CONTESTING DIGITAL DARWINISM

Dan Goodman, PhD.

Presented at West Virginia University's 21st Annual Colloquium on Literature and Film

As far back as 1989, Herbert Schiller warned:

Stunning corporate mergers and acquisitions among telephone, computer, and entertainment companies, each of them already dominant in their field, are preparing the way for an unprecedented corporate enclosure of national and social space (234).

Lest anyone think Shiller an alarmist, consider the implications of the 1996 Telecommunications Omnibus Bill, which flattens the barriers to mergers and aquisitions, makes deregulation the engine that drives the digital network, and makes only meager provisions for public access. This sellout of the public interest, which locks trickle-down logic into law, was barely reported, let alone contested.

Indeed, the Telecommunications Bill, ominous as it is, merely ratifies a tectonic shift in the global economy, one that began in the early 80s with digital computer networks and the concomitant deregulation of the telecommunications and finance sectors. The shift is towards a more flexible "cybernetic" capitalism (Robbins and Webster) whose central nervous system is the digital network. Granted, this convergence is no seamless monolith; still, it is a storm system gathering intensity in the face of weak opposition--a self augmenting system whereby capital commands both the representational terrain and the actually existing infrastructure. This convergence raises two crucial questions for those in cultural studies: How does a shift register in the cultural sphere? How can we contest the battle over representations that is thus far dominated by capital?

What are the chief characteristics of cybernetic capitalism? Transnational corporations have become planned economies with vast internal markets within which raw materials, products, informational services, and funds continually circulate. Advanced telecommunications networks are the glue that binds these disparate enterprises and drives transnationals to extend their reach. The network is both the means and the rationale for an intensive restructuring of corporate capital. Command of the telecommunications pipeline confers strategic advantage, including greatly increased control over remote production and internal operations even down to the keystroke; aggressive restructuring of the workforce; wider scope to exploit transfer pricing and currency fluctuations. Pipeline command allows corporations to target consumers down to the fine grain of individual preference; it gives corporations the leverage with which to whipsaw localities desperate to retain them. The scramble for pipeline is further exacerbated by deregulation of the twin sectors: financial deregulation underwrites the massive investments in pipeline, which accelerates, in turn, the transaction velocity of capital, spurring the creation of increasingly sophisticated financial instruments, which spurs further investment in the pipeline--and so the vortex intensifies.

The ripple effect of this tectonic shift is felt in the fine grain of personal transactions. For example, surface-level concern about invasion of personal privacy does not begin to touch on the subtlety and scope of commercial (or consumer) surveillance based on transaction-generated data. As opposed to the more active collecting of data by control agencies, there exists a more passive gathering of transaction-generated data in which any electronically mediated activity yields information that is fed into databases. The Internet, being bi-directional, is a revenue bonanza that stimulates consumption while extracting consumer data--all of which seriously curtails our freedom to work the Internet. Think of yourself as being shadowed by you transaction-generated double, where every Internet transaction leaves a trace that can be fed into the database where your double is subject to analysis. Now imagine this double growing by increments every time you pass through an electronic gateway. Indeed, when one considers how little of the surveillance iceberg is visible to the public, one feels how heavily the burden of representation weighs against those who would contest the corporate enclosure of public space.

Consider, too, the impending eclipse of the original, text-centered Internet (that is, newsgroups, bulletin boards, IRC, etc.) in favor of the Web. Those who have visited the "old neighborhood" lately know how badly it has deteriorated. The ratio of "spam" to substantive postings has increased, while the number of moderated newsgroups has decreased. Many of the livelier fringe sites are now vacant shells that survive only to steer traffic onto the Web, which is draining the life from the Internet like a mall drains the life from downtown. The bandwidth-intensive Web siphons off the Net's best resources and fosters the erroneous impression that the Internet was merely its primitive precursor. Such digital Darwinism runs roughshod over those who value the openness, accessibility, and true interactivity of the original system over the more tightly monitored, consumption-driven and segregated Web. The Web is not simply an advance over the Net; it is a more managed, less participatory regime where the drive for image consumption supplants language play.

Cybernetic capitalism has produced a deep asymmetry whereby transnationals impose their presence on the Internet and extend their reach into our lives while reserving the power and prerogatives of private pipelines for themselves. The proliferation of private networks makes the global system less a Macluhanesque village than a series of separate and competing nervous systems overseeing flow of goods, people, and money at one remove from the public gaze.