[ExI] Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit

[Stefano Vaj]

Long, and somewhat moralistic, piece that OTOH to a large extent expresses
in a more eloquent and documented way what I have been repeating for a
while...

http://www.thebaffler.com/past/of_flying_cars

Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit

David Graeber

from The Baffler No. 19

A secret question hovers over us, a sense of disappointment, a broken
promise we were given as children about what our adult world was supposed
to be like. I am referring not to the standard false promises that children
are always given (about how the world is fair, or how those who work hard
shall be rewarded), but to a particular generational promise-given to those
who were children in the fifties, sixties, seventies, or eighties-one that
was never quite articulated as a promise but rather as a set of assumptions
about what our adult world would be like. And since it was never quite
promised, now that it has failed to come true, we're left confused:
indignant, but at the same time, embarrassed at our own indignation,
ashamed we were ever so silly to believe our elders to begin with.

Where, in short, are the flying cars? Where are the force fields, tractor
beams, teleportation pods, antigravity sleds, tricorders, immortality
drugs, colonies on Mars, and all the other technological wonders any child
growing up in the mid-to-late twentieth century assumed would exist by now?
Even those inventions that seemed ready to emerge-like cloning or
cryogenics-ended up betraying their lofty promises. What happened to them?

We are well informed of the wonders of computers, as if this is some sort
of unanticipated compensation, but, in fact, we haven't moved even
computing to the point of progress that people in the fifties expected we'd
have reached by now. We don't have computers we can have an interesting
conversation with, or robots that can walk our dogs or take our clothes to
the Laundromat.

As someone who was eight years old at the time of the Apollo moon landing,
I remember calculating that I would be thirty-nine in the magic year 2000
and wondering what the world would be like. Did I expect I would be living
in such a world of wonders? Of course. Everyone did. Do I feel cheated now?
It seemed unlikely that I'd live to see all the things I was reading about
in science fiction, but it never occurred to me that I wouldn't see any of
them.

At the turn of the millennium, I was expecting an outpouring of reflections
on why we had gotten the future of technology so wrong. Instead, just about
all the authoritative voices-both Left and Right-began their reflections
from the assumption that we do live in an unprecedented new technological
utopia of one sort or another.

The common way of dealing with the uneasy sense that this might not be so
is to brush it aside, to insist all the progress that could have happened
has happened and to treat anything more as silly. "Oh, you mean all that
Jetsons stuff?" I'm asked-as if to say, but that was just for children!
Surely, as grown-ups, we understand The Jetsons offered as accurate a view
of the future as The Flintstones offered of the Stone Age.

Even in the seventies and eighties, in fact, sober sources such as National
Geographic and the Smithsonian were informing children of imminent space
stations and expeditions to Mars. Creators of science fiction movies used
to come up with concrete dates, often no more than a generation in the
future, in which to place their futuristic fantasies. In 1968, Stanley
Kubrick felt that a moviegoing audience would find it perfectly natural to
assume that only thirty-three years later, in 2001, we would have
commercial moon flights, city-like space stations, and computers with human
personalities maintaining astronauts in suspended animation while traveling
to Jupiter. Video telephony is just about the only new technology from that
particular movie that has appeared-and it was technically possible when the
movie was showing. 2001 can be seen as a curio, but what about Star Trek?
The Star Trek mythos was set in the sixties, too, but the show kept getting
revived, leaving audiences for Star Trek Voyager in, say, 2005, to try to
figure out what to make of the fact that according to the logic of the
program, the world was supposed to be recovering from fighting off the rule
of genetically engineered supermen in the Eugenics Wars of the nineties.

By 1989, when the creators of Back to the Future II were dutifully placing
flying cars and anti-gravity hoverboards in the hands of ordinary teenagers
in the year 2015, it wasn't clear if this was meant as a prediction or a
joke.

The usual move in science fiction is to remain vague about the dates, so as
to render "the future" a zone of pure fantasy, no different than Middle
Earth or Narnia, or like Star Wars, "a long time ago in a galaxy far, far
away." As a result, our science fiction future is, most often, not a future
at all, but more like an alternative dimension, a dream-time, a
technological Elsewhere, existing in days to come in the same sense that
elves and dragon-slayers existed in the past-another screen for the
displacement of moral dramas and mythic fantasies into the dead ends of
consumer pleasure.

Might the cultural sensibility that came to be referred to as postmodernism
best be seen as a prolonged meditation on all the technological changes
that never happened? The question struck me as I watched one of the recent
Star Wars movies. The movie was terrible, but I couldn't help but feel
impressed by the quality of the special effects. Recalling the clumsy
special effects typical of fifties sci-fi films, I kept thinking how
impressed a fifties audience would have been if they'd known what we could
do by now-only to realize, "Actually, no. They wouldn't be impressed at
all, would they? They thought we'd be doing this kind of thing by now. Not
just figuring out more sophisticated ways to simulate it."

That last word-simulate-is key. The technologies that have advanced since
the seventies are mainly either medical technologies or information
technologies-largely, technologies of simulation. They are technologies of
what Jean Baudrillard and Umberto Eco called the "hyper-real," the ability
to make imitations that are more realistic than originals. The postmodern
sensibility, the feeling that we had somehow broken into an unprecedented
new historical period in which we understood that there is nothing new;
that grand historical narratives of progress and liberation were
meaningless; that everything now was simulation, ironic repetition,
fragmentation, and pastiche-all this makes sense in a technological
environment in which the only breakthroughs were those that made it easier
to create, transfer, and rearrange virtual projections of things that
either already existed, or, we came to realize, never would. Surely, if we
were vacationing in geodesic domes on Mars or toting about pocket-size
nuclear fusion plants or telekinetic mind-reading devices no one would ever
have been talking like this. The postmodern moment was a desperate way to
take what could otherwise only be felt as a bitter disappointment and to
dress it up as something epochal, exciting, and new.


In the earliest formulations, which largely came out of the Marxist
tradition, a lot of this technological background was acknowledged. Fredric
Jameson's "Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism"
proposed the term "postmodernism" to refer to the cultural logic
appropriate to a new, technological phase of capitalism, one that had been
heralded by Marxist economist Ernest Mandel as early as 1972. Mandel had
argued that humanity stood at the verge of a "third technological
revolution," as profound as the Agricultural or Industrial Revolution, in
which computers, robots, new energy sources, and new information
technologies would replace industrial labor-the "end of work" as it soon
came to be called-reducing us all to designers and computer technicians
coming up with crazy visions that cybernetic factories would produce.

End of work arguments were popular in the late seventies and early eighties
as social thinkers pondered what would happen to the traditional
working-class-led popular struggle once the working class no longer
existed. (The answer: it would turn into identity politics.) Jameson
thought of himself as exploring the forms of consciousness and historical
sensibilities likely to emerge from this new age.

What happened, instead, is that the spread of information technologies and
new ways of organizing transport-the containerization of shipping, for
example-allowed those same industrial jobs to be outsourced to East Asia,
Latin America, and other countries where the availability of cheap labor
allowed manufacturers to employ much less technologically sophisticated
production-line techniques than they would have been obliged to employ at
home.

>From the perspective of those living in Europe, North America, and Japan,
the results did seem to be much as predicted. Smokestack industries did
disappear; jobs came to be divided between a lower stratum of service
workers and an upper stratum sitting in antiseptic bubbles playing with
computers. But below it all lay an uneasy awareness that the postwork
civilization was a giant fraud. Our carefully engineered high-tech sneakers
were not being produced by intelligent cyborgs or self-replicating
molecular nanotechnology; they were being made on the equivalent of
old-fashioned Singer sewing machines, by the daughters of Mexican and
Indonesian farmers who, as the result of WTO or NAFTA-sponsored trade
deals, had been ousted from their ancestral lands. It was a guilty
awareness that lay beneath the postmodern sensibility and its celebration
of the endless play of images and surfaces.

Why did the projected explosion of technological growth everyone was
expecting-the moon bases, the robot factories-fail to happen? There are two
possibilities. Either our expectations about the pace of technological
change were unrealistic (in which case, we need to know why so many
intelligent people believed they were not) or our expectations were not
unrealistic (in which case, we need to know what happened to derail so many
credible ideas and prospects).

Most social analysts choose the first explanation and trace the problem to
the Cold War space race. Why, these analysts wonder, did both the United
States and the Soviet Union become so obsessed with the idea of manned
space travel? It was never an efficient way to engage in scientific
research. And it encouraged unrealistic ideas of what the human future
would be like.

Could the answer be that both the United States and the Soviet Union had
been, in the century before, societies of pioneers, one expanding across
the Western frontier, the other across Siberia? Didn't they share a
commitment to the myth of a limitless, expansive future, of human
colonization of vast empty spaces, that helped convince the leaders of both
superpowers they had entered into a "space age" in which they were battling
over control of the future itself? All sorts of myths were at play here, no
doubt, but that proves nothing about the feasibility of the project.

Some of those science fiction fantasies (at this point we can't know which
ones) could have been brought into being. For earlier generations, many
science fiction fantasies had been brought into being. Those who grew up at
the turn of the century reading Jules Verne or H.G. Wells imagined the
world of, say, 1960 with flying machines, rocket ships, submarines, radio,
and television-and that was pretty much what they got. If it wasn't
unrealistic in 1900 to dream of men traveling to the moon, then why was it
unrealistic in the sixties to dream of jet-packs and robot laundry-maids?

In fact, even as those dreams were being outlined, the material base for
their achievement was beginning to be whittled away. There is reason to
believe that even by the fifties and sixties, the pace of technological
innovation was slowing down from the heady pace of the first half of the
century. There was a last spate in the fifties when microwave ovens (1954),
the Pill (1957), and lasers (1958) all appeared in rapid succession. But
since then, technological advances have taken the form of clever new ways
of combining existing technologies (as in the space race) and new ways of
putting existing technologies to consumer use (the most famous example is
television, invented in 1926, but mass produced only after the war.) Yet,
in part because the space race gave everyone the impression that remarkable
advances were happening, the popular impression during the sixties was that
the pace of technological change was speeding up in terrifying,
uncontrollable ways.

Alvin Toffler's 1970 best seller Future Shock argued that almost all the
social problems of the sixties could be traced back to the increasing pace
of technological change. The endless outpouring of scientific breakthroughs
transformed the grounds of daily existence, and left Americans without any
clear idea of what normal life was. Just consider the family, where not
just the Pill, but also the prospect of in vitro fertilization, test tube
babies, and sperm and egg donation were about to make the idea of
motherhood obsolete.

Humans were not psychologically prepared for the pace of change, Toffler
wrote. He coined a term for the phenomenon: "accelerative thrust." It had
begun with the Industrial Revolution, but by roughly 1850, the effect had
become unmistakable. Not only was everything around us changing, but most
of it-human knowledge, the size of the population, industrial growth,
energy use-was changing exponentially. The only solution, Toffler argued,
was to begin some kind of control over the process, to create institutions
that would assess emerging technologies and their likely effects, to ban
technologies likely to be too socially disruptive, and to guide development
in the direction of social harmony.

While many of the historical trends Toffler describes are accurate, the
book appeared when most of these exponential trends halted. It was right
around 1970 when the increase in the number of scientific papers published
in the world-a figure that had doubled every fifteen years since, roughly,
1685-began leveling off. The same was true of books and patents.

Toffler's use of acceleration was particularly unfortunate. For most of
human history, the top speed at which human beings could travel had been
around 25 miles per hour. By 1900 it had increased to 100 miles per hour,
and for the next seventy years it did seem to be increasing exponentially.
By the time Toffler was writing, in 1970, the record for the fastest speed
at which any human had traveled stood at roughly 25,000 mph, achieved by
the crew of Apollo 10 in 1969, just one year before. At such an exponential
rate, it must have seemed reasonable to assume that within a matter of
decades, humanity would be exploring other solar systems.

Since 1970, no further increase has occurred. The record for the fastest a
human has ever traveled remains with the crew of Apollo 10. True, the
maximum speed of commercial air flight did peak one year later, at 1,400
mph, with the launching of the Concorde in 1971. But that speed not only
has failed to increase; it has decreased since the Concorde was abandoned
in 2003.

None of this stopped Toffler's own career. He kept retooling his analysis
to come up with new spectacular pronouncements. In 1980, he produced The
Third Wave, its argument lifted from Ernest Mandel's "third technological
revolution"-except that while Mandel thought these changes would spell the
end of capitalism, Toffler assumed capitalism was eternal. By 1990, Toffler
was the personal intellectual guru to Republican congressman Newt Gingrich,
who claimed that his 1994 "Contract With America" was inspired, in part, by
the understanding that the United States needed to move from an antiquated,
materialist, industrial mind-set to a new, free-market, information age,
Third Wave civilization.

There are all sorts of ironies in this connection. One of Toffler's
greatest achievements was inspiring the government to create an Office of
Technology Assessment (OTA). One of Gingrich's first acts on winning
control of the House of Representatives in 1995 was defunding the OTA as an
example of useless government extravagance. Still, there's no contradiction
here. By this time, Toffler had long since given up on influencing policy
by appealing to the general public; he was making a living largely by
giving seminars to CEOs and corporate think tanks. His insights had been
privatized.

Gingrich liked to call himself a "conservative futurologist." This, too,
might seem oxymoronic; but, in fact, Toffler's own conception of futurology
was never progressive. Progress was always presented as a problem that
needed to be solved.

Toffler might best be seen as a lightweight version of the
nineteenth-century social theorist Auguste Comte, who believed that he was
standing on the brink of a new age-in his case, the Industrial Age-driven
by the inexorable progress of technology, and that the social cataclysms of
his times were caused by the social system not adjusting. The older feudal
order had developed Catholic theology, a way of thinking about man's place
in the cosmos perfectly suited to the social system of the time, as well as
an institutional structure, the Church, that conveyed and enforced such
ideas in a way that could give everyone a sense of meaning and belonging.
The Industrial Age had developed its own system of ideas-science-but
scientists had not succeeded in creating anything like the Catholic Church.
Comte concluded that we needed to develop a new science, which he dubbed
"sociology," and said that sociologists should play the role of priests in
a new Religion of Society that would inspire everyone with a love of order,
community, work discipline, and family values. Toffler was less ambitious;
his futurologists were not supposed to play the role of priests.

Gingrich had a second guru, a libertarian theologian named George Gilder,
and Gilder, like Toffler, was obsessed with technology and social change.
In an odd way, Gilder was more optimistic. Embracing a radical version of
Mandel's Third Wave argument, he insisted that what we were seeing with the
rise of computers was an "overthrow of matter." The old, materialist
Industrial Society, where value came from physical labor, was giving way to
an Information Age where value emerges directly from the minds of
entrepreneurs, just as the world had originally appeared ex nihilo from the
mind of God, just as money, in a proper supply-side economy, emerged ex
nihilo from the Federal Reserve and into the hands of value-creating
capitalists. Supply-side economic policies, Gilder concluded, would ensure
that investment would continue to steer away from old government
boondoggles like the space program and toward more productive information
and medical technologies.

But if there was a conscious, or semi-conscious, move away from investment
in research that might lead to better rockets and robots, and toward
research that would lead to such things as laser printers and CAT scans, it
had begun well before Toffler's Future Shock (1970) and Gilder's Wealth and
Poverty (1981). What their success shows is that the issues they
raised-that existing patterns of technological development would lead to
social upheaval, and that we needed to guide technological development in
directions that did not challenge existing structures of authority-echoed
in the corridors of power. Statesmen and captains of industry had been
thinking about such questions for some time.



Industrial capitalism has fostered an extremely rapid rate of scientific
advance and technological innovation-one with no parallel in previous human
history. Even capitalism's greatest detractors, Karl Marx and Friedrich
Engels, celebrated its unleashing of the "productive forces." Marx and
Engels also believed that capitalism's continual need to revolutionize the
means of industrial production would be its undoing. Marx argued that, for
certain technical reasons, value-and therefore profits-can be extracted
only from human labor. Competition forces factory owners to mechanize
production, to reduce labor costs, but while this is to the short-term
advantage of the firm, mechanization's effect is to drive down the general
rate of profit.

For 150 years, economists have debated whether all this is true. But if it
is true, then the decision by industrialists not to pour research funds
into the invention of the robot factories that everyone was anticipating in
the sixties, and instead to relocate their factories to labor-intensive,
low-tech facilities in China or the Global South makes a great deal of
sense.

As I've noted, there's reason to believe the pace of technological
innovation in productive processes-the factories themselves-began to slow
in the fifties and sixties, but the side effects of America's rivalry with
the Soviet Union made innovation appear to accelerate. There was the
awesome space race, alongside frenetic efforts by U.S. industrial planners
to apply existing technologies to consumer purposes, to create an
optimistic sense of burgeoning prosperity and guaranteed progress that
would undercut the appeal of working-class politics.

These moves were reactions to initiatives from the Soviet Union. But this
part of the history is difficult for Americans to remember, because at the
end of the Cold War, the popular image of the Soviet Union switched from
terrifyingly bold rival to pathetic basket case-the exemplar of a society
that could not work. Back in the fifties, in fact, many United States
planners suspected the Soviet system worked better. Certainly, they
recalled the fact that in the thirties, while the United States had been
mired in depression, the Soviet Union had maintained almost unprecedented
economic growth rates of 10 percent to 12 percent a year-an achievement
quickly followed by the production of tank armies that defeated Nazi
Germany, then by the launching of Sputnik in 1957, then by the first manned
spacecraft, the Vostok, in 1961.

It's often said the Apollo moon landing was the greatest historical
achievement of Soviet communism. Surely, the United States would never have
contemplated such a feat had it not been for the cosmic ambitions of the
Soviet Politburo. We are used to thinking of the Politburo as a group of
unimaginative gray bureaucrats, but they were bureaucrats who dared to
dream astounding dreams. The dream of world revolution was only the first.
It's also true that most of them-changing the course of mighty rivers, this
sort of thing-either turned out to be ecologically and socially disastrous,
or, like Joseph Stalin's one-hundred-story Palace of the Soviets or a
twenty-story statue of Vladimir Lenin, never got off the ground.

After the initial successes of the Soviet space program, few of these
schemes were realized, but the leadership never ceased coming up with new
ones. Even in the eighties, when the United States was attempting its own
last, grandiose scheme, Star Wars, the Soviets were planning to transform
the world through creative uses of technology. Few outside of Russia
remember most of these projects, but great resources were devoted to them.
It's also worth noting that unlike the Star Wars project, which was
designed to sink the Soviet Union, most were not military in nature: as,
for instance, the attempt to solve the world hunger problem by harvesting
lakes and oceans with an edible bacteria called spirulina, or to solve the
world energy problem by launching hundreds of gigantic solar-power
platforms into orbit and beaming the electricity back to earth.

The American victory in the space race meant that, after 1968, U.S.
planners no longer took the competition seriously. As a result, the
mythology of the final frontier was maintained, even as the direction of
research and development shifted away from anything that might lead to the
creation of Mars bases and robot factories.

The standard line is that all this was a result of the triumph of the
market. The Apollo program was a Big Government project, Soviet-inspired in
the sense that it required a national effort coordinated by government
bureaucracies. As soon as the Soviet threat drew safely out of the picture,
though, capitalism was free to revert to lines of technological development
more in accord with its normal, decentralized, free-market imperatives-such
as privately funded research into marketable products like personal
computers. This is the line that men like Toffler and Gilder took in the
late seventies and early eighties.

In fact, the United States never did abandon gigantic,
government-controlled schemes of technological development. Mainly, they
just shifted to military research-and not just to Soviet-scale schemes like
Star Wars, but to weapons projects, research in communications and
surveillance technologies, and similar security-related concerns. To some
degree this had always been true: the billions poured into missile research
had always dwarfed the sums allocated to the space program. Yet by the
seventies, even basic research came to be conducted following military
priorities. One reason we don't have robot factories is because roughly 95
percent of robotics research funding has been channeled through the
Pentagon, which is more interested in developing unmanned drones than in
automating paper mills.

A case could be made that even the shift to research and development on
information technologies and medicine was not so much a reorientation
toward market-driven consumer imperatives, but part of an all-out effort to
follow the technological humbling of the Soviet Union with total victory in
the global class war-seen simultaneously as the imposition of absolute U.S.
military dominance overseas, and, at home, the utter rout of social
movements.

For the technologies that did emerge proved most conducive to surveillance,
work discipline, and social control. Computers have opened up certain
spaces of freedom, as we're constantly reminded, but instead of leading to
the workless utopia Abbie Hoffman imagined, they have been employed in such
a way as to produce the opposite effect. They have enabled a
financialization of capital that has driven workers desperately into debt,
and, at the same time, provided the means by which employers have created
"flexible" work regimes that have both destroyed traditional job security
and increased working hours for almost everyone. Along with the export of
factory jobs, the new work regime has routed the union movement and
destroyed any possibility of effective working-class politics.

Meanwhile, despite unprecedented investment in research on medicine and
life sciences, we await cures for cancer and the common cold, and the most
dramatic medical breakthroughs we have seen have taken the form of drugs
such as Prozac, Zoloft, or Ritalin-tailor-made to ensure that the new work
demands don't drive us completely, dysfunctionally crazy.

With results like these, what will the epitaph for neoliberalism look like?
I think historians will conclude it was a form of capitalism that
systematically prioritized political imperatives over economic ones. Given
a choice between a course of action that would make capitalism seem the
only possible economic system, and one that would transform capitalism into
a viable, long-term economic system, neoliberalism chooses the former every
time. There is every reason to believe that destroying job security while
increasing working hours does not create a more productive (let alone more
innovative or loyal) workforce. Probably, in economic terms, the result is
negative-an impression confirmed by lower growth rates in just about all
parts of the world in the eighties and nineties.

But the neoliberal choice has been effective in depoliticizing labor and
overdetermining the future. Economically, the growth of armies, police, and
private security services amounts to dead weight. It's possible, in fact,
that the very dead weight of the apparatus created to ensure the
ideological victory of capitalism will sink it. But it's also easy to see
how choking off any sense of an inevitable, redemptive future that could be
different from our world is a crucial part of the neoliberal project.

At this point all the pieces would seem to be falling neatly into place. By
the sixties, conservative political forces were growing skittish about the
socially disruptive effects of technological progress, and employers were
beginning to worry about the economic impact of mechanization. The fading
Soviet threat allowed for a reallocation of resources in directions seen as
less challenging to social and economic arrangements, or indeed directions
that could support a campaign of reversing the gains of progressive social
movements and achieving a decisive victory in what U.S. elites saw as a
global class war. The change of priorities was introduced as a withdrawal
of big-government projects and a return to the market, but in fact the
change shifted government-directed research away from programs like NASA or
alternative energy sources and toward military, information, and medical
technologies.

Of course this doesn't explain everything. Above all, it does not explain
why, even in those areas that have become the focus of well-funded research
projects, we have not seen anything like the kind of advances anticipated
fifty years ago. If 95 percent of robotics research has been funded by the
military, then where are the Klaatu-style killer robots shooting death rays
from their eyes?

Obviously, there have been advances in military technology in recent
decades. One of the reasons we all survived the Cold War is that while
nuclear bombs might have worked as advertised, their delivery systems did
not; intercontinental ballistic missiles weren't capable of striking
cities, let alone specific targets inside cities, and this fact meant there
was little point in launching a nuclear first strike unless you intended to
destroy the world.

Contemporary cruise missiles are accurate by comparison. Still, precision
weapons never do seem capable of assassinating specific individuals
(Saddam, Osama, Qaddafi), even when hundreds are dropped. And ray guns have
not materialized-surely not for lack of trying. We can assume the Pentagon
has spent billions on death ray research, but the closest they've come so
far are lasers that might, if aimed correctly, blind an enemy gunner
looking directly at the beam. Aside from being unsporting, this is
pathetic: lasers are a fifties technology. Phasers that can be set to stun
do not appear to be on the drawing boards; and when it comes to infantry
combat, the preferred weapon almost everywhere remains the AK-47, a Soviet
design named for the year it was introduced: 1947.

The Internet is a remarkable innovation, but all we are talking about is a
super-fast and globally accessible combination of library, post office, and
mail-order catalogue. Had the Internet been described to a science fiction
aficionado in the fifties and sixties and touted as the most dramatic
technological achievement since his time, his reaction would have been
disappointment. Fifty years and this is the best our scientists managed to
come up with? We expected computers that would think!

Overall, levels of research funding have increased dramatically since the
seventies. Admittedly, the proportion of that funding that comes from the
corporate sector has increased most dramatically, to the point that private
enterprise is now funding twice as much research as the government, but the
increase is so large that the total amount of government research funding,
in real-dollar terms, is much higher than it was in the sixties. "Basic,"
"curiosity-driven," or "blue skies" research-the kind that is not driven by
the prospect of any immediate practical application, and that is most
likely to lead to unexpected breakthroughs-occupies an ever smaller
proportion of the total, though so much money is being thrown around
nowadays that overall levels of basic research funding have increased.

Yet most observers agree that the results have been paltry. Certainly we no
longer see anything like the continual stream of conceptual
revolutions-genetic inheritance, relativity, psychoanalysis, quantum
mechanics-that people had grown used to, and even expected, a hundred years
before. Why?

Part of the answer has to do with the concentration of resources on a
handful of gigantic projects: "big science," as it has come to be called.
The Human Genome Project is often held out as an example. After spending
almost three billion dollars and employing thousands of scientists and
staff in five different countries, it has mainly served to establish that
there isn't very much to be learned from sequencing genes that's of much
use to anyone else. Even more, the hype and political investment
surrounding such projects demonstrate the degree to which even basic
research now seems to be driven by political, administrative, and marketing
imperatives that make it unlikely anything revolutionary will happen.

Here, our fascination with the mythic origins of Silicon Valley and the
Internet have blinded us to what's really going on. It has allowed us to
imagine that research and development is now driven, primarily, by small
teams of plucky entrepreneurs, or the sort of decentralized cooperation
that creates open-source software. This is not so, even though such
research teams are most likely to produce results. Research and development
is still driven by giant bureaucratic projects.

What has changed is the bureaucratic culture. The increasing
interpenetration of government, university, and private firms has led
everyone to adopt the language, sensibilities, and organizational forms
that originated in the corporate world. Although this might have helped in
creating marketable products, since that is what corporate bureaucracies
are designed to do, in terms of fostering original research, the results
have been catastrophic.

My own knowledge comes from universities, both in the United States and
Britain. In both countries, the last thirty years have seen a veritable
explosion of the proportion of working hours spent on administrative tasks
at the expense of pretty much everything else. In my own university, for
instance, we have more administrators than faculty members, and the faculty
members, too, are expected to spend at least as much time on administration
as on teaching and research combined. The same is true, more or less, at
universities worldwide.

The growth of administrative work has directly resulted from introducing
corporate management techniques. Invariably, these are justified as ways of
increasing efficiency and introducing competition at every level. What they
end up meaning in practice is that everyone winds up spending most of their
time trying to sell things: grant proposals; book proposals; assessments of
students' jobs and grant applications; assessments of our colleagues;
prospectuses for new interdisciplinary majors; institutes; conference
workshops; universities themselves (which have now become brands to be
marketed to prospective students or contributors); and so on.

As marketing overwhelms university life, it generates documents about
fostering imagination and creativity that might just as well have been
designed to strangle imagination and creativity in the cradle. No major new
works of social theory have emerged in the United States in the last thirty
years. We have been reduced to the equivalent of medieval scholastics,
writing endless annotations of French theory from the seventies, despite
the guilty awareness that if new incarnations of Gilles Deleuze, Michel
Foucault, or Pierre Bourdieu were to appear in the academy today, we would
deny them tenure.

There was a time when academia was society's refuge for the eccentric,
brilliant, and impractical. No longer. It is now the domain of professional
self-marketers. As a result, in one of the most bizarre fits of social
self-destructiveness in history, we seem to have decided we have no place
for our eccentric, brilliant, and impractical citizens. Most languish in
their mothers' basements, at best making the occasional, acute intervention
on the Internet.

If all this is true in the social sciences, where research is still carried
out with minimal overhead largely by individuals, one can imagine how much
worse it is for astrophysicists. And, indeed, one astrophysicist, Jonathan
Katz, has recently warned students pondering a career in the sciences. Even
if you do emerge from the usual decade-long period languishing as someone
else's flunky, he says, you can expect your best ideas to be stymied at
every point:

You will spend your time writing proposals rather than doing research.
Worse, because your proposals are judged by your competitors, you cannot
follow your curiosity, but must spend your effort and talents on
anticipating and deflecting criticism rather than on solving the important
scientific problems. . . . It is proverbial that original ideas are the
kiss of death for a proposal, because they have not yet been proved to work.

That pretty much answers the question of why we don't have teleportation
devices or antigravity shoes. Common sense suggests that if you want to
maximize scientific creativity, you find some bright people, give them the
resources they need to pursue whatever idea comes into their heads, and
then leave them alone. Most will turn up nothing, but one or two may well
discover something. But if you want to minimize the possibility of
unexpected breakthroughs, tell those same people they will receive no
resources at all unless they spend the bulk of their time competing against
each other to convince you they know in advance what they are going to
discover.

In the natural sciences, to the tyranny of managerialism we can add the
privatization of research results. As the British economist David Harvie
has reminded us, "open source" research is not new. Scholarly research has
always been open source, in the sense that scholars share materials and
results. There is competition, certainly, but it is "convivial." This is no
longer true of scientists working in the corporate sector, where findings
are jealously guarded, but the spread of the corporate ethos within the
academy and research institutes themselves has caused even publicly funded
scholars to treat their findings as personal property. Academic publishers
ensure that findings that are published are increasingly difficult to
access, further enclosing the intellectual commons. As a result, convivial,
open-source competition turns into something much more like classic market
competition.

There are many forms of privatization, up to and including the simple
buying up and suppression of inconvenient discoveries by large corporations
fearful of their economic effects. (We cannot know how many synthetic fuel
formulae have been bought up and placed in the vaults of oil companies, but
it's hard to imagine nothing like this happens.) More subtle is the way the
managerial ethos discourages everything adventurous or quirky, especially
if there is no prospect of immediate results. Oddly, the Internet can be
part of the problem here. As Neal Stephenson put it:

Most people who work in corporations or academia have witnessed something
like the following: A number of engineers are sitting together in a room,
bouncing ideas off each other. Out of the discussion emerges a new concept
that seems promising. Then some laptop-wielding person in the corner,
having performed a quick Google search, announces that this "new" idea is,
in fact, an old one; it-or at least something vaguely similar-has already
been tried. Either it failed, or it succeeded. If it failed, then no
manager who wants to keep his or her job will approve spending money trying
to revive it. If it succeeded, then it's patented and entry to the market
is presumed to be unattainable, since the first people who thought of it
will have "first-mover advantage" and will have created "barriers to
entry." The number of seemingly promising ideas that have been crushed in
this way must number in the millions.

And so a timid, bureaucratic spirit suffuses every aspect of cultural life.
It comes festooned in a language of creativity, initiative, and
entrepreneurialism. But the language is meaningless. Those thinkers most
likely to make a conceptual breakthrough are the least likely to receive
funding, and, if breakthroughs occur, they are not likely to find anyone
willing to follow up on their most daring implications.

Giovanni Arrighi has noted that after the South Sea Bubble, British
capitalism largely abandoned the corporate form. By the time of the
Industrial Revolution, Britain had instead come to rely on a combination of
high finance and small family firms-a pattern that held throughout the next
century, the period of maximum scientific and technological innovation.
(Britain at that time was also notorious for being just as generous to its
oddballs and eccentrics as contemporary America is intolerant. A common
expedient was to allow them to become rural vicars, who, predictably,
became one of the main sources for amateur scientific discoveries.)

Contemporary, bureaucratic corporate capitalism was a creation not of
Britain, but of the United States and Germany, the two rival powers that
spent the first half of the twentieth century fighting two bloody wars over
who would replace Britain as a dominant world power-wars that culminated,
appropriately enough, in government-sponsored scientific programs to see
who would be the first to discover the atom bomb. It is significant, then,
that our current technological stagnation seems to have begun after 1945,
when the United States replaced Britain as organizer of the world economy.

Americans do not like to think of themselves as a nation of
bureaucrats-quite the opposite-but the moment we stop imagining bureaucracy
as a phenomenon limited to government offices, it becomes obvious that this
is precisely what we have become. The final victory over the Soviet Union
did not lead to the domination of the market, but, in fact, cemented the
dominance of conservative managerial elites, corporate bureaucrats who use
the pretext of short-term, competitive, bottom-line thinking to squelch
anything likely to have revolutionary implications of any kind.

If we do not notice that we live in a bureaucratic society, that is because
bureaucratic norms and practices have become so all-pervasive that we
cannot see them, or, worse, cannot imagine doing things any other way.

Computers have played a crucial role in this narrowing of our social
imaginations. Just as the invention of new forms of industrial automation
in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had the paradoxical effect of
turning more and more of the world's population into full-time industrial
workers, so has all the software designed to save us from administrative
responsibilities turned us into part- or full-time administrators. In the
same way that university professors seem to feel it is inevitable they will
spend more of their time managing grants, so affluent housewives simply
accept that they will spend weeks every year filling out forty-page online
forms to get their children into grade schools. We all spend increasing
amounts of time punching passwords into our phones to manage bank and
credit accounts and learning how to perform jobs once performed by travel
agents, brokers, and accountants.

Someone once figured out that the average American will spend a cumulative
six months of life waiting for traffic lights to change. I don't know if
similar figures are available for how long it takes to fill out forms, but
it must be at least as long. No population in the history of the world has
spent nearly so much time engaged in paperwork.

In this final, stultifying stage of capitalism, we are moving from poetic
technologies to bureaucratic technologies. By poetic technologies I refer
to the use of rational and technical means to bring wild fantasies to
reality. Poetic technologies, so understood, are as old as civilization.
Lewis Mumford noted that the first complex machines were made of people.
Egyptian pharaohs were able to build the pyramids only because of their
mastery of administrative procedures, which allowed them to develop
production-line techniques, dividing up complex tasks into dozens of simple
operations and assigning each to one team of workmen-even though they
lacked mechanical technology more complex than the inclined plane and
lever. Administrative oversight turned armies of peasant farmers into the
cogs of a vast machine. Much later, after cogs had been invented, the
design of complex machinery elaborated principles originally developed to
organize people.

Yet we have seen those machines-whether their moving parts are arms and
torsos or pistons, wheels, and springs-being put to work to realize
impossible fantasies: cathedrals, moon shots, transcontinental railways.
Certainly, poetic technologies had something terrible about them; the
poetry is likely to be as much of dark satanic mills as of grace or
liberation. But the rational, administrative techniques were always in
service to some fantastic end.

>From this perspective, all those mad Soviet plans-even if never
realized-marked the climax of poetic technologies. What we have now is the
reverse. It's not that vision, creativity, and mad fantasies are no longer
encouraged, but that most remain free-floating; there's no longer even the
pretense that they could ever take form or flesh. The greatest and most
powerful nation that has ever existed has spent the last decades telling
its citizens they can no longer contemplate fantastic collective
enterprises, even if-as the environmental crisis demands- the fate of the
earth depends on it.


What are the political implications of all this? First of all, we need to
rethink some of our most basic assumptions about the nature of capitalism.
One is that capitalism is identical with the market, and that both
therefore are inimical to bureaucracy, which is supposed to be a creature
of the state.

The second assumption is that capitalism is in its nature technologically
progressive. It would seem that Marx and Engels, in their giddy enthusiasm
for the industrial revolutions of their day, were wrong about this. Or, to
be more precise: they were right to insist that the mechanization of
industrial production would destroy capitalism; they were wrong to predict
that market competition would compel factory owners to mechanize anyway. If
it didn't happen, that is because market competition is not, in fact, as
essential to the nature of capitalism as they had assumed. If nothing else,
the current form of capitalism, where much of the competition seems to take
the form of internal marketing within the bureaucratic structures of large
semi-monopolistic enterprises, would come as a complete surprise to them.

Defenders of capitalism make three broad historical claims: first, that it
has fostered rapid scientific and technological growth; second, that
however much it may throw enormous wealth to a small minority, it does so
in such a way as to increase overall prosperity; third, that in doing so,
it creates a more secure and democratic world for everyone. It is clear
that capitalism is not doing any of these things any longer. In fact, many
of its defenders are retreating from claiming that it is a good system and
instead falling back on the claim that it is the only possible system-or,
at least, the only possible system for a complex, technologically
sophisticated society such as our own.

But how could anyone argue that current economic arrangements are also the
only ones that will ever be viable under any possible future technological
society? The argument is absurd. How could anyone know?

Granted, there are people who take that position-on both ends of the
political spectrum. As an anthropologist and anarchist, I encounter
anticivilizational types who insist not only that current industrial
technology leads only to capitalist-style oppression, but that this must
necessarily be true of any future technology as well, and therefore that
human liberation can be achieved only by returning to the Stone Age. Most
of us are not technological determinists.

But claims for the inevitability of capitalism have to be based on a kind
of technological determinism. And for that very reason, if the aim of
neoliberal capitalism is to create a world in which no one believes any
other economic system could work, then it needs to suppress not just any
idea of an inevitable redemptive future, but any radically different
technological future. Yet there's a contradiction. Defenders of capitalism
cannot mean to convince us that technological change has ended-since that
would mean capitalism is not progressive. No, they mean to convince us that
technological progress is indeed continuing, that we do live in a world of
wonders, but that those wonders take the form of modest improvements (the
latest iPhone!), rumors of inventions about to happen ("I hear they are
going to have flying cars pretty soon"), complex ways of juggling
information and imagery, and still more complex platforms for filling out
of forms.

I do not mean to suggest that neoliberal capitalism-or any other system-can
be successful in this regard. First, there's the problem of trying to
convince the world you are leading the way in technological progress when
you are holding it back. The United States, with its decaying
infrastructure, paralysis in the face of global warming, and symbolically
devastating abandonment of its manned space program just as China
accelerates its own, is doing a particularly bad public relations job.
Second, the pace of change can't be held back forever. Breakthroughs will
happen; inconvenient discoveries cannot be permanently suppressed. Other,
less bureaucratized parts of the world-or at least, parts of the world with
bureaucracies that are not so hostile to creative thinking-will slowly but
inevitably attain the resources required to pick up where the United States
and its allies have left off. The Internet does provide opportunities for
collaboration and dissemination that may help break us through the wall as
well. Where will the breakthrough come? We can't know. Maybe 3D printing
will do what the robot factories were supposed to. Or maybe it will be
something else. But it will happen.

About one conclusion we can feel especially confident: it will not happen
within the framework of contemporary corporate capitalism-or any form of
capitalism. To begin setting up domes on Mars, let alone to develop the
means to figure out if there are alien civilizations to contact, we're
going to have to figure out a different economic system. Must the new
system take the form of some massive new bureaucracy? Why do we assume it
must? Only by breaking up existing bureaucratic structures can we begin.
And if we're going to invent robots that will do our laundry and tidy up
the kitchen, then we're going to have to make sure that whatever replaces
capitalism is based on a far more egalitarian distribution of wealth and
power-one that no longer contains either the super-rich or the desperately
poor willing to do their housework. Only then will technology begin to be
marshaled toward human needs. And this is the best reason to break free of
the dead hand of the hedge fund managers and the CEOs-to free our fantasies
from the screens in which such men have imprisoned them, to let our
imaginations once again become a material force in human history.


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-- 
Stefano Vaj
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