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 (3) (2000)

From the March 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

Link to Part 2

Despite a clear tendency towards enlightening social relations, the Internet does not promise to give revolutionaries their socialist society on a plate. In fact, it offers us the parallel “disinformation revolution” as well. Unlike misinformation, disinformation is deliberate.

 Although mass propaganda can be expected to decrease quantitatively, customised propaganda may increase qualitatively. Propaganda and spin could become more, not less, powerful, as mass media gives way to “mess media” and a proliferation of micro-channels, micro-markets and perhaps micro-cultures makes the targeting of disinformation against selected individuals more feasible. It’s as if the ultimate dream of the free-marketeers is of six billion separate Earths, a doppelganger for each of us, and consensus or revolution impossible in any of them. But humans aren’t so easy to control, nor communication so easy to stop. The right-wing utopians forget about our critical faculties and our propensity to gossip amongst ourselves:

The hypnotic spell of years of television and its intense public relations is broken as people learn to deconstruct and recombine the images intended to persuade them. The result is that the population at large gains the freedom to re-examine previously accepted policies and prejudices” (Rushkoff, Cyberia, p.55-6).

Micro-propaganda just isn’t going to cut it unless we collectively agree to brick up our windows and doors and never go out. Realistically, the ideology of capitalism will not be able to rely on permanent, large-scale disinformation. The best it can expect is to muddy the waters.

The danger of participation is that there are . . . thousands of potentially critical eyes watching every entry. A faulty fact will be challenged, a lie will be uncovered, plagiarism will be discovered. Cyberspace is a truth serum (Rushkoff, p.18).

Monocultural studies 

As global monoculture advances upon us in the real world of Wal-Mart and McDonalds, cyberspace , in contradistinction, is going the opposite way by reinventing diversity. There is a double irony at work. First, the right-wing free marketeers parade their hypocritical “cult of the individual” as a justification for a sociopathic mentality of self-centred consumerism, while at the same time making every effort to destroy cultures and reduce individuals to a grinding uniformity of alienated clones. Second, their own system is producing an atomised multicultural cybersociety which may yet undo their work. Where capitalism tried to keep us apart while making us the same, cyber-capitalism will have the effect of bringing us all together while making us different.

Trouble at’ McMill 

Yet if this view of capitalism’s future seems to have a rosy tint, it’s probably a bloodstain. There is likely to be a ferocious and global scramble for the ever-decreasing number of real jobs in the hi-tech labour market. The “digerati” may get excited about their hi-tech utopias but the future looks grim for workers. The former proletariat may become the future sophisticated “cognitariat” (Toffler), but they are going to be mostly underemployed part-timers battling each other for short contracts. Meanwhile the rest of the population will presumably be fighting for work in leisure malls, call centres and other dispiriting and low-paid McJobs. And when things get really bad, workers tend to wake up from the American Dream and smell a rat. Carl Davidson, editor of Cy Rev, a “Journal of Cybernetic Revolution, Sustainable Socialism & Radical Democracy”, sounds a warning:

 In 1992 the size of the world labor force was something like 1.76 billion people; by 2025, if current trends stay more or less what they are, the world labor force is going to be 3.1 billion people. That means every year for the next thirty years the world economy needs to create 38 to 40 million new jobs. And it’s got to do that at a time when the main technological trend is going in the opposite direction of net job liquidation” (http://www.eff.org/pub/Publications/E-journals/CyRev).

What then of free-market philosophy, this wonderful doctrine from two centuries ago which thinks capitalism would work fine and dandy if the stupid politicians would just go away? Free-market capitalists think the poor don’t matter and will obligingly roll over and die, but when the first riots start, these same capitalists will remember pretty quick what they were paying the state for in the first place. Civil unrest may be most cheaply staved off by bread and circuses, and excuses, as it once was in ancient Rome, but for these angry modern workers the bread will have to be good and the circuses had better be terrific, since the excuses, as usual, will be lousy.

Virtual Unreality 

Of course, the entertainment will be awesome, if nasty, after capitalism’s tastes. Frighteningly convincing graphics and sensory experiences will create seamless mirages, a virtual unreality that might forever close the door to political change. Certainly it is curious to note that technology has brought the “circus” ever closer, from arena to stage to screen to TV to PC monitor. Ultimately we will watch our little mirages on “drop-down” corneal displays, a final triumph of the circus as it climbs right inside our heads. Better still, with full-body virtual reality, the viewer gets to climb right into the ring. But for all that, the charade, however mindbending, has to stop sometime. Circuses pall, just ask any overworked clown. Humans will never really lose sight of the distinction between real and virtual, unless they can be made to forget that they are rational animals. Besides, so much of their reality is patently bullshit that nothing short of mass lobotomy could disguise it.

Credo Greedo

And bullshit is what lies at the heart of capitalist ideology. Even capitalists themselves believe it. On Page One of every school economics textbook it says that resources are limited but wants are unlimited. As wants are satisfied, new wants always appear. Now if this were true, socialism would be impossible. Relying on this anti-human and quite unsubstantiated prejudice the capitalists, knowing the extremely short shelf-life of information commodities, expect to be able to produce new commodities indefinitely, to replace old ones that have become free or nearly so. Yet here is their mistake, for wants are not infinite. As more things become free (for example, MS Explorer, Netscape, Winzip, Apache, Acrobat, Linux and a thousand other useful programs) they expect us to keep paying for upgrades, assuming we will always want more, but we won’t. Instead, we will reach a satisfaction threshold. And then, we’ll just start expecting everything else to be free too. And why not? With modern robotised manufacturing, costs are falling in all sectors of commodity production. If they cost next to nothing to produce, why should we pay at all? Kevin Kelly, founder editor of Wired, doesn’t see a problem for capitalism in this, and argues that businesses should give their products away for free, in order to reap later returns:

Ubiquity drives increasing returns in the network economy. The question becomes: what is the most cost-effective way to achieve ubiquity? And the answer is: give things away. Make them free (New Rules for the New Economy, Fourth Estate, 1998).

One can only hope that all capitalists, convinced of our insatiable natures, are daft enough to follow Kelly’s advice, and indeed many companies are doing just this, and not just with software, (free mobile phones, free calls, free satellite decoders). Even if this loss-leader strategy just makes a loss, it plants another expectation in the public mind, and subtly undermines its own creators. Things can be free. There is such a thing as enough. Abundance does exist.

It may be that the sacred cows of capitalism and property society will be sent to the slaughterhouse one by one. Even that feared and revered symbol of ultimate power, the coin, may lose its lustre, its relevance reduced to a meaningless abstraction. Where once we bartered real things like sheep or sacks of salt, then paid with iron bars, gold ingots or copper coins, then latterly with decorated scraps of paper, now we will be held to ransom by mere electronic digits. The case for abolishing digits may not seem so far fetched in the future when nobody handles real cash anymore and the fetishised idol no longer has even a visible face.

The Socialist Virus

As well as the notion of insatiable greed, the ideology of capitalism also rests on the notion of natural inequality, the cult of the leader and of the expert. The better educated workers become, the more this cult suffers. As contempt for our politicians rides as high as voting figures sink low, the idea that we must rely on the unique expertise of superior individuals is beginning already to look decidedly comical. But in the wired network consciousness, where “no-one is as smart as everyone” (Kelly, p.14) the expert and the leader may become positively antiquated concepts. The days may be dying when the “ignorant masses” can be led, misled and mystified by some “social elite” who know better. Instead, the wired world may experience a new renaissance of democratised creative thinking, as good ideas begin to spread through the ports and wires of a billion terminals, the electronic synapses of a revolution: “You don’t attack the monster. You infect him, like a virus.” (Rushkoff, p142). And small ideas can grow big in cyberspace, as Kelly, in a backhanded paraphrase of William Morris, makes clear:

 The network economy has set into motion the power of hobby tribes and informed peers . . . The law of increasing returns can feed a small interest into a mid-sized interest. Whereas once there was a lone fanatic for every notion, now there is a devoted website for every fanatic notion; soon there can be 10,000 fellow enthusiasts for every fascination (Kelly, p.105).

Internet disinformation

Yet disinformation remains for the time being the best weapon against workers. When the truth can no longer hide in the dark, the logical thing is to dazzle us with data. It doesn’t even have to be false data, just so long as it’s irrelevant and it wastes precious time. And as the Nobel economist Herbert Simon points out: “What information consumes is rather obvious. It consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of knowledge creates a poverty of attention.” (Kelly, p.59). The grim truth is that this crude strategy will probably work, for a while at least. According to the Critical Art Ensemble, who may be perhaps thinking primarily in the short term, the vast majority of Internet users will be passive consumers, rather than active participants:

They will be playing computer games, watching interactive TV, and shopping in virtual malls. The stratified distribution of education will act as the guardian of the virtual border between the passive and the active user, and prevent those populations participating in multi-directional interactivity from increasing in any significant numbers (Alinta Thornton, Ch.5, http://www.wr.com.au/democracy/thesis1).

If this sounds depressing, one has to remember that it is a conservative estimation of human behaviour as it is now, schooled into a passive consumption of goods, news, ideas and entertainment. If there is one key hallmark of pre-internet mass society it is probably this conditioned passivity. Our pre-internet generation cannot in all fairness be expected to adapt thoroughly to such a major cultural innovation, and will certainly fail to exploit its real long-term potential. A second-generation wired society is likely to be very different, more individualistic yet better integrated, more critical and proactive, and with higher expectations. The longer capitalism lasts, the more bolshie the workers are likely to become.

For now, like everything else in capitalism, any attempt at disinformation overload will work only partially and unreliably, if it works at all, and cannot depend on any conscious or systematic conspiracy by the owning class. Conversely, we as workers have no free ticket to easy victory through the Internet. When all is said and done, it is an instrument only, an “enabling technology”. The printed word didn’t liberate us either, but it made a huge difference, and so will this, if we learn how to use it properly. With the means of knowledge—the key to the means of production—now out of the private bag and in the public domain, it is fair to say that the working class has never been in a stronger position to take control of its own future.

Revolutions are made by people, not machines, people working together, people in communities. Much is made of supposed “online communities”, but it is precisely in the real physical world of community, rather than its ersatz virtual counterparts, that the revolutionary potential of the Internet may be storing up its greatest surprise.

Paddy Shannon

(Next month, in the concluding article, we examine the Internet and Community.)

Link to Part 4

From Handicraft to the Cloud: Part 1 of 2 (2012)

From the March 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

As in the industrial revolution, progress in the computer revolution comes at a price.

Despite all the technological innovation, computing is all too often a frustrating and limiting experience. Is this because Google, Apple, Facebook or Microsoft are evil and lock down hardware, platforms, software and content? NO! Is this because we should all avoid proprietary software, even freeware in favour of mutual co-operative open-source projects such as Linux? Well this is barely half the story as can be seen when free open-source software is not immune to industry trends such as cloud computing, bloat, eye-candy, new version fetishisation and app stores. The elephant in the room is the broad historical trends in the industry which affect free software somewhat less than proprietary software and mirror the industrial revolution and tend to disempower, limit and alienate (in the Marxist sense) the end user. Software and personal computing suffers from class divisions.

2011 was another year of hype for cloud computing. In June 2011 Google launched the Chromebook and Apple announced iCloud. The Google Chromebook is no ordinary laptop, it relies on storing software and your data on Google servers. This is called cloud computing and has been considered the next big thing in IT by market experts for some years. The term ‘cloud’ is appropriate since its benefits are nebulous and it may also represent dark clouds on the horizon for personal computing.

The history of personal computing is almost as old as the first manned moon landing in 1969, and in technological terms, the personal computers of today are certainly more advanced. Why on earth is personal computing then, a frustrating and limiting experience? By 1965, Gordon E. Moore had predicted the rate of advancement in computer hardware (doubling every 18 months), which has proved largely accurate. By 1973, the first mouse-driven graphical user interface had been produced.  Niklaus Wirth observed that ‘software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware is getting faster’. This parallels Stanley Jevon’s observation over a century earlier that ‘advances in efficiency tend to increase resource consumption’. To find out why this is the case we have to look at the history of personal computing and its potential downfall.

‘A computer in every home’
The first million selling computer book was the Art of Computer Programming by Donald Knuth in 1968. Although it was an incredibly technical book, Knuth liked to stress the art aspect of the title, and it was certainly in stark contrast to the industry that it is today. In other respects, sentiments among computing enthusiasts would be familiar (especially to socialists) throughout history. In particular, The Hacker Ethic (Steven Levy, 1984, Hackers) which included such noble statements as ‘all information should be free’ and ‘access to computers should be unlimited and total’. This was not unusual for the time. Popular computing literature including magazines and books such as 101 Basic Computer Games (David H. Ahl, 1973) printed lines of code and encouraged users (especially children) to input the code to produce games. Most personal computers offered a command-line interface (even those with an additional graphical user interface) and were bundled with some form of the BASIC programming language, so named because of its ease of use and suitability for learning. The learning curve for using home computers was steep when compared with today but popular computing literature at the time helped make the curve somewhat more graduated. Despite its significance, very few writers have lamented the disappearance of BASIC, perhaps the most well-known article is titled ‘Why Johnny Can’t Code’ (David Brin, 2006).

As Neal Stephenson put it, in the beginning there was the command-line and Microsoft had the odd idea of selling operating systems. It was Apple Macintosh however, who introduced the first commercially successful graphical user interface with drag and drop capabilities and WIMP (Windows, Icons, Menus, Pointers) interface in 1984. Just a year later, the Commodore Amiga 1000 made colour, animation, sound and multi-tasking affordable to home users. Although the desktop metaphor for graphical user interfaces was used by rivals, the Amiga offered an indicator of the ethos of the time. It used the metaphor of a deeply-customisable workbench for its operating system. The desktop metaphor prevailed partly because home computers in the West evolved out of the office at a time when industrial capital was on the decline.  But also, the desktop prevailed over the workbench metaphor, because empowering users to control the means of production was gradually becoming an alien notion.

No single business seemed to be able to establish a hardware monopoly, let alone a software monopoly, that was unchallenged by rivals. In January 1986 PC Magazine reviewed fifty-seven different programs for word-processing. Even the most popular application software such as WordStar, AmiPro and WordPerfect was largely produced by small teams and in some cases individuals. The spirit of the age was described as the era of the bedroom programmer, although this is possibly a little exaggerated. Sharing software was widespread, computing magazines distributed cover disks with public domain and shareware software and users exchanged software in classifieds advertisements. Software developers might not have liked it, but magazines were an important channel for distribution. Acceptable software costs to users were generally regarded as the cost of the disk and this was the attitude in businesses as well as at home. The limitations of the hardware of the time meant also that developers were expected to optimize code to be as fast as possible.

Windows 95
The personal computer industry grew rapidly over subsequent years. By 1992, Amigas had fallen by the wayside. Ataris were cheaper and in 1993 could boast multi-tasking but by then it was too late. A monopoly position had already been established by IBM-PC compatible hardware and Microsoft consolidated their monopoly in software with a $300m launch of Windows 95. Although users may have been reluctant to embrace planned obsolescence, this was a time when the vision of ‘a computer in every home’ still involved selling hardware to first-time buyers.

The truth behind the hype was a little different, RoughlyDrafted.com (5 February 2007) comments:

 ‘From the mid 80s to the mid 90s, Microsoft amassed fortunes as an application developer for the Mac. Even in 1996, Microsoft reported making more money from Office–$4.56bn–than it did from all of its Windows sales combined–$4.11bn. Tying sales of Windows 95 to Office helped to boost sales of both. Microsoft pushed the new version of Office as a reason to buy Windows 95, and Windows 95 helped kill sales of rival applications, including the then standard WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3, neither of which were available or optimized for Windows 95 at its launch. By the release of Windows XP in 2001, Microsoft had swallowed up 98 percent of the OS market’

Innovation, but not for the masses

Although Windows 95 firmly established the desktop metaphor over rivals, this was the limit of its innovation and other enhancements were criticised as merely cosmetic. The successful introduction of encyclopedia software called Encarta on CD-Rom was regarded as cutting edge use of technology for encyclopedic content. That encyclopedias might not be traditionally editorially controlled and might instead be participatory by the next major Windows release was not anticipated by Bill Gates in his published book The Road Ahead in 1995 or its heavily revised 1996 reprint.

Many innovations after the achievement of software monopoly never reached the masses or if they did, many years later than when they first appeared. IBM OS/2 never replaced Windows 95, though some considered it more advanced. By 1997, an operating system called BeOS had been introduced with instant-on boot, 64-bit, journaling, indexing and metadata tags, but this too never reached the masses. The first 32-bit internet web browser, with FTP client, usenet group reader and internet relay chat (IRC) client was not from Microsoft but from Cyberjack in 1995. But by embedding Internet Explorer into Windows just as the internet was taking off, Microsoft was able to delay tabbed web browsing as standard (until 2006) which already existed in the relatively popular Netscape Navigator. Internet Explorer became so popular for about 5 years after 2001 that it felt no need to introduce a new version. By then it could no longer ignore the threat of Mozilla Firefox (loosely descended from Netscape) which was rapidly gaining market share.

At least, the marketing for new versions of Windows did claim to offer usability improvements and fix the many problems identified in previous versions rather than just eye-candy. What became clear beyond any doubt was that software was getting inflated at a rate roughly in proportion to each passing year (faster than Moore’s Law). Benchmarking tests are one way to test this, and are sometimes used in the independent computing press.

Bill Gates commented: ‘I’m saying we don’t do a new version to fix bugs […] We’d never be able to sell a release on that basis’ (Focus Magazine 23 October 1995).

The vision of ‘a computer in every home’ began to look dated. Instead, focus shifted to encouraging existing computer users to upgrade software. It suited hardware manufacturers that software updates should make older computers slower. Whereas the earlier trend was for first-time hardware sales to come packaged with software, now software sales (with artificial barriers)  would drive the need to buy new hardware.

Games also played a big part in driving early hardware sales of the first personal computers in the home. Games revenue eventually overtook the movie and music industry and games were even described as the leading artform of the era. The latest ‘Call of Duty’ game was the biggest entertainment launch ever in revenue terms. Games helped drive the industry upgrades but many users’ reluctance to upgrade persisted, and Windows sales through retail channels continued to decline. Planned obsolescence needed introducing more forcefully, and subscriber-computing and the internet was about to offer the opportunity to do it.

The emergence of viruses and malware on the burgeoning internet helped the software update industry. The idea of software spying on the user or otherwise compromising privacy, was something malware and viruses did, not legitimate software. Users owned their software and anything else was an alien concept. As one user on MSFN.org put it:

  ‘I will never understand why users tolerate or accept this. If an individual or company demanded that you prove that you did not steal your home or car, you’d eventually file some kind of complaint or harassment charges against them. If the same standards that are used for applications were applied to operating systems, XP and newer systems would be classified as spyware. Windows has been going in the opposite direction for some time, with each new version giving the user less control over what it does and less access to the data it stores.’

This comfortable position of around 90 percent market share could not be threatened by any rivals. Journalists of the computing press might have been tempted to describe the hardware and software monopolies as the end of home personal computing history. But to do so, would have been as foolish as Francis Fukuyama’s claim to have reached ‘The End of History’ a decade earlier.

DJW

Link to Part 2

Letters: World Without Money (2012)

Letters to the Editors from the June 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

World Without Money

Dear Editors

I remember the struggling “thirties” for my Mum and Dad, hard to find work and being abused by the capitalist system. Then with five children war took place and sent three of us to evacuation. Money I thought of was pounds shillings and pence and farthing and three penny piece Mum put in the Christmas pud.

Peace arrived and as time has gone by you heard of money crisis, tighten your belt, “you’ve never had it so good”, “a new beginning” and “we’re all in this together”, ” big society”, yes Cameron rich and poor!

Money blinds me with calculations I don’t understand, not pounds shillings and pence but millions, billions and trillions now.

The needs for people are to be fed well, sheltered and to understand to have the best of everything. Hospital, housing, schools and everything that provides a good living.

I don’t want to hear that I have an enemy today, I didn’t know him yesterday but my so-called country tells me and my family to fight him and his family. So where in the present money crisis we are unable to put money into every good and necessary need they can suddenly find millions and trillions for fighter planes and every killing machine you can think of.

Is this all insane or could there be another way to live on this great planet of ours. A global moneyless society for the whole human race. Co-operation not competition. We have the manpower, technology, resources and voluntary know-how. Capitalism has shown us how it could be but money gets in the way! So?

I’ve never been any good at understanding maths and missed out education during the war but am able to think about and see things that I hear and see. I don’t need leaders telling me what’s good or bad for me and at the same time dancing to the tune of capitalism putting profit before need.

Florrie Barwick, 

Aveley, Essex

What about the family?

Dear Editors

How do we see the Family and the upbringing of children in society after the transition from capitalism to socialism?

In the Kibbutzim in Israel from the 1950s to the 1980s people lived in a collective environment without private property where there were communal children’s homes and sleeping arrangements and the collective upbringing of children. Kibbutzim would ultimately fail as ‘socialist’ enterprises because they existed inside a capitalist framework.

In 1884 in The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, Engels describes how humanity in its hunter-gatherer stage of development lived in a primitive-communist society with female solidarity, a brotherhood of man and collective upbringing of children. It is with the end of the matrilineal clan and the beginning of patriarchy we get the beginnings of the family and private property. Professor Chris Knight’s 1991 book Blood Relations: Menstruation and the Origins of Culture follows on from the work of Engels and he states that for 95 percent of our existence, our species lived as egalitarian hunter-gatherers without family, private property and the state.

I am not proposing some return to primitivism-communist society but that the capitalist system has only been in existence a short time and is not the eternal state of things the bourgeoisie would like us to believe.

Wilhelm Reich in his 1933 The Mass Psychology of Fascism sees the family as one of the most important institutions that supports the authoritarian (capitalist?) state and is basically the centre for the production of reactionary men and women.

Following from Reich we have critique of the family in the writings of RD Laing in the 1960s, the seminal work The Death of the Family (1971) by ‘Marxist Existentialist’ psychoanalyst David Cooper, and volume 1 of Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Anti-Oedipus (1972) by Deleuze and Guattari.

Marxists have seen the family as an important conditioning agent in capitalist society, the cause of gender inequality and also the cause of much psychological damage to individuals. With the transition from capitalism to socialism will the family be redundant and collective upbringing the way forward?

Steve Clayton, 

London SW8.

Not free

Dear Editors

Regarding ‘From Handicraft to the Cloud Part 2’ (April Socialist Standard), when you say “Linux”, you probably mean the GNU operating system that I launched in 1983, in combination with the kernel Linux. People often call this combination “Linux”, which is unfair to us.

Linux is just one component of the combination. That component was developed starting in 1991 by Torvalds, who never agreed with the ethical principles of the free software movement. Thus, when people call the whole system “Linux” and give all the credit to him, they lead people away from our ideas of freedom.

Torvalds’ current version of Linux actually includes non-free pieces, and depends on other external non-free pieces. When we make 100% free GNU+Linux distributions, we have to remove those pieces from Linux before putting it into the distribution.

See http://www.gnu.org/gnu/linux-and-gnu.html for more explanation of this issue, and http://www.gnu.org/gnu/gnu-linux-faq.html about the name question.

If you were thinking of the complete system that people use, that is GNU/Linux or GNU+Linux.

If you were thinking of Torvalds’ program, I never particularly supported that.

Dr Richard Stallman, 

President, Free Software Foundation, 

Boston, USA

Pathfinders: Jealous Guy (2012)

The Pathfinders Column from the June 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

Jealous Guy

Chemistry at school has always had a dismal reputation as the boring science, which only gets interesting when it scales down into physics or up into biology. But a recent BBC Horizon documentary on the history of materials did an excellent job of correcting this prejudice by showing how new cooking recipes have been behind some of the most revolutionary technologies, from silicon and superconductors to graphene and even silicone. But one story stood out above all for its strangeness, the story of a material called Starlite, recently also picked up by New Scientist (16 May). Take some flour, baking soda and a few other sundries, whisk them up in a food processor, then paint the white gunge onto any surface and it will magically become impervious to temperatures up to 1000 degrees Celsius. A raw egg, covered with a thin layer of the stuff and then blowtorched for three minutes, remains raw and in fact not even warm.

This white paste, called Starlite by its amateur inventor, is the most efficient heat-resisting material anyone has ever discovered, and simple to apply to any surface. Nobody is entirely sure how it works. The fact that an untrained, non-scientist working alone in his domestic kitchen was able to come up with a formula that trumps all known products from established professional labs is not even the strangest part of the story. Even more bizarre was what happened next. The inventor, Maurice Ward, refused to divulge the recipe, afraid of course that he would be stitched up by capitalist manufacturers and their sharp-suited lawyers. History is littered with stories of inventors and discoverers not getting their due and Ward was justifiably determined that that wasn’t going to happen to him. He rejected every overture and stymied every proposal, obsessed with protecting his intellectual property rights.

Well, he protected them alright. One day he dropped down dead, taking his secret recipe to the grave. To this day nobody knows what went into making Starlite. It may never be known. The world has lost a wonder material.

For socialists the lesson drawn scarcely needs spelling out. Capitalism’s obsession with ownership has in this case indisputably prevented significant technological progress. It’s no good blaming Ward’s paranoia. He had every right to be paranoid. He was the golden goose in the shark tank and he knew it. People close to him have commented that it wasn’t even about the money. Ward just couldn’t stand the idea of being taken advantage of.

In socialism, with its culture of free cooperation and sharing, there is no conception of private property ‘rights’ in the first place. While it is not strictly impossible that one scientist might try to rob the credit for another’s achievement, there would at least be no money or power incentive for doing so. Without the corporate muscle that accumulated property can muster, third parties could scarcely be bought or intimidated into silence, so it’s unlikely that any such intellectual larceny could get off the ground, much less be sustained. Ward would have got the credit in socialism, no question, and we would all have got the gain.

A quiet revolution

On a more encouraging note, the concept of free access – the complete antithesis of the property ethic described above – seems to be extending delicate tendrils beyond the parent growth of computer software into the world of higher education. Some US universities including Stanford and MIT are opening up certain online degree courses, free to all comers. Given that a Stanford degree normally costs in the region of $150,000 this is a significant step. The logic, though, is simple enough. Once the course is devised, written and put online, costs of delivery fall to zero if no interactive sessions or manual marking is required, so what’s to lose? Free online courses won’t threaten the existing market for taught courses since remote or ‘distance learning’ doesn’t suit everyone, but the idea is catching on fast and it surely can’t be long before other universities follow suit.

What is really interesting is how the cheapness and ubiquity of online delivery is ‘normalising’ the idea of free access.  The change is not so much in promoting the idea of freebie giveaways, with which the world is already familiar, but more importantly in marrying the terms ‘free’ with ‘high quality’, a concept we are certainly not used to. Free software these days is top of the range, not cheap junk written in BASIC. Free apps are as good as anything Apple still hides behind its paywalls. Free information, in the form of Wikipedia, has proven as reliable as anything in commercial online encyclopedias. So ‘free’ and ‘quality’ are no longer antonyms.

This normalisation process in turn is changing expectations, giving rise to a modified sense of entitlement. It is this sense of entitlement, not just over computer software but over all resources, which the world’s population currently lacks and which socialists say they should have. Socialist revolution won’t be caused by stirring polemic about how bad or inefficient or even immoral the existing system is. It will be caused – perhaps it is already being caused – by a changed sense of entitlement, of what ‘normal’ ought to be. People who think it is ‘normal’ to have to pay for everything will not struggle to abolish the paying system even if they themselves suffer dire poverty as a result. But change what is considered ‘normal’, so that people come to expect that if something is worth having at all then it ought to be free, and you have the stirrings of a revolutionary mindset. The Occupy movement have been helpful in focussing minds on the telling inequality statistic of 99:1 but that isn’t enough.  More exciting is the quiet development of a new social norm, in which charging money for important and socially useful things begins to be seen as selfish, distasteful and somehow increasingly old-fashioned and obstructive.

Paddy Shannon

Free Software and Socialism

Latest post from the SPGB blog, Socialism Or Your Money Back

The law treats physical property and intellectual property (IP), much the same despite the fact that IP requires practically no labour to reproduce and does not spoil or wear out. The primary purpose of laws preventing people from copying music, software, literature, and other information, then, is to effect an artificial scarcity which helps secure profits for IP owners.

Independent software developers, angry with the restrictions imposed by commercial IP owners, began to voluntarily license their software copyrights under terms which guaranteed that the software would always be free for others to use, study, copy, and modify. Since most new software is created by refining and combining existing pieces of software, this licensing scheme essentially returned control of the means of production of software to the community.

The Free Software licensing scheme has since been popularised and adapted to other forms of IP, most notably artwork and literature. A case in point is Wikipedia, a large online encyclopaedia which is collaboratively edited by thousands of volunteers from all over the world. The facts that editors contribute voluntarily and without compensation, and that the project operates in a largely democratic fashion without a government, serve to refute the common anti-socialist argument that people will not work and cooperate without coercion. Though Wikipedia and other free content projects are not socialism, they are illustrative of how certain aspects of socialism could operate. If the artificial scarcity capitalism imposes on physical resources were abolished, as free licensing has done with certain informational resources, then what would be left to stop us from running the whole world through voluntary labour and free access?

SPGBer