Eva,
Your description of the emergence of the internet within the framework of
ARPA, industry, and the academy, sounds sooo much like the descriptions of
early capitalist development in the framework of feudalism (cf. Maurice
Dobb, Studies in the Development of Capitalism, or Paul Sweezy (ed) The
Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism.) Feudal lords provided
resources, licenses, guaranteed market areas, etc. So, in a way, that very
process of its birth is heartening from the point of view of dialectical
materialism.
Perhaps we suffer from an erred tendency to associate the specific pattern
of cooperation and exchange that has characterized the internet from its
inception with other " communitarian visions." I wonder if the kind of
globally distributed development that characterizes LINUX or the software
used for LETSystems (freeware, copy left, etc) has any historical parallel
(although it certainly contains elements present in other types of
productive relations). To me it seems that the type of communicative
collaboration that the internet enables to be quite new on a historical
scale.
Here again the parallel with capitalism and feudalism might be instructive.
You wrote, 'I would like to keep my right to regard them as still an "active
force". ' Yes, but how strong is that force. I think there's a tendency to
see the source of the "communitarianism" in the ethos of the 60s generation
who just so happened to be the generation to integrate the internet into
their daily practice. The communitarianism is then not something essential
in the process of using the internet as I tend to see it. The question for
me concerns the compatibility of the specifically new patterns of
collaboration and production with the social structures within which they
are coming into existence.
From a historical perspective the development of new productive forces
(clearly the internet is this!) usually occurs within the matrix of social
relations with which those productive forces are ultimately incompatible.
This contradiction becomes the fundamental system-wide contradiction whose
resolution lays a track along which subsequent history develops. We see this
clearly in the increasing emphasis on "intellectual property rights." From
this perspective the question is whether the competitive, zero-sum logic of
capitalism can contain the collaborative, synergistic logic of internet
enabled communication and collaboration. Again, LINUX development would
seem to be an important model to look at, especially as depicted in the
Microsoft internal study where it was identified as a serious threat and one
not easily dealt with by standard market strategies. As Marx wrote, "The
various stages of development in the division of labor are just so many
different forms of ownership".
Insofar as a tool predisposes toward more effective uses and designs,
certain patterns of ownership simply become more effective for the use of
that tool. Feudal lords definitely tried to control the forces they
themselves helped unleash in the early period of capitalism's development
but were quite unable to do so. (even though the process of feudal
dissolution took centuries). Listening to Case and Levin talk last week
about a big tv where one could shop, watch a football game, trade stock, and
write email all at the same time, I realized that they really don't have a
clue as to what the power of the internet really is, they just see it in
terms of consumption. They are looking backwards, using the tractor to haul
the horse from the barn to the field where the horse will be harnessed to
the plow while the tractor sits parked. But maybe they can't include it in
the world view at all since, being capitalists in the bottom line, activity
that is not pursued relative to the goal of making a profit is simply not a
part of their world view except as an abstraction, a utopian vision, etc.
No doubt they try to tap it by sending out beta-versions of software, etc.,
but is it ultimately beyond their ability to control and factor into their
calculated productive processes? As a more powerful force of production
won't it assert its own social relations over those within which it was
given birth.
Paul H. Dillon
While I would like to keep my right to regard them as still an "active
force".
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