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1 The Clash of Techno-Politics
The end of the Cold War seemed to be signalling the beginning of a new era of peace and prosperity. The fall of the Soviet Union promised the eternal reign of liberal democracy and free markets. Francis Fukyuma proclaimed the âend of historyâ, where all major political and economic questions were answered now and forever. He declares:
What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankindâs ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government. (Fukuyama, 1989: 3)
Politically, it seemed that âPax Americanaâ had been declared and appeared to be everlasting. Fast forward less than three decades and it appeared that liberal democracy and market economies were unsustainable. The new saviours were sovranism and nationalist economic policies from those on the right and socialism and social democracy from those on the left. Even financiers like Eric Weinstein, managing director of Thiel Capital, admitted that âwe may need a hybrid model in the future which is paradoxically more capitalistic than our capitalism today and perhaps even more socialistic than our communism of yesteryearâ (Illing, 2018: n.p.) How did this occur? How could the end of history end so soon?
Crucial, in this regard, is to further interrogate the political cleavages and the clash of civilisations (Huntington, 1993) emerging at the end of the 20th century. Arising were new struggles between the local and the global (Robertson, 1995), the secular and the fundamentalist. Ben Barber captured this political dynamic in his now classic and still timely work Jihad vs. McWorld, observing that
The tendencies of what I am here calling the forces of Jihad and the forces of McWorld operate with equal strength in opposite directions, the one driven by parochial hatreds, the other by universalizing markets, the one re-creating ancient subnational and ethnic borders from within, the other making national borders porous from without. (Barber, 1992: 53)
This would expand, of course, into the world-spanning and seemingly never-ending War on Terror, initiated after the September 11th attacks. These were significantly infused with technology as much as with military power. Both sides drew indeed on social media to spread their message. Drone surveillance and warfare became the modus operandi for fighting terror. Complex financial digital methods were used to transfer funds by both sides secretly and securely.
Tellingly, despite their obvious and profound differences these implacable âenemiesâ shared a number of equally profound political assumptions. Namely, that the point of politics was ideological (or religious) victory achieved through a combination of military, diplomatic and propaganda strategies. That the aim ultimately is world conquest mixed with protecting their own people â whether it be national citizens or fellow religious believers. The âJihadâ and âMcDonaldisationâ of the world, in this sense, relied on a very similar strategic discourse to that which came before them.
Hence, while these competing social and economic forces â however they are phrased: âglobal vs. national/localâ, âsecular vs. fundamentalistâ, âdemocracy vs. terrorismâ â are seemingly opposed, they are also to a large extent repeating the same old political myths with simply a new cast of characters.
The War on Terror was a replaying of Cold War realist politics for a new age. It pitted a crusading West â the protector of all things free and good â against an insidious foe who threated its âvery way of lifeâ. Communists had been exchanged for Islamic extremists, the red scare for Islamophobia. And just as before this soaring rhetoric hid a more complex history of past and present exploitation. On the other side of the ideological divide, the extremists tapped into empowering past discourses of anti-imperialism, independence and radical insurgency. While they praised Allah, like so many secular revolutionaries before them, they were dedicated to liberation through a potent mix of guerrilla warfare and subversive propaganda.
Their uses of technology were, therefore, to a certain extent ironically more innovative than disruptive. New methods of waging war, whether through drone attacks or digital attacks, ultimately fell within the well-worn tracks of anti-insurgency combat and winning âthe hearts and mindsâ of the enemy. The strategic use of humanitarian technology similarly was a clear rerun of the exploitation of âhumanitarian aidâ and, even further back, the Peace Corp for at times rather nefarious imperial purposes. And it goes almost without saying that the fear of âdigital Jihadistsâ is an updated version of the terror engendered by anarchists and Communist âextremistsâ of old.
Reflected was the rise of two competing âtechno-civilisationsâ who drew on technology to protect their perceived âways of lifeâ as well as more fundamentally their shared view of politics and power. Techno-civilisations then represent entrenched ways of seeing and being in the world, a common social construction of our realities by which new techniques and technologies help to modernise and revise rather than reboot and reinvent.
This is not to say that the West and its enemies were precisely the same, or that the free market Washington consensus has been completely replaced. Rather, it is to point out that what can at first glance appear to be quite novel, particularly when linked to fresh technological advances, is in fact rather hegemonic, an updating of past ideas with relatively new practices.
The Technology of Hegemony
By now it is well acknowledged by even the most fervent believers in the power of technology that it is inexorably linked to its social context. It is a deeply embedded part of any culture. Every civilisation engages in processes of research and discovery, seeking out new techniques and methods for engaging with their natural and cultural environments. These can have a dramatic social impact. The watermill and the heavy plough transformed medieval feudal society (see Andersen et al., 2016), for instance. However, the direction and scope of this technological discovery heavily depend on cultural and economic conditions. Thus, for instance, classical Rome had discovered steam power but failed to take advantage of it due to its large slave population.
Technology, in turn, can have a diverse civilisational effect. It can either be ultimately negligible, innovative, or disruptive. In the first instance, it has little to no serious impact on existing social, political, or economic relations. By contrast, an innovative technology helps to update and evolve a status quo â it does not transform it but refashions it and resolves key problems that it encounters in its development and daily operation. Conversely, a disruptive technology is one that directly challenges and transforms a dominant social order.
Significantly, the same or similar technologies can be negligible, innovative, or disruptive depending on how they are used and by whom. Thus mobile phone capabilities can be exploited by employers and governments to monitor and control populations or they can be drawn upon by marginalised and oppressed people to hold those in power to account (Keane, 2011).
Enriching these practical insights are critical theories describing advances in organisation and governance as âsocial technologiesâ. This perspective was influenced by the ideas of the 20th century French thinker Michel Foucault. He proposes power as productive rather than simply repressive â producing certain types of actions, beliefs, and social relations. Power, in turn, is supported by the development of a range of social technologies. To this end,
Social technology transforms social expertise for a purpose, develops ideas for the solutions for social problems. Thus, it also establishes itself as a part of modern government, it can impact governmental decisions, it allows for a âtechnisationâ, an introduction of new techniques and new procedures, new administrative ways of politics and for a specific conception of power between authority and subject. (Leibetseder, 2011: 14)
Understandably, the focus has been on the role of these social technologies as a force for domination. It refers specifically to the complex and everyday promotion of specific types of governing discourses and regimes. In the words of Foucault, they act as a
mean(s) to apply economy, to set up an economy at the level of the entire state, which means exercising towards its inhabitants, and the wealth and behaviour of each and all, a form of surveillance and control as attentive as that of the head of a family over his household and his goods. (Foucault, 1991: 92)
However, it is just as pertinent, if not even more urgent, to critically inquire into how such social technologies can produce profound political and economic transformations. Notions of discursive hegemony popularised by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (1986) are particularly useful for this purpose. They define hegemony as the capacity of a discourse â a dominant set of beliefs and associated actions â to shape an existing social order, though importantly never completely so. Quoting Howarth (2000: 102), it is an effort to âweave together different strands of discourse in an effort to dominate or structure a field of meaning, thus fixing the identities of objects and practices in a particular wayâ.
The social is hence formed in the continual battle for hegemony. A hegemonic discourse is constantly seeking to define and overdetermine all social relations. Hence,
Hegemony involves competition between different political forces to get maximum support for, or identification with, their definition of âfloating signifiersâ, such as âfreedomâ and âequalityâ (terms which can assume different meanings, depending on whether they are âarticulatedâ in, for example liberal or socialist discourse), or âempty signifiersâ, such as âorderâ or even âdemocracyâ (terms which can be invested with a variety of meanings because they have no inherent content and can serve to unite disparate movements). (Townshend, 2004: 271)
To do so, it creates an appealing vision of âsocial wholenessâ. Consequently, marketisation depends upon utopian promises of a free world where the pursuit of profit leads to both individual fulfilment and shared prosperity. In his later work, Laclau would refer to this as a state of âfailed transcendenceâ or âfailed totalityâ, where a hegemonic discourse is supported by a shared vision of personal and collective harmony. He argues,
What we have ultimately is a failed totality, a place of irretrievable fullness. The totality is an object that is both impossible and necessary. Impossible because the tension between equivalence and difference is ultimately insurmountable; necessary because without some kind of closure, however precarious it may be, there would be no signification and no identity. (Laclau, 2007: 70)
Yet this totalistic domination is always finally unachievable in practice â an impossibility that opens the space for ideological challenges. These counter-hegemonic discourses are referred to as âantagonismsâ which constantly threaten to subvert and replace a status quo. Returning to Laclauâs (1996) work, he describes hegemony as forming a social imaginary which largely limits social possibility within its horizon of meaning. The ability of antagonisms to challenge this imaginary catalyses a new battle by contending myths for hegemony.
This continual struggle for winning and maintaining hegemony depends on the creation and exploitation of social technologies. The social is paradoxically both eternally ordered and dynamic. More precisely, the establishment of order, its very stability and survival, is premised on its capacity to adapt and change. Technologies and social technologies are crucial for this process. Importantly, they can be either socially innovative or politically disruptive in their aim and effect.
Socially Innovative vs. Politically Disruptive Technologies
Technology is popularly viewed as a force for change. It is therefore counter-intuitive for many to consider technology as a tool for reinforcing a status quo. This parallels a current irony afflicting democracy. As a political ideal and in practice democracy is fundamentally about challenging and replacing power, a systematic safeguard against tyranny. It is thus not so clear what is the current role and relationship between technology and democracy in terms of their capacity to reinforce and/or challenge existing power relations and ideologies.
We focus here on the issue of whether technologies are innovative or disruptive. This distinction echoes the difference between the social and the political within critical theory (see in particular Marchart, 2007). The former focuses on establishing and maintaining an existing order. It is fundamentally a process of domination. One of the first and still best descriptions of this socialisation is from Karl Marx:
In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely [the] relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure, and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political, and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. (Marx, 1977)
The political, by contrast, is the unsettling order that challenges assumed, practices, and regimes of power. Quoting once again from Gramsci and Hoare (1971: 168):
An appropriate political initiative is always necessary to liberate the economic thrust from the dead weight of traditional policies (and ideas) â i.e. to change the political direction of certain forces which have to be absorbed if a new homogenous politicalâeconomic historic bloc, without internal contradictions, is to be successfully formed.
It is dangerous though tempting to view these as mutually exclusive, to establish a strict separation between the social and the political. Indeed, even within the most revolutionary moment there are entrenched cultural, historical and organisational features. The French philosopher Alain Badiou (Badiou and Feltham, 1987) offers a compelling perspective to reconsider this relationship. He proposes the notion of the event that introduces new guiding truths for the structuring of the subject and the social. The classic and perhaps most famous example of a Badiou-type event would be the Copernican Revolution. This new truth that the Earth revolves around the Sun completely reconfigured the very basis of the social as such. It provided not only radical new truths to believe it but also an entirely new framework for exploring and legitimising what counts as truth â namely scientific method and science generally.
Within this new âsituationâ there are obviously socialising and political forces. Politics stands as a technique for enacting change within this broader âfield of meaningâ to borrow another phrase from Laclau and Mouffe. These truths quite literally become the basis for our shared reality â it is the common sense that binds us together and provides a sense of ontological security as individuals. The recent theory of social and political logics proposed by Jason Glynos and David Howarth (2008) is especially useful for conceptually understanding this always contextually rich and dynamic relationship. Social logics, as may be surmised from the above analysis, are those discourses and associated practices that stabilise and strengthen an existing hegemony. Political logics, conversely, threaten dominant social orderings. In doing so they challenge prevailing cultural fantasies and as such a seemingly permanent and unalterable âsocial realityâ. While not explicit, governance acts as the hegemonic fantasies that organise, regulate and mobilise individualsâ subjectivities and identities. According to Ĺ˝iĹžek, it is
the element which holds together a given community that cannot be reduced to the point of symbolic identification: the bonds linking together its members always implies [sic] a shared relationship to the Thing, toward enjoyment incarnated. ⌠If we are asked how we can recognise the ...
