There are certainly some fascinating lessons to be learned from Bill's
observations about the skateboarder-builders and what kinds of labor and
technology are more or less immune to various strategies under capitalism
for lowering wages in particular fields.
I suspect though that one point I made might have been mis-interpreted: my
term 'social-technological' was meant to refer to "social technologies",
that is, to the kinds of practices we employ for organizing society itself,
for bringing about coherent collaborative efforts among many people in many
times and places, at various scales of organization from the local group
(like the skateboarder-builders at work) to global economic networks and
communities.
Perhaps the word "technology" here is partly a metaphor for systematic,
interdependent practices, and more specifically for the strategies for
social organization that our culture has evolved historically, including
ones such as bureaucratic hierarchies, centralized administrations,
Latour's 'centres of calculation' (which include census data and
tax-collection), etc. I was thinking much less specifically about computing
technologies, web design, or building and construction technologies. You
could say I was trying to talk about HOW we organize ourselves together to
make effective use of these more concrete technologies.
In particular, the issue for me is how we organize ourselves across
multiple space/time/matter/energy/population scales. Bill's example of the
skateboarder-builders at work does represent our ideal of small group
coherence and cooperative labor. But what about the higher scales of
organization? universities, corporations, cities, global economic
enterprises and associations? What are the kinds of technologies needed to
organize at these scales? and to integrate across scales? What are the
limits of our existing social technologies? ... not just their moral
defects, but their practical limitations?
I was trying to suggest that the end of our present
social-political-economic order is overdetermined in yet one more way than
is usually discussed ... not just that it works against humane interests
and people come to hate it and rebel against it, but that it seeks to scale
itself up to the point where it can't cope "socio-technologically" with
what it must become to continue to survive.
The best time to rebel against a system is when it's facing internal
pressures of functional collapse ...
JAY.
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JAY L. LEMKE
PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
<http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/education/jlemke/index.htm>
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