The bloody dawn of riots doesn’t dissolve the monstrous creatures of the night. It clothes them in light and fire, and scatters them through towns and across the countryside. The new innocence is baleful dreams come true.
Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life (1967)
All the seemingly altruistic fervor about overcoming “the digital divide” continues to be a unified campaign by corporate interests to require digital compliance everywhere, including the use of computer-based learning in schools for even the youngest of students. The suggestion has been that people without broadband access are living in a condition of deprivation, cut off from the possibility of upward mobility, career opportunities and cultural enrichment. However, the primary goal of the most powerful stakeholders is the eventual transformation of everyone into captive and obedient consumers of their products and service. The unspoken truth is that as internet access and use expands, economic inequality is heightened, not diminished.
“Tech literacy” is a euphemism for shopping, gaming, binge watching, and other monetized and addictive behaviors. Wealthy, cynical power brokers like Nicholas Negroponte, founder of MIT Media Lab, pontificate about making internet access a “human right” while corporate-friendly agendas promote “a laptop for every child,” despite the unmitigated failures of computer-based education in elementary schools. However, the juggernaut of high-tech companies marketing their products and services in the Global South and elsewhere has had more injurious consequences. The violent processes of Western modernization have always targeted the survival of local or regional singularities. In nations or areas in which traditional or indigenous solidarities persist, the internet complex becomes a new techno-colonization, ripping apart long-standing forms of social cohesion. Now, even its partial installation introduces another layer of homogenization, but this time at the level of consciousness.
Scorched Earth: Beyond the Digital Age to a Post-Capitalist World, Jonathan Crary
Beginning in the mid-1990s, the internet complex was promoted as inherently democratic, decentralizing, and anti-hierarchical. It was said to be an unprecedented means for the free exchange of ideas, independent of top-down control, that would level the playing field of media access. But it was none of these. There was a short-lived phase of naïve enthusiasm, similar to the unrealized hopes voiced at the wide availability of cable TV in the 1970s. The narrative now - of an egalitarian technology endangered by monopolistic corporations, the rescinding of net neutrality, and invasions of privacy - is plainly false. There never was or will be a “digital commons.” From the start, internet access for a global public was always about the capture of time, about disempowerment and depersonalized connectedness. The only reason the internet seemed “freer” or more open initially was because the projects of financializing and expropriation did not occur all at once and took a number of years to reach an acceleration point in the early 2000s. For transnational corporations, universal access to the internet allowed the reshaping of both work and consumption into 24/7 occupations, freed from the constraints of time or location. This also created vast and interrelated possibilities of monitoring and solicitation of anyone online, and the simultaneous intensification of social privatization.
Scorched Earth: Beyond the Digital Age to a Post-Capitalist World, Jonathan Crary
As many have noted, the falsification of “the digital age” have been so successfully inculcated that, despite direct evidence to the contrary, there is a pervasive imaginary of the dematerialized status of digital technology. Material and environmental realities are conveniently veiled by miniaturization, the apparent intangibility of wireless setups, the placelessness of data, and terms like “virtual” or “cloud.” One of the many phenomena refuting these illusions is the ceaseless construction of new data centers and server farmers to manage the massive increase in data production. These sprawling single-story structures have staggering energy requirements and generate levels of heat damaging to micro-circuitry, which must be cooled at each unit using millions of gallons of water each day. At current exponential rates of data growth, the required number of server farms fifty years from now would cover vast areas of the land surface of the continental US and other regions. The mythologies of a post-industrial information economy also obscure the persistence of earlier modes of production within the current scramble for resources essential to high-tech weaponry, communication networks, consumer technology products, solar and wind energy systems and much else. Violence to both people and their lands defines these imperial and neocolonial operations, as it has for several centuries. The very possibility of a “digital age” requires the expansion of these destructive industrial practices to world-vanquishing extremes.
Scorched Earth: Beyond the Digital Age to a Post-Capitalist World Jonathan Crary
