Future is What It Used to Be

8/9/2019 Future is What It Used to Be

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FUTURE IS WHAT IT USED TO BE

Read intro

Dr. Barbrook, in 2007, you wrote the book Imaginary Futures in which you described

the paradox that the model of the future offered in the mid-2000s is the same future

promised at the 1964 New York World Fair and that, actually, the future is what it used

to be. Could you elaborate on what the main arguments behind this are?

Well, I was interested in looking at the origins of the Internet. So, there are two stories [in the book]

told about the origins. And first it was to create a communication system to fight a nuclear war against

Russia. And this always struck me as a very unlikely reason as to why they made the Internet, because

they wouldnt replace cheap reliable switches with expensive, unreliable mainframe computers.

And the other reason that they give is time sharing, using the same computer between different

departments, different universities. And if you ever worked with computer people, they hate sharing

their computers with people in the same department, lest alone with other university departments. So I

was again a bit skeptical about this.

And when I went back and started looking at the origins of

the Internet I realised that it was not a technology that

then became a utopian fantasy, it was a utopian fantasy

that became a technology. Which quite surprised me. So it was only when I started doing the research

that I realised that, actually, the fact that it was developed by ARPA, the Advanced Research Projects


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Agency, was not an accident, because it is all to do with the Cold War: in 1957 the Soviet Union

embarrassed the Americans by putting the first satellite into space, and then they compounded it by

putting the first human into space, and then the first woman into space.

So, then I realised it was to do with that, to do with this technological race between East and West, and

that actually what they were doing was responding to the Russians.

You mention in Imaginary Futures that it was the beauty of the Russian communist

utopia that forced the Americans to elaborate on the concept of a post-industrial society:

The Americans were desperately in need of the future they had a decent present, but

the future of the Russians was better, thats the thing!

In our present day, who now plays the role of Russia, who has the most attractive future?

Well, I think that is a good question, isnt it? As I think, if we are now heading towards the society of

ubiquitous interactive communication, which it seems that we are, that future is exhausted. I mean, in

a way, what people need to do is to invent new futures, because the problem is that no one has the

future that they really believe in.

Ive met Chinese intellectuals. China has a fifty-year plan to get to communism by the capitalism road:

in ten years we will have civil rights, in twenty years we will decommunise the economy, in thirty years

we will have political democracy, in forty years social democracy, and then bingo! utopia. And I see


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them every decade they postpone it by another decade. So, if you went back to them in twenty years

time it would still be a fifty years plan. But at least they have a direction in which they go in. It might be

the wrong direction, but at least they know they are going in a direction.

The problem is certainly in the West. My friends who work in the City of London sometimes dont even

think more then a few hours ahead, and at most three months ahead. So, thats the problem. In a way,

its slightly like the film Matrix, when they have this [catechism] inspired by Jean Baudrillard. They

live in a perpetual present. You know, in the Matrix, its always 1999.

In a way, we are in that position: the moment where whats been sold to a certain extent in the West is

the perpetual present, nothing ever changes. It doesnt get better, it doesnt get worse. Its essentially a

perpetual present. And the nearest that weve got is some sort of neo-liberal dystopia, where theyre

going to reach the welfare state to create some wacky free market dystopia.

In 1999 you wrote the Cybercommunist manifesto

You have to understand that it was a joke. It is ironic. A friend of mine works at Fordham University in

New York, he was organising a conference in 1998, so it was 50th anniversary of Marshall McLuhan

comming to speak at Fordham University for the first time. And he asked [me] to talk about Dotcom

bubbles. He said that all these American academics they are just going to do rather nice papers, not

very mcluhan, because McLuhan liked provoking people and saying mad wacky things, which actually

illuminate amazingly what he called thought probes. And I thought oh, this would be funny: to get up

and say that US military invented the only working model of communism in history it is called the

Internet. So I made this speech and an article out of this speech. And what was funny is that one of the

guys, I knew he knows much more about McLuhan, he said as you realise, Marshall McLuhan already

said that, because in 1968 he went to some Cold War conference and he wrote in his letter Thank you

to the organisers and said I dont understand what we are complaining about communism for.

America is the most communist country in history. So, McLuhan already got the joke.

So, thats partly what it is about. It was like the first draft of Imaginary Futures. And it was partly

ironic.


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And what is cybercommunism itself? Does it have any relation to the Soviet ideology?

There was a Russian movement in the late 1950s and 1960s, until the overthrow of Khruschev,

basically. In the Khruschev era, led by Aksel Berg [fn. director of the Radioelectronics Institute 1947

57 and a Deputy Minister of Defence 195357], they thought that cybernetics now is the computer

network. The technology was not there yet, but they foresaw that you could use computer networks to

basically run the economy and to replace not just the market, but also the plan. So, they had a vision of

running economy more efficiently than by a market world plan, through a computer network. And in

some sense were already there, actually. This fantasy is coming true.

But then it was something further off, and now its a real thing. They all sort of saw it as a vision of a

new society. And so they saw the computer network as a way for us to move into the computer network

age. At the XXI Communist Party Congress, or CPSU Congress, Khrushchev said we will be there by

the 1970s. And in a way it would also then lead to further developments, its not just that it would

make the economy more efficient, but open up its arms. Because cybernetics can be top-down, a bit like

Google, and Amazon, and Apple, but h said that cybernetics is only really powerful when it is bottom-

up. And that means that workers and peasants would have to feedback to the bureaucracy and be able

to express themselves.

If Lenin thought that Communism was about electrification, Aksel Berg thought of the computer

network as leading to the restoration of Soviet democracy, which in turn would create cybernetic

communism. And now the computer was a kind of bring-back-democracy, but in this high-tech form.


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Its sort of an attempt to save the Soviet Union from itself by reforms within the system.

And I know when I talked to Russians about this they

didnt quite believe this was true, until I went back and

read these things. And this was the last generation in

Russia who really did believe that the system could be rescued. You know, they didnt have this sort of

double thinking between the official ideology and what they privately believed. And that I think is

interesting, because in a sense thats what the Americans were terrified of In a sense, the Americans

believed that as well, they did think that Russia potentially could create a new civilisation.

Marshal McLuhan believed that sooner or later, choosing between candidates in

infrequent elections would be replaced by on-line voting in daily referendums the

quote from your book Imaginary Futures. How far we are from this?

You have to understand that he was responding to Aksel Berg. Aksel Berg wants to restore Soviet

democracy in Russia, thats his aim actually. So, in a way, the West had to respond to that, so they also

started to talk about participation democracy.

In the same book Imaginary Futures, you write that the dream of artificial intelligence

was born in the 1940s. So it will soon reach its 75th anniversary. How long do you

estimate the belief in machines having consciousness will continue to persist?


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As long as science fiction films are known. It is a great

metaphor. I think that Karel !apek [fn. in 1920 a Czech

writer gave the world the idea of artificial people, entering the term "robot"] was using robots as an

analogy of the workers. And most of these fantasies are that the robot is us. Simple, isnt it? Thats art,

basically. But there is a deeper side of this: there is the tendency under capitalism, something Marxs

school called commodity fetishism, giving human powers to things.

So, that in a way, is what machine intelligence is. Its a classic example of that, when you endow the

machine with the power of the human. So they say Deep Blue beat Gary Kasparov at chess, as if the

machine had beaten Kasparov. Its actually the programmers who beat Kasparov and all the

grandmaster games that they programmed into the machine. Whats most interesting, Kasparov still

managed to win some of the games.

My view is that it will never happen. I have a friend who calls it not artificial intelligence, but

simulating intelligence. And I think that is actually what we are talking about here. Thats just simplealgorithms, thats not intelligence. I have a child, Im buying things online for the baby, so they just

give more baby ads. There is nothing intelligent in that.

More and more theorists and philosophers say that the postmodernist age has ended

and that we are facing post-postmodernism, or some name it metamodernism

Hypermodernism, I love it. Its around this thing with a Hyper Media Research Centre [fn. based in the


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University of Westminster, where Dr. Barbrook teaches], with the hyper media study.

All these thinkers like Deleuze, Foucault, Guattari, and all

these present people like "i#ek, Agamben, Badiou, they all

come out with this idea that society is basically the

sciences. And thats my worry with that. The theory itself,

which appeared to be this sort of new flashy theory, in many ways returned to very traditional 19th

century thinking. Its actually that same sort of thinking that Marx and Engels critiqued in The German

Ideology. They famously said that the people drowned because of the idea of gravity, not because the

water is wet. So, in a way theyve returned to this sort of early 19th century thought, but dressed up in

all this cybernetic language and semiotics and all the rest of it.

Foucault famously wrote: lots of books about prison, but a book about books about prison, or whatever

is very low. Its actually not about the real; its not like the analysing what is really going on, it is

analysing the discourses about what is really going on. And the discourses become the subject ofhistory in the same way that the computer and artificial intelligence becomes the subject.

So, I think that part of problem is a sort of theoretical crisis going on, where they now just proclaim

themselves new materialists. Well, no! You are all speculative philosophers actually. And thats a sort

of crisis about the linguistic term in philosophy or social sciences. And nobody, certainly not the young

generation, can say anything about the financial crisis. Whereas if you go and look at Volume 3 The

Capital it tells you exactly why were in the financial crisis.

So, that question cannot be answered with postmodern philosophers, because they deliberately said in

the 1960s and 1970s that political economy was garbage, we are not going to read this any more. They

do not read this stuff! They used words like commodity and capital, or exchange value, but they do

not actually know what they mean. So they use it like sexy words, but they do that with the natural

sciences too.

What question about the future should I have asked you, but didnt?

Its interesting. It comes back to your original question, which is how do we conceive the future now.


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In a way, the Internet is acting like a comfort zone. In a way, fantasy is being the same through 50-60

years. And its being very comforting fantasy, because its always just around the corner, and

ubiquitous interactive communication will create some form of utopia, and it doesnt matter where you

are in the political spectrum. So you can be on the extreme left and they will create some form of online

direct democracy and electronic Agora. If you are on the right, they will create former capitalism in the

only existing neo-classical economics textbooks.

So, thats the interesting thing about it. Either this electronic Agora will be an electronic market place,

but its a utopia just around the corner, weve got this utopia called the Internet. It comes back again

and again: The 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 2000s, and here we are in 2013. The thing is now its

exhausted, this utopia. Not because it failed, but because it succeeded. And thats the problem. You

know, in a sense, weve got there. And now the question is, and this is what a lot of interesting debate is

going on about, it is that we need a social utopia, and a political-economic utopia. Because thats what

we face at the moment the dominant economic model, which is neo-liberal, has run out of steam.

Even those people who are practising in it, who are promoting it, dont really believe its going create a

utopia in a way that they did in the 1980s.

Im old enough to remember when neo-liberalism was seen as radical: it was challenging the status

quo, the post-war consensus, it offered a way out of the crisis of the 1970s, for some parts of the world


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it offered the chance of escaping from very authoritarian states. And so it offered a way out. But now it

just seems completely exhausted. That forces us to think about what sort of future. So, its not the

future based on technology, though the technology will help, but its a sort of future where the humans

are at the centre, not the machines. Creating a truly human civilisation.

NOT THE END

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Future is What It Used to Be