Pierfranco Pellizzetti
“ Many wonderful things,
but no more admirable man.
Who plows the raging sea
and the oxen yoke from the curved horns “
Sophocles – Antigone
” The technologies, it seems, tend
to promise more than they are able
to do, at least compared to the forecast “
Evgeny Morozov
From the humans,
In 2004, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane, leading researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, published their essay The New Division of Labor the predictable breakdowns in the medium term tasks / roles between human labor and that of digital equipment; between people and computers. Appropriate update – at the time of drones and other substitutes mechanical expulsive organic rampant – one of the classic themes addressed by sociology at the beginning ( de la division du travail social ); in the light of the entry into the field of a subject that does not exist and – therefore – unforeseen at the time when Emile Durkheim wrote his famous essay: the evolution and the extension of capacity in artificial replace human functions, from the physical to the mental strength . The “second machine age”: the realization that computers and related digital programs realized in the thinking as the steam engine and the subsequent equipment of the industrial age have done in that the muscle. Apologists adding: functions with disclaimers.
A hired largely influenced by quell’inquietante efficientism mold aziendalistico imposed as Best Way by the counter Anglo-Saxon of the past four decades, “people should focus on the tasks and the work in which It enjoys a competitive advantage over their machines, leaving the computer activities for which they are best suited. ”
Based on this criterion, the authors came to identify some areas and activities – they say – unquestionably and permanently inhibited the appropriation of artificial mind; one of which was indicated in the guidance of a transport vehicle in traffic. This statement drew confirmation from the comic story of Grand Challenge two years before: the challenge from DARPA ( Defence Avanced Research Projects Agency ) – the US agency created in 1958 to to promote technology projects – to build a vehicle without a driver, able to cross 200 kilometers in the Mojave Desert. The race was held March 13, 2004 with the participation of fifteen competitors and spectacularly disastrous results; in fact, by the final comic ( slapstick ): the best performance was that of a car that was able to take just 7.4 miles, to stay on the road at a bend, fold and crashing into a dune sand.
Well, ten after arriving their fellow Bostonians Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee to tell the wonders of the “project Chauffeur” Google; personally experienced, triumphantly: the ride on the California State 101 on a car without driver perfectly reliable.
In fact, since October 2010 it is that Google has posted in the blog the news that his car totally autonomous (no human guidance) were working for a while ‘time and no problems in the tangle of streets and highways of the United States. A blatant denial of the idea – until then taken of faith – that never ever a digital program would replace the conductor in the flesh in the driving of a car. At least in the foreseeable future.
If you have a sense of the expression “dead labor that seizes the living one”, picnics Californian of Brynjolfsson and McAfee are the most disturbing representation. This also as accompanied by a senseless exultation for operations which promise more mattanze level of employability.
But the current address of the technological applications towards objectives “labor saving” – the true meaning of evolution in progress, regardless of which is cloaked in fiction folklore – is a direction “neutral” or responds to well precise will, that fold in easily identifiable objectives? The wonders shrug even when these legitimate questions are being removed prior, perhaps by marking with the stigma of “reactionary”. As it happens all the time when the Luddite movement was demoted to “obtuse closure towards progress”, when – in fact – was the desperate resistance of classes artisans to deskilling of the professions by mechanization.
Again a little ‘sound hermeneutics of suspicion can come in handy.
In fact, leaving aside the issue provocative if science is or is not a field crossed by stakes and power relationships, whether there is an objectivity “objective” (scientistic) or if this is a social product to Thomas Kuhn or Pierre Bourdieu (“epistemological rules are but the rules and regularities inscribed in the structures and / or habitus ‘), is sufficiently established that the translation of scientific evidence in proceedings for for practical purposes (production) – read “technology” – has largely to do with the criteria historically dominant. In this sense it is certainly “product” social.
In other words, an obvious question of Power, now practice the most irresponsible triumphalism while it is the expulsion of a large part of the human component of the type of organization that is being achieved: zero proactive and critical contributions of women and men “concrete” for the manufacture of things, the provision of services and the determination of un’apprezzabilità shared. In a broad sense, to democracy of citizens.
Even fifteen years ago one of our greatest explorers of the twentieth century transformations, a journalist of Cuneo allergic to fanfaluche fashion as Giorgio Bocca, had highlighted the mystifying aspects in this confused secular religion of the overcoming of ‘individual in the network, with its dark metaphors of flows and swarms, “the ruling classes have always invented ideologies to justify their comforts and their stupidity. Not knowing rule the world, they invented before the myths and then religions. And now, having killed God with their science, they try to rebuild it with the swarm, with the flow. The ideologies of the past had at least the merit or the willingness to put the man at their center. New ignore. The maximum award to a function by anthill, beehive: let fly in the swarm. ” The digitization of the human.
The watershed industrial The issue of selection criteria in the technology became the subject of a classic essay published thirty years ago: “The Second Industrial Divide,” a signature of ‘ MIT economist Michael J. Piore and his fellow political scientist Charles F. Sabel. In their view, such a choice is not based on an autonomous logic of technical or scientific necessity: the emergence and decline of technologies depends mainly on the structure of the markets for technology products; and the structure of these markets descends – in turn – by political circumstances fundamental, such as property rights and the distribution of wealth. In short, “the machines are both the mirror that the engine of development.”
Sabel and Piore called “industrial divide” ( industrial divides ) the moments where the linear path of technological development is called into question. Moments when – arrived at a crossroads – you decide the path to take, as best suited to the dominant interests. For example the movement of centrality in the world-system of the western economy towards the Anglo-Saxon area coincided with the rise of mass production methods, to the detriment of the craft Continental. It being understood that there was no reason “objective” a priori that determined the prevalence of standardization, its paradigm Taylor-Ford, flexibility (custom product) factory artisan mechanized. What proved decisive was the composition of the workforce available in public now hegemonic in the second half of the nineteenth century, characterized by low level of specialization in England in the “rotten boroughs”, as it is mainly made up of urbanized rural masses; in the United States of corporate paternalism, given the floods of immigrants from the most backward areas of the Old World (Italy, Ireland, Lithuania and so on).
As a result the choice of the dominant economic paradigm techno-logical answers that go beyond efficiency. As economic historians have amply illustrated, when the early twentieth century was resolved within the alternative transport terms between petrol engine or steam, avionics including aircraft lighter than air (blimp) and heavier ( airplane). Choices that prevailed solutions suited to the interests better positioned lobbisticamente.
“Technology is not then a because before but the product of a social conflict that alternative possibilities prevail within the choices of those in power, so as to give it a precise mark of class which determines then every consequence “(Alfred D. Chandler jr.).
However, in the past the zigzagging vicissitudes of development dependent techniques have always maintained a broadly inclusive impact against the social body; both in terms of employment, both in terms of distribution (increase in purchasing power). The figure in contrast, emerging from recent developments, it is now developing abstracts from real people. To an increasing extent.
A phenomenon declined in two areas:
- the organization of work, that is the aspect most focused in the current controversy over a model that reveals ever more evident by their goal to produce economic inequalities in the distribution of resources blocks and caste in the social composition;
- the subordination of technological innovation programs to purely commercial criteria; designed to induce, through communication manipulative, purchasing propensities in a population increasingly colonized by consumerism and a prey to its instincts activated (doped) from marketing.
Signs of autumn of a business cycle, led by the unstoppable sliding industrial profit in financial income. In still image of a season steeped in restorative moods, which hides the true nature dipingendosi as the best of all possible worlds; and – consequently – blocking the hands of time in an eternal present property, which must never be threatened by the actual process of change. That change, as inherent in the technology innovation declined to invention, which is slaved as a tool supporting the existing order. A twist than its fundamental intended use, in the first case (organizational) proves to be a trap and in the second (consumer) a real scam.
Reviving the initial considerations, while the project to use technology to subdue the democratic order proceeded to spur beaten, we were reassured with the comforting assurance that the rules expressed in algorithms and computer codes covering only variables Most common. So as to exclude the recognition of patterns, or pattern , for complex operations that can not be computerized; remaining – well – the prerogative of the human (as workers).
The most recent events are proving just the opposite. It remains to understand why and how the technological applications (especially dedicated software) have been directed to achieving that aim. Exclusion of Canon 99 percent of humanity.
The syndrome Johannesburg
“Three hours of work per day are more than enough to meet the old Adam in us. ” These are the exact words of John Maynard Keynes, uttered the famous conference Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren , 1931; inspired by a thesis that was based on the presumption of a development at the service of the general welfare. And that – in fact – inspired public policies to largely welfariana age. At least basically.
Then it came a vertical break, translated in the complaint of the covenant (Keynesian-Fordist: acceptance of the capitalist order in the face of full employment trend) that this order had held. Following the spread of what anybody called “syndrome of Johannesburg”: as in apartheid South Africa, “the rich have more and more afraid of the poor and defend themselves from attacking them, reducing humanitarian aid, worsening the quality of education, hindering migration “(Domenico De Masi). The exclusion in the service of inequality, obtained through practices of direct expropriation or concealed.
A theme that has become central to the economic policy debate in 2014, following the worldwide success of Thomas Piketty with his best-selling book “The Capital in the XXI Century” (“the processes of transfer of assets from the public to the private sector they have not only occurred in rich countries, starting in the seventies … On a global scale, the most massive operation of privatization of the entire history of capital “); already mentioned – among others – from our Luciano Gallino in “The class struggle after the class struggle” (“this struggle is waged by the ruling classes of the various countries, which are now in many respects a single global class”) . Now comes the historian Ignazio Masulli to provide highly disturbing data on the initial stages of the operation that would split the world in two, between the few wealthy getting richer and the multitudes in increasing impoverishment, made possible by innovation; early organizational rather than technological: the decentralization of production transnational, initiated by the pioneering choice of US multinational Fairchild to transfer the assembly of microelectronic components in Hong Kong, in 1962.
Here are some details from the front of ‘ EU extrapolated from Masulli: in 1980 France was investing in productive activities abroad 3.6 percent of GDP in 2012 was 57 percent; Germany has increased over the same period from 4.7 to 45.6 percent and the United Kingdom from 14.8 to 62.5. A similar trend is also found in the Italian case: from 1.6 to 28 percent. The trend reveals its full disturbing aspect examined in terms of jobs lost or not created: 5.9 million in France, 7.3 in Germany and at least 2.6 million in Italy.
The relocation wild that generated the so-called phenomenon of companies foot-loose (without feet), made possible by the revolution in transport terms of the just-in-time (thanks – among other things – the flow of containers from the Far East and to the shipbuilding industry of super-post-post-Panamax ships) conjugated to the zero time of computerized communication. As the techno-enthusiast Kevin Kelly – famous signature of Wired , the Bible of the thechies planetary – he describes as the “wonder of wonders” of countries with labor costs from slave labor that have become our neighbors. Given that separates us from them only one-eighth of a second, “the maximum time it takes for a signal to travel from one end of the world.”
In short, the wonder for anything a wonderful way to make that clear the power of organized labor in opposing the capitalist command to protect its rights. If aged industrial companies were located and the workers could block the playback of profit by sword of Damocles of their struggles, in the post-industrial (which continues to be industry, only that emigrated in the infamous Export Processing Zone in the East, where you restore the conditions of exploitation of slave mold) companies settle in the territories or will take off according to enter / exit strategy that lead counterparts always more merciful. This has resulted in a radical change of mentality in flocks precarizzate. The recently noted sociologist Marc Augé, “the proletarians not dream any more to break down the system: they fear that collapse.”
mood of submission to power relations largely dependent on technological tools and organizational, communication and centralized transport, used to break the resistance of the employee and his representatives. All this translated into a series of narratives accrediting the new course that drains of meaning, significance and its solidarity induced (the precious bindings that make society) the human component intended as productive class; fragmenting until atomization “flessibilizzarsi”, “become entrepreneurs of themselves” and other deceptions. Cages to hold off multitudes who return to be represented as “dangerous classes”; the restructuring of the company according to the meter plutocratic, running around, fencing and castalizza.
Leonardi of the XXI century or markettari?
Continuing to pass in an examination applied scientific knowledge, subjected to bending to the demands of a power that is cloaked in communication practice and blatantly false illusionism and the chameleon not offer targets for criticism, it is worth considering what recently wrote the Nobel laureate economist Paul Krugman: despite the bass drum hegemonic thought mainstream techno-centric, “an increasing number of economists are asking whether the technological revolution has not been misleadingly inflated.” Demand particularly subversive, to limit the destabilizing, given that we live in an age that likes to represent itself as a permanent laboratory for innovative drugs; where each field is described in change, with respect to the various rhythms unknown historical turning points of the past, however, and always triggered / accelerated by the succession of inventions.
So it was from the moment the West internalized the principle (first in practice, then even in theories) that changed the perception of time virandolo circular arrow upward oriented change. So they were invented categories of future (as conquest) and progress (such as construction). And the contributions of technical exerted a powerful impact in the redesign of the company.
Already at the turn of the year Mille is the technological change to create the two classes decisive in the history of Europe: the feudal knight and the artisan city. The first employee from the invention of the stirrup, came from Central Asia around the seventh century, which allowed the mounted combat; the other related to the redesign of water wheel and windmill, which enabled to produce motive force from inanimate sources – water flows and wind – urbanizing manufacturing practices and – well – favoring the affirmation of the class that gave birth European cities.
That process of accumulation that will reach its climax in the second half of the eighteenth century; the Industrial Revolution, which was accompanied by the actual “invention” of technology (the combination of téchne , craftsmanship and logos ). The first technical school was the French École nationale des ponts et chaussees , founded in 1747.
“We can consider the Encyclopaedia of Denis Diderot and Jean d’Alembert the true, great, poster of this passage to the technical skill. The most important and significant manifestation of the intellectual context in which such fervor was maturing realization. ” Fervor accompanying the reorganization of social life since the introduction of the mechanical loom and then the steam engine to the personal computer; whose construction dates back to 1965 and which – among other things – initially he spoke Italian (the “Project 101 Olivetti program” that he developed the so-called Perottina , the name of the chief project engineer Pier Giorgio Perotto) .
The entry into the game of great economic engines, such as the train and car.
But now? The growing sense – and made explicit by the unforeseen stance Krugman – that is, beyond the triumphalism of way, the old fervor came transformed into its opposite. Something in which the logic of financialization mimetically instrumental plutocratic have marginalized all other respects. Where the appearance prevails on substance and thrust of transformation inherent in technological leverage was rescheduled in counter-thrust of restoration: the breakthrough, took place in electronics since the early sixties, that is translated in miniaturization, in the transition to digital and in reducing the price of components is crucial to reconfigure the division of labor. The industrial revolution last and decisive, which devalues the human factor so far as to disregard them. So much so that the enthusiastic rhetoric about technological seasons next venture becomes a form of entertainment to divert attention from the effects really present today; and their consequences in the act of marginalization expulsion. Individual distractions that tend to become social fumisterie. In addition to mental prisons that incarcerate classes “hardworking”, now considered “dangerous”, even gadgets to revive saturated markets through manipulation of the propensity to buy masses turlupinate with hypothetical wonders of ‘ up-to-date .
In fact, the feeling is growing that most of the new hi-tech are the funniest indispensable. Merchandising. Beyond the enthusiasm caused by Twitter and its 140 characters. And the like.
In the words of a joke, “the touch screen is certainly a nice gimmick, but frankly, it will never have the social impact the internal combustion engine. ”
In other words, for a while ‘time technological innovations do not bring real benefits “unlikely that a selfie can grow the fruit of our work,” says Federico grappling hooks. And when propagandists of this high in “best of all possible worlds” – like the former economic adviser to Ronald Reagan Martin Feldstein – we magnify the dramatic improvements of our lives made by video streaming in health care, is now wonders if the meter of these improvements is the ability to download live images from the Internet or rather impoverishment average household since 2000.
In short, the hegemonic logic that immobilize the time you would have (unconsciously? Deliberately?) Drained the momentum of innovation, confining it in an ancillary role of propagandist for the prevailing order. Opera powered through a cornucopia of drugs found as essentially meaningless. Valga in confirmation of that finding, the ranking by Time of the best inventions in 2014, “you move from flying skateboard (better known as hoverboard and inspired by the movie Back to the Future ) to the wrist computer, the auctions to take selfie to the tablet can interpret sign language and translate it into words. ” In short, a large bunch of acchiappacitrulli . The sign of a halt in positive drives real masked by gadgeting , makeover , packaging of marketing. No coincidence that the time has crowned a terrific salesman with a passion aesthetics (and attitudes slavery: prompting the Chinese labor segregated to produce objects marked apple) – which Steve Jobs – to “Leonardo da Vinci of the XXI century”.
A block of creativity (concealed in communication games promopubbblicitari serving the thought unthinkable ) that is recycled in the show. Without – however – be able to change the objective fact that the special effects serve only to hide and find cavatinas. In the absence of technologies really unpublished.
Patriot Games and commercial exploitation. For decades now.
Arpanet, the mother of the Internet dates back to 1969 and was crowned the computer “Machine of the Year” by the usual Time in 1982. So far almost as anybody already assumed an inevitable fate for Standardization / trivialization of all this supposed wave of revolutionary technologies. For example Geert Lovink, director of the Institute of Network Cultures in Amsterdam, said the Web, born again around 2003 as Web 2.0 and evolved as a mass medium after 2011, is a candidate to find his place in the daily life of the refrigerator and the TV, as an assistant cook in the kitchen. If now – continues Lovink – “you do not play the most heated debates among members of civil society involved in the forum on global toaster, one day the” debate on the Internet “will be closed in the same way.” But while it has been the company’s people?
stagnation suicide
The history of mankind is accompanied by recurrent atrocities in the name of greed . He never had reached the delirium premeditated expulsion of the human component of his mental horizons and materials. Operation in which “greed” is immediate rhyme with “stupidity”.
Perhaps in the future – in the breaking of the human landscape in two continents not communicating – social psychology can explain the appearance of seemingly incomprehensible resentful aggressive hostility of the wealthy minority against the masses impoverished and marginalized: the criminalization of poor as such; the overturning of class hatred that sees the privilege to attack the disadvantaged. You could say – psicanalizzando so much per pound – transference in aggression of unspeakable fears of the threat of possessiveness, the stuff. Given the symmetrical – but in this case actual – undermined the foundations of mutual recognition as a basic constituent of the pactum societatis ; the social and cultural conditions of civil society.
So how should adequately fathomed the mental processes that legitimize the transformation dell’ingenerosità antisocial pushed to the nth degree, self-satisfied indifference and intolerance, in a sort of axiomatic ideologically underpinned (NeoCon-neolib). But if this is already in itself a clear (and at the same time almost indecipherable) symptom of madness in the spirit of the time, absolutely decipherable is the effect that suicide is causing the so-called “season of the greedy bastard” (copyright of director Ridley Scott in the movie Good Year ). Something that looks much like the metaphor of imbecility, inherent in the operation of “cutting the branch on which you are sitting.”
It is no coincidence that – while the bass drum rumbles assordandoci with its announcements of technological miracles – the actual indicators signal the ongoing economic slowdown, the irresistible advance of the inequalities, the spread of anomie social and the barbarism of increasingly large tracts of the human landscape.
There is a growing awareness that the accumulation of wealth must be used on an increasing doses to speculative bubbles, which make up for with their performance-enhancing effects in a non-existent growth physiologically effective.
In front of the choir of singing out of tune the financialization of the world, you are being felt more and more clearly voices singing a completely different song; the bitter notes of a promise betrayed: the end of uninterrupted growth.
Back in November 2013, speaking at the XIV Conference of the International Monetary Fund, the former secretary of the Treasury in the Clinton and now Harvard professor Lawrence Summers, had dared to speak the truth, “we must get used to living in the current economic depression because nothing will change. Even in ten or twenty years. Because we are going through what is in effect a secular stagnation . ” A tocsin.
In its wake others begin to declare that “the emperor has no clothes”, fearing the risk of a global market for a descent into a maelstrom of economic cycles that are no longer able to take the path of development.
Moreover, the theory of secular stagnation Summers on illustrious fathers.
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