture’ connotes all
that is good and affirmative and creative. It suggests a whole new world of possibility stemming
from networked information technologies, a world where people communicate freely and
effectively, bringing together multicultural perspectives into a global whole where mutual
understanding at the level of the global can create informed and secure communities at the local
level. Community has been a continuous trope in discussion on cyberculture. In 1993 Howard
Rheingold published an influential book called The Virtual Community in which the growth of
networkdriven cyberculture was analyzed in untiringly positive terms. Rheingold thought it
useful (because we are dealing with real people) to view cyberspace and cyberculture in
biological terms. The metaphor he chose to use (perhaps unfortunately) was that of the organism
floating in the Petri dish. He writes that:

In terms of the way the whole system is propagating and evolving, think of cyberspace as a social Petri
dish, the Net as the agar medium, and virtual communities, in all their diversity, as the colonies of
microorganisms that grow in Petri dishes. Each of the small colonies of microorganisms—the
communities on the Net—is a social experiment that nobody planned but that is happening nevertheless
(p. 10).

The network, for Rheingold, is a virtual space that mirrors the ‘real’ world in terms of its
community-creating potential, where people can ‘do just about everything people do in real life’
(p. 9). The evolving network and its communities is diverse and vibrant, he argues; it is not a
monolith, but functions more a ‘like an ecosystem of subcultures, some frivolous, others
serious’ (ibid.). The ‘ecosystem’ of subcultures that the network generates, as Rheingold and
many others have argued, is overwhelmingly positive (apart from ‘deviant’ behavior such as
cyber rape, or cyber stalking or the growing forms of cyber crime). Cyberspace is held up as the
first culture-creating context where space and time become increasingly irrelevant and where
technology is used creatively and where technology is put at the service of ordinary people. In
this Rheingoldian view people are no longer ‘slaves to the machine’ as they had been under the
ponderous and innovation-crippling phase of Fordist modernity. As at the dawn of the Age of
Enlightenment, so the argument goes, everything now seems possible again, once the shackles
of the previous era had been thrown off. Above all, this view sees cyberculture and the network
communities from which they emerge, as processes that bring with it coherence and a degree of
internal control; a ‘true grassroots use of technology’ as Rheingold puts it, in the building of a
myriad of potential and actual cybercultures (p. 9).

There are obvious truths in elements of this largely uncritical perspective. Network communities
and cybercultures do indeed permeate virtual space and time. All kinds of communities of
interest create and share cultural meanings and symbols from which forms of cyberculture
develops. From swapping online notes on pigeon-fancying with likeminded individuals from
around the world, to arthritis sufferers who email each other ideas on existing treatments or
alternative therapies, people build a cyberculture of a kind which would fit into the affirmative
framework outlined by Rheingold and others. Moreover, there is self-evident value in these
communities in that they serve a ‘community’ purpose and develop a ‘culture’ that in many
ways reflects its members and their interests.

What is proposed here, however, is to analyze more fully the preponderant trends in the
development of cybercultures in the network society; to look at the cultures that are mass and
global and where people spend more and more of their time in specific cybercultural contexts
that are more reflective of the (usually ignored) underlying philosophical and technological
premises on which computer science is built. In other words I wish to develop a critique based
on what Darren Tofts has called the ‘pre-history’ of cyberculture (1997). This is a valuable pre-
history where we find the ideas, the ideologies and processes that made possible the network
society. And contra the almost universally positive view of cyberculture, the incorporation of its
own pre-history into the analysis throws a wholly different light on how culture is produced
through cyberspace technologies, and what kind of culture it is. For that we need to go back in
time and look at the beginning of what is generally understood as cyberculture.

A short pre-history of cyberculture

To understand the basis of cyberculture we need to grasp the ideas, the politics and above all the
technologies that underscore its evolution. The technology of which I speak is of course the
computer, and I have already discussed the effects of the elemental logic of computation that is
premised on binary numbers. However, the revolutionary turn that computer science took in the
middle of the 20th century was guided by specific assumptions about what computers
represented, and by powerful intellectual figures who gave these theories, these assumptions,
concrete reality.
Evolving out of the basic number-crunching role that characterized their early development,
computers came to be seen in the post-war era as having tremendously powerful potential as
systems of control. It was conjectured that humans would be able to use computer systems as a
means with which to transform their environment, orienting modernity more comprehensively
toward plannable futures. This was a vision that was given much state support in the USA in the
context the Cold War. Military strategists, for example, could see the benefits of
computerdriven ‘command and control’ coordination that cut out as much as possible the
‘human error factor’ when dealing with vastly complex atomic and nuclear weapons systems
(Edwards, 1995). Largesse from successive administrations obsessed with the ‘Soviet threat’
spurred a generation of scientists and engineers from Ivy League universities who began to
develop the rudiments of what would become the science of ‘cybernetics’ and lay the
intellectual and technical groundwork for the Internet.

The term cybernetics has its etymological roots in the Greek word kybern, meaning ‘to steer’ or
‘to pilot’ (McHoul, 1998). It was a term that referred to maritime navigation and has obvious
connotations to control and to movement through space by means of technology (ships, rigging,
oars, etc.). In the 1940s, Norbert Wiener, an engineer, mathematician, philosopher of Logic and
scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) utilized the word to prefix the term
cybernetics, a school of thought he pioneered. Cybernetics, for Wiener, was a theory of both
control and communication through flows of information. Fundamental to cybernetic theory
was the claim that it applied equally to humans and machines. Feedback mechanisms were a
central link to this working in practice. Information feedback, Wiener hypothesized, would
generate automatic processes between the human and the machine. Automatic doors, for
example, work on this principle. A person approaching such a door alerts a sensor that
‘understands’ this human action and triggers a ‘response’ which is the activation of a
mechanism that causes the door to open. Human and machine create this ‘automatic’ action
through mutual interface—through feedback. Cybernetics was, then, at its very inception, a
mode of thought that was deeply linked to the concepts of ‘command and control’ and the
search to discover ways in which environments could be engineered and manipulated through
human-computer interaction.

Wiener, like Isaac Newton, whom we encountered earlier, saw the world and its reality as being
made explicable by number. Mathematics was key to understanding how the natural world
functioned. And so digital computers, being based on binary logic, were for him analogous to
the functioning of the natural world. Wiener saw computers as machines that mirrored what
humans were in their essence. In his 1948 book The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics
and Society Wiener was unequivocal about this link:

...the [human] nervous system corresponds to the theory of those machines that consist in a sequence of
switching devices in which the opening of a later switch depends on the action of precise combinations of
earlier switches leading into it, which open at the same time. This allor-none machine is called a digital
machine. It has great advantages for the most varied problems of communication and control (1948:11).

Equating humans with computers through a system of cybernetics was a powerful hypothesis
buttressing the development of computer networking and the systems of communication that
would eventually become the Internet and the network society. For example J.C.R. Licklider, an
acknowledged intellectual father of the Internet, wrote a highly influential paper in 1960 called
‘Man-Computer Symbiosis’. In his Introduction he writes that:

Man-computer symbiosis is an expected development in cooperative interaction between men and

electronic computers. It will involve very close coupling between the human and the electronic members
of the partnership. (...) In the symbiotic partnership, men will set the goals, formulate the hypotheses,
determine the criteria and perform the evaluations. Computing machines will do the routinizable work
that must be done to prepare the way for insights and decisions in technical and scientific thinking.
Preliminary analyses indicate that the symbiotic partnership will perform intellectual operations much
more effectively that man alone can perform them.

At the beginning of his essay Licklider seems to alternate between viewing computers as
partners with humans in the symbiotic relationship, to seeing them as mere tools that serve to
make our lives easier by performing the routine ‘intellectual operations’ that will extend our
‘technical and scientific’ capabilities. He goes on, however, to argue that symbiosis is in fact a
necessary and unavoidable phase in human development, without which human life would be
much degraded. In other words he implies that we depend on computers—a very different
proposition from there being a partnership or symbiosis in existence. To illustrate this he uses
the metaphor of a variety of fig tree that is only able to reproduce through the pollination of a
single insect, the Blastophaga grossorun. Both species he observes are ‘heavily interdependent’
on each other, and indeed each would die without a deep and direct symbiosis. Licklider’s point
is that humans need computers if they are to progress as humans. We need them because as they
are based on the logic of numbers, powerful computers are able, in the Newtonian view, to
decode the mysteries of how the world and the universe function. And if we can direct and
manipulate these celestial tools, we can then unlock modernity’s potential, penetrate the essence
of reality, and render it open to direction and control.

In Wiener and Licklider we see two significant and mutually compatible theses on the nature of
computing and the nature of humans vis-à-vis computing. Wiener argues that to be fully modern
is to depend on computing power, and Licklider suggests that computing also reflects our
human essence. These perspectives are at the core of post war computer science; and the work
of these towering intellectuals in information systems and cybernetics contain basic assumptions
regarding people and computer systems that flow directly into the creation of our networked
society. Both theorists view humans as fundamentally processors of information in a world
whose reality becomes apparent only through the interface with numbers. As Theodore Roszak
wrote in his book The Cult of Information: ‘...in perfecting feedback and the means of rapid data
manipulation, the science of cybernetics was gaining a deeper understanding of life itself as
being, at its core, the processing of information’ (p. 39). The central challenge for humans
aspiring to full modernity, so the logic runs, is to develop information processing machines that
increase in their sophistication, speed and capacity. The more powerful computers become, the
more we realize our inner essence, and the more we are able to understand the world around us.

The logic underpinning Wiener and Licklider’s theories seems to be that a relationship with a
specific form of computing is a necessary phase of human development; however, they do not
phrase it as a dependency, which would be the logical corollary. Instead, both are careful to
inscribe a hierarchy where humans remain in control, ‘formulating’ and ‘determining’ the uses
of computers and ‘evaluating’ the success or otherwise of their operations. This would be a
benign form of control where machines are developed to the point where autonomous ‘thinking’
and action could be performed. The ultimate goal of this symbiosis in Licklider’s paper of 1960,
for example, was the realization of a world where computing had moved away from the solution
of straightforward ‘preformulated problems’ to one where they would be more involved in the
formulation of problems. The idea would be ‘. . . to bring computing machines into the
processes of thinking . . .’ itself (pp. 10–11). This is an early conceptualization of artificial
intelligence (AI) that, for Licklider, would have its most immediate use in military ‘command
and control’ systems in Cold War planning (Edwards, 1995:ch8). In a more general sense, this
symbiosis (not dependency) would be expressed through the fusing of intelligent humans with
intelligent computers to fashion a mighty tool that would be a crowning achievement of
modernity. Our reliance on ‘simple’ tools would have finally been transcended. Through AI we
would have created intelligent ‘partners’ to help us achieve our highest aspirations. This new
phase in human-technology relationship would bring computing into the very centre of what it
is to be human and modern. This would be the fulfillment of an age-old dream that stemmed
from Newton and Leibniz in the period of Enlightenment, through to Charles Babbage and Alan
Turing in the 19th and 20th centuries, respectively.
Effectively functioning AI systems, in symbiosis with humans or on their own, are still some
ways from existence. But the inner logic of computing that would drive them are very much part
of our daily lives. With a passion and comprehensiveness that Wiener and Licklider would
commend, computerization is today seen in business, in government and in society more
generally, as the very pinnacle of ‘control’ and efficiency that puts the user ‘in charge’ of
‘intelligent systems’. From personal cell phones to vast corporate systems, computers are now
almost universally conceived of as the way of the future. For those who believe in the project of
modernity, computing stays true to the faith placed in science and technology by the
Enlightenment founding fathers. In other words, we can still imagine computer technology
developers, legislators, businesspeople and users themselves as ‘steersmen’ who still hold
firmly to the wheel of progress on course towards a technologically sublime future. And as
‘steersmen’ we bring the day ever closer to the realization of the Negropontean (1995) vision of
fusing ‘bits with atoms’ in the creation of a seamless interaction between machines and humans.
This will be a benevolent cyborg world where deep technological mediation blurs forever the
point at which humans end and technology begins. It was a projection that Gordon Pask took to
its conceptual limits in his 1982 book Microman: Living and Growing With Computers, where
he argued that ‘mancomputer symbiosis’ would in fact create a form of human immortality,
ideas that hitherto were the preserve of the sci-fi genre of ‘cyberpunk’ literary fiction (Pask,
1984). In Pask’s imaginary, not only would cultural artifacts and records be preserved, but also
individual human minds and their personalities. This would be the culmination of the project of
modernity that the philosophes of the 18th and 19th century could scarcely have imagined, but
would have doubtless approved. And the 20th century theories of Wiener and Licklider would
have been instrumental in taking the project of modernity to its zenith.

At its very roots, then, the search for optimal systems of control is what computer theory is
about, and by extension, so too is the networked society that is its supposed expression. Control
is the central philosophy and driving force. Control over our surroundings, control over the
means of production in society, control over our lives and control over our futures. This is the
computer dreamscape and the metaphysic of binary logic. Whether most of us give a thought or
a care to the ‘essence’ of computing is something else. The ideology of neoliberalism and its
obsession with computers as the ultimate ‘solution in search of a problem’ has dulled our
collective critical senses (Postman, 1993). Notwithstanding the lack of reflective debate on its
causes and effects, cybersociety is a growing reality and the cybercultures it spawns are
undeniable. Accordingly the profound ontological questions that this reality poses will not
disappear into the cyberspace ether. The concrete actuality of cybersociety continues to emerge
ineluctably through ‘. . . the proliferation of electronic media, and the increased automation of
everyday services, facilities and activities [that] have meant that the character of everyday life is
becoming less proximate and more virtual’ (Tofts, 1997:14). And so we need to think and we
need to care because notwithstanding its philosophy of control, cybersociety is a society that
reflects our computer dependency and lack of control.

A theme throughout this book has been that the impetus behind the (unintentional) development
of the network society and the (very intentional) ‘need for speed’ that has been its primary
characteristic, is the nexus between neoliberal globalization and the ICT revolution. As Michael
Benedict argues, cyberculture is an expression of this political and economic dynamic and
represents ‘...a new stage, a new and irresistible development of human culture and business
under the sign of technology’ (1993:1). The political economy rationale has focused on the
economic, political and the ideological processes that have created our postmodern and virtual
speed-space, wherein time and space flow at ever-increasing rates of acceleration that we
humans must try to synchronize with. This is a temporal political economy, in other words.
What makes these economic, ideological and political abstractions real is, as Benedict reminds
us, technology. This is a technologically determined space and time that creates its own
cultures, its cybercultures. The question of technological determinism thus becomes a salient
and unavoidable issue where questions of control are concerned. To what extent is cyberspace a
space (and time) that humans have real control over? And to what extent are the cultures, the
meanings, symbols and practices that emerge from this virtual space and time, reflective of free
and open forms of communication?

Technologically determined cyberspace

In social theory there are two main ways of looking at how technologies function in modern
society. First, and usually the most easily dispensed with in academic debate, is the theory of
technological determinism. As the term suggests, it is a theory which gives a defining role to
technology as the shaper of society and its individuals. It is a technology-led theory of social
change wherein people and institutions simply conform to technological developments. Classic
examples are McLuhan’s ‘the medium is the message’ aphorism from his Understanding Media
of 1964, and Alvin Toffler’s 1970 book Future Shock in which he wrote of ‘. . . the shattering
stress and disorientation that we induce in individuals by subjecting them to too much change in
too short a time’ (p. 330).

Apart from these well-known examples, such theorising (and theorists) tend to be thin on the
ground in the social sciences. This is because insufficient agency is percieved to be given to
social forces, such as culture, economy and politics. Indeed, to argue a theory of ‘technological
determinism’ is to often court ridicule for being naive, or if not naive, then in some way vaguely
authoritarian.

On the other hand, a social determinism argues that it is society—its people, and institutions
such as politics, government and the economy—which functions in elaborate, dialectical ways
to shape technology which then in turn reshapes society. The theory holds that people can
‘adopt or reject’ technologies though our ability to act as autonomous ‘consuming agents’. A
typical account comes from Hannah Rippin (2005) who explains that:

Politics, economics, culture and organization are crucial to the invention, design, adoption and
implementation of technology. The ways in which technologies are required and used by society are
driven by market forces, and the adoption or rejection of technologies are shaped by social action. The
design and production of the technology will be shaped by technologists, but the ultimate choice lies with
the consuming agents of society. Technological artifacts, although introduced into society, are not forced
on it (italics added).

Variations of Rippin’s description of social determinism or ‘co-determination’ have become the

acceptable face of theories of technological development. It is a theory that satisfies a deep-set
tendency within the social sciences to emphasize the social and the ‘ultimate’ power that it
wields. As the now-classic textbook on the subject edited Mackenzie and Wajcman maintains:

We will take technological change as a given, as an independent factor, and think through our social
actions as a range of (more or less) passive responses. If, alternatively, we focus on the effect of society
on technology, then technology ceases to be an independent factor. Our technology becomes, like our
economy or political system, an aspect of the way we live socially (1985:5).

In some ways this line appears as unarguable because it gives a shaping role to both society and
technology. It underscores the eminently sensible idea that it would be difficult to think of
circumstances where people have ever been completely passive in respect of technology—or of
anything else. Agency, resistance, or the thinking of alternatives, is part of what it is to be
human in the world (Williams, 1979:252). However, it is also important to recognize that in the
debates over technological or social determinism, talk is of technology in the abstract sense, or
when examples are given they almost always in the context of individual technologies. Rippin,
in her otherwise useful article on the cell phone, is emblematic of this intellectual tendency, and
cites the personal stereo—and in the context of the wider argument—the cell phone itself, as
exemplars of ‘co-determination’ (Rippin, 2005).
As may be seen in this short explication of theories of technological development, the question
of control is central. And ‘co-determination’, i.e., that society ‘ultimately’ shapes technologies,
is generally seen to be the most serviceable explanation. Looked at from the perspective of
networked speed, however, it may be useful to develop another way to approach this question.
In an almost throwaway line in a posting to the online Media Ecology listserve, media theorist
Rob Blechman (Media Ecology, 2005) nonetheless dramatically opens up the lens to wide-angle
in respect of the debates over technology and society when he asks:

Why does technological determinism have such a bad rep? While I always hold out for individual
freedom and choice and I don’t discount the impact of public policy, I believe that across large periods of
time and large populations a case can be made for the determining effects of technology. Recent attention
paid to the effects of natural climate change on the rise and fall of civilizations and the potential of ‘man-
made’ greenhouse gases to bring an end to our civilization should bring discussion of technological
determinism into the forefront of the debate.

Systems of techology, in other words, can have systemic social (and therefore individual-level)
effects. The countless technologies that combine to contribute to global warming are having a
determining effect on nature, and on the actions of society and individuals within it. What is at
issue here is that we should no longer take technologies (either as ‘evolved’ from earlier
versions, or from other ‘branches’ of technology) as discrete analytical forms. This is especially
the case with computer-based technologies. Accordingly, the cell phone today (if we use that
example) is not simply the particularly clever progeny of the first cell phone developed by Bell
Labs in the 1940s. Neither is it a technology that mysteriously fired the popular imagination in
the 1990s to became incredibly prevalent. The cell phone is a part of the wider revolution in
ICTs that have transformed society since the late 1970s. It is, alternatively, part of a digital
logic, a systemic force that transcends the power and potential effects of any single technology.
Cell phones by themselves do not ‘determine’ users’ behaviours, but the immensely more potent
and all-encompassing network society of which it is part, does. It therefore requires a category
shift in thinking about technology to understand the significance of this. The problem needs to
be approached from the perspective of systems of technology and accept that generalized,
networked computerization has given this technology new social and cultural power. Michael
Heim expresses this point in his analysis of Heidegger when he writes that:

. . . technology enters the inmost recesses of human existence, transforming the way we know and think
and will. Technology is, in essence, a mode of human existence, and we could not appreciate its mental
infiltrations until the computer became a major cultural phenomenon (1993:61).

McLuhan’s alleged crime of technological determinism may be seen in a rather more mitigating
light if we change the focus of the argument from individual technological artefacts to meta-
systems based on the logic of ‘command and control’. McLuhan’s ‘medium is the message’
may be rephrased here without loss of signification as ‘context informs content’. In our own
time this means that the context (networked ICT systems) generates the immense flow of
content (information) that goes to make up cybersociety. What Robins and Webster term the
‘transformative power of information’ (1999:75) works on society and its individials, orienting
them towards instrumental ends as they spend more and more of their time in ever-
accumulating, ever-accelerating data-streams. Their vulnerability stems from the neoliberal
restructuring of society’s institutions of collectivity and power that had characterized modernity.
People now become the weak link in relationship to this techno-system. Networked society
pulls us towards it through the ‘dull compulsion of economics’, and we are growing dependent
because we need to be connected to live and work and to be part of the ‘normal’ mainstream of
networked life.

Speed, the core of the entire process, makes us yet more susceptible to the determinating force
of the neoliberal network society. And what is accelerating, of course, is digital technology and
its singular product—information. It surrounds us and we enter into its flows through our
laptops, desktops, PDAs. It is a gadget-driven and networked-powered febrility that Lash sees
as a constant ‘...movement from interface with auto and cell phone to aeroplane to television to
pager to the streaming-enabling baseline software in our TV set-top box’ (2002:10). Speed and
volume mean that we are hardly in a position to make sense of all these hypermediated flows of
information as they bombard us, much less control them effectively. For example, in 2005 a US
survey found (unsurprisingly) that our lives are mediated as never before—to the point that ‘the
average American spends more time using [networkable] media devices—television, radio,
iPods and cell phones—than any other activity while awake’ (Ransford, 2005). And so we yield
to them. We do this consciously or unconsciously, to the point where the effect of ubiquitous
computing and the increasing time-space compression emating from open-ended techological
speed begins to consume our now-vulnerable subjectivity, our faculties of cognition and our
modernist perspective on the world. Herbert A Simon, cognitive scientist, developer of AI
systems, and 1986 Nobel Laureate for economics pondered the nature of accumulated
computer-generated information in society:

What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence, a wealth
of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the
overabundance of information sources that might consume it (Simon, 1971:40–41).

To ‘efficiently’ deal with this ‘overabundance’ is easier said than done in the context of the
time-squeezed network society. Efficiency, in the neoliberal lexicon is a never-complete
technical-rational process that demands always the application of yet more computing power
and speed. And as the application of computers generates yet more information at faster speeds,
‘overabundance’ and what Virilio (1997) calls ‘information gridlock’ become an even bigger
problem. An alternative to this, as Thomas Hylland Eriksen argues, is to use ICTs less, to try to
limit their use and gain more control over one’s time (2000). The problem here is that being out
of the information loop is now hardly an option if one wishes to pay the rent or mortgage, have
a decently-paid job or simply remain in the mainstream of economic and social life.
Furthermore, opting out merely avoids issues of social control through recourse to individual
denial—which is no answer at all. And so we invariably opt for the ‘technical solution’ in the
illusionistic search for autonomy through using the faster processor, the more multifunctional
personal organizer, the more powerful laptop, and so on.

The tremendous determining power that digital information posesses stems from the
valorization of speed. We saw how during the the development of early modernity time was
quantified, commodified and marshalled as an economic resource. This same logic applies to
information in the network society. Time and speed are central to the potency of information.
As Scott Lash observes, during the phase of modernity ‘Use-value and exchange-value had a
past and a present’. However, in our high-speed postmodern society, information is the primary
use-and exchange-value. Here ‘Information-value is ephemeral. It is immediate. Information-
value has no past, no future: no space for reflection and reasoned argument’ (2002:144). For
Lash, this is ‘out of control’ information, creating a ‘disinformation society’. It is information
that creates a volatile global economy and the deep-level systematicization of unintended
consequences in a meta-context where, as Lash puts it, there is a diminished ‘logical and
analytical ordering’ force in society (ibid.).

Speed-driven digital information has profound metaphysical consequences, too, affecting our
capacity to understand the reality of the world. Lash goes on to observe that our network reality
is contructed through instrumentalized information that is ‘shot through with the facticity of the
particular’ to the detriment of any universals. It is an information-generated reality comprised of
‘. . . the pure empirical with the disappearance of the transcendental’ (144–145).

This is the system-level process that inculcates the abbreviated thinking that I see as a social
pathology, or Simon’s ‘poverty of attention’ at the level of the individual. Not only does the
blizzard of information make us less able to understand the complexity of the world around us,
it compounds further the power of systemic technological determinism. Speed-derived
disorientation and the illusion of efficiency that ICTs supposedly bring, create what Robins and
Webster see as ‘...the general sense of acquiescence to innovation’ (1999:74). They go on to
argue that:

...technology, without discernible origins, is something that ordinary people cannot understand. The
technology is a mystery, and it remains a mystery even when its technical functions are explained in
simplified terms, because its genesis—its social history—is ignored. (...) Without history, the new
technologies have become an unstoppable force which, though incomprehensible to natives, is understood
sufficiently for them to realize that they must change their whole way of life.

In their different ways McLuhan and Toffler understood the power of technological systems as
opposed to technologies analysed at their discrete levels. They understood the power of a
generalized technologic, even if they could not have foreseen the precise and profound
consequences of computerization. McLuhan, for example, understood systems of
communication, but misunderstood speed. In his Laws of Media he wrote that: ‘At electric
speed, all forms are pushed to the limits of their potential’ (1988:109). By this he presupposes,
as does the neoliberal argument, that ‘speed is good’ and that through it we will be able to
realize ourselves as moderns. He did not foresee the detrimental consequences of social
acceleration through ‘electric speed’ that surges as pure information and which is, as Lash puts
it, ‘out of control’. Above all he did not realize that this systemic speed, this techno-speed, this
ideological speed, would subjugate people through its valorized and instrumentalized
orientation.

Toffler on the other hand more clearly perceived the dangers of a new systemic force in history.
He termed it the ‘accelerative thrust’ and saw in it a new and determining power (1970:402). In
his stillreadable Future Shock he notes with a consciously un-Luddite eye the speed of his 1970s
world, a world then on the threshold of yet greater technological and social transformation.

The speed-up of diffusion, the self-reinforcing character of technological advance, by which each forward
step facilitates not one but many additional forward steps, the intimate link-up between technology and
social arrangements—all these create a form of psychological pollution, a seemingly unstoppable
acceleration in the pace of life (p. 388). (my italics)

Our alienation from the history of technology, or more precisely, from the genesis of systems of
production and efficiency, makes the speedup seem ‘unstoppable’. Toffler recognizes that the
issue is a political one which involves the ‘conscious regulation of technological advance’ (p.
387). His is not an argument for limiting technology; indeed we need more of it, he insists, but
only under greater social control. His ‘future shock’ is the observation that we ‘face an even
more dangerous reality: many social ills are less the consequence of oppresive social control
than of oppressive lack of control. The horrifying truth is that, so far as much technology is
concerned, no one is in charge’ (p. 290). Toffler’s presentiment lies in the fact that he could see
the effects of systemic speed a decade before neoliberalism abnegated much social control over
technological development—and left it to market forces instead.

Toffler’s approaching ‘dangerous reality’ is our cybersociety: a metacontext of speed wherein

people dwell and try to synchronize their lives to its quickening tempo. From this reality new
cultures (cybercultures) emerge and grow. These comprise the living expression of the nexus
between technology and social self-identity. Analysis of these ‘cybercultures of speed’ will
conclude this section.

Speed driven information culture

In recent times the subject of cyberculture at the popular level has begun to generate a growing
literature. Much of it, as Darren Tofts puts it in his Prefiguring Cyberculture, ‘addresses the
matrix of themes to do with the integration of human life and technology’ (2002:2). However, a
fairly uncritical enthusiasm still outweighs critical analysis. A growing awareness of what
people do in cyberspace and the possibilities it may indicate has prompted a multitude of
responses in such realms as art, literature, film and design. Numberless courses have been
developed in the universities, hoping to capitalize on its fashionableness with younger
generations, and also to seek money-spinning ‘synergies’ with new ‘creative industries’ hungry
for tech-savvy workers who feel at home in this digitally created space and time (CIRAC,
2005). Indeed the European Graduate School (EGS) in Switzerland is an example of an entire
institution devoted to the study of cyberculture. It is, predictably, a ‘virtual university’ with an
optional summer face-to-face programme for Masters and Doctoral students. Again, the effort
here as in much cyberculture activity, is oriented towards industry and the commodification of
the process. EGS is organized to attract well-paid professionals from the new media industries
with the prospect of higher-degree accreditation from a university virtually staffed by a galaxy
of cyberculture practice and theory superstars from around the world (e.g. from Tracy Emin and
D.J. Spooky, to Georgio Agamben to Zlavoj Zizek) who comprise its (bizarrely diverse) virtual
faculty (EGS: 2008).

What is lacking in much of this intellectual and commercial activity is an understanding of, or
critical perspective on, what these hugely significant technological and social dynamics
represent. What is missing is an analysis that looks at the mechanics of cultural production
within cyberspace and the foregrounding of speed and time to the very centre of this human life
and technology nexus.

A possibly more productive way of approaching an analysis of cyberculture is to delicately alter

the angle of vision by giving the subject a slightly different name. It is an name with the very
same meaning and connotations, but carries with it a flexibility that allows more easily for its
deconstruction. For the purposes of this thought experiment let us change the term
‘cyberculture’ to ‘techno-anthropology’. Admittedly it does not sound as mellifluous or as cool,
but it does allow for some intellectual purchase in the attempt to get some deeper insight and
meaning.

We have already looked at the meanings and effects of information technologies, the dynamics
underpinning the ‘cyber’ or ‘techno’ prefix. But what of the ‘anthropology’ of cyberspace, of
the dynamics of cultural production and reproduction that take place within what poet Richard
Brautigan (1967) termed the ‘cybernetic ecology’ of our postmodern era?

A motivation that deeply pervades the production of cultural practices in human societies is that
of control (Adam, 2004:143–148). The need to feel able to have some degree of power over our
relationships with other humans and with the environments that surround us is a primal survival
instinct—even if we do not always see it in such terms. As we have seen in the works of Wiener
and Licklider, with their emphasis on control systems and human-computer symbiosis, their
oeuvre can be seen as contributing to a technological expression of this entrenched tendency. If
the need to control (communication, order and understanding) is an impetus behind cultural
production, we still need to dig a little deeper to ask: what then is culture?

In his The Interpretation of Cultures anthropologist Clifford Geertz maintained that the concept
of culture ‘is essentially a semiotic one’. In other words, it is through the production of signs
and symbols that humans derive meaning and understanding (1993:5). He goes on to note that
‘...man (sic) is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture
to be those webs . . .’ (p. 5). To stretch this metaphor a little further: the spider controls its
environment through the spinning of the web which delivers it food, just as humans attempt to
control their environment by surrounding themselves in ‘webs’ of meaning through the signs,
symbols, values (and the technologies) they create to allow them to survive and thrive.
Importantly, this is not a passive process. We can augment Geertz’s idea of the production of
culture as being geared towards the construction of frameworks of meaning by utilizing the
concept of action as motivating the actual mechanics of culture production. As Erik Kline
Silverman puts it in his treatment of Geertz’s work: ‘...structures of culture guide the
individual’s actions, but only through action do structures and culture become real’ (1992:124).

We can see that this control action in cultural production is present at the metaphysical level in
the human construction of religions and cosmologies that ordered and structured the world from
its earliest social beginnings (Adam, 2004). For example, ideas of time and space have been
deeply implicated in the cultural ordering of society, and humans have created a great diversity
of systems of time and space reckoning that evolved according to the precise contexts that
shaped them. At the social level, control through the production of cultural systems of meaning
and values also developed through the diversity of institutions, traditions and codes that humans
have constructed. As societies became more complex, then more sophisticated forms of control
became necessary. And so systems of government developed, as did forms of politics, law,
institutions of control such as armies, prisons, hospitals, schools and so on, which became
imbued with deep cultural significance that served (more or less effectively) to regulate and
order societies.

In the period of modernity this growing complexity and interaction of cultural norms fed into
what John Frow terms the general ‘social organization of culture’ (1995:1695). Arts and
sciences were analytically (and culturally) separated, as was mass culture from high culture.
Space and time became more fully developed scientific concepts. Newtonian-based science
extracted these from the culturally diverse realms of which they once were part to become a
rigid and universal mathematical set of principles. With regard to our relationships with time
and space, this development resulted in the institutionalization of a formal geometry of space
reckoning and the inculcation of clock time as the real measure of time.

Technology, ‘man’s mode of dealing with nature’ as Marx put it, is of course integral to this
process. Without the most basic technological aids there would be no cultural production which
could be said to constitute forms of social control; even the metaphysical dimension of cultural
control such as religion would be impossible without the physical construction of the symbols
and signs that make them ‘real’. And our relationship to technology and technological
development has, for the most part in human history has been one that evolved through the
dialectic of ‘social shaping’. Increasingly complex and sophisticated technological ‘extensions’
as McLuhan termed them, allowed modernity to develop, bringing the control-oriented
processes of cultural production into industrial processes. This development occurred early in
the industrial revolution, but reached its apex in what could be called the ‘culture of Fordism’
that emerged in the post Second World War era. And as Harvey (1989:135) writes of this
process:

Post-war Fordism has to be seen . . . less as a mere system of mass production and more as a total way of
life. Mass production meant standardization of product as well as mass consumption; and meant that a
whole new aesthetic and a commodification of culture . . .

Note how Harvey implies a creeping imbalance between the dialectic of social shaping of
technology as means of control through cultural forms—to a dynamic within high Fordism
where technological forms begin to dominate, producing a ‘total way of life’ and ‘a
commodification’ of culture. The webs we began to spin at this period were cultural webs, but
increasingly they were being determined more than ever by the quest for economic and
technological solutions. Fordism had thus been the means through which humans finally created
what Neil Postman called ‘Technopoly’ or ‘the submission of all forms of cultural life to the
sovereignty and technique of technology’ (1993:52).
By the early 1970s the system of Fordism was doomed. But the rise of technological forms of
domination continued, of course, and indeed was massively compounded and expanded through
the revolution in ICTs. The ‘need for speed’ through computer networks has rapidly created
what Lash sees as an ‘information society [that] has for its unintended consequences the
information culture’ (2002:146). The search for order and control through abstract and machinic
solutions thus contribute to unintended consequences or, in the case of the network society,
systemic blowback. Lash sums this up neatly when he observes that: ‘Modernity is ordered:
modernity’s consequences disordered. The consequences of order are disorder’ (p. 146). Put
another way, one could say that in our neoliberal society the consequences of control are risk,
hazard and chance.

Notwithstanding this persistent disorder in economy and society, the innate drive for control
still underscores the neoliberal project. However, the recurring failure for neoliberal outcomes
to match neoliberal promise is justified or legitimated, to borrow from Geertz, by using
‘ideology as a cultural system’ (1993:173–234). The ideology is based on a fundamental
contradiction: effective control over the form and shape of an economy (and of society) will
always be elusive if the ideology centres around abstract market forces—which serve to take
control away from social, economic and political institutions. What has occurred in the period
of globalization from the 1970s is that computer-based technology has filled the control void
that the end of Fordism has left. Computerization consolidates to become a form of technology
that we have become reliant on like no other. Ubiquitous computing now assumes a pivotal
position in economic and political life, and consequently begins to dominate the forms of
cultural production that reflect the dynamics of this technological dependency. This is
cyberculture.

The creation of cybercultural practice now goes broad and deep. The iridescent signs, symbols
and representations of cyberculture displace and marginalize other forms of cultural production.
This is especially the case with people who are born into the network society and for whom the
‘time-squeeze’, dense interconnectivity, speed and rapidly developing forms of digital media are
normalized and internalized aspects of life. The ideology of control actually functions well at
this level, concealing the reality of growing powerlessness through relentlessly promoting a
utopian discourse which engages with much of what people actually want—which is of course
control over as much of their lives as possible. Being connected, being part of the network
society, of cyberspace, is to be on the road to a bright future, to be in command—and all this
feeds the illusion of control.

What is more, this is not an elaborate deception practiced by the business class. They either
consciously believe it, or unthinkingly accept it as true. Whichever way, business can see that
cyberculture accords perfectly with the project of neoliberalism. For them cyberculture
translates as tech-savvy workers who are ‘self-directed’, autonomous, entrepreneurial, and able
to make ICTs do all manner of wonderful things; to turn ICT applications into novel business
practices, to develop new products and open up new markets and new demands for other
businesses to service. These tech savvy network builders are what Louis Rossetto of Wired
magazine called the ‘heroes’ of the information age, the connected denizens of the creative
industries that governments put so much emphasis on and investment into. Theirs is a
compelling worldview that reflects a growing ‘Finlandization’ of the planet, where ICTs are the
principal drivers of the economy, transforming old business concerns (the Finnish company
Nokia used to make paper and rubber products) into weightless business entities that span the
globe and whose virtuality seeps into every pore and moves every process.

Let us look now an example of cyberculture in practice.

Serious games
In cyberculture a relentlessly grey homogeneity that emanates from instrumentalism lurks just
beneath the colorful surface of diversity, opportunity, innovation and efficiency. Take game
culture. This is a massively popular activity where players enter a virtual world linked through
computers to compete in increasingly realistic games in genres such as motor racing and science
fiction-based adventure. It is a prototypical cybercultural practice. Many of its practitioners are
attracted to it because it has connotations with the lifestyle made famous in Douglas Copeland’s
anti-Baby Boomer tract Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture (1991). Copeland
inspires much of this cohort through the manifesto-like chapters in his book. Chapter titles such
as ‘I Am Not a Target Market’, or ‘Enter Hyperspace’ or ‘Purchased Experiences Don’t Count’
purportedly define the Generation X zeitgeist. Gaming is thus widely seen as a hip, non-
mainstream activity where individuals can express themselves in true Generation X fashion and
compete with each other using cutting-edge computer applications and highly trained hand-eye
coordination skills in a context where a Marinetti-like glorification of speed pervades. Not for
them, so the rhetoric goes, the slavery of conformity or complicity with the consumerism and
commodification that had blighted the worldview of the baby-boomers.

Notwithstanding its ‘youth’ and its ‘radical’ connotations—mixed-up it should be added, with
the fascination with some of the more lawless aspects of hacker culture—the real name of the
cyber game is business. And it is an immense business. The games industry roundtable
predicted worldwide growth (game consoles and software sales) to expand from $31.2 to $49
billion from 2006–2011. This would make gaming a bigger industry than Hollywood movies
(Gallacher, 2008). The market moreover has enormous room for further expansion as the
network society spreads and deepens. For example, the number of users in China went from
zero in 2000 to 14 million in 2005 (Joseph, 2005). One ‘free’ game, when launched in China in
2007, attracted over a million registered users within two weeks (BNET, 2007). Moreover,
industry leaders Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony, are deliberately seeking to expand the market
out from its young male demographic (Joseph, 2005). As in any industry under capitalism, the
tendency toward monopoly control always makes itself felt. It is an age-old pattern and an iron
economic logic that emerges clearly in the gaming industry. The logic is as follows: as hardware
and software become more complex and powerful, then the producers incur increasing
development costs. The innovators of many of the popular games, however, are from small
independent software producers comprised of less than ten people. These companies with
possibly fresh idea have two choices: devote their entire workforce to a single project; or seek
buyers for the business and be subsumed into a multinational. The first option is a considerable
risk in a fickle industry, and the second is one that tends to iron out any kinks of creativity and
originality in game design, and goes with what will predictably sell in the marketplace.

Users themselves are not immune to the effects or the dictates of business. The laws of
globalizing capital flow through the networks of online game users along with the bits and bytes
of information that drive the games themselves. Online gaming is the burgeoning centre of the
games industry. Users are linked through the Internet and compete with each other. They play
games where killing virtual opponents, finding secret keys, more powerful weapons and so on,
make up much of the challenge. More powerful games allow players from anywhere around the
world to join forces against others in these virtual global battles. Players coming from ‘virtually’
any point on the face of the Earth, can band together to form alliances in cyberspace. But we
live in a world of uneven development and the structure of these virtual armies reflects and
sustains the concrete reality of global class stratification and exploitation. Tony Thompson,
writing in the London Observer in 2005 describes an entrenched development in game culture
whereby wealthy users in developed countries can pay users in less developed countries
(ostensible allies) to do much of the routine work for their characters (avatars). Thompson
writes that:

The most valuable commodity in [online games] is time, and this has spawned the rise of the virtual
sweatshops. Every player starts with little ‘virtual money’ and few skills. Moving up to the next level
involves carrying out dull, repetitive tasks such as killing thousands of virtual monsters. But thanks to
companies such as Gamersloot.net, players now have an alternative. They simply pay someone else to do
the dull work, and buy a ready-made character at a more advanced level.

In other words gamers in the USA or UK, for example, can pay gamers in Romania (the
example in the article) the equivalent of 50 cents an hour to do the tedious work of killing
virtual monsters for up to ten hours a day. Freed from the tedium of slaying enemies all the
time, wealthy gamers can involve themselves in the higher levels of the game, where the virtual
rewards are greater. The very businesslike nature of online gaming culture is further underlined
when we learn that avatars can be bought and sold on eBay for four-figure sums (Winokur,
2003). The real-world stresses that accompany this virtual space have other—predictably human
—effects. For example in June 2005 Xinhua News Agency reported that a Shanghai online
gamer had been sentenced to death, with a two-year reprieve, for murdering another gamer who
‘stole’ his virtual sword, a ‘Dragon Sabre’ used to kill opponents. The ‘thief’ had already sold
the weapon to another gamer for $870.00 (Xinhua, 2005). In Russia in 2008 there occurred a
similar incident, when online duelers arranged to meet and fight in real life. One man traveled
‘to Moscow from Ukraine to meet his rival [and] the confrontation ended with the Moscow man
being beaten to death’ (Russia Today, 2008).

Boosters for game culture and cyberculture more generally, are not restricted to the business
world. For example Gerard Jones in his book Killing Monsters argues that the violence and the
fantasy (the majority of online games content) should not be discouraged. This is because
computer games ‘give them the coping skills they desperately need’ in the real world, to
‘help...better navigate the world around them’ (2002:101). Doubtlessly individuals develop
certain skills in these virtual worlds—but what kind of skills, and what do they indicate to us
about our real world and its cultural production? It is perhaps more reflective (and certainly less
sanguine) to suggest that at some level, people realize that to survive in both virtual and actual
reality (where the dividing line increasingly blurs) it is necessary to acquire the handeye
coordination skill need to synchronize with high speed action, and develop the calculative (rat
cunning) skills to outwit opponents in the hyper-competitive world of gaming. A sense of social
solidarity is of course as absent from the virtual game world as it is from the actual world that
neoliberalism constructs.

Gaming is about the survival of the avatar in an always hostile or dangerous environment, and
likewise in the real-life world of individualism and acquisitiveness, we are schooled within
network culture to seize the moment or risk being left behind. Successful gamers think and act
quickly because in the real world this is what is required for their survival: both at the level of
the individual and at the level of the business enterprise. Quick-wittedness is a fundamental skill
learnt online and it is something now highly valued in the real world. This is a recent
development. The personality trait of fast thinking, as Nicholas Lehmann (1998) observed, was
once seen as suspect:

It used to be that the business world was neutral, or even hostile, toward this quality [of quick-
wittedness]. Especially at big corporations, quickness marked someone as peculiar, high-strung, and
unreliable. But now the situation has changed. In high tech and finance at the very least, quickwittedness
rules [and] is not a state of affairs that would, in most times and places in history, have been considered
normal and healthy.

But today it is. Major corporations such as Microsoft have developed questionnaires that are
designed specifically to highlight this quality in prospective employees. Being able to ‘think
quickly’ has its obvious advantages in sectors such as high technology and finance, as Lehmann
notes. But in the accelerated network society where ‘seizing the moment’ is everything, such
thinking is now the sine qua non in almost all sectors of the new economy. Boiled down to its
essence this abbreviated-thinking-in-action is very near to a form of gambling or risk-taking and
is what successful gamers do best. Computer games require these skills. They are developed on
narratives that reflect the most speed-worshipping and violent aspects of our culture (car racing,
gun play, space-age fantasy and so on). These narratives and the temporalities that propel them
thus become second nature to young people brought up in the virtual environments of
Playstation, Xbox, Wii or GameCube. Peer pressures and the addictive nature of the games
themselves mean that users must quickly ‘get up to speed’ both cognitively and physiologically
to compete and endure in this virtual combat zone, a zone that increasingly overlaps with
reality.

Game culture is discussed as an element of cyberculture because it is seen by many as

something different from the instrumental reality of day-to-day jobs in the network society.
What is argued here is that cyberculture is stamped with the same logic of profit and loss as
much as any other realm in the network society. Generation X and the cohorts beyond are
consumers who enthusiastically buy into this logic. For its part, the virtual world of gaming is a
component of the parallel world of business that impinges on our lives. Through its growing
preponderance, it seals off access to other worlds and other ways of thinking about our own
lives. The screen becomes the closed world of the quick thinking gamer, the stressed office
worker, harried student or pressured executive alike. These connected worlds are the context for
abbreviated thinking. We become what Madeline Bunting (2005) calls ‘willing slaves’ to a
high-tech capitalist system that seems ostensibly to be democratic, full of choice and
progressive, but which in fact masks a reality of anxiety and worry; a world of evanescence and
depthlessness where the deeper currents of change are blurred by increasing speed.

The journalist Bunting calls this ‘cult of efficiency’ a ‘massive fraud’ (2005) whereby big
business entices people into the high-speed network society with the seductions of
consumerism: a sleek-looking iMac for you to become more productive and well-organized, and
a concerned offer of professional counseling when you become burnt out or are made
redundant. This form of coercion supposedly replaces the relatively more ponderous carrot-and-
stick approach that had characterized workercapitalist relations in an earlier phase. However,
there is no organized deception on the part of big business or anybody else. No one is in charge.
The system of feedback has broken down (or was never really established). The forms of human
control that the information technology revolution was supposed to bring were never able take
root because social institutions were consciously excluded from the development of
computerization in the quest for open-ended speed. Globalization and the network society it has
engendered, is out of control. Consequently, the roles of human ‘steersman’ and ‘pilot’
envisaged in their cybernetic dreams by Wiener and Licklider are being systematically
abolished within a neoliberal economy. Their tasks become fully automated, and the steersmen
and pilots experience ‘restructuring’ or are relegated to pulling the oars inside the hull of the
ship. The problem is that, like slaves in the bowels of a galley, they must keep their heads down
and pull ever faster under threat of being thrown to the stormy seas. Preoccupation with their
toil means they have no time to lift their heads, but if they did they would realize that there is no
one any longer at the wheel.

We are dependent on computing to an extent that has no parallel in our human relationship with
technology, and computing is the very lifeblood of the networked society. Barring a nuclear or
environmental catastrophe it almost impossible to think of returning to a form of organization
that is not built on its logic. Computers and high-speed network systems are now an
ineffaceable fact of life, yet we have no large-scale or meaningful social control over their
development. Where do alternative visions come from? In the eye of the storm that is the ‘cult
of information’ where do we find the times and spaces to dream, to reflect, and develop
critiques of this world and construct imaginaries of other possible worlds? As Scott Lash
observes in his book Critique of Information (2002:1):

The global information order has erased and swallowed up into itself all transcendentals. There is no
outside space anymore for critical reflection. And there is just as little time. There is no escaping from the
information order, thus the critique of information will have to come from inside the information itself.
The penultimate section of this book will look at the how the neoliberal ‘information order’ is
being challenged (and critiqued) by millions of people around the world. The digital Empire of
Speed is, for all its dearth of social control, a global political space. Indeed it is intensely
political. Within it people are articulating critiques of neoliberalism and its specific market-
oriented form of globalization (Klein, 2000; 2007). Importantly, the critique is developing
through use of the information technologies and the networks that neoliberalism has created—in
other words, from ‘inside the information [order] itself’. It comes from politically minded tech-
savvy users of networked computers and networked applications and practices. Their actions
constitute a profoundly political challenge in an age where institutionalized politics, the politics
of liberal democracy, has undergone deep crises. This is, then, is a new form of political
activism. The reactions to the depredations of the networked order are taking politics to a new
realm and a new plane of social articulation. These spaces are virtual and physical, local and
global at the same time. It has different aims and uses different processes from earlier political
forms. It is an evolving politics that has grown out of the crises of liberal democracy that
emerged and evolved in an era that began in the 18th century, and therefore reflected a
technologically and politically different world. This was a world that was already coming to an
end by the 1970s. With the rise of neoliberalism, ‘old’ liberalism, or more precisely liberal
democracy, has been found wanting by millions all over the world as markets and speed-driven
networks ride roughshod over the forms of democratic control that had constituted our once-
cherished and vibrant political institutions.

Something has happened to the Enlightenment project of liberal democracy; an interest and
belief in what happens between our elected representatives in parliaments and congresses and
senates has sunk precipitously. The alternative political space of the Second Empire of Speed is
a nascent but energetic space where different ways and means to 18th century political practices
are being sought (Saul, 2005). To understand why liberal democracy has come to such a point
of global crises, and to understand the logic behind the countercurrents to neoliberalism, we
need to look at the structures of liberal democracy itself. This is done once more from a
temporal perspective. Accordingly, what the following chapter tries to articulate is that, just as
time is in everything (eigenzeiten), in people, in nature and in the environments that surrounds
us, time (or temporality) is in the political structures we create. It was argued in chapter one that
to understand the nature of social acceleration, it is important to grasp the idea that technologies
are ‘time-loaded’. We saw that with the dawn of industrialization and modernity, the
technologies that made them possible were ‘timeloaded’ by the dominating time of the period,
the time of the clock. Liberal democracy grew and flourished alongside industrialization and
modernity. As the following section shows, liberal democracy too has been ‘time-loaded’ in
large part by the clock. It follows further that it is a form of political action that is nowadays
literally too slow to function as a truly representative form of democracy in the 21st century, the
century that is set to be dominated increasingly by networks, by market forces and by open-
ended speed.
CHAPTER SIX
THE SPEED OF LIBERAL DEMOCRACY

Time is to politics what space is to geometry.

Regis Debray, (1973:90).

. . . political time is out of synch with the temporalities, rhythms, and pace governing economy and
culture.

Sheldon Wolin, (1997)

Précis

As Debray’s quotation indicates, time is central to the political process, and in the quote from
Wolin we see the observation of a temporal disjuncture between politics and the economy. In
this chapter it is argued in some detail why this is the case. It is suggested, moreover, that some
disturbing consequences flow from this idea. To do this the temporal perspective is applied in
particular to the processes of liberal democracy. The emerging theory attempts to make more
explicit the rhythms and tempo—the contextually derived timescape, in other words—of liberal
democracy, the preeminent political system in the world today. Liberal democracy is a form of
political representation that came into being over the course of the 18th and 19th centuries. And
like the dynamics of modernity and industrialism that have become so much part of its
evolution, liberal democracy is ‘time loaded’ and ‘conditioned’ by the context of its creation.
The timescapes that are at its core reflect a world that had a very different temporality from our
own. As it evolved and spread, liberal democracy developed specific institutions and traditions
that broadly reflected these bass-line rhythms. It was a form of politics that was able to lead and
shape the economy, culture and society for much of the 18th and 19th centuries. Given the
relatively unsophisticated technological levels of ‘connectedness’ that governed the potential of
the temporal context at that time, liberal democracy could function ‘fast’ enough to develop this
leading role. However, as we will see, over the passage of time, the institutions of liberal
democracy are also prone to inertia. A major consequence is that as its institutions of power
become slower in comparison with an always growing and accelerating industrialization
process, then liberal democracy becomes less able to lead and begins to react more to the
developments (and imperatives) of capitalism and capitalist modernity.

Through this perspective, the chapter reveals that during the postWorld War Two phase, the era
of ‘high Fordism’, there was something of an interregnum in the inexorable temporal
disconnection of the polity from economy and society. Indeed during this period politics was
able, albeit in cooperation with capital and labour, to lead once more and utilize the processes of
what was a social democracy to make positive changes in the lives of people. Importantly, these
decades constituted the zenith of the democratic process within the ‘arc of time’—as Debray put
it (2007:6)—that was most conducive to it delivering upon its historical responsibilities. The
rise of neoliberal globalization, the ICT revolution and the network society during the 1980s
signaled the end of the social democratic experiment. Social and economic acceleration has
made the temporal disconnection even more profound and have left the institutions of liberal
democracy trailing in their wake. The major consequence has been an increasingly
undemocratic society where the historical responsibilities of democracy (to articulate the needs
and wants of people) are abandoned in favour of a neoliberal ‘democracy’ that is concerned first
and foremost with creating the right business conditions for capitalism.

No time for politics

If we consider once more the concept of timescapes as a method of perceiving the temporal
dynamics of human action—individual and social—and if we apply this to political theory and
to political history, then a couple of profound (and alarming) conclusions force themselves onto
our understanding the nature of politics and democratic political agency today.

The first is that the politics of liberal democracy (the system of representative democracy that is
held commonly to be the most advanced means devised of achieving justice and fairness for the
majority) is becoming disconnected from the dynamics of economy and society in the age of
globalization and the ICT revolution. Second, and related, is that liberal democracy is
increasingly unable to fulfill its most basic function, which is to represent the civil and political
rights of the people, the demos.

The temporal perspective provides this insight and shows that the increasing speed of life, of
culture, economy and society is a central factor in this breakdown of democracy. Indeed this
failure is also the failure for liberal democracy to guarantee the temporal rights of individuals
and cultures and societies today. Time as a resource, time as a human right, a right that should
be considered in the same way as the right to freedom of speech or the protection against
slavery, is being systematically denied within an over-powerful and increasingly autonomous
economic system, an empire that is predicated on the unrestricted application and dissemination
of speed and profit throughout the social space of the planet.

The insight is surprising and then again, not. Herbert Reid, as we saw, noted the lacunae at the
centre of our understanding between politics and temporality in 1973, prior to our current and
much more pressing context. More recently Sheldon Wolin made a broad statement of the
problem in his 1997 essay ‘What is Time?’ when he observed that ‘the instability of political
time’ may best be approached ‘through the language of temporality’. And Douglass North
(1999) also tried to put the issue of temporality as a method for framing research and analysis of
political processes back on the agenda. He sees our present situation as a bleak one:

For an economic historian, time has always been something that is fundamentally disturbing, because
there is no time in neoclassical theory. The neoclassical model is a model of an instant of time, and it does
not therefore take into account what time does...I will be blunt: Without a deep understanding of time,
you will be lousy political scientists, because time is the dimension in which ideas and institutions and
beliefs evolve. (cited in Pierson, 2004:1)

One could take issue with the last sentence in this quote, because as the logic of this argument
so far would suggest, ‘ideas and institutions and beliefs’ do not evolve in time—but that time
evolves (is in the process of becoming) with ‘ideas institutions and beliefs’. But this may be to
quibble with the general thrust. North makes his point rather well, and identifies a blind spot in
the ways that social science analyses history, especially as it relates to the theory and practice of
politics. Here the central argument is that politics—as at once an ‘idea’ an ‘institution’ and a
‘belief’, in the dominating model that has come to be known as liberal democracy—has indeed
evolved with the ‘passing of time’ (since the late 18th century) but has done so only glacially
and through force of pressure from below.

That politics has a specific temporality is the central question at stake here, and in many ways is
the hinge issue of this book. We are still finding our steps here. As Reid, Wolin, North and
others have indicated, the approach begins first with the identification the problem—which is
the nexus between politics and economy within the frame of temporality. The next step, and is
the step that much of this book has tried to take, is to fashion a theoretical framework that helps
explain the problematic. This (no pun intended) takes time, and it requires us to go back to basic
principles that give shape to the theory and the argument. Consequently, wherever possible I
will link that temporal framework to concrete situations so as to illustrate more clearly what we
are dealing with conceptually—and judge how well it is able to explain empirical reality.
As we shall see, neoclassical politics, in the shape of liberal democracy has inherent tendencies
towards inertia and crystallization, a propensity to try to hold back the ‘flow’ of time and
change in ways that reflect its own unique context of becoming. In other words, a mutually
implicating acceleration of culture, technology, economy and society has pulled clear from the
fossilizing mechanics of classical political organization, ideas and agency that were developed
in another time and at another speed. To understand how this occurred it is necessary once again
to become ‘time aware’, and to look at the issue of politics with the theory of temporality, of
timescapes and of eigenzeiten in the foreground of the analysis. But before we do that, it may be
useful to look at the term ‘liberal democracy’ and make it clear what is meant by the term
before subjecting it to temporal analysis.

What is Liberal Democracy?

There is no simple definition of the term, and much debate continues that reflects the
complexities of what liberal democracy is and what it does (or should do)(Lipset, 1960; Bobbio,
1984; Habermas, 1987; Held, 1987). These need not detain us here. What can be said is that in
general terms, for many people in the Westernized developed and developing economies of the
world today, liberal democracy is seen as something akin to the highest form of political
organization that humans can aspire to. It is seen as the benchmark of a civilized country. States
that do not have liberal democratic systems are viewed negatively as ‘authoritarian’, or as
‘dictatorships’ and are regularly sanctioned for having (by default) a heretical political system;
or, as in the case of several states of subSaharan Africa, they are labeled as ‘failed’ states whose
shortcomings evoke the patronizing ‘conditional’ disbursement of aid with which to ease (or, as
some argue, prolong) their suffering.

The terms ‘liberal’ and ‘democratic’ can be separated out if we look at the contemporary
political scene. Let us look first at ‘democratic’. Aspirant developing countries must show their
‘democratic credentials’ (at least de jure) if they are to have normal diplomatic relations and
receive multilateral aid from bodies such as the World Bank and the International Monetary
Fund. Core elements of democracy such as representative government, a universal franchise,
regular elections, an independent media, relative transparency in governmental processes and so
on, are seen as the minimum standards required to be called democratic. Of course the practice
can differ from the theory, and states such as China or Russia can practice repression and other
undemocratic measures, whilst ostensibly having democratic constitutions. Hypocrisy can also
be involved in such country-to-county relations, and in many instances democratic principles
are put aside should they not fit with more pressing political and economic interests. A case in
point here is that of the monarchy of Saudi Arabia where an overtly (and constitutionally)
undemocratic country receives normal, if not sometimes favorable treatment from the majority
of the world’s liberal democracies.

On the other hand, to qualify as a ‘liberal’ democracy, to be seen as the kind of country and
polity that others should aspire to, then the preconditions are self-set. And so not surprisingly
the leading liberal democracies are those who have the power, the prestige and the history to
identify themselves as such. Moreover, such polities agree on who else is to be part of this inner
circle of political and cultural sophisticates. Countries and regions such as the USA, Canada,
Britain, Australia and most of Europe, by general consensus amongst themselves, are
democratic polities; and, by implication these are said to contain the most highly developed and
complex forms of civil society. Moreover, the term ‘Liberal’ comes freighted today with notions
of free trade, open markets and individual freedom, as opposed to statism, managed economies
and collectivism.

As I noted briefly in the Introduction, Francis Fukuyama conspicuously enunciated the ideology
of liberal democracy as being the fullest expression of human political potential in his 1992
book The End of History. In it he asserted that history in the last quarter of the twentieth century
had in fact come to an end due to the triumph of liberal democracy in the wake of the imploding
socialist experiment. Liberal democracy, he maintained, constituted the ‘end point of mankind’s
ideological evolution’ and the ‘final form of human government’. Indeed, the ‘ideal of liberal
democracy’, Fukuyama insisted, ‘could not be improved on’ (1992) (italics in original). At the
time his thesis was extraordinarily controversial and divisive in academic, policy and political
circles. This is because on one hand for some people it merely expressed a set of ‘truths’ that,
for example, America’s political founding fathers saw to be ‘self-evident’. Alternatively, others
saw it in terms of a frighteningly existentialist scenario, engendering a sort of ‘there must be
more to life than this’ attitude that required taking Fukuyama’s thesis to task, primarily through
various Marxist critiques and historiographies (e.g. Callinicos, 1991; Derrida, 1993).
Fukuyama’s thesis broke open an ideological hornet’s nest mainly in the Western academy, in
policy circles and in think tanks—each using it or abusing it to justify their own particular
positions regarding the value of liberal democracy, as they perceived it. Two decades later,
however, the buzz has died down, and in our nownetworked society, the ‘self-evident’ truths of
liberal democracy, the stock phrases of politicians mainly, are still purported and broadened out
as the only valid political direction for the demos and for civil society. The pity (and the
problem) is that political life and civil society in general has never been so fractured and
divisive, so full of uncertainty and inequality—notwithstanding all the formal protections that
liberal democracy is supposed to afford (Sennett, 1998; Putnam, 2000; Saul, 2005).

All this then begs the question: why does there seem to be such a gulf between the theory and
the practice of liberal democracy? To unpack this contradiction it is necessary to step back a
little bit to look at some of the major factors that went into the formation of liberal democracy in
the 18th century. In particular it is necessary to look at the beginnings of liberal democracy
through the prism of temporality. What were the primary timescapes that dominated the
economy, culture and polity at this time, and what kind of contextual timescape did these
construct? What kinds of speed dominated at this formative period and how were they
generated? Lastly, it is necessary to set this timescape and its specific tendencies against the
changing social, economic and cultural forces of capitalism that were born alongside classical
liberal democracy, but were driven by their own internal logics.

The roots of classical liberal democracy

Fukuyama’s thesis has its roots in a faith in classical Enlightenment thought. This promoted the
idea that the perfectibility of human systems was basically a matter of uncovering their
immutable ‘truths’ that had been hidden by mythology, ignorance and religion. The 18th and
19th century was a special period of history that saw the confluence of a whole range of
revolutions in the ways in which people oriented themselves to the world. Under the general
rubric of the Enlightenment, ideas in science and technology, philosophy and political economy,
secularism and political theory, triggered an intellectual process that would transform human
society. It was possibly the most significant time in world history in terms of its long-term
legacy. It was a self-conscious transformation of what it meant to be human in a proto-modern
world. Indeed, whereas historical periods such as the Renaissance or the Middle Ages were
designated post facto by historians, the Enlightenment was possibly the only time in history
where the leading figures themselves actually designated the time in which they were living
through as one of ‘enlightenment’.

The somewhat self-aggrandizing zeitgeist that pervaded the intellectual climate of the
Enlightenment was one of boundless optimism and seemingly unlimited possibilities. The
human mind (through the application of logic, reason and critical thought) was deemed able to
solve any problem and deliver humankind from charlatanism and superstition. For example, it
was Voltaire, a leading French author and philosopher of the Enlightenment, who encapsulated
the ethos when he wrote that: ‘No problem can withstand the sustained assault of thinking’,
encapsulated the ethos. The Enlightenment, moreover, was totalizing in its intended field of
effect, expressing as Adorno and Horkheimer put it, ‘the actual movement of civil society as a
whole in the aspect of its idea embodied in individuals and institutions...’ (1986:xiv).

Science, commerce, art, literature, philosophy and politics were all affected, and these in their
turn would revolutionize culture and society. This was an intellectually effervescent period
when the philosophes first began to think about (or to revisit) ideas such as mass education,
penal reform, secularism, republicanism, nationalism, freedom, tolerance, scientific method and
constitutionalism to name but a few. It was an age where humanity seemed to wake up and view
the world in a new way, in the clear light of reason and commonsense. Society and its
institutions, it was increasingly assumed, could be remade for the better; they could be newly-
invented from scratch to fit with the novel circumstances—or be destroyed altogether if they did
not accord with the new thinking.

The institutions of politics, which had traditionally served the interests of an elite stratum, were
now a core domain for such reforming and reinvention. Politics was the power source for much
of society. As a social process, politics was able to marshal the material resources and the
ideological will that could implement the changes that would transmit the vibrant pulse of the
Enlightenment to many other fields of life. What this meant in practice was that political power
concentrated in the hands of the few was giving way to ideas for an emancipatory politics for
the benefit of the majority.

A specific view regarding what time was, lay at the heart of this revolution in thought. Time in
Enlightenment thinking was energetic, and it flowed from the universal and mechanical
principles of Newtonian Physics. Time unfolded leaving history in its wake; it oriented its flow
towards a luminous future that beckoned constantly on the horizon. This made for a dynamic
present. In Enlightenment thinking in general and in political thought in particular, this could
best be described as being an ‘open’ present. Accordingly, political philosophers would freely
reach into the past for guidance on how to reshape their present and then direct it towards a
knowable and plannable future.

Classical Greece and Rome served as exemplars for principles of government that would act as
the basis of neoclassical politics. For example Greek conceptions of democracy, of demos, of
government by the people, were appropriated and refashioned thinkers such as John Locke and
Montesquieu, as meaning government through consent by the people. Montesquieu in particular
looked to Britain after the English Glorious Revolution of 1688 as the model for modern politics
and governance. In his Spirit of the Laws of 1747 Montesquieu praised the British constitution
that separated state power into three independent branches of government: the executive, the
legislative, and the judicial. The fact that no single person or cabal was in charge, he reasoned,
established a system of ‘checks and balances’ that gave the maximum amount of freedom to the
general population. It was the very absence of such a constitution in France at this time, together
with the popular perception of a corrupt, decadent and absolutist monarchy, which made that
country the locus of much radical Enlightenment thought.

This was an ever-yawning void between the people and the elites that culminated in the
Revolution of 1789.

The Roman Cicero’s ideas on civil society were revived and redeveloped by thinkers such as
Thomas Paine, G.W.F. Hegel and Alexis de Tocqueville. Civil society came to be seen as an
important domain that existed outside the forms of state and governance. Indeed it was
characterized by a separation between the state and society that retains strong resonances today.
David Held (1987:281) describes it in more detail:
Civil society retains a distinctive character to the extent that it is made up of areas of social life—the
domestic world, the economic sphere, cultural activities and political interaction—which are organized by
private or voluntary arrangements between individuals and groups outside the direct control of the state.

During the Enlightenment period, the ‘economic sphere’ became, rapidly, the most dynamic and
powerful element of civil society. Indeed, the growing power of civil society, beginning in the
18th century, conferred a hitherto unknown level of freedom and rights to industry and
commerce. The Enlightenment and the modernity it brought into being was undoubtedly a
world-changing phase in human history whose effects have resonated down the centuries to our
own time. It is also a period and a legacy that has been analyzed extensively from its political,
technological, economic, philosophic and industrial perspectives. What have not been analyzed
to anything like the same extent are its temporal dimensions—the nature and quality of the
timescapes that developed from this convergence of social forces.

The speed of classic liberal democracy

The merged dynamics of Enlightenment, industrialization and modernity had the restive logic of
acceleration at its core. Instrumental efficiency, secularity, clarity, organization, transportation,
planning and progress were just some of the watchwords that informed its bubbling and surging
spirit. Politics, or the marshalling of society’s powers to realize society’s newfound potentials,
drove and was driven by these dynamics of modernity, speed and industry.

What were its constitutive ‘times’ during the period, say, from the late 18th century to the early
19th? A few sentences are needed first of all to outline the temporal analysis that will illuminate
this particular problem. To begin with, it is necessary to understand the importance of social
connectedness during this phase of history, a period that saw the term ‘net-work’ as fairly recent
coinage (the mid-16th century). The actual density of social connectivity is dependent upon
technological innovation. In other words, the greater the sophistication of communication
technologies becomes, then the greater the levels (and density) of communication in the creation
of a network ecology. Second, this ecology, at whatever level of sophistication, comprises a
timescape, wherein a context is created where interpenetrations of temporal relations ‘cluster’
into specific temporal relationships that have their own contextually shaped and shared rhythms.
These can be powerful, dominating and long-lasting rhythms such as that of the clock, or they
can, through the nature of the context which causes the timescapes to merge, be much more
evanescent and short-lived.

In the period we are concerned with here—the century that encompassed the beginnings of the
industrial revolution, through to its golden age of steam—socially constructed space and time
were undergoing their own intense periods of technologically driven revolutions. To begin with,
in terms of connectedness, in the late-18th century when Montesquieu was cogitating on his
Spirit of the Laws, the concept of globality, of a ‘consciousness of the world as a whole’ as
Roland Robertson (1992:8) put it was still a very rarefied one. A thin social stratum of
intellectuals, philosophers, navigators, traders and explorers would have been aware of the
world as a planetary whole. Henry of Mainz, for example, had produced the first map of the
world in 1110 AD, and new and more accurate chartings had appeared regularly ever since,
reflecting the growing (but relatively slow) process of diverse human societies coming into
contact and connecting with each other (Livingstone and Withers, 1999).

However, for most people, including intellectuals and philosophers, the idea of a world where
everyone would be connected, would have been very much an abstract one. The ‘world’ in
practice for the vast majority of people was still very much a localized one.

From this Eurocentric perspective, the levels of connectedness between villages, towns, cities,
regions and nations were relatively loose—and in many cases non-existent. Australia was not
‘discovered’ and annexed until 1788, for example; and at this time much of Africa and Asia was
still to experience the unasked-for contact of the European mercenary, missionary and
merchant. Systematic networks of communication flows and information exchange, not to
mention commodity production, consumption and exchange, were still fairly rudimentary. The
central point is that these connections were both tenuous and capacious; they contained the
potential spaces and times with which to accommodate human actions at a relatively slow
tempo that was suited to, and reflective of, the existing political and technological contexts.

The temporal flow of information and networks of communication becomes salient here because
in the development of liberal democracy, the currency was ideas. This complex notion has been
expressed clearly by Regis Debray who writes that it is:

Impossible to grasp the nature of conscious collective life in any epoch without an understanding of the
material forms and processes through which its ideas were transmitted—the communication networks that
enable thought to have social existence (2007:9).

In Debray’s view technologically generated speed (temporal rhythms) has a powerful role in the
forms of ideas we conceive of and how they are given social and material reality. And in a
historical context dominated by writing and the printed word, a phase Debray calls the
‘graphosphere’—that great ‘arc of time’ that began with the invention of moveable type in the
16th century, until the arrival of the electronic ‘videosphere’ in the late 20th—specific clock-
centered rhythms constituted the ‘material forms and processes’ that saw the emergence of
liberal democracy (Debray, 2007:5–6).

What were the salient temporalities of this period of the ‘graphoshpere’? Well, information and
the ideas that it carried was, for widespread distribution, necessarily print bound. Accordingly
the ideas of democracy were conceived, fixed in print, and given life through practice in the
social world. As Debray puts it, the beginnings of the graphosphere laid down the basis for ‘the
age of reason and of the book, of the newspaper and political party’ (p. 6). (Italics mine) How
were print-bound ideas of democracy (or anything else) disseminated through the increasingly
complex social networks that were emerging at dawn of liberal democracy? The first thing to
realize is that a relative slowness permeates this process, and this was expressed in the
embedded temporalities that the theory and practice of liberal democracy maintained. For
example, in the mid-to late-18th century, information was communicated through means that
had been available for a long time. For example, people walked on foot to meet with others to
discuss the ideas and issues of the day. Horseback, for those who could afford to use it, took
people longer distances within shorter timeframes. Sailing ships took influential political
thinkers such as de Tocqueville and Paine from Europe to the nascent American Republic to
spread their ideas and to imbibe new ones in the places they visited and with people they met.
However a ship traversing the 5000 miles from Southampton to Boston could take a very
uncomfortable six to eight weeks. Once in Boston, the variable state of the roads and the time of
the year could affect a trip to, say, New York. This was a 250-mile trudge that could take
another week or more (Isserman, 2002).

And in the ‘graphosphere’ the vectors for ideas existed in much more potent form in books,
treatises and pamphlets that spread the tenets of liberal democracy to a much wider audience
than any individual could. These too were dependent on the speed-generating technologies of
mail coach, ship, booted feet and shoed horse. Nevertheless, in the context of the time, these
ideas were traveling rapidly. For example, the news that George Washington’s armies had
defeated the British General Cornwallis’s troops at Yorktown on 19th October 1781, reached
King George III nearly six weeks later. If judged by our own standards of speed, the time gap
would have rendered Washington’s victory for nascent liberal democracy ancient history, or
very old news, something that would have much-diminished relevance. But for those concerned
at the time the news would have been fresh and something that could still be acted on; it would
still be ‘live’ in that it would have teleological effects in a present that still connected deeply to
the past and to the future in ways that hyperspeed tends to dissolve.

The point is that the ideas of liberal democracy—from the elite philosophes that generated them,
to the foot soldiers of General Washington, or the sans-culottes of Paris in the French
Revolution of 1789—could be discussed, read, disputed and then acted on. This was done
within a certain context-created timescape that was at least amenable to a mode of reflection, to
a working through of ideas towards a fuller understanding them and more systematic
dissemination of them. The timescape both contextualized the ideas and the ideas themselves
reflected the tempo of the timescape. Of course this does not mean to say that the political
process did not make mistakes, or misjudge events, or act precipitously. However, what this
does mean is that the time to reflect on the consequences of certain actions existed in a way that
has been inexorably diminishing through the infusion of increasing speed throughout the project
of modernity. In its elemental forming, then, liberal democracy developed an inherent
temporality that reflected the technical, political, philosophical context of the age. If the
institutions were social instead of supra-political, then the ‘superceding’ of its timescape may
not be of great consequence. For example, a debating society such as the 18th century Scottish
‘primitivists’, who idealized the concept of the ‘savage’ and his supposed more noble traits,
could come and the go when the social and intellectual context changed—it was of no great
consequence in political terms. However, democracy was supposed to be timeless, and be
somehow transcendent of mere social context. It is this contradiction that we will continue to
explore in this chapter.

The slow-beating heart of liberal democracy

Systems of thinking such as logic, rationality and dialectic, the essences of the fresh currents
that were transforming the world at the time of the Enlightenment, were derived from ancient
Greece, from Plato, Socrates and Aristotle. These, too, of course, had their own temporal traces,
their own times that evolved through their development as formal thought processes that sought
to uncover the reality and truth of the sensible world. For example, a formal system of logic
seeks empirical proof and validity (and reflection on the principles of validity itself ) (Neale,
1984). The Enlightenment has often been referred to as the ‘Age of Reason’. Deductive
reasoning is a form of logical thinking, a method by which to arrive, as David Hume (1711–
1776) put it ‘. . . at the discovery of truth or falsehood’ (Gare, 1996:138). And similarly,
dialectical thinking, a system developed by Socrates, seeks truth and reality through dialogue, a
backand-forth discussion comprised of proposition and counter-proposition, whereupon the
‘truth’ eventually emerges through the drawing out of the intrinsic contradictions in the other’s
position.

These are gross simplifications, of course, and each of these ‘essences’ has their own immense
traditions and different branches of development that reflect both similarities and incompatible
tendencies. The objective, however, has been to show that these all have common qualities. One
such trait is reflection, the application of the mind to careful consideration of the complexities
of a problem; the functional necessity to think though the issues at hand in the search for
contradictions, inconsistencies and possible logical consequences. Another common
characteristic is that these traits contain no inherent speed dynamic, no pressure or tendency,
latent or active, which would automatically valorize rapidity or instrumental efficiency. They
are intrinsically resistant, in other words, to the pull of speed. In respect of political time, Wolin
argues that:

Political time . . . requires an element of leisure, not in the sense of a leisure class...but in the sense of a
leisurely pace. This is owing to the needs of political action to be preceded by deliberation and
deliberation...takes time because it occurs in a setting of competing or conflicting but legitimate
considerations (1997:4)
Classical liberal democracy has its own time, then, and represents, as North puts it ‘a model of
an instant of time’ (2004:1). And as Fukuyama avers, it is an instant of time that exists as an
ideal that ‘could not be improved on’ (1992:xi). Time is thus required to stand still with the
theory, the practice, and the ideal. Indeed, these essences of liberal democracy could be said to
be ‘timeless’ in that the ‘time taken’ to arrive at a ‘truth’ or ‘fact’ through logic, reason or
dialectic or debate, is immeasurable because each issue, each set of contexts that shape each
problem or question has its own time and its own unique temporal make-up. The underlying
assumption concerning the application of logic, reason, or dialectic is that the ‘time taken’ is the
‘time needed’—however long is necessary to eventually and properly come to the ‘explanation’
or ‘proof’ or ‘reality’ of a particular question.

Within its deep structures, classical liberal democracy has some identifiably ‘embedded
temporalities’. William Scheuerman in his Liberal Democracy and the Social Acceleration of
Time (2004:49) makes this extremely illuminative point with reference to the so-called
‘separation of powers’, the single most vital element of liberal democratic functioning. The
branches of liberal democratic systems of government that comprise the judiciary, the
legislative and the executive, Scheuerman argues, all have specific and separate temporal
orientations. The fact that the judiciary, for example, is oriented towards the past, is exemplified
in its ‘association with retrospective decision-making’ and its functional emphasis upon
tradition and precedent. Legislatures, for their part, are future-oriented in that they are expected
to plan, and project and anticipate (as much as is possible) the future consequences of the laws
that they conceive, debate and enact. And the executive branch is geared towards the present,
towards making rapid decisions and responding to unforeseen events or crises, and ready to
‘swing into motion a moment’s notice’ (Scheuerman, 2004:54) in circumstances where there is
judged to be no time for prolonged legal deliberation or lengthy legislative supervision.

And at this level, within the workings of the parliament, the temporal rhythms derived from its
context and from its overarching structures, evolved in many different ways that are commonly
overlooked, but which are themselves embedded temporal forms. We see examples in the
central institutions that liberal democracy has developed in the form of a parliament, or an
assembly or congress of people’s representatives. To these fixed places people physically
convene to acquire information, to debate, to table motions, produce Bills for ‘readings’ which
would then entail more debate, more time taken to ‘reflect’, ‘digest’, ‘mull over’, ‘consider’ and
argue the pros and cons in a practical working of the Socratic dialectic in the search for truth
and the right path towards progress and concord. Procedures such as the ‘moratorium’ from the
Latin ‘to delay’, or the American ‘filibuster’ or British ‘guillotine’ became practices for being
deliberately obstructionist and anti-speed, to avoid rushing to judgment or make hasty decisions
in their legislative deliberations. The reasoning behind this is clear. As Scheuerman notes:

Slow-going deliberative legislatures, as well as normatively admirable visions of constitutionalism and

the rule of law predicated on the quest to assure legal stability, mesh poorly with the imperatives of speed,
whereas anti-liberal and anti-democratic trends benefit from it (2001:2).

These slow-beating and ‘leisurely’ characteristics at the heart of the Enlightenment and at the
core of liberal democracy became, by comparison with an emerging liberal capitalism, an
increasingly unresponsive inertia that foreshadowed inevitable contradictions and their ultimate
disconnection. Nevertheless during the 18th and 19th centuries, these ‘timeless’ metaphysical
methods for discovering the underlying reality of the world, and of the limitless potential for the
improvement of the human condition, were still at the core of the project of liberal democracy.

Dromocracy and the age of modernity

The new elite of the age of Enlightenment was comprised of philosophers, social engineers and
the growing ranks of what Eric Hobsbawm (1996:2) called the ‘conquering bourgeoisie’. These
were emerging as a whole new vibrant and motivated class, what Virilio termed a dromocracy
(1986) who were transforming the world, creating in the process the first Empire of Speed.
Open-ended speed was not at the heart of liberal democracy, but its revolutionary ideas
nonetheless unleashed countless social, cultural, economic and industrial processes that would
have this logic built into them, and would eventually leave the ‘leisurely’ pace of social
democracy far behind. At the beginning, however, the print-bound and print-disseminated ideas
and rhythms of liberal democracy would lead the way.

A politics infused with the spirit of liberalism would clear the weeds of sloth and irrationality to
forge a path to the future. In this way it was able to shape the ‘pace of events’ as opposed to
merely trying to react to them as institutionalized politics does today. In an 18th and 19th
century world that was still loosely connected in terms of its information flows, networked
markets and distribution chains, liberal democracy (notwithstanding its glacially changing
internal structures, extending the franchise, holding more regular elections, and so on) was still
able to be a dynamic and legitimate force for change in the world of commerce, culture and in
society more generally. Indeed it would be true to say that political dromocracy and industrial
dromocracy were functioning in something approaching synchrony during the period of early
modernity—and this was to the speed of the clock.

During the formative years of modernity, the temporality of the clock fitted neatly with the dromocratic
projects of politics and industry, and its logic and its influence grew in tandem with the rise of modernity
itself. However, the clock also served to entime the politics of liberal democracy and the liberal
democratic state. In fact the adoption of Greenwich Meantime as the coordinating time-structure of the
industrial economies of the late 19th century, merely formalized a clock time dependency that had been
inserting itself into modernity for a hundred years prior (Whitrow, 1988:157–169).

Clock-time on a general social scale, spreading as the validation of Newtonian physics and the
mechanistic representation of a harmonious universe, meant that the future was something that
was plannable, something that was unfolding into a knowable state of affairs. During the
industrial revolution the clock was the rhythm of the new and the meter of progress. It signaled,
with its increasing accuracy, the idea of modernity in action and industry on the move.
Modernity was pushing ever forward, its ethos claimed, with boundless energy and infinite
enthusiasm in the search for what homo politicus and homo economicus could achieve in
partnership under the shared ideological banner of liberal democracy.

Temporally speaking, politics was successful and the political dromocracy could flourish
because the ‘pace of events’ could still be created within and contained by the meter of the
clock. Functioning as the temporal base-line of a developing modernity, the clock ticked away
in a precise and orderly fashion that allowed not only political organization to flourish, but for
the rational, instrumental and organizational propensities of an industrializing economy to grow
in complexity, scale and depth. This progressed to the point where, around mid-to late-19th
century, the ‘Age of Capital’ as Hobsbawm has termed it, moved into its first full phase of
development in Europe and North America with the improving of the factory system and the
full utilization of steam power. The dual dromocratic forces of liberal democracy and capitalist
industrialization became the dominant political and economic forces in the world. Capitalist
nation states were born and consolidated, cities grew and prospered, and populations increased
and were delivered into the predictable and absolute rhythms of the clock and industrialization
and modernization. Citizens internalized this time and viewed it (through a liberal democratic
philosophy, as well as everyday subjective experience) as ‘natural’. It was a world where the
past, present and future could be represented as one long chain of human progress. What Virilio
called the ‘dromocratic revolution’, produced for the first time in history, a systematic
manufacture of machine-based speed that began to assert itself—and insert itself—into the
everyday lives of people in culture, economy and society, through uncountable different social
processes and technological applications.
Social acceleration, political inertia and the maturation of modernity

The central tenets of liberal democracy, those of democracy, liberty, freedom of association and
speech, and so on, are today very much unchanged from their 18th century origins. And these in
turn drew from much more ancient theories that have their roots in Greek and Roman antiquity.
On one hand many would find this unsurprising. After all, these are the purportedly immutable
essences of human social and political organization that is (or should be seen as, timeless), the
system that, as Fukuyama saw it, ‘could not be improved on’ (1992:xi).

On the other hand the world today would be fairly unrecognizable to a person living even fifty
years ago, much less two hundred or two thousand. So why do we accept (or are continually
encouraged to accept) that liberal democracy is still the appropriate social and political
organizational principle for the present age? The issue becomes even more pressing when we
consider that liberal democracy palpably has not fulfilled its promise of a happy and contented
present and a bright future. Why, after two hundred years and more of political democracy do
its promises of a better tomorrow ring hollow and cynically in the ears of increasing numbers of
people, especially young people? Why do our individual and collective futures seem to contract
onto a frighteningly close horizon, a future time we feel unable to shape or even sense that we
will be welcome within? What went wrong, in other words, with the promises of the
Enlightenment, modernity and modernization?

Hartmut Rosa has pondered similar questions and he observes that:

...contrary to the other constitutive features of the modernization process—individualization,

rationalization (functional and structural) differentiation, and the instrumental domestication of nature—
which have all been the object of extensive analysis, the concept of acceleration still lacks a clear and
workable definition and a systematic sociological analysis. Within systematic theories of modernity or
modernization, acceleration is virtually absent; with the notable exception of Paul Virilio’s
‘dromological’ approach to history...we cannot adequately understand the nature and character of
modernity and the logic of its structural and cultural development unless we add the temporal perspective
to our analysis (2003:3–4).

In this book I have sought in a modest and initiatory way to apply the temporal perspective to
issues such as these. We can develop this further by using ‘social acceleration’ (Rosa’s term) as
a point of reference with which to view increasing speed as characteristic of social, cultural,
political, economic and technological processes under capitalism. This helps us gain insight into
how classical liberal democracy fails in its historic responsibilities, and falls short in its efforts
to be relevant to the contemporary age.

The speed of liberal politics does not have an open-ended spectrum along which to accelerate—
unlike the speed of capitalism. Its nature (if it is true to its tenets) is reasoned, deliberative,
reflective and leisured. Notwithstanding the purported partnership of homo politicus and homo
economicus throughout the project of modernity, liberal democracy is fundamentally and
irreconcilably antithetical to the speed of capitalism. The ever-contracting instant produced by
social acceleration dehistoricizes and defuturizes the present—all of which have an important
bearing on the functioning of the speed and temporal frame of democratic politics. Jean
Chesneaux states the problem, accurately and starkly, as it exists in our own time:

Speed has become one of the paramount values and requirements in our modern societies. Yet democracy
needs time, as a major pre-condition for political debate and decision-making; it cannot surrender blindly
to speed. Nor does speed favour the dialogue between present, past and future, which is fundamental for
the proper exercise of democracy (2000:407).

This disconnect between polity and economy that Chesneaux views as the central political issue
of today did not occur suddenly as a cataclysmic break; the economy did not suddenly cut loose
from its liberal democratic foundations and hurtle off into another realm of speed at levels
approaching instantaneity. If the rupture had been sudden and total we would surely have
noticed it. The process has in fact been much more gradual and corrosive. Liberal democracy
and the economic system of capitalism were in theory supposed to be co-equivalents—mutually
reinforcing dynamics that would propel humanity to an anticipated future of prosperity and
happiness. Accordingly, the fiction that capitalist countries were ‘naturally’ democratic and that
the truly democratic countries were ‘naturally’ dominated by free market capitalism could still
be maintained. Even today, the disconnection, where it becomes apparent, can be attributed,
usually successfully, to simple bad government or corrupt CEOs. The underlying assumption is
that the ‘system works’ and will work if more ‘responsible’ governments are elected and those
few ‘bad apples’ are moved out of the corporate boardroom to the prison farm.

The cleave between the time-consuming propensity at the heart of liberal democracy and the
uncontrolled and open-ended obsession for speed at the core of what has become today a neo-
liberal dominated capitalist system is only recently becoming apparent (Harvey, 1989; Bauman,
1998; Chesneaux, 2000; Scheuerman, 2003; Hassan, 2003). The gap widens as we embark on
the 21st century and the uncertain, unsettling and unknown futures that this time holds. We
move now to discuss in more detail the intrinsic and conflicting temporal qualities between the
politics of liberal democracy and what is now generally recognized as neoliberal capitalism.

The triumph of speed over reflection

Let us begin with what is argued to be the generative motive force in the contemporary
estrangement between economy and polity: neoliberal capitalism. The term neoliberalism is of
course of recent coinage, its provenance being in the very deep intellectual synthesis of liberal
democracy and market capitalism that has just been elaborated upon. However, from the period
of around the 1860s—the mid-point of Hobsbawm’s ‘Age of Capital’—‘liberal capitalism’ is
the term used to describe what we see in retrospect as nothing less than the triumph of
capitalism as the paramount mode of economic (as well as social and political) organization. In
his 1944 book, The Great Transformation, Karl Polanyi revealed the myth of the liberal-
capitalist state as being one devoted to classical liberal values. Instead, he insisted that during
the Age of Capital democratic institutional interests were sacrificed to the overriding interests of
business. Such freedom meant, in part, autonomy for capitalism to spatially expand. Inevitably,
this freedom was transformed and organized (by the state) as imperialism, and as Tony Judt
observes ‘...it is hard to be an imperial democracy’ (2004). Thus the growing economic power
of the industrial capitalist class engaged in the day-to-day fight for markets and profits slowly
but surely began to eradicate the traditions and legacies of the humanist, liberal Enlightenment.
Indeed, Polanyi noted that: ‘To narrow the sphere of the genus economic specifically to market
phenomena [the workings of capitalism] is to eliminate the greatest part of man’s history from
the scene’ (Polanyi, 1957:6).

This has been a deeply temporal shift as it served to sacrifice the past and the future on the altar
of acceleration and instrumentalization. A principal effect, as Polanyi implies, is that
dogmatized economic exigency is raised to the status of both means and end; the ‘how’ question
predominates, and this is driven by the logic of speed. Accordingly, the facility or inclination to
ask the ‘why’ questions become increasingly difficult, as these are considered marginal, if not
irrelevant to the main game of life on Earth, which under the rule of capitalism is to increase
material wealth. And as societies accelerate, the present becomes overwhelmingly where our
focus lies. Ironically that same dearth of reflexivity due to the effects of speed makes the
ideology of liberal democracy much more successful and the myths of progress, freedom, an
open and exciting future, and so on, much easier to propagate and perpetuate. Indeed we come
to believe in the ideal of classical liberal democracy more, even as our direct and meaningful
experience of it dissolves in the rush of events that propel us through our lives. This was
something that Terence K. Hopkins and Immanuel Wallerstein noted when they reviewed the
broad historical context of this ideological progress:

Liberalism’s success as a mode of containing discontent and tumult was a direct function of the evidence
its protagonists could present of incremental social ‘progress’, a thesis they were able to support quite
well in the nineteenth century, but which has been much more difficult to argue consistently in the
twentieth century (1996:8).

An important consequence of this ideological process was that time was perceived to be an
important economic resource that had to be used efficiently and oriented toward material ends.
This constituted an intensely utilitarian approach to time that, as noted previously, was famously
analyzed for the first time by Max Weber in his 1905 essay ‘The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit
of Capitalism’ (1989).

This original victory for liberal capitalism in the late nineteenth century, made possible by the
‘growing strength of industrialism’ as Polanyi put it (1957:7), set in place the economic and
political conditions for the ramping up of the processes of social acceleration. The growing
technological complexity and geographic spread of liberal capitalism at this time contributed to
the earliest significant and connected phase of time-space compression, the point in history at
which the first Empire of Speed was launched.

The concepts of ‘time-space compression’ and ‘time-space convergence’ were formulated by

social geographers such as David Harvey (1989) and Nigel Thrift (1996) as closely related
concepts through which to analyze the experiential, temporal and spatial effects of powerful and
all-encompassing industrialization. As Jeremy Stein (2001:106) explains, the former term refers
to ‘the cumulative effects of historical improvements in the speed of movements of goods,
service and information’, whereas the latter concept describes ‘the sense of shock and
disorientation such experiences produce’. The Age of Capital saw this process take on global
and epic proportions. Stein (2001:108) goes on to note that:

Without doubt, the cumulative effects of technological change, especially over the past century and a half
in the field of transport and communication, have been impressive. This was particularly the case in
Europe and North America during the nineteenth century when the introduction of railway, telegraph and
steamship services radically reoriented geographic and temporal relationships. ‘The annihilation of space
and time’ was a common mid-nineteenth century phrase used to describe the experience and significance
of these changes. Karl Marx, writing in the 1850s, used similar terminology to describe the improved
transport and communications for the circulation and reproduction of capital. In the Grundrisse he wrote
that ‘while capital must on the one side strive to tear down every spatial barrier to intercourse...it strives
on the other side to annihilate this space with time, i.e. to reduce to a minimum the time spent in motion
from one place to another’ (Marx, 1973:539).

The tearing down of ‘every spatial barrier to intercourse’ also inevitably led to an acute increase
in the frictions and tensions between nationalcapitalist states. Competition is what Marx is here
referring to as both the motor of capitalism as an inherently expansionary system, and the
generator of the contagion of soft speed technologies that shrink space and time. During the last
quarter of the 19th century, competition between capitalist states took on new and dangerous
military dimensions, because states had the means of making war as an alternative to economic
competition and large corporations did not. As the Age of Capital morphed into the ‘Age of
Empire’ in Hobsbawm’s epochal historicity, then so too did the dromocratic propensity for
conflict between states became more acute. The ‘speed of events’ such as the ‘scramble for
colonies’ in the late-19th and early 20th century became such that the oft-quoted line ‘the
inexorable march to war’ became a truism as the time for reflection and working through of
issues and projecting their possible consequences into the future became truncated in direct
relation to the quickening pace of the economy, of technological development and a politics that
was increasingly suborned to the exigencies of national capitalism. Such an internationalizing
system thus laid the basis for humanity’s first—and by that time inevitable—global war.

Social Democracy: a brief renaissance of reflection over speed

Guenther Roth (2003:264) has written that: ‘Many contemporaries failed to anticipate the
catastrophes that would befall [classical] liberal capitalism in the twentieth century, and once
these occurred, they did not believe in its recovery’. In 1944 when the Great Transformation
was published, Polanyi (1957:250) also shared the view that no recovery was likely due to a
‘congenital weakness’ liberal democracy suffered i.e., ‘. . . not because it was [an] industrial
[society] but that it was a market society’ (emphasis in original). This ‘congenital weakness’
resides in:

. . . the conflict between the market and the elementary requirements of an organized social life [that]
provided the century with its dynamics and produced the typical strains and stresses which ultimately
destroyed that society. External wars merely hastened its destruction. (p. 249) (italics added)

Again using the temporal historical framework it is possible argue that in no small part the
‘typical strains and stresses’ of society that led to the world wars of the twentieth century were
between the incompatible speed rates between a capitalist market economy and ‘the elementary
requirements of an organized social life . . .’. The former thrives on speed, whereas the latter
functions on planning, an historical perspective, a future perspective, debate, reflection and
through conscious effort to resist valorizing time to the point of fetish. The ‘congenital
weakness’ becomes in part a temporal one and is in the inability of the liberal polity to keep in
check the speed propensities of capitalist industrialism and the failure to democratize and to
decelerate the core functioning of a system that self-organizes around the competition-speed-
profit cycle.

The large-scale destruction wrought by two world wars and the immeasurable human misery
that is contained under the technical and economistic sounding rubric the ‘Great Depression’,
had shocked and traumatized a couple of generations in the 20th century. An effect of this was
that the myths of the automatic beneficence of the liberal democratic/capitalism conjunction
could no longer so easily be sustained, as Hopkins and Wallerstein noted. Indeed by 1945, just
after Polanyi published his book, a great transformation in society was already underway.
Millions of people all over the world had had enough of the effects of ‘free market democracy’.
In the immediate post war era there was widespread pressure for change, especially in Europe,
where much of the structural, economic and social damage had been done. A then-novel
experiment called ‘social democracy’ was very much on the agenda in the shape of
governments such as the British Labour Party, the Scandinavian social democratic parties, and
the socialist, Christian Democratic and Social Democratic movements of continental Western
Europe. These were powerful forces for change that could not be ignored. The will of the
people, expressed through their representatives coming to power, had decided to take more of
an interventionist role in the volatile operations of the market, with the intention of instilling
more predictability and planning into the ‘elementary requirements of an organized social life’.

It is interesting to consider that this experiment in social democracy was in many ways a
revisiting of the idealistic core of Enlightenment thought. Elements of the ‘irretrievably fading’
Enlightenment heritage that Max Weber (1989:182) had noted at the beginning of the century
were now back in vogue through political thinkers and politicians such as Konrad Adenauer and
Ludwig Erhard, as well as influential economists such as John Maynard Keynes. Indeed,
Keynes had written his classic essay ‘The End of Laissez-Faire’ in 1926 during the interwar
years, which presented the case for a return to the ideals of classical liberalism and criticized the
distortion of Enlightenment ideals by the instrumental demands of commerce. He wrote that:
. . . individualism and laissez-faire could not, in spite of their deep roots in the political and moral
philosophies of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, have secured their lasting hold over the
conduct of public affairs, if it had not been for their conformity with the needs and wishes of the business
world of the day. They gave full scope to our erstwhile heroes, the great businessmen.

Social democracy from 1945 until the middle of the 1970s thus acted as a brake pedal on the
speed of laissez-faire liberal democracy. And in retrospect the period can be seen as the apex of
what democracy has been able to achieve within the historical context of its embedded
temporalities (As good as it gets?). The previously unfettered competition-speed-profit cycle
that had estranged capitalism from its liberal democratic origins were placed to a significant
degree under the regulation of the state in a whole host of important countries. Of course it is
not claimed here that big capital was controlled by the state, insofar as the state unilaterally
decided the direction and substance of the economy, but simply that in the post war era, capital,
labour and government agreed, after the trauma of the three previous decades, that a new form
of ‘partnership’ would be in all parties’ interests.

In such an environment the ‘elementary requirements of an organized social life’ could once
again be reflected on and acted on at something approaching the appropriate speed when
government took a lead role in the process. There would be the time to do it, because it was not
the time it would take that mattered, so much as the ‘ideals’ themselves (Flora, 1986; Patterson,
1997). And so beginning in North America, Western Europe and Australasia, social
democracies began to transform their respective constituencies—this time with the majority of
people being positively affected. Mass welfare states were projected, planned and created, a
new social context where the ‘elementary requirements’ in terms of health, education and social
security were developed and improved under state auspices. The speed of a more socially
oriented democracy was able to function in a more-or-less loose synchrony with the speed of a
more socially responsive capitalism.

This is not to say the post war decades were a phase of slow down and inertia—far from it.
Economies boomed, factories hummed and heavy industries roared with activity and change and
creativity. Indeed as late as 1963, at a Labour Party conference, British Prime Minister Harold
Wilson could boast about the ‘white heat of the technological revolution’ that was sweeping
Britain and much of the Western world. This now-famous phrase was a politician’s rhetorical
flourish, of course, but it did signify something important, something we can only appreciate if
we analyze it through the converged prism of speed, technology, politics and capitalism.
Wilson’s words reflected a confident polity, where social-democratic principles could lead;
where political institutions could grant to themselves the power to control the pace and nature of
technological development—speed where necessary and caution and prudence where it was
deemed appropriate. Institutional politics could achieve this because it was in partnership with
corporate capital and organized labour. The speed of society, we can now see, was under the
control and auspices of these major stakeholders who could all see self-interest in the processes
of social democracy as long as political prerogatives, profits and jobs were not threatened.

Still, the ‘technological revolution’ that Wilson could point to, made for a process of rapid
transformation. Industry and society accelerated because of the conjunction of spatial and
temporal factors that proved amenable to capital, labour and government. First of all there was
the space (geographic and social) for capital to expand into. Much of Europe had been
devastated, physically, by six years of war. The rebuilding of lives, communities, cities and their
infrastructures gave enormous scope and spur to economic activity. Through wholly political
initiatives such as the 1947 US Marshall Plan, where over 12 billion dollars (an astronomical
sum at that time) was channeled to 16 countries, new and expanded markets and millions of jobs
were created. The process snowballed massively as economic activity was stimulated and more
new markets and yet more jobs were generated in the emergence of what would become the
post war consumer society, a society where consumption and the production of culture would
merge into an increasingly ubiquitous process of Fordist commodification (Slater, 1997).
The time factor was propitious, too. During this period of economic boom, the so-called ‘golden
age’ where profits and prosperity were rising across the board, and where unemployment and
inflation were low, the pressures on the core logic of speed and competition were eased. Life
could and did speed up during the 1950s and 1960s but this was through the consumer
emoluments of Fordism as a total way of life. Wilson’s ‘white heat’ of technological innovation,
as it turned out, merely envisioned a consumer revolution, a rather pallid form of Enlightenment
‘progress’ in the form of the purchase of a washing machine for the first time, or a new car or
television, or entrée into the growing ‘jet set’ who traveled abroad. The expanding consumer-
based economy meant that the pressure to ruthlessly speed up productive processes, to cut costs
and to plough vast amounts of investment into technologies that would allow this to happen was
not acute. Moreover, state subsidies and tariffs protected the inefficient and slow from the full
force of competition, and powerful unions would fight to protect uneconomical jobs and
outmoded work practices. As long as profits flowed to those who mattered most in the most
powerful elements of the capitalist system, then the management of the economy in partnership
with dilatory unions and stolid government departments could be tolerated. The spatial growth
of the post war globalizing system, in keeping with the moderating temporal influences of social
democracy was, according to Thrift and Taylor, ‘dramatic but controlled’ (1982:1).

However, geographic space is limited and the inevitable pressure on profits began to be felt, as a
result of overaccumulation, as early as the mid-1960s. Fordism as a historically novel mode of
capitalist organization began to reach its spatial and temporal ‘frontiers’. As competition
became more acute, both big government and powerful unions were identified by big business
and by a growing number of neoliberal intellectuals (who were influenced by thinkers such as
von Hayek) as the obstacles to continued prosperity. In particular it was perceived that their
general resistance to the introduction of technological innovation, especially computer-based
technology in the production process was a salient ‘rigidity’ in the Fordist system (Kolko,
1988).

The speed of capital (increasingly being referred to as the ‘mobility’ and flexibility of capital)
began to make itself an issue once again (Pierson, 2001). Although this was seen at the time as
an issue of straight profitability by big business, it was an issue that quickly morphed into one
of identifying all the perceived obstacles to the proper functioning of the capitalist economy as a
whole—from overpaid and under-productive workers, to ‘ideological’ unions and governments
obsessed with red tape—all of which were supposedly strangling the natural entrepreneurial
spirit of the hard-pressed capitalist. Throughout the 1960s this pressure cooker economic
situation moved inexorably towards crisis point. The final reckoning came with the oil shocks of
the early 1970s. The global economic crisis that ensued precipitated the ‘neoliberal turn’ and
signaled the rise of what we now call globalization (with the new focus on speed, efficiency,
cost-cutting, computerization and interconnectedness that rapidly evolved into the ‘network
society’) and the effective end to the tentative post war social democratic enterprise (Pierson,
2001). From now on the ‘pace of events’ would have its locus in the volatile neoliberal
marketplace instead of within the more measured and considered (and slower) ethos of social
democratic thinking and planning.

Power and inertia in liberal democracy

I have tried to argue that the politics of liberal democracy has its own timescape, a temporality
that is inherited in large part from the contexts of its creation as a political mode of thought and
agency. It is important to note that this form of organization and its slow-beating temporal
rhythm are prone towards an inertia that contrasts sharply with the restless dynamism of liberal
capitalism. It also needs to be understood that this is a structural problem with liberal
democracy, with outcomes, as we shall see, that are not necessarily positive for citizens of the
liberal democratic system. But what are the essences of this inertia?
A major obstacle in the way of a vital and dynamic polity that is able to respond flexibly to the
speed of liberal capitalism is, somewhat ironically, power. On a macro level, politics is of
course vitally concerned with power and its exercise: the power of legitimacy, the power to
marshal the forces of society that can be directed toward the realization of specific ends, the
power to enact enforceable laws that help shape culture and society, the power to punish those
who transgress those laws, and the power to see off threats from antithetical power—be it from
hostile neighbors or from domestic insurgency.

However, Ben Agger argues, apropos the failure of the liberal democratic state to sufficiently
create the conditions that positively transform the lives of its people, that: ‘Why things do not
change for the better is summarized simply enough in words like “power” and
“domination” . . .’

(1992:47). What Agger implies is that power tends to concentrate and its ‘weight’ acts as the
means for domination by the powerful and the privileged, the ‘power elites’ in C. Wright Mills’
classic study (1970). This has by now become a fairly mundane observation, except that when
we consider Agger’s quote more closely its meaning can present itself as being profoundly
temporal. It is the speed of classical liberal democracy that provides the tendency for power to
concentrate. Its relative slowness emerges from the contexts of its essential dynamics, such as
the fixity of the written word, the physicality of face-to-face meetings, the embedded rhythms of
talking, debating, and the making of speeches, the working though of arguments and the
coming, eventually, to the issue of recommendations, provisional findings and final conclusions.
Gilles Deleuze declared that ‘it is in the nature of power to totalize’ (1997a). This will and
tendency to totality is an adjunct to relative slowness. In the operation of liberal capitalism,
however, speed tends towards shortcuts, missing steps and not reading the signposts properly.
Power has no time to consolidate or to stabilize; those who wield it must be continually on the
move, to seek new opportunities, to stay ahead of the pack lest they be caught and devoured by
it. By contrast, slowness and deliberation in the traditional political process tends towards taking
in the whole picture and seeing the totality as its proper range of perception and intended effect.

The inherent speed of classical liberal democracy generates other important tendencies that have
kept its processes relatively slow. One is the tendency towards the ‘iron cage’ of bureaucracy,
famously theorized by Max Weber as an intrinsic function of modernity (1989:181). Political
bureaucracy is of a unique kind. It has a hierarchical ‘weight’ that has its own beat and tempo.
For example in the departments of state services, anywhere in the world, a visit to a place such
as an unemployment benefit office, or a passport office, is to feel the ‘weight’ of the slow-
moving pace of power and bureaucracy. It is to experience individual helplessness in the face of
what is often an unresponsiveness and unfathomableness (a process, as Neil Postman
(1993:116) argues, that is actually enhanced by computer technology). Indeed, Franz Kafka,
through the surreal travails of his character Josef K, created a literary genre around the speed of
bureaucracy. Such deadening administrative systems backed by state power, allows the
inefficiencies, costly illogicalities and expensive delays that could not be tolerated for long
outside the political field.

The other tendency that follows from slowness and the concentration of power in liberal
democracy is the inevitability of oligarchy. In 1915 Robert Michels gave sociological
expression to this in his classic theory of the ‘iron law of oligarchy’ that he developed in his
book Political Parties (1966). In it he found that all political parties and organizations
eventually develop oligarchic power structures, and their individual leaders (over time) are
liable to exhibit autocratic tendencies—‘le partie c’est moi ’ syndrome, as Michels termed it. In
other words those in power tend to like to keep it, and will devote time and energy to develop
the bureaucracies and mechanics of power that will insure that this occurs. The social
Darwinism of the wider political system, indeed, compels parties to do this if they are to
function effectively within its logic. As a consequence they become less and less responsive to
pressure from ‘below’ from the rank-and-file of the party and from society generally, where the
effects of constant change are felt most acutely. The time factor has not been directly applied to
Michel’s theory by those who have used it as an analytical framework, but Dieter Rucht perhaps
makes the point unconsciously when he writes that politics ‘tend to become more centralized-
bureaucratic and more moderate in their actions over time’ (1999:27) (italics added).
Paradoxically, perhaps, as William Scheuermann observes, the bureaucratisation and
centralization of power is the form best suited to reacting to the narrow imperatives of
acceleration. He writes:

Ours is an increasingly high-speed society, and high-speed society places a premium on high-speed
political institutions: the widely endorsed conception of the unitary executive as an ‘energetic’ entity best
capable of acting with despatch means that social acceleration often promotes executive-centred
government and the proliferation of executive discretion, while weakening broad-based representative
legislatures as well as traditional models of constitutionalism and the rule of law.

And yet as power concentrates into the hands of political oligarchies and bureaucracies, the
inability to change and the temptation to stick to old ways, to become more ‘moderate’ or
‘conservative’ are unavoidable. The time of politics doesn’t stand still, but it becomes relatively
slow, regulated as it is by the fixity of the institutions of politics itself, its processes, protocols
and conventions. ‘Over time’, a mechanical routinism acts so as to dull the political imagination
and confidence to the point where real alternatives to political organization are no longer
seriously considered.

Oligarchies and bureaucracies, of course, develop in other fields, such as in business. The
tendency is strong here too, but the market itself, through the dynamics of competition (where is
exists adequately) continually exposes these inefficiencies. If ongoing (and speed driven)
restructuring and regeneration do not occur ‘over time’, then inefficiencies will result in falling
profits, lower competitiveness and, ultimately, bankruptcy. The global economic crises of the
1970s was therefore, as we can see from the temporal perspective, a reckoning with speed,
space and time that was inevitable in the social democratic entanglement with capitalism.

Today, as Zygmunt Bauman (1998) argues, power within corporations in the environment of
neoliberal globalization tend toward ‘dephysicalization’ and ‘weightlessness’—that is to say,
toward provisional power formations that synchronize more readily with the functional speed of
capital. The ephemerality of power in the network society—the fact that power is always
‘elsewhere’, as Scott Lash argues (2002:75), that it is volatile and mercurial in the private sector
—is something that is regularly validated in the marketplace. This is conspicuous in the constant
waves of ‘creative destruction’ that ensure that those corporations and their bureaucracies and
oligarchies can suddenly cease to exist if they are not fulfilling expectations of short-term
profitability. Witness the rise and fall of Enron Corporation, WorldCom, Tyco, Arthur Andersen
and the ironically named Long Term Capital Management, to name only a few. These examples
show how unstable is the basis of power within neoliberal capitalism. By contrast, the autocratic
political leader can be assassinated, be voted out, or be deposed by cabinet or by the people.
However the slow-moving power of the political system is geared to simply incorporate the next
political party or proto-autocratic leader into its intrinsic rhythms and tendencies.

The economic crisis of the 1970s was also a crisis for politics. The cumulative effects of the
post-war experiment with social/liberal democracy served to artificially constrain the natural
tendency towards ever increasing speed. The ‘resolution’ to this crisis was therefore also
fundamentally a political one. It was the voluntary drawing back from participation in the
market process by the institutions of the state. The speed of the market was allowed to function
again at levels that were generated from the freedom to use such technologies as deemed
necessary to promote efficiency and rapidity in production, distribution and consumption. And
as we have seen, information and communication technologies were most suited to this process
and its momentum kick-started the information technology revolution that continues apace
today. The brief flirtation with social democracy was transformed—through the rise to power of
market oriented ideologues such as Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan—into what came to
be known as a neoliberal democracy, with the ideologically-charged prefix ‘neo’, indicating the
new-found confidence in market processes, the ‘natural’ way to cure the ‘rigidities’ and
‘sluggishness’ of the post-war experiment in social democracy.

Politics is able to move faster in the neoliberal economy. But as Scheuerman observes, ‘high-
speed political institutions’ evolved primarily in response to narrow economic pressure.
Executive government was intended to act with haste in periods of emergency or crises, such as
in war or economic collapse. It is a branch of government, additionally, that would have
obvious advantages in its notional ability to act decisively in other times too, and to override or
ignore the slower tendencies of the judiciary or legislature. It would follow that executive-
centered government has attractions for a neoliberalized economy where speed is of the essence.
It gives the appearance of ‘administrative efficiency’ in a world where efficiency is all;
efficiency thus overrides democratic procedures because they are increasingly proving to be too
slow in a fast-paced world. A common response for perceived instances of executive high-
handedness is for the critic of such actions to decry it as imperious or arrogant. A consequence
of this is that the concentration of power into the hands of the executive is often represented as
(and reduced to) the work of individual personalities who crave power for its own sake. The
pressure for the polity to act quickly as a general neoliberal tendency—and what this may
signify in a systemic sense vis-à-vis the relationship with capitalism—is thus missing from such
predictable analyses. This is a general neoliberal tendency we can illuminate with an example.

In July 2006 the American Bar Association (ABA) released a report on the huge proliferation in
the use of an executive instrument called a ‘signing statement’. These are statements that the
president attaches to a Bill sent up from congress that he has signed into law. The Bill passes,
and on the face of it, it seems like there has been no executive veto or interference. However,
the ‘signing statement’ written by the president says, effectively, ‘I pass this bill into law, but
intend to ignore it and do not feel bound by it’. The ABA noted in its report that ‘. . . it was
Ronald Reagan who first used signing statements ‘as a strategic weapon in a campaign to
influence the way legislation was interpreted’. And since 1980 there have been more ‘signing
statements’ attached to passed legislation than at any other time since the inception of the
American republic. Incredibly, and with almost with no publicity, George W. Bush himself has
signed 800 of them since coming to office in 2000, whilst only 600 in total had previously been
signed since the time of George Washington (ABA, 2006). Rule by executive-centered
government may be even more pronounced in developing countries where democracy has been
only unevenly established. It is in countries like these, in Peru for instance, where the executive
has always had a strong role, that neoliberalism finds its optimal relationship with government
and offers, perhaps, a disconcerting glimpse into a generalized future scenario (Klein, 2007).
The New York Times reported in 2000 that ‘Peru is considered a democracy because it elects a
president and parliament. [But] in the five years after an election [in 1996]...the executive has
been known to make 134,000 rules and decrees with no accountability to the congress or public’
(Scheuerman, 2001).

The timeline of the burgeoning of ‘signing statements’ in the US is instructive. It follows almost
precisely the timeline of the rise of neoliberalism, with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980.
The pressures on George W. Bush were evidently even greater that his predecessors, and
executive authority was wielded to a unique degree. Indeed the extent of executive authority of
the Bush administrations from 2000–2008 was on full view to the world with the US led attack
on Iraq in 2003, a Washington elite-led military adventure that was at its core an expedition to
protect the interests of US capital in the Middle East and ensure hegemony over the strategic
region of oil production to which the US economy is dependent (see for example, Cockburn and
St. Clair, 2004).
Short-termism becomes the norm for planning and legislation, with there being insufficient or
no time to properly research, debate and analyse the possible consequences of legislation before
it is enacted. Montesquieu’s ‘checks and balances’ are relentlessly weakened in the deregulatory
process. Liberal democratic polities in their transformation into neoliberal organizations have
left the market to operate and to globalize according to its own unpredictable logics. Market-
friendly politicians, overridden or compliant legislatures and government bureaucracies, now
make a virtue out of their disengagement from direct participation in the economy. In the early
21st century this has continued to the point where state-owned enterprises and large, organized
and influential labour unions are seen as an anachronism, a relic from another, much slower,
and consequently less efficient and profitable world. And in a reversal of the ethos of public
creation and ownership of the ‘the elementary requirements of an organized social life...’ that
developed through the temporary dalliance with social democracy, ‘the provision of [such
things as] hospitals, roads and prisons’ as George Monbiot notes, ‘. . . has [now] been
deliberately tailored to meet corporate demands rather than public need’ (2000:4–5). Freed from
much of the burden of public responsibility and duty, most governments now focus obsessively
(and competitively with other governments) on the establishment of the ‘right business
conditions’ that would attract the highly mobile capital flows to their particular countries, and
thus enhance their global credentials as a ‘business friendly’ city, region, or whatever.

Neoliberal democratic polities no longer shape the ‘pace of events’ as liberal democracies did in
the 18th century and as social democracy did during the evanescent post-war phase. Neoliberal
politics does not lead but instead follows the vagaries of market competition, with results that
inevitably do not favour the masses of ordinary people—the professed raison d’être—but global
capital. This failure to lead and to plan (and respond to the unexpected) was graphically
illustrated in the New Orleans floods of 2005, when the government of the world’s most
powerful nation was unable to act in the most basically efficient way within its home territory
(Davis, 2005).

As Scheuerman puts it, executive-centred government acts on the basis of a permanent

‘economic state of emergency’ where capitalism and its health are the primary focus
(2000:1980). With the abnegation of its historical responsibilities, liberal democracy has sold its
soul. It has sold its ‘own’ times that were the temporal-social contexts of its beginnings and its
traditions. It has exchanged them for abstract speed that is oriented towards the nebulous
concept of efficiency. Most importantly, perhaps, it has sold its heritage and links to history as
well as its stake in the future in exchange for the temporal and ethical vacuum of the constant
present.

The need to do things faster has only increased the propensity towards oligarchy and power
concentration in political democracies, a process that leads in its turn to further instability and
uncertainly within the whirlwind of globalization. The legislative effects are inevitably, as
Scheuerman noted, executive-centred, pro-speed, ‘anti-liberal’ and ‘anti-democratic’.

Speed and constant acceleration are now hyper-valorized and geared towards pulsing money,
ideas, commodities and information throughout the global system, leaving institutionalized
democratic politics and their traditional ethics and principles of democracy and accountability
floundering weakly in their wake. In this temporalized perspective, politics, democracy and our
already-diminished relationship with time, take on yet more gloomy features in the context of
neoliberal globalization and the information technology revolution. To quote Chesneaux
(2000:417) once more:

As the [clock] time continuum is hastily and happily deconstructed, democracy dwindles to the shadow of
itself, desiccated, shortsighted both upstream and downstream, reduced to purely functional and
functionalist objectives and references. And speed enters the picture; it is expected to provide society with
a new, introverted field of activism, as a substitute for the now obsolete horizons of the future as well as
for the rich, successive layers deposited by the past.
Our present age is one that Virilio characterizes as a ‘dictatorship of speed’ that ‘increasingly
clash(es) with representative democracy’ (1995). A major problem is that the clashes are at the
abstract level of the idea of representative democracy. Our living ‘representatives’ are almost all
under the enthrallment of neoliberalism. Markets and competition and informationalization are,
more than ever, prescribed for us as the solution to economic and social problems. Within fewer
and fewer realms are the economy and society within the purview of institutional politics.
Accordingly, in many of the Anglo-Saxon economies, large swathes of social security, health
and education are already commodified and placed on a ‘competitive’ footing (Monbiot, 2000;
Hassan, 2003; Head, 2004). And continual pressure is applied to those more obstinate areas
(such as guaranteed unemployment benefits, or the health care safety net) that have not yet been
brought under the supposedly purgative effect of the market.

In those countries where the social democratic experiment held out for longer, such as in
France, Germany and Scandinavia, neoliberalism (or what thinking people in these countries
call the much-feared ‘Anglo-Saxon model’), is making inroads in terms of declining union
membership, increased flexible working and growing income inequality (Glyn, 2005). These are
already high-speed societies; it is just that their governments are backing away with a little less
haste from their responsibilities in those residual areas where the market demands a presence.
The trend is salient across the world. For example, China and India, where most of humanity
live, liberalises and marketizes further each day; the Asia-Pacific region more generally speeds
up as governments withdraw (Rao and Mendoza, 2005); and Russian capitalism combines
oligarchy, mafia criminality and authoritarianism with complex connections to a high-speed
global economy in a unplanned endeavour that no-one controls and no-one can predict.

Virilio’s characterization of speed as a ‘dictatorship’ is perhaps the wrong word. It connotes

domination by an individual, a cabal or a régime—something physical that may be focussed on
by those seeking to resist or overthrow it. Speed, or the propensity to accelerate is not embodied
in anything human—speed works on humans in all the negative ways we have seen so far.
Speed is an abstract process, an idea of efficiency and competitiveness that has become
dominant through the centrality of a neoliberal ideology that depends on it. In some ways this
makes the problem more difficult as people, individuals, groups and communities have less to
focus on. How do you protest against ‘the market’ when we are constantly told that the market
is beneficent, or at least neutral? How do you oppose speed when it is embodied in digital
networks that are supposedly built to make us more productive, more efficient and wealthier?

In other ways, however, this domination makes the problem more interesting. It is difficult to
think of individuals internalizing the existence of a dictatorship of speed. At some level of
understanding dictatorships are recognized as such by those who toil under them, generating at
the very least a private hatred and a stubbornness to do only what is necessary. Domination on
the other hand is a more benign and subtle process. Accordingly, people can incorporate the
domination of speed through ICTs into their lives. They can do it and feel confused about how
and why they feel oppressed.

Nevertheless it is possible—through the fact that neoliberalism encourages ‘selfempowerment’

and ‘innovation’ to use speed-generating ICTs more effectively—to develop ways and employ
means that do not strictly accord with the largely instrumental intentions of their creators. ICTs
and the global networks, applications and processes that they are developed to create, in other
words, can be used subversively.

In the final chapter of this book the upside in what has been until now a fairly dismal account of
the transition from Fordism to post-Fordism is discussed. Here we find the appearance on a
global scale of a new politics, or new forms of old politics (as yet uncoordinated and
unfocussed) that have emerged as a dialectical response to the processes of neoliberalism and
the destruction of the liberal democratic polity though excessive speed.
CHAPTER SEVEN
TIME FOR POLITICS: A TEMPORALIZED DEMOCRACY

The Street finds its own uses for things—uses the manufacturers never imagined.

William Gibson.

It’s a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before. It’s about the cosmic
compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and the million-channel people’s network YouTube and the online
metropolis MySpace. It’s about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for
nothing and how that will not only change the world, but also change the way the world changes.

(Time Magazine on the decision to nominate Web 2.0 ‘You’ as Person of the Year in 2006).

The possibility of democracy is emerging today for the very first time.

(Hardt and Negri Multitude, 2004) Précis

This book has argued that we live in a postmodernity, one that has essentially been the effect of
the transition from the ‘high modernity’ of Fordism, to the postmodernity of ‘flexible
accumulation’. There have been many cultural, social and ontological dimensions to this
essentially economistic transition. This final chapter looks at the ‘political pessimism’ effect of
postmodern thought on the Left, an effect Fredric Jameson saw as the ‘eliminating [of] any
memory trace’ that could envision other political possibilities to a dominant neoliberal
globalization. The political pessimism that emerged over the 1980s and 1990s as a result of the
rise to dominance of the postmodern worldview, led to an atrophying of the Left and a
diminishment of the intellectual power of Marxism, of social democracy and of the concomitant
analytical framework of political economy with which to reveal some of the most important
dynamics of neoliberal globalization—those of computerization and the social acceleration that
derives from it.

The lack of such an understanding of the nature of neoliberalism has led also to an insufficient
grasp of the contradictions of the neoliberalized global economy. The chapter shows that for all
the ideological power of the neoliberal worldview, for all its success in ‘eliminating any
memory trace’ of what was, and an indication of what could be, the severe and globalized
depredations of neoliberalism has nonetheless provided the context for a set of formative and
nebulous (and globalized) political alternatives. This is a ‘technopolitics’ that is unified
primarily by its anti-neoliberalism. In the network society, technopolitics is the consequence of
the ‘digital dialectic’ that is the operation of capitalism’s age-old contradictions carried forward
into the 21st century. However, the operation of this particular dialectic does not presage the
end of capitalism. The technopolitics of anti-neoliberal global civil society movement does not
in fact or in theory represent the arrival of capitalism’s ‘gravediggers’. The traditional Marxist
typologies of class and revolutionary movements evaporated with modernity. Networked
society is consumer society to its very core. Anti-neoliberal activists, for example, march in
Nike trainers and organize through cell phones. What this indicates is that citizens of the global
civil (networked) society want the fruits of new production technologies—and not the
overthrow of capitalism per se. Nevertheless, techno-political activism is mass and is global and
is infused with modern tropes of justice, equality and democracy. As a totality they form a
rhizome which exerts an upward political pressure upon the neoliberal elite. This pressure, this
democratizing antithesis to the worst excesses of neoliberalism—together with the building
contradictions and crises of the neoliberal global economy—are producing the contexts for
positive change. These are social, political, economic and technological contexts brought
together and made explicit through focusing upon the effects of temporality and speed. This
focus throws into relief the dynamics of clock time and network time and reveals these for what
they are: human artifacts. One is a mechanical device that began to dominate our conception of
time in the 18th century, and the other a computerdriven process that drives our networked lives
today.

The book ends by discussing how a reasserted control over our temporal relationships with the
clock, the network and with the embedded times of our body and the environment that
surrounds us, can herald the beginning of a more inclusive and more democratic networked
society and globalized economy. The ‘bad’ speed of neoliberalism can then be replaced with the
‘good’ speed democratic control.

Politics and the effects of forgetting

The 20th century was dominated by a particular kind of politics. It was a century where, despite
the traumas and the catastrophes, the purpose of institutional politics and the boundary-lines of
these politics were comparatively clear. Politics was about contesting for power, the power to
shape economy and society. In the earlier part of that century it was still a fairly elite project,
where in the industrialized West big business and big politics tended to be inhabited by the
same people from the same social class. The tensions inherent in this historical arrangement
culminated in the inter-elite World War of 1914–18. The 1920s and 30s saw the blowback to
that kind of politics in the form of the extremism of Left and right in the shape of fascism and
what evolved into Stalinism. Nevertheless, political power, and who gets to hold it, was the
common theme throughout the instability of the century’s first forty-five years. Post-World War
Two saw a reaction to the chaos of the market and the chaos of war, and the increasingly
educated and politically aware populations of the more mature (and war-ravaged) economies
demanded a radical reforming of political institutions and political practices. The limits of
possibility were subsequently expanded, but the direction was still more-or-less clear, and the
project of democracy, in the form of social democracy, was seen to have taken a progressive
turn for the better.

The 1960s and 70s was in many ways the culmination of this new found democratizing energy
and the political space it created. Within this space feminism, for example, could grow, as could
radical democratic politics in the form of the New Left, or the Campaign for Nuclear
Disarmament. Moreover, the baby boomer generation that was coming of age experienced a
cultural awakening that transformed music, literature, fashion and art, and commenced a new
engagement with the environment and the limits to sustainability. This space was socially
created, but it was financed by a booming world economy. However, as we have seen, the
1970s saw an economic crisis begin to grow, and this had its inevitable effects upon culture and
society. After 1968 a pessimism began to set in for the Left, and he narratives that had recently
seemed so self-evident in terms of the path to ‘progress’, the nature of ‘truth’ and universality of
a particular kind of ‘democracy’ quite quickly did not seem so unambiguous after all. As
economic boom engendered a cultural and political renaissance, then so too did economic crisis
provoke a cultural and political decline—a decline that produced a new ‘philosophy’, an
essentially ‘uncritical’ philosophy that, as coincidence would have it, was rather well-suited to
the rising forces of neoliberalism (Norris, 1992). An effect of that decline was that political
pessimism brought with it a loss of political memory. This was a forgetting about the historic
achievements of democracy and consequent loss of faith in what was possible through the
agency of inclusive and democratizing structures. With the passing of time, the generational
division meant that as the 1970s moved through into the 1980s and beyond, the new
generations, X and Y were born into a high-speed individualistic society where politics were
increasingly marginal—serving to dissipate social political memory even further. Let us look at
the intellectual context of this forgetting.

Postmodernity and political despair

Postmodernism is discussed here at some length because it is important to my argument, and is
important notwithstanding the fact the postmodern debates have largely run out of steam—and
have themselves largely been forgotten. It is important because the nature of the postmodern
debates and their consequences continue to have an effect and contribute still to the political
loss of direction that afflicts our social and cultural world. Moreover, it is a political
disorientation that is a result of social acceleration that in turn serves to sustain social
acceleration through a lack of critical thought and a lack of transformative political agency.

I have been describing the contemporary period as being ‘postmodern’, or as being

characterized by a spirit or feeling of ‘postmodernity’. In the opening part of this chapter I want
to show that postmodernity, a worldview that extends back early into the last century, set the
intellectual and philosophical conditions for the relative political apathy of today and has
exacerbated the increasingly atrophying structures of institutional politics. The definition of
postmodernity that has been used should be clear enough, but to recapitulate: postmodernity, for
me, has its roots deep in the convergence of neoliberal ideology and the revolution in
information and communication technologies. It is a postmodernity that is economic,
technological, political and, perhaps most importantly, ideological. Through the transformative
effect of so-called market forces and the now-vital need for speed, the political, social and
cultural underpinnings of modernity are being bypassed in the rush towards an unplanned and
unknown future. The ontological certainties, the provisional universal truths, the ‘grand
narratives’ and the sweeping historical temporality of modernity—that is to say, a distinct
feeling of a sense of past, present and future—are now blurring and distorting through the force
of dynamic economic and technological change that have trespassed into every realm and into
every relationship.

Other thinkers did not see postmodernity as stemming from this particular locus or having this
particular effect. What might now be called ‘mainstream’ postmodern thought perceived the
times through a different, and often more positive, theoretical lens. Influential theorists of the
early 1980s, such as Kenneth Frampton and Craig Owens, framed the analysis in the cultural
and aesthetic realms and considered postmodernity as an ending of the modern ‘myths of
progress and mastery’ over nature (Foster, 1983:vii). The focus in the cultural and aesthetic
realms in these debates, quickly fed into a process that led to what Antonio Gramsci in another
context termed a ‘pessimism of the intellect’ concerning what modernist politics could achieve.
In broad terms, the cultural and aesthetic locus of postmodernism began to seep into other
discourses, in literature, in debates on the nature of civil society, feminism, consumer society
and communications (see Foster, 1983 for a seminal discussion).

What this expanding perspective led to was a fundamental questioning of the validity of
everything that had grown and evolved within the ‘myths’ and ‘masternarratives’ of the period
of modernity. Above all, the questioning and the new postmodern discourses that began
dominate, constituted a retreat from traditional politics and a growing pessimism about their
being able to exert a democratic influence over the new and radical trajectories of economy,
society and technology that were developing in the late 20th century (Agger, 1992). This
abnegation created the political and ideological vacuum on the Left that allowed neoliberalism,
and its project of globalization and the revolution in ICTs, to become so dominant.

These postmodern debates, which reached something of a zenith in the 1970s and 1980s, have
their genesis in much earlier writing in which we can see clear traces of the time-space thinking
that has so much real-world consequences today. For example, the intrinsic pessimism and time-
space framing of these very European debates has a clear echo in the works of German theorist
Walter Benjamin. In his essay The Storyteller, written in 1936, Benjamin comments on the loss
of the narrative coherence of storytelling (and thus a fix on ‘reality’) through the general
mechanization and relative acceleration of society. He wrote that:
The art of storytelling is coming to an end. Less and less frequently do we encounter people with the
ability to tell a tale properly. More and more often there is embarrassment all around when the wish to
hear a story is expressed. It is as if something that seemed inalienable to us, the securest among our
possessions, were taken from us: the ability to exchange experiences. One reason for this phenomenon is
obvious: experience has fallen in value. And it looks as if it is continuing to fall into bottomlessness.
Every glance at a newspaper demonstrates that it has reached a new low, that our picture, not only of the
external world, but of the moral world as well, overnight, has undergone changes which were never
thought possible. (. . .) For never has experience been contradicted more thoroughly than strategic
experience by tactical warfare, economic experience by inflation, bodily experience by mechanical
warfare, moral experience by those in power. A generation that had gone to school on horse-drawn
streetcar now stood under the open sky in a countryside in which nothing remained unchanged but the
clouds, and beneath these clouds, in a field of force of destructive torrents and explosions, was the tiny,
fragile human body.

Here Benjamin describes the effects of contemporaneous time-space compression on the ‘fragile
human body’. His focus is on the revolutions in the mechanization of warfare that the First
World War had made so horribly efficient and apparent. The shrinking of time and space meant,
in the modern war context, was that no one was safe from being enveloped within a growing
war zone that had not only spatially expanded its realm of operations, but had also temporally
accelerated the speed at which conflict was conducted. Benjamin’s thesis also implied certain
social and political effects. These were picked up and developed in Virilio’s 1986 Speed and
Politics where he wrote that ‘history progresses at the speed of its weapons systems’. This was
for Virilio, a retrograde development, one which—as early as 1914—spelled the end for the
Marxist and Enlightenment-derived project of human emancipation through modernity: ‘From
1914 onward, the proletariat’s motor—and thus political—power was no match for the
[bourgeois] European battlefields’ (1986:97).

Virilio’s gloom may be seen as emblematic of the growing pessimism of once-progressive

French thought that reached something of a nadir in the wake of the crushing of the Left in May
1968. The defeat was, according to Rod Kenward ‘a final twist of the modernist, ideological
spiral which had conditioned all French politics since the 1920s’ (2005:244). The ‘postmodern
turn’ began to emerge in earnest after this period, as disaffected Left-wing intellectuals began to
drift away from political activism and toward the realms of thought which dominated
postmodern theory—such as philosophy, literary theory, literary criticism and aesthetics
(Norris, 1992). The disputes, such as they were, all had a distinctly metaphysical ring about
them, and they took place within the pages of weighty books and sober journals, which
considered questions such as ‘what is/was modernity?’ and ‘what is postmodernity’?
Intellectually speaking this was high-end stuff conducted by the foremost contemporary
thinkers. But it was thinking that shied away from the political and economic questions that
dominated the time, that is to say, the rise of neoliberalism and the dwindling of any socially
progressive alternatives that would challenge it.

Jean-Françoise Lyotard, for example, in his celebrated and muchdebated The Postmodern
Condition that was discussed briefly in Chapter Four, believed that the eclipse of modernity was
to be welcomed. Postmodernity (however it came about) represented for him an end to the
‘totalitarianism’ of the metanarratives of science and technology (amongst others) that gave
modernity its rigid and narrow perspective. However, far from seeing the ‘postmodern turn’ as a
release into a new historical phase of freedom, Lyotard averred, somewhat contradictorily, that
it was contributing to the widespread commodification of knowledge, and to an equally narrow
perception of what it is to be human in the world. This bleak vista was made possible through
the speed régime of ubiquitous computerization that was geared toward creating and
disseminating the valorized and instrumentalized knowledge required for the capitalist
marketplace (1979:3–4).

The allegedly corrupting influence of the post-industrial reliance on digital information systems
was further—and even more negatively— analysed by fellow French thinker Jean Baudrillard.
For Baudrillard it is a computerized and networked global media that plays a leading role in the
political transformation to a networked age. Through the hyper-proliferation of the electronic
image, in advertising, in movies, in video-games and in the daily signs and symbols of
commodity capitalism that suffuse our life, the media create what he terms a ‘hyperreality’.
Baudrillard’s thesis follows logically from the 1968 work by Guy Debord, The Society of the
Spectacle, where the ‘fetishism of the commodity’ obscures the dynamics of political power.
Baudrillard argues that:

The fetishism of the commodity—the domination of society by ‘intangible as well as tangible things’—
attains its ultimate fulfillment in the spectacle, where the real world is replaced by a selection of images
which are projected above it, yet which at the same time succeed in making themselves regarded as the
epitome of reality (1988:137).

For Baudrillard, the incessant ‘projecting’ of an image above reality produces a hyperreality, a
‘simulacrum’ or copy of the real that is devoid of depth and meaning. The fetishism of the
commodity through the signs and symbols of the image (the spectacle) have been globalized
and supercharged and accelerated by the neoliberal revolution in ICTs. In Baudrillard’s reading
of the postmodern, the loss of reality and the loss of meaning, leave people atomized and
exposed to the stupefying effect of a constant plethora of digital stimulation. The unavoidable
implication in Baudrillard’s work is that such epistemological trauma renders futile any kind of
coherent and progressive politics.

The generally baleful influence of so-called ‘French Theory’ was powerful and spread quickly
onto fertile ground during the 1970s and 1980s. It reached into the Arts and Humanities
departments of the AngloSaxon academies, bringing ‘postmodernism’ to the fore as a theory to
describe a new era of relativism, depthlessness and meaninglessness. The works of Lyotard,
Baudrillard and in a slightly different way, those of Jacques Derrida, acted for many as a
conscious or unconscious explanation of the seeming end of the ‘project of modernity’ and the
actual collapse of a socialist alternative in the face of the surging neoliberal tide. In his Late
Marxism, American theorist Fredric Jameson spoke for a significant section of Anglo-American
Marxism that was in its dénouement:

...late capitalism has all but succeeded eliminating the final loopholes of nature and the Unconscious, of
subversion and the aesthetic, of individual and collective praxis alike, and, with a final fillip, in
eliminating any memory trace of what thereby no longer existed in the henceforth postmodern landscape
(1992:124).

Of course these debates took place in academic journals or in books that sold only to a narrow
stratum of academicians. The majority of people in either continental Europe or in the Anglo-
American countries were mostly oblivious to the theorizing going on in sundry departments in
the institutions of higher learning.

This sealed world was only occasionally broken open to public scrutiny, and then usually as a
source of ridicule. In 1991, for example, Baudrillard published in the British Guardian (from
the original which appeared in the French daily Libération) an article entitled ‘The Gulf War
Did Not Take Place’. In it he argued that what we ‘witnessed’ in the war to oust Iraq from
Kuwait was not a war, but a simulation constructed through electronic mass media.
Baudrillard’s point was that the global mass media could, in effect, create almost any ‘reality’ it
wished through its control over the proliferation of digital signs and symbols. However, right-
wing media, and mainstream media in general chose to ignore this subtlety and ridiculed
Baudrillard (and by implication all ‘French Theory’) for arguing that the war did not occur, that
it was all a media confection. This willful or obtuse misrepresentation was held up as ‘proof’
that intellectuals (French or otherwise) were hopelessly out of touch with the concerns and
thoughts of men and women in everyday life. The impression was reinforced in 1996 when
Alan Sokal, a leading quantum physicist, published a highly divisive piece of writing in the
cultural studies journal Social Text. His article ‘Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a
Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity’ appeared to argue—using an excessively
opaque version of the language of social theory and cultural studies—the need for a postmodern
perspective on the mathematical and physical sciences, a perspective where relativism and
subjectivism should be given a legitimate role in the physical sciences. Sokal later unveiled his
article as a hoax on the ‘anti-science’ rhetoric of postmodern thinking. Ridicule was heaped on
the editors of Social Text who failed to pick up the sham article at the review stage. Sokal’s
point that one could say almost anything within the postmodern discourse and have it taken
seriously. It was an observation that was eagerly taken up in the mainstream media as yet
another example of how improvidently taxpayer’s money was allegedly being spent in the
universities.

The political consequences of postmodern pessimism

Except when being encouraged by the media to join in the fun and pour scorn on ‘intellectuals’
(the term usually had unmistakably cynical inverted commas attached to it in the Anglo-Saxon
world) ordinary men and women were sidelined from these debates. And this is a central issue;
it fitted neatly with an ideological agenda. The academic obsession with the ‘postmodernity
debate’ missed the point. For a decade and more, it served mainly to divert many critical minds
from properly analyzing the locus and scope of the actual changes that were rapidly occurring
in society. For a mainstream society at the mercy of increasingly narrow media viewpoints, the
alleged babble of the Left-leaning academic or postmodern thinker seemingly ‘proved’ that, for
a start, socialism and social democracy was finally and decisively bankrupted. The general
internalization of this concept meant that much else which dovetailed with the neoliberal project
was able flow: from the idea that ‘there is no alternative’ to neoliberal restructuring and the
natural supremacy of market forces, to the realization that ‘there is no such thing as society’
only an agglomeration of competing individuals in a market context. Both these utterances came
from Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s. Thatcher blazed a trail for neoliberal ideology that
quickly dominated British politics and pioneered the global transformation of economy, culture
and society. Her close ideological ally, US president Ronald Reagan, spoke for the business and
rising political class in that bastion of neoliberalism in terms of market power, when he said in
his first Inaugural Address in 1981 that: ‘government is not the solution to our problem;
government is the problem’.

It is no coincidence that during the early 1990s when the subject of ‘globalization’ was being
seen as the ‘next big thing’, the postmodernity debates were beginning to peter out. In fact these
terms, globalization and postmodernity, were describing the same processes—only the former
better describes the cause and the latter its effect. The central ‘problem’ during the 1980s and
1990s was not one of postmodern ontology and metaphysics; these could be debated ad
infinitum. The pressing issues were (and still are) economic and political issues, the dominance
of neoliberal globalization and the reckless speeding-up of economy and society. As the
analytical framework of this book would suggest, this transformation can be seen as due to a
technologically and politically driven time-space compression which resulted in the shift from
the regime of Fordism (high modernity) to one of flexible accumulation (postmodernity). In this
historical materialist analysis, this shift represented the basis on which economy, culture and
society became postmodern or, more accurately, neoliberalized and globalized.

The political pessimism of the post-1968 era allowed an academic and essentially arid
postmodern debate to obscure this fundamental process. Theorists and intellectuals got caught
up in essentially irrelevant disputation and neglected to first analyse the real world
transformations that lead to flexible accumulation, before looking at their ontological and
metaphysical ramifications. A significant political problem stemming from this was that a Left-
wing critique had lost much of its legitimacy in the eyes of a public bombarded by a neoliberal
media and (by the 1990s) a politically conservative academy (Hassan, 2003). The analytical
power the Left had derived from a historical materialist and flexible political economy approach
had become increasingly marginalized during the 1970–90s, not only in the postmodern
debates, but also in the succeeding debates on globalization that continued through to the 2000s
(Frankel, 2001).

Alternatively, the foregrounding of temporality within an historical-materialist and political

economy approach would have revealed that of supreme importance was the disconnection of
Enlightenment and clock-time based politics from an open-ended continuum of market-driven
speed through ICTs. This would have revealed a crisis within the institutions of political
liberalism, a crisis where social and economic acceleration effectively made the ‘project’ of
liberal democracy impossible to realize. However by turning away from politics, a French
Theory-derived postmodernism allowed the crises of politics to go unchecked and
misunderstood.

Into this apolitical vacuum rushed the ideology of the market. Its ascendancy helped to ensure
that many accepted as inevitable the disruptive transformation to flexible accumulation that
would allegedly bring wealth, efficiency, productivity and profit as its rewards. In this real
world context, the question of the erasure of the ‘memory trace’ that Jameson notes, is therefore
not a philosophical one (in the first instance) but an ideological and technological one—with
profoundly temporal effects. The past is left to be forgotten or to be written from a perspective
that naturalizes the constructed trajectories of the market, of science and technology, and of the
individualism and relativism of the postmodern (and politically apathetic) present. The future,
for its part, is painted as a vague but always-ominous horizon of anxiety, one where surprises
will be many, and one where it is the individual who must take responsibility to insure against
whatever it may bring.

Unlike the post war baby boomers, generations X and Y have no experience of an
institutionalized political culture that has ‘naturally’ occurring ideological differences—or even
generally different policies. Today the ideology of neoliberalism puts up a broad front in the
parliaments and in the congresses and senates of the developed and developing world. It is an
ideological homogeneity that is reinforced and disseminated by a powerful global media, which
like the university, functions primarily as a business like any other (McChesney & Herman,
1997). It is arguable that the majority of younger people sees no political differences and
perceives no crises in the archaic and disconnected party political system. And as the
mainstream media hardly ever tackle issues of crises within the party political system, then
people simply don’t consider it. Society appears (contradictorily) to be about the individual,
about the need to lower taxes, about mortgage rates and the price of gasoline, school fees and so
on. In this context social acceleration continues apace and networked globalization and the
supremacy of the market are viewed as ordinary aspects of life.

However, equally arguable is the idea that for others, as society becomes increasingly atomized
and the concerns of people are yet more instrumentalized in their orientation, then the
apprehensions, the stresses, and the time-squeezes can act as catalysts for reflection, for
questioning, and for action from an overtly political perspective. And it is within this liminal
space—that is to say, between the promise and the reality of neoliberal globalization—that
political hope lies.

The limits to neoliberal domination

If neoliberalism functions too fast to allow it to deliver on the promises it made to people in the
1970s and continues to make today; and if liberal democracy functions too slowly to deliver on
its ‘historic responsibility’ to its citizenry, then what is the alternative? The truth is that no one
knows. Accompanied by its empty and largely cynical adherence to the tenets of ‘liberalism’
and ‘democracy’, persistent economic and social crisis continue to follow in the fast-flowing
wake of the neoliberal project. All the while its ideologues and unthinking followers assure
those who still listen that things will be all right if we become yet more efficient, yet more
productive and yet more competitive. Millions fall into the daily routine of unthinking
conformity, or convince themselves that there probably are no alternatives.

This is of course a form of ideological domination. But it is a highly complex one in the context
of a seemingly free and open network society where diversity abounds. Ostensibly, the Internet
carries every manner of idea, every topic of discussion and every form of analysis. Websites
proclaiming the virtues and necessity of anarchism, or socialism, or fascism, or eugenics, or
communitarianism, or almost any topic you care to type into Google, can give the impression of
a vibrant, almost subversive digital space, one that undermines the very basis of the neoliberal
speed economy. But it isn’t. The Internet and its predominantly business networks are
monopolized by instrumental uses. These submerge everything else. We are online in the office,
the home and in the school and the university to do the ‘new economy’ work and learning that
increasingly consume our waking lives. We spend long hours processing information in our
factory-offices, we catch up on the backlog of tasks at home at nights and on the weekends.
Children, in preparation for a life in cyberspace, spend more and more time reading, writing and
researching on the Internet at school and at home.

The leisurely ‘surfing the Internet for fun’ trope that is beloved of ICT advertisers as a hook to
get people online, actually represents a fairly small part of what people do there. For example,
the Pew Internet and American Life Project found that of the 220 million Americans (some 75%
of the population) who used the Internet daily (in 2008) only 28 per cent spent some time in idle
website hopping. A somewhat larger fraction of this number (39%) accessed the Internet to find
mainstream political information and news (Pew, 2008).

It may be overwhelmingly apolitical and business-oriented, but it is not all doom and gloom on
the Internet. When not using the business or educational networks, it seems that what people
overwhelmingly do at home (and in the office if they dare) is share music and video files
through peer-to-peer (P2P) protocols. Wired magazine cites research by IT firm Cachelogic,
which found that ‘P2P applications consume between 60 percent and 80 percent of capacity on
consumer ISP networks’ (Glasner, 2005). Spending much of your time downloading the latest
movie blockbuster or hit songs may be technically illegal, but it is certainly not political or
subversive. Indeed, the ‘illegal’ period of being able to freely swap and download copyrighted
music and films is rapidly coming to an end as the business model of P2P asserts itself. This
was highlighted in 2006 when the iTunes website run by Apple sold its one billionth ‘legally’
downloaded song (titled, fittingly enough: ‘The Speed of Sound’) to an unsuspecting user in the
USA. The lucky customer received ten iPods and an iMac computer as a prize (Apple. com,
2006). The number of iTunes songs sold tripled just a year later (Apple.com, 2007).

The ideology of the market and the commodity culture clearly dominate the network society and
the increasing time we spend within it. It is the Baudrillardian nightmare of domination through
signs and symbols writ large. It constructs a super-mediated existence where the ‘formal’
network of the Internet and its peripherals, with their speed and their commodification and their
instrumentalism, seeps into realms well beyond the job or the classroom. According to Thomas
de Zengotita, this Baudrillardian hyperreality through speed creates a kind of ‘numbness’, a lack
of feeling for the real and the actual, for the essence or the originary level in daily processes.
This is analogous to Kuipers’ metaphor of ‘constantly treading water at the surface of change’
(2000:12). In his 2005 book Mediated de Zengotita composes a playful piece of writing to catch
the rhythms of this numbness:

All about time. Crunch time. Time to get a life. Busy, busy, busy being numb. You don’t need a
Blackberry, you need a chief of staff. Quality time. Down time. Even the food is fast. Real time. She runs
marathons too. The end of the day (p. 175).
Zengotita gets rather more serious a few pages later when he gets to describing the effects of
these stultifying dynamics. He goes on to observe that ‘our state of numbness’ is created by
being:

. . . swamped by routine activities. The old-fashioned superficiality of routine blends seamlessly with the
new superficiality, the surface quality of ubiquitous representation—and this hybrid accelerates
constantly, as you take on more and more. (. . .) The result is a simulation of reality convincing enough to
pass for the original, for most of us, most of the time. It is only when the ultimate reality descends on us
in the form of a tragic accident, illness, death or a miraculous recovery, the birth of a child—only then
does that simulation stand revealed for what it is (p. 186).

According to Baudrillard this speed-driven dynamic results in ‘the purest and most illegible
form of domination’ (1988:130). This domination, however, is not effected through a simple
dichotomy between ‘reality’ and its ‘simulated’ and accelerated representation. Super-mediation
means that there is no ‘ultimate reality’ as Zengotita puts it, except for those events such as the
death of a friend, or a personal illness that can cut through the thickets of signs and symbols.
Domination stems instead from the fact that within the process of super-mediation there exists
little personal autonomy, few areas of actual diversity that is not premised on the capitalist
commodity logic.

Within this logic, ‘diversity’ and ‘choice’ are potentially limitless—as we see in the Internet
itself. But these are constrained, ultimately, by the simple necessity of what sells and what can
be made to sell.

Domination. It is a word that feels like the weight of a load on your back, or an oppressive
mental force that obliges us to think this way or that, or to be this or be that. Domination can
seem to operate so successfully—through a well-oiled ideology—that it functions to the point
where it becomes invisible (Eagleton, 1991:47). We no longer feel its effect on us, we no longer
discern its point of production or the heaviness of its presence—we come under its spell, in
other words. The ideology of religion functions in such a fashion, and the ideology of
neoliberalism functions in ways that approach this point of invisibility. In politics and in the
mainstream media, ideas such as market forces, free trade and liberal democracy are routinely
referred to as if they are as natural and life affirming as the air we breathe.

Whatever one thinks of their modalities of analysis, the writings of Lyotard and Baudrillard
undoubtedly make the forms of domination in postmodern society readily apparent. But they
also lend themselves to a politically pessimistic reading, to what Christopher Norris describes as
a ‘postmodern-neopragmatist drift’ (1992:85) where domination becomes an inescapable (and
increasingly invisible) part of the postmodern condition.

However, the term domination can also connote a complex and subtle process. Indeed, a more
nuanced understanding of it can in fact reveal the process of domination as actually a sign of
vulnerability. Such a perspective can identify gaps in what appeared to be the solid edifice of
the system. Raymond Williams gives us such a way to think about domination and its operation.
He argues that for a power to contemplate ‘domination’ it must presupposes a resistance, some
active force to be kept in check or held in place by a greater force. Williams goes on to observe
that:

...however dominant a social system may be, the very meaning of its domination involves a limitation or
selection of the activities it covers, so that by definition it cannot exhaust all social experience, which
therefore always potentially contains space for alternative acts and alternative intentions which are not yet
articulated as a social institution or even project (1979:252).

Using Williams’ injunction, these spaces of alterity and reflection can be utilized to show that
religion, for example, has no answers, and functions mainly to deaden the capacity for
rational/critical thinking. Similarly, neoliberalism, for all its dominance in the media and in the
business and government spheres, cannot possibly function to the point of invisibility because
unlike religion it forces itself daily into our lives. It does so through the inevitable and
inexorable contradictions that arise between the idea and the reality, the incongruity that
emerges between the promise and the product itself. For many millions across the world the
inconsistency makes itself felt in ways that can be uncomfortable or irritating—like another tax
increase in an environment where government and regulation are supposed to be minimized.
More often the contradictions can be very sharp, and the effects a good deal harsher. Jobs can
disappear, economies can be wrecked, and families and lives can be torn apart in innumerable
ways through the stresses and anxieties of living in a free-market economy where ‘restructuring’
is a permanent and palpable and painful feature of life.

Neoliberalism’s particular vulnerability is that it cannot be sustained as either an economic

system or a political ideology. The contradictions of open-ended acceleration and a spiraling
consumption without end (neoliberalism’s principal time-space contradictions) guarantee that it
will fail—but they don’t guarantee that what will follow it will be any more sustainable or
rational. This is where the immediate challenge lies for a progressive politics. Before looking at
the signs of change and the options for political change it is necessary to illustrate some of the
primary contradictions of the current economic dis-order.

Capitalism and its contradictions

In their book What is Philosophy? the rather more politically committed French theorists Gilles
Deleuze and Felix Guattari argue that: ‘all concepts are connected to problems without which
they would have no meaning and which themselves can only be isolated or understood as their
solution emerges’ (1994:146). This is almost a straight paraphrase from an even more politically
activist Karl Marx who wrote in the Preface to the Critique of Political Economy that:

...mankind always sets itself only such tasks as it can solve; since, looking at the matter more closely, it
will always be found that the task itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution already
exist or are at least in the process of formation (1975:182).

What these quotations argue, in simple terms, is that ideas evolve in a continuum, not in
isolation. Ideas are connected to their immediate social environment, which in turn are
indissolubly linked to earlier ideas and their social milieu. It is a classically dialectical mode of
thought which argues more broadly that no society or mode of production or dominant ideology
can break down and its historical effects be transformed until they have first begun to develop
the contradictory forms and processes that are inherent in its internal relations. More crudely
put, as was often his wont, Marx reiterated this point in The Communist Manifesto by writing
that ‘What the bourgeoisie . . . produces, above all, is its own gravediggers’ (1975:46). At the
present time this dialectical and historical materialist analysis is rendered practically invisible
by the ‘postmodern neopragmatist drift’. But when it is rendered and utilized, many economic
and political developments that are routinely seen as marginal, or obscure, or unconnected, take
on greater political, economic and social significance.

Neoliberalism—capital’s latest and most comprehensive manifestation—is replete with

contradictory forms (see for example Galtung, 2005; Jessop, 2007). These stem from the same
intrinsic problems that have always been associated with its operation. Today, however, these
have been intensified and extensified by wave after wave of ICT-driven globalization that
envelop the entire planet. In human terms the impact of free markets and the pursuit of growth
and profit at almost any cost, was articulated as I touched on in the introduction in the 2005
Report on the World Situation published by the UN Department of Social and Economic Affairs
(UNDP). Its findings were devastating, but thanks to an institutional global media that lines up
squarely behind corporate interests, it barely raised a flicker of interest when it was released.
The Report noted first of all that the much-trumpeted political and economic commitments
regarding the overcoming of global inequality that were outlined at the 1995 World Summit for
Social Development, were ‘fading’. It goes on to observe that:

In spite of the compelling case for redressing inequality, economic and non-economic inequalities have
actually increased in many parts of the world, and many forms of inequality have become more profound
and complex in recent decades (UNDP, 2005).

So much for the decades old neoliberal guarantee that the ‘level playing field’ and the
democratizing magic of market forces would bring prosperity to all. The ongoing economic
pressure for a reduction in tariffs in the pursuit of ‘open markets’ has had a devastating effect on
poorer and less developed countries that simply cannot compete with powerful multinationals
(Bello, 2005:129–179). And within the richer economies themselves, workers in skilled or semi-
skilled manufacturing or IT jobs that can be done more cheaply in China, or India, Russia, or
Mauritius, or Guam, or wherever, find themselves, in their millions, being reduced to working
feverishly in the booming service industries on lower pay and in more tenuous circumstances
(Roberts, 2005). Under neoliberalism it is clear that inequality runs deep and wide and corrodes
social cohesion in New York or London as much as it does Abidjan or Mumbai.

A more worrying contradiction for CEOs, for Wall Street analysts, and for the occupants of the
boardrooms of the world more generally, is that of overproduction. This is linked the economic
effects of inequality we just mentioned, and to technologically driven speed. The need to
continually increase the rate of the production of commodities is an ineffaceable aspect of
capitalism. It reduces the cost of goods and services and allows the producer to undercut rivals.
ICTs have been key to the speed-up in production in all industries under neoliberalism. This can
have superficially positive outcomes. For example, Western consumers are able to buy the
mountains of cheap goods that run off the factory assembly lines in, say, China or Malaysia.
The result is that most of us have more commodities crammed into our lives than anyone would
have dreamed possible even a couple of decades ago. Three or four television families are
nothing special now. As are two cars in the suburban driveway. And laptops, desktops, cell
phones, MP3 players, DVD players, CD and DVDs discs, set-top boxes, PDAs, Blackberry’s
and so forth, clutter our houses, offices and take up increasing amounts of landfill space.

The expression ‘the consumer society’ is not even a cliché any longer. We have internalized its
logic through saturation advertising. We consume but never feel sated, only dissatisfied and
frustrated (Barber, 2007). Notwithstanding the ultimately false promise of advertising that we
all recognize at some level, most of us simply take for granted (even in the large stratum of poor
and unemployed in the West) capitalism’s first rule of never-ending domestic consumption.
This habit is prefaced on another exquisite contradiction: we are told that consumers must be
‘confident’, i.e. we must buy more and more to keep the economy strong. But we are also
cautioned that we must save more—for our mortgages, for our retirement, for periods of
unemployment, for our children’s education and so on. However, it is impossible to do both at
an increasing rate. So we tend to carry on consuming because it is easier and more pleasurable
in the short term. Living on a day-to-day basis means that increasingly we find ourselves with
fewer savings or no savings at all. For example, fully twenty-seven per cent of people in Britain
do not have a penny in the bank (Toynbee, 2005). So the ‘free market’ answer to this is for debt-
financed consumption to take up the slack, causing levels of personal indebtedness to soar to
crisis proportions (Padgham, 2007).

Spiraling consumption of course has its limits. People need and can afford to buy only so many
TVs and cars—yet production has to go on, and indeed it must continue to expand and to
accelerate if individual capitalist concerns are to survive. The car industry is a classic example
of what the industry calls ‘overcapacity’—or too many unsold products piling up. In 1998
academic and activist David McNally cited industry figures which estimated that ‘global excess
capacity in autos . . . is around 21–22 million cars . . . roughly a 36 percent overcapacity relative
to world markets, the equivalent of 80 efficient state-of-the-art plants’ producing at full capacity
(1998:27). In 2004 an industry consultant told Reuter’s news agency that carmakers in the US
alone were sitting on some four million surplus vehicles worth US$100 billion (Reuters, 2004).

There is an overproduction in almost everything. If there isn’t then entrepreneurs eagerly will
jump in to exploit the opportunity until the market is once more glutted and crises ensue. The
logic is as old as the capital relation itself. The ICT industries are allegedly the quintessence of
efficiency and ‘new economy’ thinking, but the logic here is exactly the same. Economist
Robert Brenner writes that:

In 2000 no fewer than six US companies were building new, mutually competitive, nationwide fiber-optic
networks. Hundreds more were laying down local lines and several were also competing on sub-oceanic
links. All told, 39 million miles of fiber-optic line now criss-cross the US, enough to circle the globe 1566
times. The unavoidable by-product has been a mountainous glut: the utilization rate of telecom networks
hovers today at a disastrously low 2.5–3 per cent, that of undersea cable at just 13 per cent (2003:54).

As Brenner goes on to argue, this example and countless others like it show that the market, left
to its own logic, certainly does not know best. In fact the permanent tendency towards
overaccumulation demonstrates that the neoliberal ‘solution’ to the self-same crises in the 1970s
was no solution at all. Indeed, it points to the inescapable conclusion that a ‘managed’ economy
is more efficient because through regulation, tariffs, and consultation with the stakeholders
involved, the crises of overaccumulation can be deferred for much longer period of time. High
Fordism can thus be seen as an unconscious experiment in the social control of time and speed.
The post war Fordist ‘managed’ boom was the longest uninterrupted period of prosperity in
history. The neoliberal ‘rule’, by contrast, has been a highly compressed three decades of
turbulence, restructuring, social dislocation, atomization, and the widening of levels of
inequality across the world.

A digital rhizome emerges

In the face of such reality people have either hunkered down, hoping for better times, or they
have grasped the initiative and begun to fight back against the depredations and contradictions
of neoliberalism. The growth of alternative political forms to institutionalized neoliberalism
since the early 1990s takes us to another contradictory logic. It is one that has so far been under-
appreciated, but it is one that is nevertheless working to produce its own antithesis. This logic
has its roots in the development and uses of ICTs, comprises, to borrow phrase from Peter
Lunenberg (2000), a ‘digital dialectic’ that is emerging to challenge the neoliberal order.

Under neoliberalism the ICT revolution was to be all things to all people. It would free the
economy from its choking red tape and would liberate the individual who had been held in the
binds of statist serfdom since 1945. Neoliberalism, if it subscribes to nothing else, subscribes to
the tenets of individualism over collectivism. It was the core thinking of the Thatcher and
Reagan revolutions of the 1970s and 1980s and on into the 1990s. It has been their enduring
legacy into our own time. Its ideas flowed into government policy formation and into business
strategy. Big business took to these Hayekian principals with alacrity (Frank, 2000:34–35). The
ideology of individualism worked positively in the minds of business leaders, and this is most
clearly evident in the adoption and uses of new information technologies on three specific
levels.

First, is that ICTs and the spread of free-market individualism made possible the post-Fordist
economy of flexible accumulation. This effectively divided and atomized the old Fordist
tendency toward collective action in the workplace, thereby fatally undermining the
organization of labour that grew and flourished in the modern period. It was the inculcation of a
social-collective mentality amongst the working classes that under postwar social democratic
Fordism in particular was able to function as an effective resistance to the introduction of new
‘productivity tools’. Second, is that it is cheaper to leave people with relative autonomy to
explore and learn and innovate with ICTs. They are able to do not only what is required of them
(and more, always more) in their jobs, but they are also able without prompting to follow their
own interests and passions, to experiment at home as well as the workplace, to write code, to
tinker and fiddle, to discuss better ways of doing things and to develop new processes and
applications for computing. This is the sort of basic interest and passion that allowed the
ARPANET researchers of the 1950s and 1960s create the fundamental infrastructure of the
Internet. Third, for the capitalist who provides the environment for keen and willing
individualists to pursue their genuine passions, they provide also the potential for further
economic growth. It was in such an ‘open’ environment that entrepreneurs such as Bill Gates,
Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos or Google’s Larry Page and Sergey Brin could emerge to build the new
industries in which more profit-making opportunities could be explored, and new markets
exploited.

So are we left with a world of ICT-driven individuals, where collective political action is no
longer possible? A world where ‘individuality’ is at our psychological core, with ‘society’ being
simply an expression of market transactions? At one level this would appear to be the case.
Individualism and its economic effects surround us. It has left a trail of destruction and misery
and feelings of powerlessness amongst those who had to pay the cost of the anti-collective, anti-
social and anti-humanist policies of the last quarter-century (Davis and Monk, 2008). At another
level, however, the atomization of societies has not irrevocably scattered people to the ends of
the Earth. Look at any period of history and see plentiful evidence that, whatever Margaret
Thatcher and others aver, people need to be social. Cooperation, to paraphrase Marx with a dash
of Darwin, is part of our ‘species essence’. It would follow from this that if you try to create and
manipulate a world of individuals by giving them powerful communication tools, the results are
likely in many cases to be something other than you expected.

It is a fact that neoliberal globalization and its dependency on competent users of ICTs in its
pursuit of ‘efficiencies’ and profit, has created a global strata of technologically savvy people.
These are the millions who can see the potential uses of ICTs through their expertise with them,
but who also still think critically and are able to express a measure of commitment to the
Enlightenment tenets of Reason, justice and democratic political participation at all levels of
society through their expert uses of information technologies.

Since at least the early 1990s, prior even to the Internet becoming mainstream, individuals and
collectives had been active in developing and articulating new political languages through
innovative use of ICTs (Hassan, 2004:100–138). As John E. Young of the Worldwatch Institute
commented ‘As of mid-1993, thousands of environmental activists and organizations around the
world [were] using commercial and non-profit computer networks to coordinate campaigns,
exchange news, and get details on the proposals of governments and international organizations’
(1993:21). The effects of networked neoliberalism were global and so, in fairly short order,
were its networked and global responses. Famously, the 1994 ‘Zapatista’ rebellion in dirt-poor
Chiapas Province in Mexico, showed not only how deep went the logic of neoliberalism, but
also how far the recognition of the need for a coordinated (networked) political resistance to it
had penetrated. The Zapatista struggle (especially in respect of its inventive use of ICTs as a
weapon) was picked up by sections of the media and became a cause célèbre in the struggle
against the worst aspects of free enterprise. For example, in July 1996, in a bold show of
international solidarity, over 3,000 protestors from over 40 countries around the world, gathered
in Chiapas to take part in what came to be known as the ‘First Intercontinental Gathering for
Humanity and Against Neoliberalism’ (Flood, 1996). Delegates at the meeting called for the
creation of the ‘Intercontinental Network of Alternative Communication.’ Their spokesperson
was Subcommandante Marcos, the leader of the Zapatistas, whose statement (cited in Leal
2000:7) read:
Let us start a communications network between all our struggles, an intercontinental network of
communication against neoliberalism, an intercontinental network for humanity. This intercontinental
network will seek to tie together all the channels of our words and all the roads of resistance. This
intercontinental network will be the means among which the different areas of resistance will
communicate. This intercontinental network will not be an organized structure; it will have no moderator,
central control, or any hierarchies. The network will be all of us who speak and listen.

These activists came together just as the ‘Internet revolution’ really got underway and the
movement in general gained much momentum from the growing presence of ICTs in everyday
life. The Internet had been given a massive boost around the middle of the decade with the
giveaway browser software that came with Windows 95 and with the ultimately doomed
Netscape Navigator that could be downloaded free from the Internet itself. IT businesses
boomed as the dotcom bubble began to grow unchecked. The process of ‘ubiquitous computing’
that Mark Weiser and John Seely Brown (1997:5) describe became a reality as almost every
industry began to believe their own hype and come to view computing as the ultimate solution
for every problem. IT corporations went on large-scale ‘recruitment drives’ to get people online
—and millions accepted and signed up to new companies called Internet Service Providers
(ISPs). People began to surf the net and work or consume as it was intended for them to do; but
many technologically savvy activists also began to make their own non-instrumental
connections. These ‘intercontinental networks’ were explicitly political and anti-neoliberal and
were forming into a loose and amorphous (yet densely connected) movement.

We saw its globalizing beginnings emerge from the International NGO Forum that was the
‘alternative summit’ to the elites’ 1992 Rio Earth Summit. The 1990s was the decade that saw
technopolitics grow on a world scale, with the événements of Porto Alegre, Seattle, London,
Genoa and other cities snowballing into what became known as the World Social Forum (WSF).
Emerging formally in 2001 at Porto Alegre, the WSF is a worldwide agglomeration of activists
of every kind, whose main reason for coming together is a shared antipathy towards neoliberal
globalization. North American Christians, animal liberationists, right-wing French farmers,
Italian anarchists, British socialists, Brazilian rubber workers, Australian new age hippy’s,
Filipino trade unionists, South African miners and many others use ICT networks to swap
stories of their plight under neoliberalism and seek or suggest alternatives. This diffusive
coalition comprises what is in effect a global civil society in cyberspace, an embryonic
substitute to the perceived bankruptcy of their own local civil societies in Brazil, in France or
wherever it may be.

This global civil society is a grassroots movement in a genuine sense. It is an emergent energy
that encompasses, politically, all that neoliberalism is not and cannot be. Its participants look to
the collective as opposed to the individual; and they look to democracy instead of the
marketplace. What is most important about it is that it is only made possible through
information and communication technologies. Through them they become, potentially, a force,
a culture and an evolving political language that communicates globality as a human solidarity
in place of an economic opportunity. This virtual movement also represents a new relationship
with time and space. It is a virtual political autonomy that is in elemental form. Its teething
problems are many and some might possibly prove fatal. Michael Hardt attended the second
Porto Alegre WSF in 2002 and wrote the following for the New Left Review:

The [Porto Alegre] Forum was unknowable, chaotic, dispersive. And that overabundance created an
exhilaration in everyone, at being lost in a sea of people from so many parts of the world who are working
similarly against the present form of capitalist globalization (...) The encounter should, however, reveal
and address not only the common projects and desires, but also the differences of those involved—
differences of material conditions and political orientation. The various movements across the global
cannot simply connect to each other as they are, but must rather be transformed by the encounter through
a kind of mutual adequation (. . .) What kind of transformations are necessary for the Euro-American
globalization movements and the Latin American movements, not to become the same, or even unite, but
to link together in an expanding common network? The Forum provided an opportunity to recognize such
questions and differences for those willing to see them, but it did not provide the conditions for
addressing them. In fact, the very same dispersive, overflowing quality of the Forum that created the
euphoria of commonality also effectively displaced the terrain on which such differences and conflicts
could be confronted (emphasis added).

The final sentence encapsulates the dilemma that faces the global civil society movement. The
many and varied effects of neoliberal globalization has brought together an enormous range of
people who want to resist it. However, if the effects of neoliberal globalization are so diverse,
stretching across so much of the world, how are people able to confront their differences
sufficient to not only resist neoliberal globalization effectively, but also to change it? It is far
from clear that anything approaching an organized and plausible alternative can emerge from
this ‘overabundance’ of political energy. Nonetheless it is a political force that cannot stay still
nor be ignored. Its energy-filled composition means that it will continue to evolve and change as
neoliberalism does likewise. Indeed this ‘digital rhizome’ that had been growing during the
1990s had already reached the point of self-awareness vis-à-vis the importance of ICTs tools for
the creation of alternative times and spaces. As Naomi Klein wrote in 1999 in the New York
Times of the Seattle demonstrations against the policies of the neoliberal-dominated World
Trade Organization (WTO):

This is the first political movement born of the chaotic pathways of the Internet. Within its ranks, there is
no top-down hierarchy ready to explain the master plan, no universally recognized leaders giving easy
sound-bites and nobody knows what is going to happen next. But one thing is certain: the protestors in
Seattle are not anti-globalization; they have been bitten by the globalization bug as surely as the trade
lawyers inside the official meeting. Rather if this new movement is ‘anti’ anything, it is anti-corporate,
opposing a logic that what’s good for business—less regulation, more mobility, more access—will trickle
down into good news for everybody else (. . .) The face-off is not between globalizes and protectionists,
but one between two radically different visions of globalization. One has had a monopoly for the past ten
years. The other has just had its coming-out party (2002:3–6).

In its diversity, collective resistance to the power of market forces and the perceived whittling
away of the rights to free speech and free communication has taken other forms that are not so
directly political but nonetheless add to the totality of networked resistance. The ‘open source’
movement, for example, has catalyzed a global stratum of those who write computer code, or
are activists who are concerned about questions of free speech in cyberspace. These are the
tech-savvy architects of the formal network society, but they tend to bridle at what they see as
its overly proprietary and commercial nature (Robins & Webster, 1999:255). Lawrence Lessig
is one such campaigner who recognizes the dangers of a cyberspace that is being privatized by
corporations through rapacious property laws. A lawyer and academic by training he advocates
a much more free and creative cyberspace, an open and public domain that is not trammeled and
constricted by copyrights and the ‘user pays’ culture. His books have been profoundly
influential in creating the pressure for what he terms a more democratic ‘regulability’ of
cyberspace. Indeed his 2004 book Free Culture was made available for free download at
www.free-culture.org. In the Introduction to his 1999 book Code and Other Laws of
Cyberspace Lessig argues for control, but control of a specific kind:

Liberty in cyberspace will not come from the absence of the state. Liberty there, as anywhere, will come
from a state of a certain kind. We build a world where freedom can flourish not by removing from society
any selfconscious control; we build a world where freedom can flourish by setting it in a place where a
particular kind of self-conscious control survives.

In other words freedom cannot be left to a speed-filled cyberspace where there is no one in
control, where there is no direction but where the market takes it, and where no account is taken
of those who cannot pay. The ‘open source’ movement which was developed by Richard
Stallman in the 1980s, merged neatly with which Lessig’s thesis that people, not corporations,
own ideas (see Stallman, 2002). Written by tech-savvy libertarians, such as Linus Torvalds who
created Linux, ‘open source’ software was ‘free’ and programmers were able to make
modifications and improvements to it in what is called the ‘copyleft’ system. This ‘general
public license’ (GPL) is at the core of the open source movement and permits users to sell,
copy, and change copylefted programmes. The finished product can then be copyrighted.
However, you must pass along the same rights to sell or copy your modifications and for others
to possibly change them further. You must also make the source code of your modifications
freely available. With potentially hundreds of thousands of programmers and hackers
continually modifying and (one would think) improving the code, the GPL system acts as a sort
of Darwinian ‘natural selection’ where applications that best suit their contexts or environments
are the ones that are most successful in meeting the actual needs of people. (Moody, 1997).

Cross-fertilization is rife in the activist network ecology. And the lines between street-based
technopolitics, the freethinking libertarians who spend much of their time writing code, and
constitutional lawyers who agitate for a creative digital commons are blurring to invisibility. For
example Lessig wrote in TechnologyReview.com in 2005 of his visit to that years’ 100,000–
strong World Social Forum, again in its Porto Alegre ‘base’ in Brazil. He described a ‘sprawling
collection of wooden huts, connected by a canvas spread across their roofs’.

This was the free-software lab. To the right, there was a training room, with more than 50 PCs arranged
along long tables. At the far end was a large screen, where 20 to 30 kids were watching an instructor
explain the workings of some video-editing software. Every machine was running free software only—
GNU/Linux as the operating system, Mozilla as the browser, and a suite of media production software,
most of which I had never seen on any machine anywhere.

This little scenario captures the authenticity of forms of technopolitics. It depicts self-motivated
political action that is driven at some level of consciousness by retrofitted Enlightenment ideas
of liberty, justice and the ineradicability of the public sphere. All this, remember, is made
possible through a neoliberal-derived expertise with digital communication tools. In his article
Lessig ponders over the political ethos which makes possible this (in some ways absurd)
coming-together of neoliberalism’s antithesis. Drawing from Richard Stallman’s Free Software
Movement, Lessig perceives the Porto Alegre political and technological driving force as being
guided by the Movement’s four principles ‘geekily numbered starting with zero’:

(0) The freedom to run the program for any purpose;

(1) The freedom to study how the program works and adapt it to your needs;
(2) The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor; (3) The freedom to improve the
program and release your improvement to the public, so that the whole community benefits.

Lessig concludes by observing where this energy, knowledge and commitment are going:

Consider how the kids in Porto Alegre think about remixing. They remix culture with words, certainly.
But they want to build the capacity to remix more than words. They hope to use computers to remix
culture. For most of us, computers are a way to type fast. But for most of them, computers will be a way
to speak, using sounds and images, synchronized or remixed, to make art or remake politics.

What these trends indicate is that that the democratic spirit has not been completely eradicated.
Its cultural ethos remains, even if its political power has been diminished. And so the anti-
globalization movements, free software promoters and the growing aesthetic movement that
uses digital art as a new form of language, are not necessarily political. Indeed the haziness and
diversity that Hardt describes takes much of the edge and the focus off any political
possibilities. All is not lost, however. There is a different trend in the rise of blogging, a network
practice that does have definite (and often effective) political orientations. It is necessary to
devote some time to blogging as it has been described by the Institute for Interactive Journalism
as a networked form of ‘citizen journalism’ that ‘lets people from all walks of life take the
media into their own hands’ and has the potential to transform politics as we know it (KCNN,
2008). It is thus potentially a form of control for people and therefore a means toward political
empowerment—something very much lacking in our neoliberal high-speed world.

A political economy of blogging

The fact that blogging has some kind of political future was evidenced during the 2008
Democratic and Republican Conventions in the USA. Here, for the first time officially
accredited bloggers attended these hugely important meetings, alongside the mainstream media,
many of whom had also jumped on the blogging bandwagon (Fairbanks, 2008). What this
signified is that the spectrum of potentially counter-systemic ICT social media users now covers
a broad and growing span—from the geeks in Porto Alegre, to the independently-minded code
writers who produce ‘copyleft’ software, and on to the political nerds who opinionate to the
blogosphere from their bedrooms or from party conventions.

From its emergence in the early 2000s as a result of technical innovations such as Web 2.0
software that allows for ‘real-time’ interactivity through web browsers, blogging, like social
networking, has gone mainstream. Although seeming to plateau near the end of its first decade
of existence, blogging is nonetheless phenomenally popular. The Internet tracking company
Technorati estimated that by early 2007 there were 72 million individual blog sites, which is
more than the entire population of France or Britain (Cheng, 2008). Blogs are so simple to
create and maintain that, inevitably, they will reflect every whim and obsession that people
have. Many blogs are devoted to scouring the Internet for weird and wonderful things: links to
pictures, streaming audio and video, stories, new gadgets and so on. This trend might be
classified as ‘general interest’ blogging where people can read, comment or ignore at their
leisure. However, many, if not a majority of them, would go under the rubric of ‘culture, news,
and politics’. This realm of the blogosphere is even more chaotic and dispersive than that of the
emergent global civil society. With thousands of blogs sprouting weekly, political comment,
ideas and analysis can range from the first-rate to the vacuous; and from the liberal humanist to
the neo-Nazi racist. There is no ethic or set of rules that exist to uphold standards—and if there
were, they would be impossible to supervise or enforce. And who would have the right to
pronounce on universal principles across a global diversity anyway?

The point is that they are being embraced by millions of people who spend their time creating
them, reading them and thinking and acting on what they have created and read. In other words
blogs are having a discernible affect on both the political process and mainstream media whose
institutional structures they threaten—or at least are perceived to threaten. Repressive régimes
such as those of Iran and China get very uneasy at the thought of free and unregulated
communication emanating from within their borders. And with good reason: it was estimated in
2005 that there are about 50,000 bloggers in Iran alone (Garton-Ash, 2005). One of them, Arash
Sigarchi, was jailed for 14 years for what a BBC report termed ‘charges of spying and aiding
foreign counter-revolutionaries’ (BBC NewsOnline, 2005). Mainland Chinese authorities, for
their part, have been busy blocking would-be Chinese political bloggers from reading overseas
blogs or creating their own. Moreover, it was reported (in a blog) that the blocking capability
was supplied to the Chinese government courtesy of US Corporation Cisco Systems
(McKinnon, 2005).

The growing complexity and interconnectedness of political blogging is apparent in the rapidly
growing sophistication and level of organization within an ostensibly unordered blogosphere.
Most political blogs have sidebars, or what are termed ‘blogrolls’ where readers can view links
to dozens, sometimes hundreds, of other blogs that share the same interests. At a still higher
level of organizational complexity, clusters of like-minded bloggers form in cyberspace to
create political pressure groups. One such group is the Paris-based Reporters Sans Frontières, or
in English, Reporters Without Borders (www.rsf.org). At their website they provide free access
to a publication called Handbook for Bloggers and Cyberdissidents. This manual gives plenty of
advice on how political bloggers can get to work. Information such as ‘how to set up and run a
blog’, ‘how to blog anonymously’ and ‘technical ways to get around censorship’ are offered.
Julien Pain contributes an essay ‘Bloggers: The New Heralds of Free Expression’ to the
handbook and in it he writes that:

Blogs get people excited. Or else they disturb and worry them. Some people distrust them. Others see
them as the vanguard of a new information revolution. One thing is for sure: they are rocking the
foundations of the media in countries as different as the United States, China and Iran (2005:5).

Reporters Without Borders see blogging as the basis for a potential revolution in political
journalism. They see it functioning as a kind of journalistic rhizome where honest and truthful
reporting has the ability to undermine the corporate media and the political status quo whose
interests it primarily serves. As Pain goes on to argue: ‘...blogging is a powerful tool of freedom
of expression that has enthused millions of ordinary people. Passive consumers of information
have become energetic participants in a new kind of journalism...’ (2005:5).

This new kind of journalism was brought rather dramatically to the fore during the lead-up to
the Iraq war in 2003. In the weeks and months prior to the widely expected US invasion in
March of that year, the ‘Baghdad Blogger’ whose blog name was ‘Salam Pax’, animated the
blogosphere and the wider institutional media with his accounts of daily life in the Iraqi capital
where journalists were unable to operate freely. After the invasion he kept posting to his blog,
dear_raed.blogspot.com. So popular did his blog become, especially his description of the
‘shock and awe’ phase of the US bombing, that he was hired by the Guardian newspaper to
write a fortnightly column (McCarthy, 2003). Much blogging is from a liberal, Left-of-centre
political perspective. However, there is no shortage of diametrically opposed blogs. Again
during the 2003 Iraq war a blog called blogsofwar.com attracted a large following for its alleged
revealing of the ‘truths’ that the Left-leaning ‘liberal press’ would not print about the war.

There are now numberless political blogs crowding cyberspace. Many simply repeat what is
said in other blogs, and so therefore it is easy to get the impression that bloggers are a collection
of politics nerds who spend their time reading each other’s postings—many of which would
refer to the same news items anyway. I shall say something shortly on what has been termed the
‘echo chamber effect’. However, people in power actually read them and are influenced by
them. Some particularly enthused politicians have their own blogs and increasingly come to see
them as an effective way to reach a wider audience. Authoritarian governments, as we just saw,
certainly read them and are prompted to curb or destroy what they see as an incipient parallel
political universe that could grow into a threat to their prerogatives.

What are we to make of all this political action? Blogs are modes of online production. They
create forms of knowledge that can question institutional knowledge and disseminate alternative
views. However, given that anyone can write anything on these sites, does this make them
useless, or at the very least suspect, in the pursuit of ideas that could change the world?
Moreover, speed appears to be valorized here as it is in the neoliberal economy. So is blogging
just another instance of the pervasiveness of speed? Looked at coolly, is this ostensibly
alternative domain, simply another realm of information production, and a ‘data trash’ creator
that bombards and disorients us still further?

These caveats raise substantial and legitimate concerns. However, to put the best possible
inflection on what blogging represents, it can be said, to begin with, that it is a consciously
political use of ICTs. Moreover, as the basis for the production and distribution of political
ideas, political blogs may be the nascent platform for the formation of a global civil society
movement that represents an overtly grassroots form of control over new relationships with
space and time. Simply put, blogging potentially amounts to the political and creative
reestablishment of social control over time, space and speed. How so? Politically speaking,
what bloggers are potentially able to do is to hold (in virtual space and time) ideas that have
been obliterated or marginalized through the effects of the speed-economy of globalization.
These network spaces can thus become retentional areas where thoughts and ideas develop.
This is in stark contrast to the currently monolithic 24-hour news cycle where what was said and
published yesterday evaporates as the media move on to other issues. Politically committed
bloggers, however, can keep an issue going for as long as the blogosphere feels that it is
important enough. It is in this time-space framing that we can see the latent power of the blog to
retain cultural and political memory, which is a prerequisite for any form of effective and
positive resistance to postmodern ‘post politics’.

In a diversity of circumstances and at multiple levels of awareness, people are now able to
realize that the computer, mobile communications and the networks that bring these erstwhile
business tools to life, have uses that can be resistant and subversive and furnish the means for
autonomous political agency. Political actors who have been marginalized from the institutional
dynamics of democratic processes, or who have found them to be ineffectual, are discovering
through their own technical application, spaces and times of alterity that are able to be
developed to work against the dominating pressures of the neoliberalized network. The ability
for nearly ‘everyone to be an author’ and have a political voice that can reach millions is a
unique development in human communication, one made possible by instrumentally oriented
ICTs being turned to other purposes.

Thinking about blogging in this way is to project a best-case scenario for the capacity for the
political blog to transform political processes and institute new ones. But how effective have
blogs been in concrete terms? In other words what does the evidence indicate? This is a key
question in the context of this book, because it concerns a technology that holds out so much
promise for so many people.

The evidence seems to be that political blogging has real-world effects at two distinct levels
where there exist two functionally separate spheres of institutional political sophistication. At
the first level, political blogs are recognized as a powerful tool for subversion. As Jacqui Cheng
observes, the areas in the world where blogging has taken off fastest, is in authoritarian or
newly-democratic societies, those with just enough freedom and just enough GDP to allow its
use to spread—countries such as South Korea, Taiwan and China (Cheng, 2008). Democratic
structures in countries such as these are relatively new, and evolve in the context of a globalized
economic system. In China in particular, blogging is growing in tandem with tremendously
rapid general Internet access. China is of course only formally democratic, and in practice the
one-party state jealously guards against any threat to its power. Freedom of political speech is
therefore severely curtailed in mainstream as well as in online media (Reporters Without
Borders, 2008). Accordingly, in Mainland China most blogging is restricted to non-political
topics such as lifestyle, culture, music, movies and so on. However, it seems to me that a way of
explaining the fact that so many Chinese choose go on line to blog about virtually anything
apart from political topics, is that at the very least it signifies a yearning for a freedom of speech
in any way they can get it. In this sense blogging about movies, for example, can be seen as a
form of political engagement in that it constitutes the exercise of a democratic freedom. Where
this can lead to is an open question, but what the practice does is to inure Chinese citizens into
having an opinion that they can legitimately express. At the present time this acts as a vital
safety valve for the government in a country that has deep connections with the global
economy, but it is a profound contradiction within Chinese capitalism, and is one that is
ultimately untenable.

The second level is in the context of the mature democracies of the West, in the Anglo-
American context especially. Here overtly political and critical blogging is widespread and
growing. It reflects a diversity of political opinion and a level of free speech that Western
democracies take for granted. However, notwithstanding some of the work independent
bloggers do in exposing corruption, hypocrisy, keeping an issue alive, fact-checking and so on,
they represent no threat to neoliberalized democratic institutions. The unavoidable conclusion is
that there is presently no insurrection coming from the blogosphere, no political ‘vanguard of a
new information revolution’ as Julien Pain put it (2005). We see this illustrated, for example, in
the craving by some of the most popular and influential independent bloggers to be accepted
into the mainstream through their willingness to participate and be ‘credentialed’ at formal
political processes such as the 2008 US conventions (Fairbanks, 2008). Incorporation into the
larger traditional structures of the political-media system is the striking symbolism here.
Striking too is the parallel dynamic of commodification, such as when prominent blogs like the
liberal Daily Kos take advertising. By this act they willingly insert themselves into the network
society cash nexus and subject themselves to everything that becoming a business entails. As a
platform for genuine free speech and fearless opinion, and for the propagation of new ways to
conduct politics, the dual processes of incorporation and commodification strictly compromise
any such radical political pretensions.

Moreover, the potentially important role that independent political blogging can play, with its
ability to exert some control over time and space in the development of new ideas, of political
critique, and of being able to form the basis of new and global political structures for a global
age, is hampered by the very digital technologies that give them existence in the first place. For
example Cass Sunstein, in his analysis of the political efficacy of blogging, describes what he
calls the ‘echo chamber effect’. In his 2001 book Republic.com Sunstein makes the point that
sometime soon in the future, technology will have ‘greatly increased people’s ability to “filter”
what they want to read, see, and hear . . . [and] you need not come across topics and views that
you have not sought out. Without any difficulty, you are able to see exactly what you want to
see, no more and no less’ (3). It is a new kind of media use that threatens to make redundant any
general interest media that cover a whole range of topics in the one newspaper or magazine.
Sunstein has a name for this media consumption. He calls it ‘The Daily Me—a communications
package that is personally designed, with each component fully chosen in advance’ (7). He
notes that this kind of technology was hailed by many as a triumph of individuality,
convenience and control. Sunstein sees also that this could be viewed as a form of consumer
power—the ‘growing power of consumers to filter what they see’ (8). And ostensibly this does
seem like a good thing. You read and see what you want, when you want. No nasty surprises as
might happen on old broadcast television, where graphic vision of, say, a car bomb going off in
some far off city, with many innocents killed and injured is unexpectedly shown. In this new
kind of media consumption, serendipity, or chancing across an interesting article, or hearing a
point of view that you were not previously familiar with, becomes increasingly less likely, too,
as filtering software becomes more sophisticated. As Sunstein put it, such a development is a
false kind of social power that puts private control in conflict with public democracy. The
shared experiences that help constitute a ‘mass society’ where people have a similar perspective
on the world and fairly similar forms of knowledge through which to inform this common
worldview are in danger of degenerating into a kind of social fragmentation within cyberspace
(10–13). Through the technological ability to be exposed only to what you want to be exposed
to, opinions, views and ideas ring as if in an echo chamber. As Sunstein observes: ‘New
technologies, emphatically including the Internet, are dramatically increasing people’s ability to
hear echoes of their own voices and to wall themselves off from others’ (49). Moreover, there is
the tendency to listen out only for ‘louder echoes of their own voices’ (16). This presents a
major problem as far as a vibrant and diverse democratic functioning is concerned. Fragmented
communication, ghettoised communication, ‘niched’ communication, leads to a narrowing of
opinion. We may feel ‘free’ and secure within our own digital bubble, but as Sunstein (50)
argues:

Freedom consists not simply in preference satisfaction but also in the chance to have preferences and
beliefs formed after exposure to a sufficient amount of information, and also to a wide and diverse range
of options. There can be no assurance of freedom in a system committed to the ‘Daily Me’.
Writing in 2001 at the dawn of the blogosphere, what Sunstein terms ‘collaborative filtering’
can be seen as a pre-blogging term for blogging. However, in a 2007-revised edition of
Republic.com, Sunstein takes up the issue of political blogging more explicitly, and devotes a
whole chapter to the subject. He writes that political blogging is but a small percentage of the
vast and growing total blogosphere, but nonetheless it ‘seems to be having a real influence on
people’s beliefs and judgments’ (2007:138). According to Sunstein, there are genuine benefits
to be had from blogging in the political realm. For example, thousands of keeneyed bloggers
can act as fact-checkers on the claims of politicians, or the media, or corporations. Political
bloggers are also able to highlight issues and force them onto the institutional agenda, issues
that might otherwise have been forgotten or buried in an ocean of information. However, as yet,
the evidence of the blogosphere’s ability to influence the agendas of the public stage is,
Sunstein concludes, ‘all too little’ (146). He believes that the wiki-based technologies of
blogging simply make the echo chamber effect much more efficient. Political bloggers, he
observes, are ‘primarily interested in cherry-picking items of opinion or information that that
reinforce their preexisting views’ (143). Recall here my description of ‘blogrolls’ where like-
minded bloggers advertise each other’s sites.

Sunstein’s main point is that as a forum for ‘deliberative democracy’ the blogosphere does not
work. The echo chamber effect, he argues, fragments the public sphere and polarizes political
opinion. To strengthen his case he cites the ‘Colorado Experiment’ from 2005 whereby in a
controlled laboratory situation the polarization of political opinion within selected groups
became strongly evident. The experiment consisted of ten groups of six American citizens, with
each group consisting of people with either ‘liberal’ or ‘conservative’ opinions. They were
asked to discuss between themselves three of the most contentious issues of the time: same-sex
marriage, affirmative action, and whether the US should sign the Kyoto climate change
agreement. Participants were asked their opinion after fifteen minutes of deliberation, and then
asked to try to reach a public verdict prior to the final anonymous statement. The results
indicated that in ‘almost every group, members ended up with more extreme positions after they
spoke with each other (60–61). So not only was the polarization effect strengthened, but also the
opinions within the polarized groups tended to become more radical. Sunstein suggests that ‘it is
entirely reasonable to think that something of this kind finds itself replicated in the blogosphere
everyday’ (145). He cites further evidence that suggests that the blogosphere is indeed
comprised of discrete political ghettoes: a study conducted during the 2004 US elections found
that out of the 1400 blogs surveyed, fully 91 per cent of the links (the ‘blogrolls’) were to like-
minded sites (Sunstein, 2007:149).

Blogging, or general online communication, can put millions of people onto the street as we saw
in the positive perspective—or, conversely, it can become a highly efficient echo chamber
where opinions and ideas and strategies for political action are discussed in an increasingly
narrow context and where the tendency is towards ever more polarized and extreme opinion. As
technological expressions of politics, or ‘technopolitics’ what can we take from this
positivenegative summary? Unfortunately, it is not possible to give definitive answers or clear-
cut predictions. Why? Because it is in the nature of the media—and in the nature of society—to
militate against such a neat packaging of postmodern political reality. This is even more the
case in the context of social/technological acceleration. For example, Wikipedia tells us that
although blogging was fairly widespread from 2001, it did not become mainstream until 2004,
when easy access to wiki software created the explosion in user generated content. In the space
of just a few years it has made an impact, intellectually and practically, as we have seen.
However, this rapid acceleration should tell us something. The information society is still
evolving. It is evolving in ways that we cannot predict because the logic of the information
society, the rationale that drives it, is anarchic and based upon the dis-order of competition.
Blogging (political and otherwise) rose rapidly to become global phenomena. But if no one had
conceived of it a decade ago, who’s to say that it won’t just as rapidly fall into abeyance over
the next few years, as the next new ‘killer app’ sweeps the planet as the latest techno-fad? Who,
indeed, can argue against the strong likelihood of this happening? Change is a constant within
capitalism, but capitalist change, or what Joseph Schumpeter called ‘creative destruction’ has
become digitalized and is expressed in the information that flows through the network at speeds
that increase with every new microprocessor that becomes the latest ‘system benchmark’.

Economy and politics are about social power, and power is now attached to the bits and bytes
that comprise the network traffic. As Castells puts it, ‘relentless adaptation’ and the ‘multiple
strategies (individual, cultural, political) deployed by various actors...’ is what constitutes the
quest for dominance in the information society (Castells, 1999). Power moves and stops,
dissipates and concentrates, but it does so in the context of a constantly moving dynamic, where
nothing stands still for very long. Google, for example, is presently the darling of Wall Street
and is perched atop of the globalization/ICT heap with shares worth over $700 a piece and
rising. It finds favor at the highest political levels, too, a fact illustrated by a British government
initiative to have Google involved with solutions for poverty in Africa (Elliot & Boseley, 2007).
They have come a long way in a few short years. But Google could easily fall prey to the power
flows of an uncertain and volatile economic/political system. ‘Confidence’ in the Google
business model could evaporate in the wake of a political decision or technological
development. Who knows? As for the institutional political realm itself, there is precious little
sign that it has fallen out of love with a free market, or with globalization based on a free market
premise. This means that liberal democracy’s self-marginalization from the loci of economic
(and hence social/political) power will remain—and probably increase. Global and local
political institutions still invest inordinate power in both the market and information
technologies as the solutions for societies ills. They do this in the face of very little supporting
evidence, and do it at the expense of democracy. Global warming, for example, is possibly the
most important challenge that faces us. But it is a crisis that will not to be tackled primarily
through the application of science and the mobilization of political will to prioritize action and
to take the rational and logical measures necessary. Instead, humanity is to confront impending
catastrophe through the application of a market in carbon trading. In other words, we are
entrusting our collective future to the irrational and illogical dynamics of capitalist competition
(Monbiot, 2007). Another example of government weakness and lack of democratic
accountability is the US government’s takeover of the mortgage lending corporations Fannie
May and Freddie Mac in late 2008 to avert their collapse. By that action US the taxpayer
effectively had assumed liability for trillions of dollars of housing loans, monies that wash
around a global system, and are subject to global volatilities that the US government has little
control over—other than as a local backstop against neoliberal collapse.

The question begs: what keeps this kind of society (global and local) together? Fear might be a
reason. Fear of the pace of change (and so we tend not to challenge it, even as it accelerates);
fear of our economy collapsing (so we don’t question ‘the experts’ and their ‘solutions’); and
fear that our politicians don’t really know what they are doing anymore (Giddens’s observation
that we live in a ‘runaway world’). In an information society governed by the volatility of
market competition and driven by the hyperspeed of networked computers, and in the absence
of an effective politics at the local or global level the ‘fear factor’ makes some sense. Such
pervasive fear connects with the discussion on anxiety that was identified earlier as a major
‘pathology’ of speed. Replace the term ‘fear’ with ‘anxiety’ when considering the opinion of
Tony Judt writing on the logic of networked neoliberalism in the New York Review of Books:

Fear is re-emerging as an active ingredient of political life in Western democracies. Fear of terrorism, of
course; but also, and perhaps more insidiously, fear of the uncontrollable speed of change, fear of the loss
of employment, fear of losing ground to others in an increasingly unequal distribution of resources, fear
of losing control of the circumstances and routines of one’s daily life. And, perhaps above all, fear that it
is not just we who can no longer shape our lives but that those in authority have lost control as well, to
forces beyond their reach (2007:22).

And fear/anxiety is at the centre of the supposed solutions for the crises of Western democracy:
neoliberal globalization and information technologies. The fear engendered by the Cold War
was at the core of the computing logic that helped create the Internet. And fear of the threat of
rising interest rates, of rising inflation, of rising prices for a barrel of oil, of a return to the
generalized crises of the 1970s, and so on, is the gel that binds globalization; not promise, or
progress or hope. This baleful scene is a far cry from the rather more positive visions of
someone such as Daniel Bell who foresaw the possibility of progress carrying the information
society forward through knowledge workers and expert systems that were to be ‘managed
politically’ in the context of a functioning and committed democratic polity (1973:18–19). It is a
scene that also is in stark contrast to those present-day boosters of the information society, such
as Bill Gates of Microsoft, or for Google’s Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who assure us that all
kinds of social, material and democratic benefits would flow from ubiquitous computing. They
see the information society fundamentally in terms of pure technological progress, where new
and improved forms of culture and democracy will automatically follow.

I have tried to propose another reality, one that is constructed through the prism of a political
economy of speed. In this perspective we see that political blogging is able to carve out a
measure of autonomy and agency within the context of the institutional political structures that
have been found wanting. However, within the technological paradigm of the neoliberal global
economic system, politics is currently weaker than the orbital pull of speed and capitalist
imperatives. What this has meant is that for all the hope invested in the power of the blog, it is
ultimately destined to be incorporated and commodified—or marginalized—by the overarching
logic of abstract market ‘laws’. In the pursuit of a new politics to rid us of the pathologies of the
speed economy, we need to think afresh. And so to conclude I want to try to develop some ideas
on the future of democracy, by taking all that has been said thus far into a consideration of what
might be our best options.
Conclusions
Speed and politics: is there a future for democracy?

In the The Communist Manifesto Marx and Engels famously declared that:

What else does the history of ideas prove, than that intellectual production changes its character in
proportion as material production is changed? The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its
ruling class (1975:52).

Expressive of their teleological and materialist conception of history, the authors of the
Manifesto expected that the contradictions of capital would precipitate insurrectionary
revolution, turning the old order on its head. The new and democratic ‘ruling class’ would then
produce its own ‘ruling ideas’ for a new Communist Age. Their expectations didn’t eventuate,
but their concept of society’s ruling ideas having a specific social-technological provenance still
holds true.

Regis Debray, as we saw previously, reminded us of this critical insight in his 2007 essay
‘Socialism: A Life-Cycle’ in which he argued that the most important material basis for the
production and dissemination of the ruling ideas of a society were the ‘communication
networks’ that predominate at any particular time (2007:9). And, since the time of the industrial
revolution the bourgeoisie has of course overwhelmingly owned these. Debray’s contribution to
Marx and Engels was to temporalize this process in the context of what he called the
‘graphosphere’ where communication networks based upon printing constructed a great
periodization, an ‘arc of time’ that was only superceded with the coming of the digital age. The
‘graphosphere’ was, as we also saw, a temporal context, a ‘timescape’ which conditioned the
ruling ideas of the beginnings of modernity, the political ideas that gave the project of
modernity its dominating temporal rhythms that were arranged around the bass-line of the
clock.

Given the perspective of Marx, Engels and Debray on the nature of the production of ideas, and
their material context, we can properly ask, what are the ruling ideas of today, in the timescape
of the network society? In the economic realm during the industrial revolution, the ruling ideas
consisted of the efficacy of liberalism, or markets and of capitalism more generally—and in the
realm of politics, the Enlightenment ideas of progress, of universalism, of a brightly unfolding
tomorrow and of modernity more generally, held sway. Today, the ideas that govern the
economic realm are similar due to the dominance of neoliberalism, however the political ideas
are much less salient and shaping of culture and society. Indeed, as we saw previously, the
triumph of postmodernism in much of the universities, in the media and in political institutions
themselves, has meant that we are much less sure of ourselves politically. The idea of ‘progress’
is now seen as somehow naive, the future is uniformly dark for most people, a vague a
threatening place that we have little control over, and a deep faith in the capacities of
democratic institution to make our lives better has been replaced by a cynicism, or an apathy, or
a relativism that eschews any ‘totalizing’ solution for an innately contingent world. Institutional
politics, wherever people take it seriously any longer, is a disordered faith wherein the
universalism of democracy is a pipe dream, and a practicing democracy is itself a ‘vulnerable
local achievement’ that stands upon permanently shifting sand (Martin, 2007:10).

In politics, the postmodern view of ‘anything goes’ has in a sense been the triumph of no ideas,
of no observable and understandable master-narratives that give meaning to our lives and our
place within a specific kind of socially constructed world. This is a serious problem for concepts
of democracy that evolved and grew in a very different context. It is, however, very good for
neoliberalism and the speed economy of globalizing capital. Today, ideas exist in a marketplace
of ideas. They become bits and bytes of information, commodities that may or may not sell in a
fickle and distracted consumer society—made fickle through the tyranny of choice, and
distracted by the tyranny of speed. We have ideas, but in postmodern theory one idea is as good
as any other. It is a logic that would argue, for example, that people in the West have no right to
say that Chinese must be more like us politically. And so we have a ‘Chinese democracy’ where
individuals can get rich, but are not allowed to question the government; and a Chinese
democracy where individuals can now get sick and die due to lack of socialized health care, but
no one is allowed to complain about it too much. The Chinese way, like the American way is
thus another ‘vulnerable local achievement’, but it is one that is not necessarily exportable,
because in the postmodern way, the rights of the Other are always to be respected. Again this
suits globalizing capitalism well, because the differences between local and global can be
packaged and sold as choice and difference and freedom.

The whole thrust of my narrative has been that temporality (speed and acceleration) needs to be
made salient in order for us to perceive and understand society better. The temporal perspective
allows us to see what effects the Second Empire of Speed has had upon the economic processes
of capitalism, and in turn upon the political institutions that have historically been so
comprehensively enmeshed with it. We see also that through neoliberalism and postmodernity,
and through the effects of a networked speed economy, the ideas that sustained liberal
democracy and social democracy have become subordinate to the needs of capital. I have
argued this point consistently and have discussed at length the social, cultural and political costs
of this transformation.

However, there is another cost that I have not given much attention to until now, and that is the
loss of political memory.

In the constant present of our network society, where accelerating speed and increasing volume
of information keeps us increasingly preoccupied by what is immediately to hand, the social and
individual memory of political history dwindles in older generations, and is barely able to take
form in the minds of younger generations. Collective memory can span generations, but in the
postmodern context it is especially susceptible to selectivity—aspects of remembering that are
chosen for their political utility by political elites to manipulate and stir local populations
(Misztal, 2003:112114). Here, political memory becomes oppressive of democratic processes.
This was graphically illustrated in the Balkans in the early 1990s where nationalist demagogue
Slobodan Milosevic repeatedly used the symbolic memory of the Battle of Kosovo in the
faraway year of 1389 to help inflame separatist passions in the Serbs, projecting a selective
memory of their historic ‘persecution’ that led directly to the brutal break-up of Yugoslavia.

Selective political memory provides no general threat to the current capitalist system in the way
that a widespread recovery of the traditions, promises and achievements of liberal and social
democracy would. And this point leads us to conclude that it is necessary to get back to some
basic principles that were lost in the fizzling out of modernity and the subsequent rise of
postmodernity and neoliberalism in the 1970s. The postmodern debates were largely conducted
in the realms of cultural theory, literary criticism, architecture and so on. Progressive politics
was a primary casualty here because many of its leading theorists never really took the debates
as being intrinsically political. The fact that they were, coupled with the diminishing influence
of critical social analysis in the universities and beyond, led to a political pessimism on the Left
that allowed neoliberalism to flourish (Agger, 1992:51–52).

Across the world, baby boomers are now settling into retirement, and with them go their
receding memories of another age of experience of what a form of politics committed to taking
the lead could achieve. Many of this generation was born and grew up experiencing a post-war
social democracy, where government-implemented Keynesian economic programmes of free
education and health care, unemployment and sickness benefits, public housing, rising real
wages, progressive taxation and so on, were instigated. These were the basis for Polanyi’s
‘elementary requirements of an organized social life (1957:249) and constituted a consensus
driven social democracy, where the individual was able to be a part of the promise that
democracy had held out since the dawn of the Enlightenment.

Generations X and Y have no such experience and therefore no such memories. They must
come to appreciate the achievements of democracy through relevant study and reflection, and
also to take part in a relatively active political life. Such things do not come naturally or
logically any more. The triumph of individualism has meant that traditional politics matters
primarily as a career option. Mainstream media, the workplace and politicians themselves
everyday confirm the neoliberal precept that you are on your own. Collective political action is
portrayed as something from a grainy black and white past. Schools and universities reinforce
the point by downgrading those arts and humanities subjects that are not vocationally oriented.

How then do we get back to basics? This itself a requires a form of political memory, the
experience or the recognition that allows us to understand that we can see the world differently
and that it is possible to make steps in the direction of change. What indeed are the basics? The
framework I have been articulating thus far in this book provides for me what I think are the
principal political challenges at the beginning of the 21th century. In finishing, then, let us look
at what these are, and what kinds of potentials they contain.

1) The power of ideas and of collective political action:

We need to remember the power of political thought and to work to restore that power to
institutional politics. Voltaire’s quote on the power of ideas: ‘No problem can withstand the
sustained assault of thinking’ is all very inspirational. However, his phrase, or something like it,
today encapsulates an ethos that permeates the kinds of books that aspirant CEOs might read, or
something that Bill Gates or Steve Jobs would be expected to say, a neat line directed at the
individual that has morphed into a vapid business mantra. This is indicative of profound
political and cultural change in our society. Voltaire, we need to remember, was no Wall Street
venture capitalist or Silicon Valley entrepreneur. He was a philosopher and political reformer
whose thinking was fashioned by the spirit of the Enlightenment. Ideas that have the power to
change society thus need to be overtly politicized and articulated as democratic in nature and
social in their orientation. They need to be seen as useful insofar as they satisfy a collective
social need that can be tackled collectively. It needs to be remembered, moreover, that the main
problems that require the power of old and new ideas are not difficult to identify. They are the
problems that most people could agree to be the most salient. They are the issues that
governments across the world easily recognize, but often are unable to do much about, issues
such as poverty, health care, housing, jobs, caring for children and the elderly, the environment,
global warming and long-term sustainable development.

A proactive and reformist politics would constitute a form of temporalized democracy where the
role and function of time (a recognition of the value of a past, present and future orientation) is
made salient, if not preeminent. It would be a temporalized politics in that it recognizes the fact
that a postmodern ‘post-politics’ where everything is relative and contingent has not worked,
and has only produced anxiety and volatility. Consequently politics could once again take the
lead, as it is historically committed to do. This would mean a revitalized polity that sees the
social value in the development of explicit political programmes that organize time and space
and society—not in a rigid and instrumentalized sense, but in ways that provide open, inclusive
and ongoing solutions to the problems that every society contends with. For example, the effects
of the five-year plans of the USSR and China are rightly regarded with horror by anyone who
cares to read the histories of collectivization and industrialization in these countries. However,
the underlying principle behind communist planning was sound, it sought to shape and
anticipate the future and its needs, and this was entirely rational. However, the reality of forced
labor, of unrealistic targets and of the systemic concealment of disastrous consequences was the
result of totalitarian system locked in competition with a ‘free-world’ world that was equally as
totalitarian in its defense of capital. History thus provides a great deal of experience to draw
upon in terms of what planning can achieve, what to plan for, and what to leave to the market
instead.

This leads to the crucial point of politics taking the lead. A truly democratic society is one
where the needs of capital and a narrow stratum of capitalist, either globalized or localized,
correspond to the preeminent needs of the majority. This is an age-old socialist principle, or
course, but it does not follow that it should be a rigid principle in the form of the always
ominous-sounding ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’. We need to adopt a different approach. To
temporalize a political process can be to suddenly make it look achievable; that is to say, if the
political relationship with capital looks to the past and to the future in the ways in which the
economy, global or local, is managed, then opportunities present themselves, opportunities that
may not be so apparent if the temporal factor is ignored. The approach need not be complex. For
instance, a major lesson from the recent past is that the free market, as the leading force in
economy and society, has been catastrophic and, accordingly, that the economy requires more
democratic management. Likewise, the recent history of social democracy shows that there are
also areas in the economy where the market can work better than government. A fundamental
‘law’ of a temporalized democracy would be to work within an inherent flexibility—with the
proviso being that democratic management, however that may be articulated, is the overriding
guiding principle. Looking to the future, a temporalized democracy could be expressed through
a political teleology where, again with an inherent flexibility, the principle of intentionality is
foremost. It would require the polity constantly to ask: what kind of society do we want? and
what could be the best way to get there? This would be a democratic control over forms of
social and economic temporal production, where risks are projected and minimized as much as
possible through the ongoing ‘stabilization of change’ (Adam and Groves, 2007:41–43). In this,
politics would function as Enlightenment reason argued that it must, by taking charge of the
future, and creating the future through a society that is fully in control of a temporal present that
has been rescued from the uncertainties emanating from the abstract laws of unbridled markets
and competition.

2) Remembering the achievements of democracy:

The good faith and broad based retrieval of the political memory of a city, or region, or nation
would be an immensely powerful tool for social change. Such recuperation would bring into
play a process of continual assessment and re-assessment of our history and democracy’s
achievements in the form of an on-going political project; an intrinsic aspect of institutional and
cultural political life that ideally could be normalized as a fully functioning element of a
incorporative civil society. This conceivably could be a Habermasian public sphere where new
technologies of mediation that the network society provides could be used in ways that run
counter to their overwhelmingly instrumentalized usage today. What we have seen in the
phenomenon of blogging, indeed, provides an insight into what might be possible on both a
local and global scale.

Politics in such a public sphere could be made both reflective and projective. The political past
can be mined for instances, innovations, practices and patterns that have had positive outcomes
for the majority of people, and these can serve as policy options to be projected forward to the
future.

The post-war experiment with social democracy provides an example of both the achievements
of democracy as well as its limitations. The social democratic project, in all its manifestations
and in all its local contexts, is a wealth of historical-political memory that can help societies and
cultures draw lessons about possible paths for political action in the present and the future. Its
major achievements such as socialized healthcare, free universal education, social safety nets
and so on could be reconsidered for extension and improvement as opposed to being considered
for selling-off. Such a reflective and projective attitude would be mindful of the trap in which
the Third Way of the 1980s was snared. Here, a middle way between laissez faire and state
socialism was sought, but it was a form of political theory that developed in a historical context
where the momentum of rising neoliberalism was too strong, and where many of the Third
Way’s leading proponents, such as Tony Blair and Bill Clinton, became preoccupied with the
speed imperatives of executive office. This factor, coupled with the ideological stifling of any
broad-based support for it, meant that was destined not to progress much beyond rhetoric and
wishful thinking. The fate of the Third Way, then, is in itself an historical lesson, a memory of
the limits to democratic processes when capitalism is given free rein to follow its own logic. It
teaches us that along with the limits to democracy, we always need to scrutinize and understand
both the limits to capital and the dangers of capital.

A positive remembering of the actual achievements of democracy— instead of hazy

idealizations of it—would predispose us to see it in the way that Habermas saw modernity more
broadly, as an ‘unfinished project’ (1987). This would require us to accept that the
Enlightenment essence of reason is still intact, but that the instrumental rationality of
technology that Marcuse identified (1964) has deflected modernity from its democracy-oriented
course. A temporally aware civil society would conclude that after the disasters of
neoliberalism, it is politics, not capitalism that has to take the lead again. Moreover, Marcuse’s
technological rationality, which is always necessary to some degree, needs to be itself deflected
by another form of rationality, what Habermas called a ‘communicative rationality’ wherein the
communicative process is oriented towards the social and political instead of, as is currently the
case, towards the economic in the profit driven search for efficiencies in society’s productive
processes. The potential for successful ‘communicative rationality’ within ICTs is tremendous
—but only if people, and not ‘market forces’, are in control of the processes of technological
innovation, development and deployment. To paraphrase Habermas, modernity in a
temporalized context, would thus be ‘always unfinished’ and would develop as part of the
longue duree of historical becoming.

3) Temporal sovereignty as a democratic right:

The most important idea I have tried to promote is that we must look at temporality in a new
way. With the rise of the networked society and neoliberal globalization it is socially and
politically necessary to move beyond seeing time as something expressed by the clock,
something abstract and uncontrollable that we must synchronize with. The issue is doubly
important in the context of network time within the Second Empire of Speed, where social
acceleration is now creating myriad social, economic and cultural pathologies.

Time is not ‘out there’ in the form of some backdrop to the universe, as in the Newtonian sense
that has dominated our social, cultural and economic thinking. Time is social; we create time, or
what I’ve argued to be contextually derived ‘timescapes’, whether we are aware of it or not. It is
a process that historically has created the disjuncture we feel, intuitively at least, between social
times and the temporalities of the clock and network, one which led St. Augustine of Hippo,
writing in the 5th Century, to ask: ‘What, then, is time? If no one ask of me I know; if I wish to
explain to him who asks, I know not.’ By seeing time as social, we can see it as non-abstract
and as rooted in concrete processes of everyday life. By seeing time in such a fashion, we would
go some way to understanding St. Augustine’s dilemma.

Time and space are deeply connected processes. I argued, following Lefebvre (1990) and
others, that as time is socially produced, then so too is space. Historically it has been less
trouble for us to make the cognitive connection that space is more socially ‘real’, and have
imbued the idea of social space with special properties that recognize this. We thus are able to
own space conceived of as ‘property’ in the form of land, or a house, and so forth, which may
be owned by an individual. More broadly we conceive of space as a form of territory that
‘belongs’ to the people or nation that are contained within it. The idea of sovereignty was
developed as a right over a territorial area of political governance, a right that inhered down to
the level of sovereignty of the ‘personal space’ of those within its spatial jurisdiction. A logical
extension of this idea would be the development of a form of temporal sovereignty that would
inhere the idea of ownership (individually and/or collectively) into social time.

At the meta-scale the temporal sovereignty of the polity would entail the protection of the
institutional processes of democracy. Political time, as Chesneaux (2000) reminded us, would
thus be an inviolable time, a sacrosanct temporal relation that could not be sacrificed or rushed
for the sake of narrow economic or political expediency. This would constitute a political
(democratic) control over time that would recognize that speed has its place and is a
requirement that may be accommodated in times of emergency, or when there is a genuine need
for rapid action. But it would also be the recognition that many of society’s problems need time
for reflection and deliberation—times that would vary from issue to issue and from problem to
problem. A temporalized democracy would thus be equipped to deal with the pathologies of
speed that beset society today, and which we have already discussed in some detail. Instead of
appearing as unconnected phenomena as they currently do, these pathologies would have a
locus, and there would be political recourse to solutions through arguing that these are temporal
problems with temporal solutions.

The idea of temporal sovereignty is not so far-fetched. I noted in Chapter Three that in 1999 UN
Secretary General Kofi Annan argued (in the context of the expanding network society) that
information, and access to it, should be considered a human right. The case for temporal rights
is surely just as arguable. What is needed is an acceptance that there is a very deep problem in
our relationship with time under a free-market capitalism. This recognition would form the basis
for the emergence of the necessary political will to begin to address issues of time in economy,
in society and, vitally, in the polity itself.

Temporal rights and temporal sovereignty would feed directly into democratic control over the
forms and pace of temporal production in society. If the issue of temporality were made more
salient, then the blanket acceleration that we experience under neoliberal globalization would
rightly be viewed as illogical, and as ultimately inefficient and wholly unsustainable. We
produce time socially and so we need to ‘make’ it as well as ‘save’ it. If either making or saving
time is considered appropriate to whatever issue confronts us, then resources, temporal and/or
technological, should be made available.

These are questions of control and technology that raise the question of the network society
itself. I have shown that the networked economy is the primary cause and consequence of social
acceleration today, but it does not have to be so. To what extent is it be possible to ‘control’ the
network society? It is neither possible (or desirable) to uninvent the network society or constrain
it with crippling state controls. Any such attempts would indicate that we have not remembered
or learned the lessons of authoritarian ‘democracies’ and the disasters they have created. The
network society has much potential for the promotion of an affirmative communicative
rationality, one where cultures and societies may be positively enhanced through democratic
structures that are intensely networked, but in ways that subordinate the free market to social
needs. To realize such potential the network society needs to be socialized, brought under
democratic control at both the local and global levels (and at the levels in between) instead of
being left to develop through the vagaries of competition. A democratically underpinned
network society would still create contextual ‘timescapes’, but the contexts themselves would
be structurally oriented toward social needs and desires. Possible the greatest technological
prize it that the logic of computing itself would become humanized instead of instrumentalized
because people themselves would control it, and not abstract laws. This would be a far more
faithful rendering of the dreams of Alan Turing, J.C.R. Licklider and Norbert Weiner—none of
whom ever remotely considered a pre-eminent role for market forces in their theorizing.

It is my hope that what has been argued in this concluding section does not read as wishful
thinking or, a worse fate, a theory of everything that becomes a theory of nothing. Critical
theory and critical thinking are at the core of my work, but this is because we are in the midst of
a historical phase, one that is conditioned by what A.C. Grayling (2008) called the ‘cancer of
the contemporary intellect, postmodernism’—and so critical theory and critical thinking need to
be remembered, revived and redeployed to render objective conditions more comprehensible.
The first steps are inevitably speculative and tentative

The impetus for the work comes also from the belief that humanity in the 21st century needs
something better if it is to see the 22nd in reasonable shape. Today there is no alternative to
capitalism, not even anything promising on the horizon. However, through the use of the
temporal framework it is possible to provide insights into why the world is as it is today, and
how we might begin to change it and direct it to a more positive future. In many ways this is an
old message, one that continues to place faith in the power of reason, in the initial impulse of
the Enlightenment, and in the potential for democracy to create a better world no matter how
impossible it may currently seem, or how lost the cause may today appear. I have tried to
articulate a set of provisional alternatives and enact through their essential non-radicality,
visions of other ways of being and other ways of seeing. A much wider recognition of the fact
that neoliberalism, the free market, and open-ended social acceleration are more a problem than
a solution, may be the basis for the building of a global network society that is more democratic
and more oriented towards managing the system through networks at the local and the global
level. But this in itself would not be the solution. What I’ve projected thus far is a politics of
reformism. A more sociallyand environmentally-friendly capitalism will not solve capitalism’s
contradictions. They will always rise to the surface in the form of crises at some point in time
and space, sooner or later. For a temporalized democracy to work fully and towards its open
potentiality, capitalism has to be got rid of. There can be no such thing as a permanently viable
model of capitalism. I see the present phase, Debray’s ‘videosphere’, as much less durable and
profound in its effects as the ‘graphosphere’ because it is based upon rapidly evolving
technological change. And so we are living through an interregnum, or breathing space: a time
where, despite continual change and distraction, we need to imagine viable alternatives to the
rule of capital and think about how these may be articulated, developed and implemented.
Control over the spaces and times of the network would be the first step towards a new global
imaginary. In the current void that represents other ways of thinking about how economic,
political and temporal life might be ordered, it stands as the only way forward.
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