Letter: Class struggle through ‘cyber struggle’ (1995)

Letter to the Editors from the August 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

Class struggle through ‘cyber struggle’

Dear Editors,

I disagree with Jonathan Meakin’s pessimistic conclusions regarding the global computer network known as the Internet (“Internet; Forum or Marketplace?", Socialist Standard, June 1995). My experience as an avid "net surfer” lucky enough to enjoy cheap access as a university student is that the Internet does not simply mirror the capitalist marketplace. At the moment only about one half of net “traffic” is put to commercial use. Alongside this market-driven content is an incredible diversity of non-commodified information reflecting the multiplicity of net users, most of whom seem to be hostile towards attempts at money-making and the imposition of state (or any other) censorship. The decentralised and fluid nature of this form of communication has been capitalised on by unions and grassroots organisations around the world in their attempts at preventing the erosion of gains won under capitalism in the face of the innocuous sounding “global restructuring". Unions in particular, while slow to catch on to the potentialities of "cyber-struggle”, have more recently begun to the use the Internet to coordinate strikes and boycotts, educate around labour issues, and make links around the globe with otherwise isolated union activists. One of the most successful political uses of the net came with the dissemination of information concerning the plight of Mayan Indians in the Mexican state of Chiapas, following the recent crackdown by the Mexican government. The situation was largely ignored by the mainstream media, yet the support garnered from the speedy and widespread publicising of the demands of the Zapatistas on various global computer networks was cited as one of the main reasons why the government was eventually forced to negotiate with the rebels.

There are also numerous mail-lists, newsgroups, and "web sites” which are of more direct interest to socialists. One particular mail-lists "oneunion”—involves participants drawn from the political sector which the World Socialist Movement shares an affinity with; anti-statist and non-market socialists and anarchists. Discussions on this list are wide-ranging and include debating the relative merits of "free access” versus labour vouchers. criticisms of reformism, and appropriate methods of working-class organisation. There is also an excellent web site where those who are so inclined can access most of the work of Marx and Engels at the touch of a button.

Of course, the Internet is not perfect and it cannot escape being tainted by capitalist social relations. As Meakin acknowledges. availability is obviously restricted to those with literacy and access to a computer, modem, and the relevant software— which counts out the vast majority of the world’s population— although the growth of "freenets" (computers hooked up to the Internet available free of charge usually in public libraries) is encouraging. The question of whether computer-mediated communication is desirable given the health risks associated with the production and use of this form of technology, is important to consider. And with the Clinton-backed "Information Super-Highway" just around the corner, the possibilities for Orwellian levels of surveillance and social control of people in their homes is indeed frightening.

Nevertheless, commercialisation and state interference with the Internet is not as inevitable as Meakin implies. It is unlikely that the millions who, at the moment, enjoy the accessibility, diversity, autonomy, and co-operative nature of the net will simply stand aside and concede to the crass consumerism of the invading market. In fact, if it is inevitable that every form of communication used by workers to counter capitalist ideology and exploitation will eventually succumb to the "law of the market", how on earth will socialist ideas spread? Why wait for a revolution? Used in concert with other media, the Internet has the potential to become a useful tool in the hands of a growing socialist movement and, despite the ruminations of neo-luddites, it is probably here to stay.

Julian Prior, 

Vancouver, Canada (julianp@sfu.ca)

Note: 

The Marx and Engels Archive is available on the World Wide Web at http:// csf.Colorado.EDU:80/psn/marx/ To join the "oneunion" maillist send a message to OneUnion- request@list.lever.com with the subject “subscribe”.

Proper Gander: Hack To The Future (2022)

The Proper Gander Column from the August 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard 

A thread which runs through the work of film-maker Peter Kosminsky is exploring how people relate to ideologies which defend power structures. For example, his 2017 drama The State described the journeys of extremist British Muslims joining ‘Islamic State’ in Syria, while his latest series The Undeclared War (Channel 4) takes a different angle by examining how cyber-warfare is used to drive political agendas.

The drama is a high-tech take on the Cold War thriller genre, set in 2024 when a cyber-war between the UK and Russian governments is escalating. The lead character is Saara, a student on work experience at GCHQ who discovers what her colleagues miss when fighting on the cyber-front against the Russian state’s hackers and opinion-makers. Much of the plot relies on characters staring at rows of code on computer screens, which is livened up by being represented as Saara searching through dreamlike tunnels and rooms. Otherwise, the script goes for verisimilitude, unusually referring to many real organisations, not only GCHQ and its Russian counterpart the Federal Security Service (FSB), but also the BBC, Twitter, BT’s Openreach, Swift and the main political parties.

It’s one of those dramas set in under-lit rooms with tense conversations underlined by sombre music, but it’s convincingly acted, carefully structured and grounded in research into cyber-warfare. The fictionalised activities of GCHQ, the FSB and their associates are based on what’s been reported in the real world, and given some dramatic licence by the near-future setting. While The Undeclared War’s plot is driven by hacks and counter-hacks into the Russian and British state’s infrastructure, along the way we see strategies used by Russia’s authorities which aim to mould people’s views and behaviour. The result is an uneasy reminder that events and how they are reported can be manipulated to suit the narrative of power-hungry states. Ironically, this feeling of doubt about what’s real is mentioned in the drama as part of what the Russian government wants to encourage.

With social media being a conduit for many people’s interpretations of events, it’s also an opportunity to shape perceptions. Two of the drama’s main characters meet when working at the Glavset ‘troll farm’ in Russia, sending at least 80 tweets a day, chipping in to chats about British politics to stir up trouble. These places do exist, and not just in Russia. In 2017, Freedom House (a think tank funded by the US government) found that 30 states worldwide hired people to ‘spread government views, drive particular agendas, and counter government critics’ on social media (tinyurl.com/4tdsevez). As anyone who uses Twitter will recognise, its discussions can be easily derailed by crass or provocative comments of the kind knowingly spread by troll farms.

How television is used to push a particular agenda is shown in the drama through the activities of Russia Global News (RGN), with a studio in London and reporters in the open. This isn’t a real TV channel, and if it were, it wouldn’t be allowed to operate in that way during a cyber-war, given that its closest real-life counterpart, RT UK, had its licence withdrawn by Ofcom following the invasion of Ukraine. One of RGN’s staff makes the fair point that criticisms that it’s a ‘propaganda mouthpiece’ are hypocritical when they come from journalists told what to say by the media corporations which employ them. RGN’s broadcasts aren’t obviously pro-Russian, but convey their message through more devious tactics. Its back-office staff set up two bogus Facebook groups (the lefty ‘Luton For Labour’ and fascist ‘Take Back Control Of Luton’), wait for people to join and then post details of a demo at the same time and place on both groups’ pages. RGN’s reporter and camera crew turn up and record the subsequent violence when far-right numbskulls meet leftist demonstrators. This plot-point has a reportedly actual precedent. In his 2016 documentary Hypernormalisation, Adam Curtis described how pro-Russian state ‘Political Technologists’ sponsored fascist groups, anti-fascist groups and parties opposed to Putin, then let it be known that this had happened so no-one could tell how real those organisations were. As one of RGN’s staff explains, the point isn’t that their news is false, ‘the point is to get people used to the idea that everything’s a lie, that there is no truth. And once they accept that, well, biggest liar wins’.

The Undeclared War is set around a future general election, another target for the Russian state’s FSB. Databases are hacked, distorting exit poll results reported by the BBC and taking people from ethnic minorities likely to vote Labour off the electoral register. RGN reports this as pro-Tory election-rigging, and fakes footage of an ensuing riot in order to spread unrest. These scenes hopefully aren’t based on actual occurrences, although there’s evidence that the Russian state has interfered with US presidential elections and the Brexit referendum, and that the US state has a long history of intervening in other countries’ elections.

Cyber-warfare as described in The Undeclared War is as much about psychology as it is about technology. The script refers to the strategy of ‘reflexive control’: manipulating an enemy’s behaviour, in this case to promote the interests of the Russian state. This approach isn’t new, but it finds new applications as technology develops. In the drama, this is shown as attempts to influence the responses to hacks and to create interpretations through TV broadcasts and social media. The Undeclared War is set in the future, but much of what it depicts is already here.

Mike Foster

Pathfinders: Eye to eye (2021)

The Pathfinders Column from the August 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

Eye to eye

The recent Guardian exposé (19 July) concerning Israeli company NSO and its Pegasus phone-hacking software is only the latest in a long line of media revelations about government surveillance. One can no longer be surprised by this sort of shenanigans. Of course governments watch people of interest to them. Ruling elites have always had their spy networks for keeping an eye on enemies from without and enemies from within. It’s an unwise ruler who fails to keep themselves sufficiently informed, as Julius Caesar found out.

NSO says that the Pegasus software, which monitors your location and can secretly activate your camera and microphone, is only for tracking criminals and terrorists. But of course they would say that. An investigation by Amnesty International and others revealed that human rights activists, union officials, journalists and lawyers have also been targeted. One journalist in Mexico, whose number appeared on a leaked Pegasus list, was assassinated at a carwash after, it’s believed, being tracked there via his phone. NSO won’t say who their state customers are but they are known to include Mexico, India, Hungary, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, UAE, Morocco, Rwanda, Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan.

What other countries might be customers? Pakistan, surely, and Burma, given that India is. If Saudi Arabia and the UAE are on the list, then Turkey, Egypt, Jordan, Iran and Syria probably are too, demonstrating incidentally that the Arab-Israeli ideological divide which incites poor workers to kill each other is of no concern when it comes to businesses making lots of money. Other countries probably don’t need Israeli software. Belarus almost certainly gets its hacking tools from Russia, as North Korea will from China. Five Eyes, the intelligence group of the ‘Anglosphere’ that includes the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, no doubt has its own sophisticated spyware, indeed might well have provided the Israelis with the tech expertise to develop Pegasus in the first place.

The obvious concern for workers everywhere, and for anyone who wants to see a better society supersede capitalism, is that government surveillance could become so powerful and all-pervasive that independent critical thought and deed become impossible.

When you look at some of the more authoritarian or unstable countries in the top 25 global economies, it’s easy to believe that this is indeed their ultimate aim. China is obsessed with totalitarian control freakery despite having given up any vestige of its so-called communism years ago in a bid to become the world’s top capitalist economy. Russia, with an economy smaller than Italy’s, is run by gangsters who have made murdering journalists and political opponents almost an Olympic sport, as have Mexico and Saudi Arabia. But what about other countries in the top 25, such as Australia, Canada, the US, Switzerland, the UK, Sweden, the Netherlands, etc? Flawed to be sure, but as capitalist democratic freedoms go, these states score fairly high, with little outward sign that they are bent on creating Orwellian dictatorships.

They probably could do it, technically speaking, if they wanted to. Some, like the UK, have granted themselves the legal powers for almost unlimited surveillance, and the tools for the job already exist. Nowadays you don’t need armies of red-eyed, chain-smoking spooks listening in on phone calls. You just need AI plugged into the cable and satellite feeds. Even so, round-the-clock surveillance of an entire population would be a huge drain on money and resources, and would it represent a good return on investment given that 99 percent of the population don’t do anything interesting?

It depends how paranoid you are. Some regimes are so dodgy they have every reason to be paranoid. Needless to say, all capitalist states feel the need to be eternally vigilant, however for the most part, they are likely to be more judicious in their focus, keeping a weather eye on individuals and groups deemed dangerous but in general letting the population go about its business.

It’s easy too for individuals, especially angry and radical dissenters, to get themselves caught in a feedback loop of confirmation bias regarding state surveillance, and become convinced that Big Brother is staring at them out of every CCTV, phone screen and laptop webcam, and that everything that happens, even in a pandemic, is part of some dark design by the deep state. How far any of this is justified or based on objective reality is a matter of debate, but unfortunately rational debate tends to fly out of the window when paranoia comes knocking at the door.

Whistleblowers like Julian Assange are held up as evidence of deep-state conspiracies, and certainly their treatment by vengeful governments can be appalling. But if state control was really as strong as some people think, how did these individuals manage to blow the whistle in the first place? And why is it that states and their politicians seem to conduct their affairs in a way that is so often confused, chaotic and incompetent, a fact made very obvious during the pandemic? Are these devious Machiavellis just pretending to be idiots, or are they what they appear to be, venal mediocrities with little idea what they’re doing? What kind of deranged global plan would include runaway climate change, now thought to be causing record heat levels, forest fires and catastrophic flooding? Is the simpler explanation not the more likely one, that capitalism is out of control and its leaders clueless?

Lose the ability to wield Occam’s Razor and you can lose your bearings. Once, at a socialist meeting, a visitor asserted that there was no point doing anything because the whole world was mind-controlled by a giant media conspiracy. When socialists asked him how come, in that case, we were free to hold a socialist public meeting, his reply was ‘You’re in on it too.’ That’s a cave-dive down a very deep rabbit hole.

Still, it’s understandable that a lot of radical political activists worry about state surveillance. If it’s not happening now, they argue, it soon will. If you try to downplay this concern, perhaps by suggesting that any large-scale suppression of legitimate working-class activity would create more problems for the state than it solved, you can be seen as naïve. Conversely, we suspect that activists sometimes overestimate how ‘dangerous’ they really are. In any case, the more secretive you aim to be, the more the state will take an interest in your affairs.

So, all things considered, the Socialist Party conducts its political activity in plain sight, with open public meetings, because it’s a democratic organisation that seeks change by democratic methods, and you can’t be democratic from the shadows. The best way to challenge the legitimacy of capitalism is, we think, to be legitimate yourself. Instead of trying to avoid the state’s gaze, we meet it, eye to eye, and wait for it to blink.

Paddy Shannon

Pathfinders: All Quiet in the Western Front Room (2010)

The Pathfinders Column from the April 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard

All Quiet in the Western Front Room

Pathfinders, in defiance of its own dire warnings against making predictions, predicts that watching too much BBC iPlayer will lead directly to a net fall in wages. Oh yeah, how come? Well, see if you can fault the logic. Currently, according to Microsoft’s own possibly somewhat self-serving trends analysis (EUROPE. LOGS ON. European Internet Trends of Today and Tomorrow, April 2009), while all patterns of media consumption are flat or, in the case of DVDs, declining, internet use is climbing inexorably. TV consumption at 11.5 hrs pw is set to be outstripped by internet use at 14.2 hrs pw by June 2010. There are of course a variety of reasons for this, among them people’s mania for buying and selling mostly useless tat (eBay) and reading and writing mostly useless tittle-tattle (blogs, Facebook etc).

Still, one can’t be too curmudgeonly about a social trend that connects people more than they’ve ever been connected in living memory, especially if it gets them off the front room sofa too. People are eschewing the traditional sit-down-and-slurp-it-up TV diet in favour of an a-la-carte and on the move eclecticism. Microsoft estimates that one in seven of the age range 18-24 watch no live TV at all.

This is affecting not only the pattern of what is being watched and when, but where. Increasingly the viewing audience is lounging in its bedroom with a laptop, so what does this mean for the lonely and neglected TV in the now rarely occupied front room? Do the householders succumb to the blandishments of TV manufacturers and buy yet more and bigger flat-screens, and soon to be had 3D TVs? Maybe, but probably not in this economic climate. Instead,  the TV goes on eBay with the rest of the junk and the front room stands ready for other purposes. The creative householder, mindful of the high cost of housing and the consequent demand for rented rooms, now decides to turn the vacant room to good account by sub-letting it. Thus, cyberspace turns TV space into living space.

What happens? The sudden availability of rented accommodation creates a downward pressure on rents and also on housing demand and house prices. Seeing that workers are now paying less to live under a roof and therefore are being paid just that little bit too much, employers will put the squeeze on wages until they in turn show a net fall.

Dare one go on? Increased friction between workers and employers, together with all this networking, media choosiness and increased domestic sociability will lead directly to an upsurge in political class consciousness and the emergence of a new revolutionary… oh, but wait, it’s time for the pills again . . .

All this tireless internet activity has also, of course, raised the hypothetical question: what if somebody sabotages it? The House of Lords EU Home Affairs sub-committee, charged with the task of investigating this question, has reported that the UK is very well placed to withstand a cyber-attack from persons unknown (China) or rogue states (China) or criminal masterminds (China). “Last year the UK government staged a simulation of a catastrophic nationwide failure of the phone network, codenamed operation White Noise” (‘UK can cope with cyber attack, says Lords committee’, BBC Online, 18 March). The phone networks promptly fell over each other’s feet in a straggly attempt to recover from this, however the fact that the UK did this experiment before the EU is what entitled the sub-committee to claim that the UK is ‘ahead’ in its war against non-specific cyber-crime (China) and thus claim a victory rather than a sprawling mess for Operation White Noise (Yellow Peril). Why all this paranoia? you ask. What evidence is there to suggest that persons unknown (China) are really expending every effort to bring down western civilisation, especially given that they already own most of its financial institutions? Well, the evidence is cold-war logical: our spooks are doing it to them, so they must be doing it back.

Meanwhile, once again fortified with reality pills, Pathfinders wonders whether the odd internet shut-down would be so terrible anyway. According to Microsoft only 30 percent of internet traffic involves commerce while 65 percent is instant messaging and social networking. If nobody could text their friends for 24 hours they might regain all feeling in their thumbs and rediscover the art of conversations longer than four sentences but may otherwise be entirely unharmed.

It seems barely a moment since the capitalist state fretted over the internet’s ability to undermine its power, and now here it is fretting over somebody’s ability to pull the plug. Among the several measures being suggested for emergency communications during a cyber shut-down the boffins seem to have overlooked a tried and tested system that would get us all out in the open air—bonfire beacons on every hillside from coast to city, just in case the Chinese invade. Instant messaging plus roasted chestnuts. Well, it worked with Napoleon.

Climate sceptics pass ID test

 Those who think there is an element of doubt about human-caused climate change are of course correct, but only because there is always an element of doubt in science, and always will be. This does not mean, however, that there is an evenly balanced controversy, despite what the deniers claim. In science as in socialist theory there is rarely if ever proof, only a weight of evidence.  Pseudo-scientists exploit this lack of certainty to insinuate their own bogus ideas into the public consciousness, demanding in the name of free speech the right to air these ‘controversies’.

Does all this remind you of anything? Of course, evolution versus intelligent design! Coincidental then that in Texas the pro-ID lobby are now moving to align ID with climate change denial, in order to shoehorn the former back into school text books on the basis of the supposedly more respectable latter (‘Battle over climate science now spreads to US schoolrooms’, New Scientist, 13 March).

Socialists must be on their guard against the misrepresentation of supposed controversies. Just because there is a Flat Earth Society doesn’t mean there is legitimate doubt about the shape of the planet. Pseudoscience isn’t just cranky, it’s downright dangerous. The MMR scare persuaded parents to disregard the scientific consensus and refuse to vaccinate their children, exposing them to risk, while tourists to Asia returned suffering from malaria because they believed their homeopathic remedies would protect them. Pseudoscience is an unscrupulous and dishonest fast-buck industry, and reacts to defeat by changing its argument, as with the recent MMR class action in the US. “They keep moving the goalposts”, remarks one scientist, “It’s the hallmark of pseudoscience”(‘Victory for vaccines’, New Scientist, 20 March). Workers need their wits about them, because capitalism is always finding ingenious ways to stitch them up.

Paddy Shannon

Capitalism and computers (1994)

From the July 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

If you’re busily looking around at what political parties propose to do about the world we live in, you’ll notice that it’s very hard to get them to come clean and tell you their whole programme. They will say that is because you can’t explain a whole political programme in a sentence. I say that if you can’t explain your objective in a sentence it's because you haven’t got one. The Socialist Party objective is highly controversial, but it's very straightforward: the abolition of private property. It’s not that we oppose capitalism and would like to have some other arrangement of the property laws. It’s not that we hate money and prefer direct bartering of property. We oppose the concept of property ownership itself, and everything it entails.

Now why should property be such a problem, you might ask. Surely all our problems derive from not having enough of it in the first place? Don't we spend all our lives dreaming of the Pools? How does getting rid of all money and private property solve anything? We want more of these things, not less.

In answer allow me to refer you to interesting developments in the computer industry by way of analogy. In the world of computers, information can be privately owned, and therefore bought and sold, just like tins of spaghetti. Now I must point out that unlike other commodities such as spaghetti it is possible to steal information without its owner being aware of the theft — the shelf stocks don’t shrink from pilfering because you don’t actually physically take anything. You simply copy it. And if you’re copying it, you're not buying it. So the information tycoons get ripped off (shame) by invisible tealeaves who hardly ever get caught. Question: What can they do? Answer: Take you to the cleaners if they do catch you, otherwise not much.

Software piracy is now a criminal offence and is covered by the copyright laws. So if your boss at work asks you to copy an unlicensed program for the company, or use a program that you know has been copied without a license, you personally can also get prosecuted. So tell the boss to fuck off, unless he's going to make it worth your while to break the law. And incidentally, disgruntled ex-employees reading this will be interested in the potential for dropping their old employers in the shit. The fines can be ginormous. Not that I would encourage fellow workers to be spiteful, you understand . . .

But all that only applies to direct bit for bit mechanical copying. Alternatively, suppose you rewrote a program in your own code, in such a way that it did exactly the same thing as the original commercial program, and you then sold the finished item as your own program? In other words, you haven't copied it, but you have created an exactly similar replica. Maybe it sounds improbable to have to reinvent the wheel like that but it’s called reverse engineering and it goes on all the time. Only the twisted logic of a money-driven society could come up with anything quite as stupid as this, but there you go. Much of what passes for research in many different industries is simply company scientists being paid to reverse engineer other companies’ ideas. You wouldn't be breaching copyright, but you would still have pinched someone else’s idea and used it to make a profit. So how do you stop that? In theory, by holding a patent. However, you can’t rely on them.

In a recent patent dispute Intel the chipmakers tried to sue a rival company, AMD, for reverse engineering the 80386 and 80486 series of chips. AMD were of course guilty as hell. In fact they didn’t deny it. They won the case on the basis that reverse engineering didn’t breach Intel’s patent restrictions and that besides you can't copyright a number. So they effectively stole the whole thing, name and all, and got away with it. Intel retired sulking over their lost case, eventually emerging to retaliate with dash and brilliance by calling the new 80586 the 'Pentium'. On a different note, we can no doubt look forward to the Sextium, or maybe they’ll change its name to 'Esprit' or perhaps just 'Roger’. You think I jest? I make schoolboy joke? Let me tell you, an industry that calls a binary number an item of 'underwear' is capable of anything.

I digress. Now it happens that once upon a time the Patent Office didn't grant patents for computer algorithms at all, arguing amongst other things that it wasn't possible to call a string of numbers in a file (all that a program really is) an invention. In the 1950s through to the 1970s, unhampered by patent restrictions, research borrowed freely from research, and computer software developed very rapidly during this period as a result. It was an exciting period to be involved in computers, and all the real landmarks in computer technology were established at this time: spreadsheets, word-processing and DTP, computer aided design, networking, real-time simulation and virtual reality. The only thing that looked more exciting than the present was the near future.

However, things changed. During the 1980s patents started to be granted, sometimes for ridiculous things which were not original at all. The Patent Office arguably couldn’t keep abreast of fast-moving changes in this sunrise industry and tended to believe what it was told. And then the problems began.

If you can gull the Patent Office into granting a patent for your code, then whenever anyone writes any program that uses the same idea, they have to pay you royalties. So what big software houses are doing now is buying up buckets of patents and using them to sue the arses off all their competitors as a way of slowing them down — because it ends up being impossible to write any code at all without being in breach of somebody’s patent. As one observer puts it, in today’s information superhighway the Patent is what gets you pulled over for speeding (New Scientist, April 23).

The problem is, ownership of ideas slows down development of new ideas across the board, and in every field of computer science, and by extension in every field of human endeavour. Research is now hag-ridden with lawsuits. Nobody dares do anything innovative for fear of being stomped on by the big bullyboy patent owners. The result is that progress grinds to a halt, or shifts phase into that monumental waste of effort known as "lateral" or "sideways development", which is a process of designing the same thing over and over again in different fashion shades. You see what I'm getting at here? Private ownership has avalanched into the vale of ideas and dammed up the river. So the computer world is fiercely divided now between the rich software houses with their libraries of patents and their conservative views, and the rest who are clamouring to abolish the patent system. In other words, abolish the right to "own" an idea by patent, and you can at one stroke emancipate computer research and people can once again start to do really interesting things with the technology.

Anyone familiar with the Socialist case will see the similarity between the two arguments immediately. They are saying that ownership of ideas halts the progress of ideas. We are saying that ownership itself halts human progress of almost any sort. The scientists complain that they can’t have free access to ideas. We complain that humans can’t have free access to even basic necessities like food and shelter. The upshot of both arguments is the same — how are we supposed to progress as a civilisation under such restrictions?

In actuality the progressive scientists are not being as revolutionary as all that. Even if the state agreed to abolish the patent system — perhaps in order to stimulate the sagging computer economy — that doesn’t mean that suddenly information would become free. Those scientists would still be happy to make us pay for their ideas — they just wouldn't have to pay themselves. But the probability is that they won’t get their way. The reason that you can "own" an idea is that capitalism is a system of "ownership". It tends to commodify whatever can be made into a commodity, however unlikely. If you can figure out some way to stop everybody getting at it, then you can force them to buy it from you as a commodity, on a market established for that purpose, and at a massive rate of profit.

Example: why isn’t air a commodity while water is? Because they haven’t figured out how to restrict our access to air yet, but god help us all when they do. You see, the money system depends on stopping you from getting what you want. Now you see we are having to pay for metered water, even though it rains for eleven months of the bloody year, because they "own" the purification plants. A thing doesn’t have to be rare or scarce to be a commodity. It just has to be rendered unavailable by careful containment.

So all that’s happened in the computer industry is that information has been commodified. There should be no surprise about that, and no real expectation of being able to return to earlier times. You can’t seriously expect owners of a commodity like information to allow you to decommodify it from under them. Not unless you were actually challenging the concept of property ownership itself, the whole basis of capitalism, in which case we’d be talking world socialist revolution.

So hard cheese to the computer scientists. And anyway, what makes them think progress is on the agenda in the first place, or that "pure" research is or ought to be somehow exempt from the property system? They really do become insufferably pious and moral at times. There’s only one item on the agenda of anyone who owns anything in this world, and it begins with 'M'and rhymes with funny. Ingenious though I think computer researchers frequently are, I just can’t figure out where they get this idea from. Too much staring at the screen makes you go blind, perhaps.

Paddy Shannon

Pathfinders: Game On (2006)

The Pathfinders Column from the June 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

Game On

A man from Sydney, Australia, buys an island populated by wild animals for $26,500, and charges tax for hunting rights, as well as renting beach front property. This is perfectly normal behaviour in capitalism. The money he earns from it is real enough. The island, however, does not exist. It is a virtual island, with virtual animals. (New Scientist, May 20)

Elsewhere, in Shanghai, a man lends his prized sword to a friend, who then secretly sells it for 7200 yuan (£500), back-pocketing the proceeds. Furious, the man complains to the police, who do nothing. Enraged, he breaks into his friend’s house, and stabs him to death. The knife he uses is real enough, and the man gets life imprisonment for murder. No action is ever taken over the original theft, because the sword does not exist according to any known law. Real blood spilled by a virtual sword.

From Carolina, one man has made a fortune selling rare virtual furniture and other items, which, he discovered through a bug in the program, he could duplicate, and sell over and over again. Nobody knows if he has broken a law. The game company closed the bug hurriedly, but not before the man had cleared $100,000.

Online gaming is moving beyond the purview of geeky kids. Virtual items and goods, though theoretically worthless, acquire value in the real world as players seek to shortcut the time-consuming process of acquiring them in the game, and serious money is being made in the ‘grey market’ of virtual trading. Now game currencies have been indexed to real currencies, and one game developer, MindArk, has launched an ATM cashcard that players can use to withdraw real cash, calculated according to MindArk’s exchange rate of their ‘game’ wealth. The global trade in virtual goods is currently estimated at $880 million and rising, with 30 million, mostly western and mostly affluent gamers, playing games for up to 18 hours a day. In one popular online game, Second Life, a third of the players spend more time in the game than in the real world.

It’s not hard for socialists to see why people would want to escape the rigid fetters of real-time capitalism. People have been escaping the real conditions of life ever since the Greeks invented the outdoor theatre. What is slightly depressing but perhaps not very surprising is that people work so hard at their escapist fantasies only to create societies of lawlessness, savagery and insane self-destructive cruelty that make capitalism look like a pussycat by comparison. In one game, players are dedicated to the task of setting off virtual semtex bombs and blowing themselves and their online world up. In others, there are virtual assassinations, or random slayings, where players find their character has been murdered for no particular reason, apart from somebody’s idle amusement. A player can take a long time, sometimes years, to build a character up, provide it with its special faculties and powers, as well as its virtual property. To be robbed and murdered after all this work is no small thing and can be deeply upsetting to the player. But this is the virtual wild west, and there is a nihilistic appeal. Law doesn’t appear to work in people’s interest in the real world (true, in many ways), so the idea is to get rid of all law and have an orgy of violence and blood in the games.

The problem is, as with the Shanghai murder, the violence is starting to spill over into the real world, prompting some observers to suggest that law and punishment should be introduced into the games. The game developers are opposed. What is the point of playing a game that lets you do nothing? That’s just like real life, the very thing people want to run away from.

The other problem, from a socialist view, is the constant reinforcement these bloodthirsty games give to the perceived need for law and policing. For these are, in a way, highly moral games, in that they strongly emphasize what dread chaos results from ‘amoral’ or lawless behaviour. Socialism proposes to abolish all coercive law which serves class interests (which is to say, all property law, at the very least). What laws or rules socialism would retain is a moot but interesting question. What is evident however is that no rational debate on the socialist need for laws, or rules, or their nature or means of enforcement, is possible among workers while they are bamboozled into believing that a society without repressive legal structures is always going to look like a scene from Conan the Barbarian. Play one of these online games for a week and you will either become a nightmare axe-murderer from the Dark Ages or you will be screaming for the return of capital punishment and school floggings.

Why normal bank clerks and home heating engineers should want to lead double-lives as marauding rapists and genocidal maniacs is a topic too large to enter into here. But it would be interesting to speculate what a socialist society would make of it. Would they look back at capitalism and trace a pattern from the Boy’s Own stories of Empire days with their strongly moral content, through the poignant emptiness of punk culture and on into the cybernight of shoot-em-ups and global conquest games and say: there, that was a society in decline? By giving reality to the horrors of the repressed mind is capitalism liberating or enslaving us even more deeply? Will there come a point, perhaps with the total abolition of hard cash, when capitalism will itself become a virtual game, with a human population of players who try to amass arbitrary ‘units’ of currency in order to buy arbitrary artifacts? The difference between real life and a game is that you always have to return to real life eventually, but it is just possible that this difference may one day disappear, and our grip on reality may disappear with it.

Game Off

On a more positive note, a friend who is a computer repairman reports a recent case where a young man came in to have his computer repaired. The graphics card, an expensive one, had blown, and the cost would be over £300. The man appeared, and was given the bad news. He went away to think about it. A week later he returned.

“£300 is a lot of money when you don’t have a job. I can’t get a job because I’m too busy playing online for 16 hours every day. I haven’t been to a pub in two years, all my friends have disowned me, and I never see anybody. On top of that, I’m bored with the games because I am Grandmaster in all of them and can’t be beaten. In the past week I’ve gone to the pub, gone to a party, found all my friends and even met some new ones. In fact, I’ve had the time of my life. Tell you what. You can keep the bloody thing.”

And with that, he walked out into the real world.

Paddy Shannon

Educating our sons (2021)

From the May 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard 

In the last few years the abuse of women and girls has been prominent in the news and on social media. From the ‘Me Too’ movement which started in 2016 but gained momentum with the Harvey Weinstein affair, to the highlighted significant increase in domestic violence in the current lockdown, to the Sarah Everard protests where at least one placard read ‘Educate your sons’. Well, it seems our sons have been getting the wrong kind of education.

Soma Sara is a 22-year-old young woman and founder of the Everyone’s Invited website set up in 2020 and where she shared her personal experience of what she describes as ‘rape culture’. In a few days there were over 10,000 posts, testimonies of abuse, harassment and assaults in schools and universities from pupils and ex-pupils. The majority of reports were from girls and young women but a few from boys and young men.

‘Rape culture’ is the normalising and trivialising of sexual violence, from inappropriate sexual language, misogyny and non-consensual touching through to assault and rape. Many of the posts were initially from posh private schools and mainly in London but reports quickly showed the problem to be country wide and equally prevalent in state schools. Heads have been accused of covering up the problem regarded by some as an ‘open secret’, and even some teachers have been accused of sexual harassment.

Most incidents of a more serious nature occur outside of school, at friends’ houses or at parties, and the stories make disturbing reading. Date rape is not an uncommon experience especially in universities. The vast majority of assaults are not reported for various reasons, embarrassment, not wanting to cause trouble, not being believed or simply accepting that these things happen. Inappropriate sexual behaviour towards others has even been observed and reported in primary schools.

How did we get here? Sex sells. It is a cynical and manipulative exploitation of a basic human need. Pre-teens are targeted and sexualised by cosmetic and clothing companies and dumbed down and mirror imaged on social media. The porn industry is a multi-billion-dollar concern and its most violent and degrading content is readily available to young boys on their smart phones. Gone are the seemingly innocuous images of the 1940s pin-up girls and gone are the porn mags on the top shelf of the local newsagents, embarrassingly purchased and packaged in concealing brown paper. Most likely young boys wouldn’t have been able to afford too many and would probably find it harder, with an eagle-eyed parent about, to keep it secret.

Parents who have or have had teenagers know that they are online almost constantly. A 2018 Ofcom report revealed that more than 450,000 children aged 12 to 15 spend between 6 and 8 hours a day online at weekends. A survey commissioned by BBC3 of over 1000 young people aged between 16 and 21 showed that one in four had seen online pornography by the age of 12. Gender differences were clear with one in five of the young women questioned saying they had never seen internet pornography, but only 4 percent of young men saying the same. A common response given in the survey was that young men expect young women to behave like porn stars and that porn also gave young men unrealistic ideas of women’s bodies. Often a young person sees online sexual images by accident or through natural curiosity looks it up for the first time, however, thanks to internet algorithms it’s not long before sexual content will just pop up without initiation and gradually get more explicit and violent as it goes on.

The online world is giving boys some very clear but misleading messages about women, sexual violence, feminism and sexism. Anti-feminist jokes, memes and videos on social media can be extremely unpleasant, and peer pressure from messages from online forums perpetuate dangerous assumptions, such as that women are lying about sexual assaults. The boundary between online and offline becomes increasingly blurred.

How are young men supposed to develop healthy, loving and consensual sexual relationships when women are objectified and abused? Trying to choke a girl while having sex, as described by one young woman on the Everyone’s Invited site, is shockingly not the way to do it. How far removed is a desensitised attitude to abusing women from the explosion in global domestic violence? Pornography on smart phones has been cited as a contributory cause of rape in countries like India, named the rape capital of the world though cultural attitudes towards women and girls are doubtless also responsible. Despite national poverty most young men there have or have access to smart phones where they can share often violent images.

Sex and relationship education is still not compulsory in all schools and plans to introduce it will give faith schools an opt-out. Hopefully it is not – or will not be – restricted to the mechanics of sex and contraception, but will include education on sexual attitudes to the ‘other’ and mutual consent. It would seem something is going horribly wrong. A report into the issue of sexual harassment and violence in schools, and overseen by Conservative MP Maria Miller was published in 2016 by the Women and Equalities Commission, but it appears nothing has been done since. Instead we are continuing to see peer abuse in schools with the authorities either ignoring the problem or trying to cover it up.

These issues reflect a systemic power structure whose hegemony filters down and becomes part of our culture almost as if we invented it ourselves. We live in a violent world and a society where everything is for use or sale including men and women. Instead of co-operation and empathy we have competition and exploitation and women and girls seem to be at the bottom of the pecking order. Gender stereotyping and sexist attitudes can start young, boys being seen as stronger and more technical, girls being the weaker and more caring sex. We’ve all heard the jokes about the mother-in-law and women drivers, and women’s aptitude for housework. It seems harmless but it’s a drip-by-drip reflection of the power men often have over women in capitalist society.

Until all power structures are dismantled both social and economic, until we live in a world as equals, where buying and selling is obsolete and respect for the ‘other’ is universal, these problems will not go away. Men and women have to work together but as long as there is distrust and disrespect between the sexes, as long as there is sexism and fear of the ‘other’, women may not always feel totally included in the struggle for socialism and as women make up over 50 percent of the working class that could mean no socialism for anybody.

Carla D.

The internet and capitalism (1) (2000)

From the January 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

Just over 30 years ago in October 1969 the first email was sent, and the world took no notice. Even in 1990, in Megatrends 2000, the authors Naisbitt and Aburdene failed to mention the Internet. After ten more years, the world is still largely unprepared for the scale of the communications revolution overtaking it. According to Andy Grove of Intel: “The Internet is like a 20-foot tidal wave coming, and we are in kayaks.”

The Global Internet Project (GIP) (http://www.gip.org), a collective including AT&T, Sun, Visa, Fujitsu, BT, IBM and Deutsche Bank, believes that the Internet explosion will be good for capitalism, a “cause for unambiguous celebration” as they put it in a recent report. The figures they have supplied illustrate the explosive colonisation of cyberspace.

In 1980 there were just 100 Internet host computers. The World Wide Web did not exist in 1991. In 1992 there were just 100 web sites. In 1996 there were 10 million host computers. Today there are 120 million hosts, 250 million users in hundreds of countries, there are uncountable millions of web sites, and the Web is growing by 300,000 new pages every seven days. The amount of information on the Internet has reached a level almost beyond human comprehension, and it doubles every year.

Gold fever has been evident at the stock exchange, with Internet company values being grotesquely over-inflated and largely responsible for the share price bubble. Start-up companies with no assets and no profits have been valued at millions. Oddly, there exists an uncanny parallel with the overvaluation of RCA shares in the, then, new technology of radio prior to the Wall Street Crash in 1929 (Money Programme, BBC2, 24 October). As then, Internet company valuations are also likely to be wiped out, but this won’t stop them in the long run. The speed of growth is breathtaking, and contributes to the speculative hysteria. The accountants just can’t keep up. Mobile phone sales were not even included in GDP figures until 1998, while there is still no reliable estimate for Internet sales, although GIP puts it at about $6.6 billion for this year.

In October of last year, Tony Blair announced to a startled population that 100,000 computers would be made available to poor families, at just £5 a month. The significance of a move to put even the poorest online should not be underestimated. Meanwhile, huge pressure is being brought to bear on BT to make Internet calls free, as they are in the USA. If they don’t, somebody else will. Callnet UK announced the first such, free and no strings, service in late October. A rash of similar services is expected to follow. The expense of being online is rapidly heading downwards, to almost zero, as capitalism anticipates a cyber-bonanza of sales that will make free calls, even free computers, more than worthwhile.

Falling costs

Capitalism is rushing with orgiastic zeal headlong into cyberspace. The prospect of global reach for free is the Holy Grail of any business, and the “technology of the ether” can make transaction costs so small as to amount to their elimination. “What market can ignore transaction costs, when there is one that has none?” says Michael Vlahos of the Progress and Freedom Foundation. The potential savings are enormous in other areas too. The cyber-based company of the future may need far fewer staff, no premises, little capital expenditure, tiny running costs, no stock or warehousing, and have no distribution overheads. Yet they will be more efficient than any business has ever been before.

“By putting everyone on the Web accessing information in both directions internally and externally,” says Barry Demak of Cadence, “we suddenly had a cohesive view of our markets, customers, and technologies—it all started coming into focus for us. And if you compare the cost and time to train the sales force, and factor in the difference in time to market, the returns are awesome” (Quoted in GIP).

There is a revolution in advertising and marketing theory too, as technology makes possible the placement of tailored advertising on the screens of specific customers. XTV, the new wave smart video, not only records the TV programmes it knows you’ll like, it gives you bespoke personalised commercial breaks too (Observer Business, 7 November). Every user’s every movement on the Internet is a piece of valuable marketing information. Now the talk is of “infinite stratification” of demand and “micro-niches”, of industrial mass-based society being remoulded by an individualistic assortment of micro-demands and micro-viewpoints, with customised low-volume production replacing the conveyor belt. Already the biggest engine of growth in the US, so-called Mom and Pop stores, will proliferate in cyberspace, the one place they can really compete with the big players. Here they can use “knowledge robots” or “knowbots” to roam the Web, create customised reports and newspapers, find specific products at the best prices, and even negotiate on behalf of the trader and customer.

As the expense of being online plummets to near zero, the speed of connection is soaring. The slow modem is obsolete as fibre-optic lines no thicker than a human hair with a trillion bit per second transfer rate are being installed in the US at the rate of 4000 miles per day, while in Britain BT is promising nationwide permanent ADSL links (50 times faster than modems) within two years. Project Oxygen plans to lay ocean-floor optical cables across the Atlantic, while satellite data broadcasting offers wireless Internet connection. Bandwidth (the bottleneck of the data exchange process) doubles every year. Bill Gates in 1994 predicted “we’ll have infinite bandwidth in a decade’s time”. Information will before long be able to travel at almost literally the speed of light.

In consequence of all this, there is an orgy of buyouts and alliances as capitalism races to reconfigure its entire business system, including everything from Hollywood to hard drives:

The business of computing (hardware, software, and services), communications (telephony, cable, satellite), and content (publishing, entertainment, advertising) are . . . collapsing to create a new industry sector. This new media industry is the engine of the new economy and will be critical to leading a successful transition. The rise of this new sector and the transformation of corresponding markets is forcing every company to rethink its very existence . . . (Don Tapscott, author and chair of Alliance for Converging Technologies).

One can easily envisage the telecommunications companies becoming the new giants, eclipsing all others as one box does everything and all bills are paid through one tele-account. Yet talk of “boxes” is itself an obsolescent concept, as Xerox have perfected “e-paper” (Observer, 22 August) and research continues towards wristwatch computers and even brain implants, giving rise to talk of “synthetic telepathy” in the more distant future. And as science revolutionises the Internet, so the Internet is revolutionising science. With the spatial decoupling of the scientist from the task, the so-called “collaboratory” is born, enabling multiple users to share a single physical resource, enhanced productivity with no travel time, and participation by experimenters in multiple, geographically-distributed projects. Remote science not only levels the playing field for researchers, it also offers more rigorous standards of specification, note-taking and reproducibility of results. Capitalism’s R&D department is as excited as the Accounts department and the Board of Directors.

Yet despite all this breathless enthusiasm there may be serious problems for capitalism inherent in this revolution. That the marriage of the state and the capitalists is fraught with mutual suspicion is evident from their attempts to reach a solution to the problem of devising a code to keep details secret (see GIP report on House of Lords Encryption Summit, 1997). The capitalists want a system which is unbreakable, for customers will not expose their bank details in an unsafe medium, and corporate secrecy remains essential in a competitive market. However, the state cannot afford to allow it, citing terrorism as its pretext, and demands a master key for every code. The capitalists respond that they don’t trust governments not to use these keys for their own unsavoury purposes, such as interfering in business, and back and forth it goes. At present it seems unlikely that the state will get its way. It could probably happily do without the Internet altogether, but conversely, capitalism needs the Internet, possibly as much as it needs the state, given that local lawmakers are anyway creating a global maze of parochial laws and regulations that offer nothing but obstructions and impediments to the progress of capital. The cry of “free the market” is heard everywhere from boardroom to newsgroup to government office, and legislators do not seem to be winning.

Price-less information 

There is a worse problem. Information, as a buy and sell commodity, carries a curse unknown to any other type of commodity. In the words of an old computer hacker slogan, “information wants to be free”. When one disgruntled ex-employee of a software firm recently posted the company’s products on a free website, the site was closed down in two hours. Yet twenty minutes would have been enough to start mirror sites containing the free software, at a stroke wiping out the firm’s profits. It is worth recalling what really makes a commodity—it is restriction of access. Air is just about the only use-value in existence which is not yet a commodity, in other words it has no exchange value. If access cannot be restricted to a good, money cannot be charged for it. The unique property of information is that you can make infinite exact copies, you can “steal” it without removing the original, or leaving any trace of the “theft”. Just as the music industry had to learn to live with music piracy (which of us does not have pirate tapes on our shelves?) so the information industry must live, not only with piracy, but an extremely short shelf-life. The price of any information commodity will tend towards zero more rapidly than any other commodity. The traditional product-cycle will contract to a single, sharp peak and steep descent. Whereas capitalists now salivate over a presumed bonanza this short-term pay-out will give way to a cut-throat and dog-eat-dog business world characterised by a falling rate of profit and a desperate race to stand still.

Impossible though it seems, it gets worse for capitalism. The goose could be laying a golden bomb. Unlike any other sector of production, the knowledge-producing sector which produced the Internet has always incorporated a strong ethical tendency towards free distribution—the gift economy. In a far-sighted study of Internet sociology, Richard Barbrook’s essay on Cyber-communism (Link) argues powerfully that a knowledge-rich society will increasingly tend to share rather than sell, just as socialist common ownership is a logical adaptation to material abundance. In an ethical reversal, it is selling, not piracy, which will be seen as anti-social. All in all, capitalism would appear to be staking its future on a commodity it can never control:

  The scarcity of copyright cannot compete against the abundance of gifts . . . At the cutting edge of modernity, the exchange of commodities now plays a secondary role to the circulation of gifts. The enclosure of intellectual labour is challenged by a more efficient method of working: disclosure.

Barbrook foresees the collapse of production and market relations in the same way as other business observers have been worrying for years about the “technology paradox” of “zero cost production” in industry (Business Week, 6 March 1995). As the computer world gapes at the meteoric rise of a new operating system called Linux, designed by a student as an antidote to the “bloatware” of Microsoft and, more to the point, given away free as “Open Source”, there does indeed seem to be some basis for the optimism of the gift economists. The implications for the future of capitalist market relations are huge and contentious. There are no guarantees that capitalism will drown in its own Third Wave, but equally there are no guarantees that it won’t. But as if this wasn’t enough, there arises a new problem which has no precedent and for which no avoidance strategies have yet been devised. In the knowledge explosion, what happens when we know too much?

Paddy Shannon

(In Part Two of this three-part series, Paddy Shannon explores the consequences of the information revolution for the ideological foundations of capitalism.)

Link to Part 2

Capitalism and the Internet (2): The Internet and Ideology (2000)

From the February 2000 of the Socialist Standard

Link 1

  The Internet is being hailed as a saviour by both capitalists and anti-capitalists alike. Rarely has any technology been so universally viewed as a holy grail by sworn mutual enemies. Who is right? Will it destroy capitalism or rejuvenate it?

At the Christopher Columbus school in Union City, New Jersey, a dustbin school with a dropout rate as high as its pass rate was low, an experiment was conducted in 1993. Each student was given a home PC and taught online, with both teacher and parent training to assist. The dropout rate fell to near zero, the daytime attendance rate rose to near perfect, and test scores rose 10 points higher than the NJ state average, in every subject. (http://www.gip.com).

Though schooling is unlikely ever to be entirely online, for social reasons, the possibilities of education in general via the Internet are nevertheless enormous. Traditional education—in real time—relies on too many ingredients being present in the right order, amount and quality. Virtual schools can tailor classes to individuals to a far higher degree of precision. Night school does not have to be at night, or local, or regular, or in one place, or reliant on one teacher. Educators have literally a world of resources to draw upon, while self-educators have the best access to knowledge of any generation that has existed. The establishment of the global knowledge network which we are now seeing has been aptly described by Douglas Rushkoff as “the hard-wiring of the global brain” (Cyberia 1994). Education, once the province of the rich and jealously guarded by them, is being democratised at an unprecedented rate. And ideology cannot change without a change in education.

Education is also about debate, and the lack of a public domain or sphere in which to discuss ideas has been held to be a key factor in late 20th Century ideological stagnation (Habermas, Schneider, Rheingold, quoted in Alinta Thornton’s Masters thesis, University of Sydney, (Link). Now, however, Usenet, the global network of mailing lists and newsgroups, is becoming an organic encyclopaedia and coffee house which permits debate on every issue 24 hours a day. As the Romans had the Forum, so we have Usenet. It is the new theatre in the war of ideologies now heating up. Good ideas will spread there. Bad ones will die there. Usenet is where theorists become activists, and where activists learn their theory. Capitalist ideologues are going to have to work harder in future, for educated populations cannot be fobbed off with fairy tales. They start to expect things their forebears didn’t even imagine. They start to make demands.

The DD Digerati

The first demand is more democracy. Capitalism in its advanced form relies on a model of liberal democracy to get the best out of workers, but it has to take a chance on them asking for too much. Now, governments from Britain to Malaysia to Costa Rica are “enthusiastically” experimenting with virtual council meetings and online voting in an effort to keep abreast of the public expectation of more open government. That this enthusiasm is ambivalent is shown by the fact that many of these same governments are also trying to legislate controls into the Internet—unsuccessfully as it happens. The cybergeek contingent—the “digerati”—are excitedly lyricising about running society with Direct Democracy instead of representative government, which they somewhat naively imagine was a democratic expedient imposed by geographical and other practical limitations.

Astonishing technical advance

Nobody who comprehends the class struggle will believe for an instant that the rich will allow Direct Democracy—except where it can’t do any harm and where it might bore us stupid with trivial decision-making. However, the expectation of more democracy is an important and empowering development nonetheless, for it represents a line of convergence with socialist thinking and away from the leadership mentality which plagues radical thinking. When it becomes loud enough, it will be a sign that the working class is gaining a little self-respect at last.

The second demand is a new agenda. As the organisational ability of “wired” protesters is now increasingly on a par with that of governments, as we saw with J18 and N30 and may see again with Mayday 2000, a new sense of potency seems to be sweeping through the radical mind. We don’t have to take it lying down. Corporations are not invulnerable. Individuals can be held to account. Even an entire social system can be challenged, as disparate and sometimes frankly deluded single-issue activists coalesce under the gravitational pull of common experience into what may yet become an embryonic anti-capitalism movement. Instead of being a passive consumerist mass, we can learn to think of ourselves as a proactive team of individuals. The Internet is creating a climate of new possibilities that cuts away at the dead growth of apathy and spawns a new idea: the network consciousness, a concept of interactive, interlinked human nodes in a vast, decentralised and co-operative process, a foretaste of working class consciousness.

Custodes custodiamus

Schooled however in the old thinking, we might conclude that the state will take over the Internet and use it as a new and terrible weapon of control over the working class. Accepting that they have always won in the past, we can only imagine that they will always win in the future. Is there not now a CCTV camera on every street corner? Do they not have their satellites, listening stations and Cray computers monitoring every move, purchase and phone call we make? Well, they may do, and those dedicated to underground criminal or insurrectionary activities may indeed worry about this, but there is something here for the monitors to worry about too—we can also watch them.

The near-level playing field of the cybersociety means that whatever they can do to us, we can do right back to them. This mutual integrated surveillance is already taking place, as US state governors now find themselves and their domestic affairs interrogated by an international brigade, and the government of Mexico finds its attempts to quietly crush the Zapatistas constantly harried and hamstrung by the unwelcome attention of the global online community. Amateur video of Rodney King helping police with their enquiries started the LA riots, and protesters now typically tool up with camcorders, laptops and mobile phones. Anything one protester discovers, all soon know. Governments, like the burglars they are, hate to work in the spotlight, and now it isn’t only the news media which are directing the beams. This is a game we can all play. Quis custodes custodiat? Answer: we do.

Bomb damage

Much is made of government censorship, and governments can certainly close down any website they don’t like. But only temporarily. Just as the forerunner of the Internet, ARPANET, was devised by the military to route around bomb damage to any node, so the Internet can equally route around censorship damage. Besides, the Net is global, whereas governments are local, and what one government dislikes another will frequently allow or ignore. China, so keen to imprison radical Internet users, is nevertheless in a minority of one where censorship is concerned, and its control of internal information flows is haemorrhaging at a thousand different points.

Monitoring of users worldwide is easily countered by the rapid growth of “anonymiser” sites (e.g. www.anonymiser.com), which strip out your personal details and let you roam without fear of identification. Autocensorship software is notoriously unreliable and it is easily outmanoeuvred. Besides, the rich themselves are not keen on government control. A book called Friendly Spies quotes the IBM office in Paris as having done a set of experiments to demonstrate the fact that the code keys they were required to share with the French government were being used for industrial espionage purposes (quoted in GIP).

It may not be states we have to worry about. The omniscient state may be an obsolescent dinosaur in any case, as capitalism militantly embraces the ‘free’ market and multinationals grow so powerful that “an estimated one quarter of all world trade now consists of sales between subsidiaries of the same firm” (Alvin & Heidi Toffler, War and Anti-War, 1993).

  “The flow of information into or out of a nation can no longer be effectively controlled by the state; information is everywhere and accessible. To participate in the burgeoning economic benefits of world commerce means adopting practices that undermine state control . . .” (Carl Builder, Strategy analyst, RAND Corporation).

Riccardo Petrella, a former science and technology director at the European Commission, predicts the collapse of the nation state and the rise of a ‘hi-tech archipelago’ of city-states in conjunction with multinational companies, while Warren Christopher, former US Secretary of State, predicts “5000 countries rather than the hundred-plus we have now” and George Yao, Singapore deputy PM, foresees the disintegration of China into hundreds of city-states. (Quoted in Toffler).

Today, cutting edge; tomorrow, garbage

Were this to occur, it must be a disaster for fascist ideology, since it gives the nationalists just what they think they want, and lets them choke on it. People might fight for the right to be called Basques, Latvians or Chechens, but it is hard to imagine them fighting over Coke or Pepsi in the same way. In any case, war is likely to become increasingly hard to justify when the global working class is just that, global. Much of the hate propaganda necessary to stoke public sympathy for a war will be impossible to foist on an internationalised class which works together, online, every day of the week.

The String Vest of Secrecy

Even secrecy is on the wane in the future, if one believes the former science adviser to President Reagan, G. A. Keyworth. Pointing to the fact that traditional intelligence gathering has been on the monumental scale (the US Government produced 6.3 million classified documents in 1992 alone) and involves a huge industry of chaff sorting and “analysis paralysis”, he says: “The price of protecting information is so high that classification becomes a handicap”. Meanwhile Robert Steele of US Intelligence, a critic of the secrecy industry, says: “The hidden costs of secrecy are so immense they often outweigh the benefits by a wide margin.”

Steele and others argue for an open system, with very little secrecy. It is surprising what is already in the public domain. Larry Seaquist of US Naval Intelligence reports that they get more useful information from one Internet PC than all their private and highly secret SPARC workstations put together. There are already few things which are really secret, even if we might wish they were. An underground nuclear cookbook called Basement Nukes prompts Michael Golay, professor of nuclear engineering at MIT, to say: “What’s classified today is how to build a good weapon, not how to build a weapon.” In a wider sense, the Internet will by its nature militate against the holding of secrets, for risk-free disclosure is a button-press away for any individual and information sharing has long been the accepted mode of transaction online. The global brain, one might say, will steadily illuminate its own dark areas. Capitalist ideology, insofar as it depends on secrecy, is due for a hammering.

Paddy Shannon

(Next month: we continue the discussion of the impact of the Internet on capitalist ideology.)

Link to part 3

GLITCH 

As if to prove that computer technology is not infallible, in Part I of this series the first two paragraphs on page 9 of the January Socialist Standard , were garbled as a result of the unexplained introduction of material from another article. The garbled passage should have read:

Yet talk of “boxes” is itself an obsolescent concept, as Xerox have perfected “e-paper” (Observer, 22 August) and research continues towards wristwatch computers and even brain implants, giving rise to talk of “synthetic telepathy” in the more distant future. And as science revolutionises the Internet, so the Internet is revolutionising science. With the spatial decoupling of the scientist from the task, the so-called “collaboratory” is born, enabling multiple users to share a singe physical resource, enhanced productivity with no travel time, and participation by experimenters in multiple, geographically-distributed projects.

Our apologies to readers and the writers—Editors. 

Pathfinders: Darwin in the pink (2009)

The Pathfinders Column from the February 2009 issue of the Socialist Standard

Darwin in the pink

It seems fitting, in the year of Darwinius Laudatus, that the new incumbent of the White House is stuffing his team with scientists and proclaiming that science is top of the agenda again. Well, it won’t bring on socialism, but at least those who seemed obsessed with visions of a new religious Inquisition in the West can stop worrying for the moment. Nature too is sticking two fingers up at creationists who have problems struggling with the facts of life, by recently producing two entirely new species that, as they say, you couldn’t even make up. One, a bizarre pink iguana, happens to live on the one Galapagos island Darwin didn’t manage to visit  The other is a mirror-eyed spook-fish in the deep ocean with an entirely novel means of discerning sharp images using light reflector arrays (New Scientist, 10 January). Advocates of Intelligent Design will easily explain pink iguanas (God was having a camp day) but in the case of the highly complex mirror mechanism, the obvious question would be: why did our Intelligent Designer not do things the easy way and just have the fish live somewhere it could see by normal means? Recent footage has also emerged of a unique venomous mammal, the Hispaniolan solenodon, suspected of being the last surviving relic of a branch of mammalia with a very uncuddly characteristic. Will ID supporters kindly explain why The Creator can’t seem to make up his mind, and keeps producing hybrid experiments that look suspiciously random and unplanned? Whatever next, a mammal that lays eggs?

Biofuels at bedrock in ratings

Speaking of random and unplanned, capitalism can usually be relied on to filter out all the smart solutions and pick the dumbest, amid a fanfare of speeches about innovation and progress. It seems hardly a moment since biofuels were the ingenious answer to everyone’s oil crisis. Now a new study suggests that they are the worst possible way of dealing with the problem, even taking coal or nuclear power into account (SciDev, Biofuels bottom of the heap in impact study, 7 January)

Why so popular a solution then?  Because it was cheap, the land was already in cultivation for something else, and it was a zero-tech, zero investment changeover. Wind power comes out best, which is perhaps no surprise. If we were to plant wind turbines in every government meeting room in the world, we could probably get all our energy for free.

Free is cheaper

Now where have we heard that one before? It’s nice to see that the digerati are still plugging the idea that because costs are heading towards zero soon everything will be free, citing such free services as Google by way of example. Chris Anderson, editor of Wired magazine, is the latest to put this no-longer-very-revolutionary idea in his new book Free: the Future of a Radical Price (BBC Radio 4, In Business, 8 January). Of course, he means everything digital will be free. About the real world of food, clothing and heating he has no comment to make. No doubt it will comfort the refugees of Darfur that they can access free pictures of food whenever they like.  What Anderson and his colleagues could usefully do is extrapolate from their own cosily self-absorbed cyberworld to ask what socialists ask – couldn’t we do the same thing for tins of beans as terabytes? After all, production costs in material goods also have a tendency to fall over time. Besides, there is also the question of what you mean by free. Users don’t pay to use Google, but two Google searches are as carbon heavy as boiling a kettle, and the global IT industry produces as much greenhouse gas as the global airline industry (BBC Online,  ‘Carbon cost’ of Google revealed, 12 January).

PC I-Plod

One thing which is patently becoming less rather than more free is the matter of civil liberties, with police being encouraged by a new European directive to spend more time hacking into the public’s private computers (BBC Online, Police ‘encouraged’ to hack more, 5 January). Not that it will do them much good. Even if your firewall doesn’t keep them out, they probably couldn’t use the information anyway because they have no way to prove they didn’t put it there themselves. That’s if they don’t lose the information first. Anyone paranoid enough to believe that Big Brother has already arrived will feel a heartwarming glow at the latest in a long line of government security boobs. When the National Hi-Tech Crime Unit was shut down and replaced by the Serious Organised Crime Agency in 2006, the government did not bother to keep the old NHTCU webname and it was bought by a German company. However, the government forgot to mention this to anyone, so whenever any agency including the BBC attempted to tip off the government about suspected cyber-fraud or other criminal japes, they were in fact sending this potentially explosive information to a private commercial enterprise (New Scientist, 3 January).

Paddy Shannon

Crime and Capital (2020)

From the September 2020 issue of the Socialist Standard

Private enterprise pays

At the beginning of July, it was loudly trumpeted in the media that hundreds of people had been arrested in operations across Europe. It was a directed strike at organised crime groups, enabled by French police compromising the communication servers of a company called Enchrochat, which offered secure encrypted communications. Believing themselves safe from police surveillance the criminal entrepreneurs using its services were caught planning drugs deals, kidnappings and murders.

The enterprises engaged in drug production on an industrial scale. Police uncovered ‘19 meth labs, 1,200kg of meth and 10 tons of cocaine’ (LINK). This industrialism is complemented by the horrifying fact that Dutch police found a shipping container that had been converted into a soundproofed torture chamber, complete with a chair to strap victims into.

Enchrochat charged £1,500 for a 6 month contract with its dedicated handsets, and it’s believed that 10,000 people in the UK availed themselves of its possibilities, out of 60,000 worldwide (LINK). The law enforcement agencies consider that this was a bespoke service for criminal enterprises, used by middle tiers and upwards of organised criminals. So this set of police raids, which have netted 800 arrests (so far) has also revealed the extent of organised crime.

Although those numbers sound large on their own, what they reveal is how small the organised criminal underworld really is, and how efficient their business is for so small a number to cause so much pain and mayhem. Just as with most other enterprises, modern industrial technology has increased the productivity of those whose output is crime.

The raids in the UK amounted to over 700 arrests, netting £54 million in cash. This is, though, not the full value of these businesses.

These are early days, and the state agencies have a vested interest in saying everyone who used these machines was a criminal (as opposed to legitimate business people with a need for privacy). What these events show, though, is the professionalisation of crime. Indeed, the root cause of crime is free enterprise, and entrepreneurs would be foolish not to make the best use of available technology to spread their businesses. They co-operate across borders with business partners (the press called them ‘gangs’) in other countries.

Like any other business, they need to co-ordinate their activities, and although this co-ordination remains hidden most of the time, this communication was used in this case to smash their organisations. They also need secrecy, lest their competitors take their markets from them (their competitors including capitalist businesses that are ‘legitimate’ and use the law to make their money rather than breaking it). Like the criminals, the police advanced their use of technology. As Joseph Cox (also at Vice) explained, there was:

‘…malware on the Encrochat device itself, meaning that it could potentially read the messages written and stored on the device before they were encrypted and sent over the internet’ (LINK).

Enchrochat themselves boasted that nothing was stored on their servers, and that their phones had an easy wipe feature. The malware prevented wiping and stored passwords.

The loss of Enchrochat has temporarily broken the bond of trust needed to engage in this type of business, but new encryption services are coming forward, and the criminal enterprises will learn and return to their pursuit of wealth and profit without restraint at the first opportunity. After all, isn’t that what capitalist ideologues tell us all to do: fill your boots?

Pandering to the wealthy

Similarly, a criminal enterprise broken apart by state action is Jeffrey Epstein and his associates. His ‘little black book’ of contacts has been released and while, it should be stressed, there is no reason to think any of the names listed in it are connected with his sex crimes, it is an interesting insight into the connectedness of the rich and powerful (LINK). Just as criminal gangs organise in international networks, so too do supposedly legitimate businesses.

Jeffrey Epstein famously committed suicide in prison (under murky circumstances that led many to claim he was ‘suicided’). He was convicted of sex trafficking, as his Wikipedia article relates:

‘Epstein pleaded guilty and was convicted in 2008 by a Florida state court of procuring an underage girl for prostitution and of soliciting a prostitute. He served almost 13 months in custody, but with extensive work release. He was convicted of only these two crimes as part of a controversial plea deal; federal officials had identified 36 girls, some as young as 14 years old, whom Epstein had allegedly sexually abused’.

His initially lenient sentence after the plea deal was attributed by many to his having influential friends.

He was a wealthy financier from a modest background. He gained wealth in the ‘80s as a Wall Street trader. Steven Hoffenberg, who served 20 years in federal prison, claims Epstein was a co-conspirator in his fraud, and yet he was not charged. He moved in to managing the investments of the truly wealthy.

 He used his wealth to pander to other wealthy and powerful men. It is interesting to see who was willing to be a recipient of his largess, flying on his private jet – rather tastelessly nicknamed ‘the Lolita Express’ (apparently because of the number of teenage girls it flew to his private island). The list of those who flew on the jet included Bill Clinton, Donald Trump and Andrew, Duke of York. Epstein’s contact list included Prime Ministers like Tony Blair (of course, this just means he knew their contact details, not that they had been in contact).

At his death, he possessed $112 million in investments, $56 million in cash and was worth an estimated total of $577 million, including his Caribbean private islands. As a fund manager he made his wealth looking after billions of dollars of other people’s money. To that end, his luxurious lifestyle was part of his means of impressing clients and potential investment partners.

That lifestyle included using his wealth to obtain and sexually abuse young women and girls. While still alive he settled a string of lawsuits with pay-offs. There are allegations he provided girls to his contacts (LINK). More will come out, doubtless, in the upcoming trials of his associates.

Like the Enchrochat criminals, wealth and respectability came to him from the proceeds of criminality. Like the, state intervention shows how the powerful and wealthy organise and connect to each other. The wealth stolen from our labour funds these lavish lifestyles. For the truly wealthy, the law becomes optional, and it took particularly egregious behaviour from Epstein to even get a slap on the wrist.

The connection between his world and the Dutch torturers is wealth and ego turning into impunity: wealth, secrecy and power go hand in hand which in turn enables criminality. Billionaires do not need a lift on a friend’s jet, but they like the flattery and affirmation.

Pik Smeet