INTRODUCTION
This
book was born out of the deepest frustration. We could
no longer bear the ignorance and childishness of the
public debate about the digital future. What was being
said and written was to such a depressingly large
extent tainted by ideological wishful thinking and/or
completely without any foundation in an historical
analysis of how a breakthrough of information technology
could transform a society. Neither the intoxicated
optimists nor the gloomy pessimists have seriously
been able to engage in the problematics; they are
both right only in the most banal respects, and wrong
about everything important. And yet we live and work
in Sweden, a country that is constantly held up as
an example of the early adoption of new technology
and a high degree of globalisation. If we are constantly
forced to wade through all this nonsense, whatever
must it be like in the rest of the world?
As
we wrote in the introduction to the original edition
of this book, it is about time that someone got a
firm grip of the most difficult and important issues
arising when a new form of information technology
is breaking through on all fronts: What will happen
to the State? What will happen to politics and democracy?
What will happen to education and the labour market?
What will happen to the creation of identity and patterns
of consumption? How will the media, art and philosophy
be affected? How will the old class structures be
altered, and what will the new class struggles look
like? Which groups will be favoured and which harmed
by the new circumstances? How will the new electronic
networks function? How will power and status be distributed
within the new hierarchies that are emerging? What
are the interests and strategies of the new elite?
What are the characteristics of the new underclass?
Which sciences will set the tone? Which social problems
will be most acute, and what solutions are available?
How will man¹s image of himself and the world
change, and what consequences will this have? And
so on.
In
order to approach these questions, we have had to
provide certain basic definitions. The reader needs
to know what a dominant information technology is,
and what is does; what man is, as both social and
biological creature; what power is, and how it is
gained. Our reasoning ranges over vast areas and transgresses
many boundaries. Experts in different spheres may
well be able to find much to argue with in the details,
but what interests us is the broader pattern which
only emerges if you dare to make breath-taking generalisations.
This is a book entirely written in the netocratic
spirit described within the book itself.
The
original Swedish version of Netocracy The New
Power Elite and Life After Capitalism was published
in September 2000, and reactions to it were extreme
everything from effusive to dismayed. The book
went on to top the Swedish bestseller chart for non-fiction
for the rest of the year, and during our many readings
there was fierce debate. How could we be so certain
of this or that?
What
did we mean by saying that capitalism and democracy
were inexorably in their death-throes? Wasn¹t
the reverse really the case, as everyone else was
saying, that the Net meant that capitalism could go
into turbo-drive and that democracy was heading for
a renaissance? Slightly more than a year has passed
since then, but a lot has happened, the death of the
dot.coms has hit stock markets all over the world,
hundreds of millions of pounds have vanished in one
of the most dramatic upheavals in modern economic
history, and we believe that developments have proved
us completely right.
For
everyone who read carefully what we had written, it
was clear that the analysis that so many people had
so energetically dismissed was correct on the most
crucial points. The Net is important. The Net is changing
everything. And what the dot.com crash shows, as clearly
as possible, is that the old capitalists basically
do not understand the new economic and social logic
that is developing on the Net. As a result, it is
almost self-evident that the old capitalists will
not manage to cling on to power once the new circumstances
have broken through completely. A new, global dominant
class has entered the arena: the Netocracy. And because
the old, capitalist production apparatus has become
redundant as a result, there will also be a new underclass;
instead of the old proletariat, a new consumtariat
is developing. The breakthrough of digital interactivity
as the dominant medium of communication is a paradigm
shift, which entails, in turn, a shift in power of
the same extent and significance as when the bourgeoisie
took over from the feudal aristocracy with the breakthrough
of industrialism.
However,
the most shattering events since the Swedish publication
of this book are, of course, the terror attacks on
the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon
in Washington DC on september 11, 2001, and their
effects on politics, culture, trade, stock markets
and virtually everything else. And even though the
scale of destruction and the extent of the consequences
might be mindblowing, the escalation of this sort
of blind violence, without any kind of concrete political
purpose, should come as no surprise to attentive readers
of Netocracy. This is, sadly, the shape of things
to come, as we, with in hindsight prophetic precision,
argue in chapters ten and eleven. We had better get
used to the fact that an informationalist society
is an environment where a small but tightknit network,
strictly driven by attentionalist principles, can
easily even get the world¹s biggest nation-state,
with almost unlimited financial means, down on its
knees. Already in the near future, September 11, 2001
may very well be considered the historical date when
informationalism formally overtook capitalism as the
dominant paradigm of the world. Or at least when it
proved it eventually will.
The
world now circles around identity. Groups of people
who feel, rightly or wrongly, that the effects of
globalisation work against them and render their traditions
and their whole lives meaningless, will increasingly
use the means most effective in the age of electronic,
interactive media to make their voices heard, and
more effective than anything else is the spectacular
act of terror. Don’t look for any ideology, don’t
look for a coherent logic; remember that the WTC high-jackers
were very well educated and very much at home on the
Net. These guys even booked their plane tickets on-line.
They possessed the necessary financial means, but
more importantly, the necessary networking skills,
to make their plans work. So this is certainly not
a matter of who is and who is not hooked up on the
Net, and it is certainly not a matter of rich and
poor; it is a matter of gaining or losing power under
changing circumstances, brought on by a major transformation
in our socio-ecological system, a transformation driven
by evolving technology more than anything else.
These
conflicts are very real, even though they may appear
confusing and full of paradoxes. Contrary to a popular
misconception, society becomes very much less transparent,
rather than more so, as a result of these changes.
A steady pattern will be difficult to fixate as new
trends confront ever more violent countertrends. It
will most likely not be a pretty picture.
Another
area of conflict arising from the book has been the
crisis of democracy. We have been accused of being
cynical, of lacking a democratic disposition when
we argue that the crisis is fatal and that the Net
is going to deal the death-blow rather than act as
any kind of knight in shining armour. But again: everything
suggested by developments is proving us right. All
graphs illustrating voter participation in elections
and engagement in party politics show a relentless
downward trend. According to press reports, for example,
more British people phoned up to vote in the final
of the TV docu-soap Survivor than bothered to vote
in the latest European election. This is nothing that
can be remedied with fancy phrases, the circumstances
under which democracy was the answer to the question
of how best to construct a political decision-making
process will not resurrected simply because we want
them to.
In
no way does this make us defeatists of determinists,
as some critics have claimed. Of course social developments
can be influenced, but only within a material framework,
anything else is muddled wishful-thinking. And the
possibilities of influencing the development of society
will be dramatically improved if you have a relatively
objective and well-thought-out understanding of the
nature and history of this framework.
Other
writers, such as Manuel Castels in his multi-volume
work The Information Age, have tried to encapsulate
the new paradigm, but they have nearly all been trapped
in the thought patterns of the old paradigm and have
therefore been unable to contribute noticeably to
an increase in understanding. Whereas Castels lists
masses of new statistics and tries to interpret all
his figures within the framework of traditional humanist
sciences and an obsolete view of politics, we try
instead to write and think from within the revolutionary
changes that are blowing like a whirlwind around us.
We are neither right nor left, we have no political
agenda. We are not for or against any particular changes,
we merely seek to understand and explain. How and
why? Because clarity of vision is preferable to self-deception.
These
questions are global. With this translation, the English-speaking
world can finally interact with our analysis. The
conversation continues, the number of participants
is growing. We are no longer quite as frustrated as
we were.
Stockholm, November 2001
Alexander
Bard & Jan Söderqvist
