Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics

Barabasi argues that insofar as network evolution is governed by preferential attachment, one has to abandon the assumption that the Web (or Hollywood or any citation network) is democratic: "In real networks linking is never random. Instead, popularity is attractive" ( 86). Nodes that have been around for awhile, that have to an extent proven themselves, have distinct advantages over newcomers. In networks characterized by growth and preferential attachment, then, hubs emerge.

The fantasy of abundance-anyone can build a website, create a blog, express their opinions on the Internet-misdirects some critical media theorists away from the structure of real networks. Alexander R. Galloway, for example, emphasizes "distributed networks" that have "no central hubs and no radial nodes:' 17 He claims that the Internet is a distributed network like the U.S. interstate highway system, a random network that scales, to use Barabasi's terms. Embracing Gilles Deleuze's and Felix Guattari's image of the rhizome, Galloway notes that in a rhizome any point can be connected to any otherj there are no intermediary hubs and no hierarchies. For him, the Web is best understood rhizomaticaly, as having a rhizomatic structure. Barabasi's work demonstrates, however, that on the Web, as in any scale-free network, there are hubs and hierarchies. Some sites are more equal than others .. Imaginng a rhizome might be nice, but rhizomes don't describe the underlying structure of real networks. Hier.; archies and hubs emerge out of growth and preferential attachment.

Networked communications are celebrated for enabling everyone to contribute, participate, and be heard. The form this communication takes isn't concealed. People are fully aware of the media, the networks, even the surfeit of information. But they act as if they don't have this knowledge, believing in the importance of their contributions, presuming, say, that there are readers for their blogs, articles, and books. People tend to believe, then, in both abundance and registration. They believe that there is too much� out there and that their own specific contribution matters. "Why? As I explain in the next section, networked communications induce a kind of registration efect that supports a fantasy of participation.

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The Fantasy of Participation: Technology Fetishism

In their online communications, people are apt to express intense emotions, intimate feelings, some of the more secret or significant aspects of their sense of who they are. Years ago, while surfing through Yahoo's homepages, I found the page of a guy who featured pictures of his dog, his parents, and himself fuly erect in an s I M -style harness. At the bottom of his site was the typical, "Thanks for stopping by! Don't forget to write and tell me what you think!" This quaint image suggests how easy many find it to reveal themselves on the Internet. More contemporary examples are blogs, image-sharing sites like Flickr, video-sharing sites like YouTube, and social-networking sites like MySpace or Facebook. Not only are people accustomed to putting their thoughts online but also, in so doing, they believe their thoughts and ideas are registering-write and tell me what you think! They imagine themselves brave participants in a combative arena or prostrate confessors acknowledging their shortcomings. One believes tha,t one's contribution matters, that it means something to and within a context broader than oneself. Contributing to the information stream thus has a subjective registration efect detached from any actual impact or eficacy.

Because of this registration efect, people treat their contribution to circulating content as communicative action. They believe that they are active, making a diference by clicking on a button, adding their name to a petition, or commenting on a blog. Slavoj Zizek describes this kind of activity with the term interpassivity. "When we are interpassive, something else, a fetish object, is active in our stead. Zizek explains: "You think you \_are active, while your true position, as embodied in the fetish, is passive:' ¹⁸ The frantic activity of the fetish works to prevent actual action, t_? prevent something from really happening. Activity on the Internet, contributing to the circulation of afect and opinion, thus involves a profound passivity, one that is interconnected, linked, but passive nonetheless. Put back in terms of the circulation of contributions that fail to coalesce into actual debates, that fail as messages in need of response, we might think of this odd interpassivity as content that is linked to other content but never fully connected. Linking or citing stands in for reading, which stands in for engaging. At each juncture, there is a gap.

Networked communication and information technologies are exquisite media for capturing and reformatting political energies. They turn eforts at political engagement into contributions to the circulation of content, reinforcing the hold of neoliberalism's technological infrastructure. Political intensities become shorn of their capacity to raise claims to the universal, persisting simply as intensities, as indications of subjective feeling (a phenomenon taken up in greater detail in chapter 4) . The more strident the voices, the more intense the feelings, the stronger is the pull of communications media in their myriad, constant, and ever-ready forms. Media circulate and extend information about an issue or event, amplifying its afect and seemingly its significance. This amplifcation draws in more media, more commentary and opinion, more parody and comic relief, more attachment to communicative capitalism's information and entertainment networks such that the lmot of feedback and enjoyment itself operates as (and in place of) the political issue or event. Attention focuses on reflecting and commenting on the tangle of intensities-for the moment. More energies are invested in it. And the problem or issue is neglected, left to continue along its course, undeflected and unchanging despite the massive amount of interest and energy it has generated.

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This capture of political energies and investments and their reformatting as contributions is enabled by the reduction of politics to communica• tive .acts, to speaking and saying and exposing ;:md explaining, a reduction key to a democracy conceived of in terms of discussion and deliberation. Struggles on the Internet are able to reiterate and thereby displace political struggles in local and institutional settings precis�ly because these latter struggles are envisioned as communicative engagements. In turn, this displacement protects the activities of corporate and goverrimental oficials who are able to market and monitor, expropriate and privatize, unencumbered even as their activities are observed and discussed.19 That people !mow what corporations and governments are doing doesn't mean they can change them. That they are aware of a problem, have an opinion, and make their opinion !mown doesn't mean they have developed the infrastructure necessary to write new legislation, garner support for it, and get it passed, much less carry out a revolution (a term the left has abandoned and the right embraced).20 Vhen communication serves as the key category for left politiCs, whether communication be configured as discussion, spectacle, or publicityj this politics ensures its political failure in advance: doing is reduced to talking, to contributing to the media environment, instead of being conceived in terms of, say, occupying military bases, taking over the government, or abandoning the Democratic Party and doing the steady, persistent organizational work of revitalizing the Greens or Socialists.

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Under communicative capitalism, communication functions fetishistically as the disavowal of a more fundamental political disempowerment or castration. If Freud is correct in saying a fetish not only covers over a trauma but in so doing helps one through a trauma, what might serve as an analogous sociopolitical trauma today? A likely answer can be found in the left's role in the colapse of the welfare state: its betrayal of fundamental commitments to social solidarity. A thorough account of this collapse is beyond the scope of my analysis here. Three aspects of left failure nonetheless mark the political trauma underlying technology fetishism: its abandonment of workers and the poor; its retreat from the state and repudiation of collective action; and its acceptance of the neoliberal economy as the "only game in town:'

In brief, the late 196os and early 1970s witnessed a set of profound changes in the world economy, changes associated with declines in economic growth and increases in inflation and unemployment. As the following chapter explores, powerful figures in the corporate and finance sectors took this opportunity to dismantle the welfare state (by privatizing public holdings, cutting back on public services, and rewriting laws for the benefit of corporations) . For the most part, the American left seemed relatively unaware of the ways business was acting as a class to consolidate political power-a fundamental component of which was the passage of a set of campaign finance laws establishing the rights of corporations to contribute unlimited amounts of money to political parties and political action committees.21 Instead, coming out of the movements associated with 1968, increasingly prominent voices on the left emphasized and fought for personal freedoms, freedoms from parental and state constraints as well as freedoms for the expression of diferences of race, sex, and sexuality. "While these ideals were situated within movements for social justice, their coexistence was precarious, as tensions at the time between workers and students made clear. Harvey writes, "Pursuit of social justice presupposes social solidarities and a willingness to submerge individual wants, needs, and desires in the cause of some more general struggle . . . It has long proved dificult within the U.S. left, for example, to forge the collective discipline required for political action to achieve social justice without ofending the desire of political actors for individual freedom and for ful recognition and expression of political identities:'22 Just as corporate, business, and financial interests were coming together politicall}lj those on the left were fragmenting into particularities.23

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Identity politics proved a boon for the right, enabling the aliance between social conservatives and neoliberals. The former opposed the welfare state for the way it allegedly undermined morality and family values, encouraged criminality, abortion, and sex outside of marriage, and benefited the drug-addicted and lazy more than the sober and diligent. Engaged in struggles against social conservatives on all these fronts, many leftists embraced the emphasis on freedom and attack on the state prominent among neoliberals. The state seemed but another repressive authority, its provisions tied to the sexism of the traditional family and the racism of the white mainstream.24 Unions appeared corrupt, already part of a status quo limiting opportunities to the white and the male. Likewise, in the wake of more than a quarter century of anticommunism, ever fewer leftists found in Marxism a viable language for expressing political aspirations. Observing how oppression occurs along multiple axes, they argued that a focus on class obscures the diversity of political struggles.25 The economic problems plaguing the welfare state, moreover, suggested to some the 1.i:n?-ts of political attempts at regulation and redistribution. The economist Michael Perelman notes that "by the time of the Carter admin: istration, many liberals joined conservatives in ppposing regulation:'26 Deregulation came to seem like a respectable policy. Given the imp�ra• tives of complex systems, even leftists started to agree that some form of capitalism would and should persist; what was needed were guarantees for the rights and diferences of all within capitalist societies, a more radical or participatory approach to democracy.

Yet as t}ley echoed the critiCisms of the state prominent on the right, leftists failed to provide a compelling vision of a new form of social solidarity. Instead, they continued to emphasize the plurality of struggles on a variety of social and cultural terrains and to afirm diferent modes of living. Such an emphasis and afirmation enabled an easy coexistence with consumer capitalism insofar as choices of fashion and entertainment could be quicldy read as politicaly significant. Antiracist? Wear a Malcolm X t-shirt. Gay-friendly? Fly a rainbow flag. The ease of political expression, the quick availability of the afective thrill of radicality, could let more people feel that they were politically engaged even as the shift in political parties from person-intensive to finance-intensive organization strategies reduced the political opportunities open to most Americans to voting or giving money.

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In short, the American left responded to the attack on the welfare state, colapse of Keynesianism, and emergence of a neoliberal consensus by forfeiting its historical solidarity with workers and the poor, retreating from the state, and losing the sense that collective solutions to large-scale systemic inequalities are possible and necessary. The failure of solidarity was manifest perhaps most acutely in President Bill Clinton's destruction of welfare guarantees (aid to families with dependent children) in favor of Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (capped at five years) in the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996. Republicans didn't eliminate welfarej Democrats, the party associated with the interests of the·poor and the working class since the Depression, did.

This failure of solidarity is closely linked to the left's withdrawal from the state-even as various elements on the right developed strategies for funding and winning electoral campaigns, interpreting the Constitution, and re"W!iting laws, even as corporate and business interests steadily increased their political investments, the left failed adequately to defend what had long ago been won, namely, the notion that the most fundamental role of the state is ensuring a minimal social and economic standard below which no one is allowed to fal. Indeed, many dismissed the state as useless and outmoded, preferring to theorize instead a politics beyond the state (a move which left an open field for conservative strategists) .27

Finaly, as it overlapped with a reluctance to ofend any particular desires for freedom, backing away from the state resonated with a sense that there is no alternative to the market. And rather than simply an approach to the distribution of goods and services, this sense is more profoundly a sense of political ineficacy: we can't do anything about anything. In part, the loss of agency results from the prior acceptance of the inevitability of capitalism. But it results as well from an underlying skepticism toward uttering the word we, toward speaking for others and thereby risking overlooking their specific diferences.

The splintering and collapse of the left constitutes a political trauma. Technology fetishism responds to this trauma, acknowledging and denying it at the same time. For many, new media let them feel as if they are making a contribution, let them deny the larger lack of left solidarity even as their very individualized and solitary linking and clicking attests to the new political conditions.

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In the last decades of the twentieth centuryj information and communication technology spread beyond government and university settings on the promise of political empowerment. Ted Nelson, Stewart Brand, and the People's Computer Company reconfigured images of commuting away from IBM and its technocratic experts and toward the emancipation and empowerment of ordinary people.28 In the context of the San Francisco Bay Area's antiwar activism during the early seventies, they held up computers as the means to renew participatory democracy.29 This was the setting for Apple's presentation of its Macintosh computer as changing the world, as saving democracy by bringing technology to the people. In 1984, the company ran an advertisement with an image of a Mac next to a picture of Karl Marx; the slogan: "It was about time a capitalist started a revolution:' During the nineties AI Gore and Newt Gingrich promised ordinary citizens' access to government. They appealed to the possibility of town meetings for millions opened up by the Internet. Their rhetoric of democratization and education drove the Information and Infrastructure Technology Act, the National Information Infrastructure Act (both passing in 1993), and the 1996 Telecommunications Act.30 Networked communications technologies would ensure real political eficacy and gov-. ernmental responsiveness. ·Democracy would be enhanced as all citizens acquired the ability to ac:cess information and express their opinions.

This promise of participation was not simply propaganda. It was and remains a deeper, underlying fantasy wherein technology covers over our impotence and supports a vision of ourselves as active political partici;. pants. T� of the rhetoric encasing any new device, syste1:, code, or platform. A particular technological innovation becomes a screen upon which al sorts of fantasies of political action are projected�31

Peer-to-peer file sharing, especialy in light of the early rather hypnotic, mantra-like appeals to Napster, provides a clear example. Napsterdespite that fact that it was a commercial venture-was heralded as a sea change; it would transform private property, bring down capitalism. More than piracy, Napster was a popular attack on private property itself. Nick Dyer-Witheford argues that Napster, and other peer-to-peer networks, present "real possibilities of market disruption as a result of large-scale copyright violation:' He contends: "While some of these peer-to-peer networks-like Napster-were created as commercial applications, others -such as Free Net-were designed as political projects with the explicit intention of destroying both state censorship and commercial copyright. . . . The adoption of these celebratory systems as a central component of North American youth culture presents a grassroots expansion of the digital commons and, at the very least, seriously problematizes current plans for their enclosure:'32 Lost in the celebratory rhetoric is the fact that capitalism has never depended on one industry. Industries rise and fall. Corporations like Sony and Bertelsmann can face declines in one sector and still make astronomical profits in other ones. Worries about the loss of the beloved paperback book to unwieldy e-books weren't presented as dooming the publishing industry or assaulting the very regime of private property. 'Why should sharing music files be any diferent? "Sharing" at one level (files) enables ownership at others (hardware, network access).

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Even the much-lauded "consumer as producer" fails to attack private property. On the one hand, large commercial sites like Amazon claim ownership rights to all content-book reviews, lists-placed on their site. On the other, production is always and necessarily a kind of consumption, whether of raw materials or labor power. 33 Joshua Gamson's point about the legacy of Internet-phila is appropriate here: wildly displaced enthusiasm over the political impact of a specific technological practice results in a tendency "to bracket institutions and ownership, to research and theorize uses and users of new media outside of those brackets, and to allow . 'newness' to overshadow historical continuitY:'34

Napster is a technological fetish onto which al sorts of fantasies of political action were projected. In this instance, the fantasy is one deeply held by music fans: music can change the world. Armed with networked personal computers, the weapons of choice for American college students in a not-so-radical oh-so-consumerist entertainment culture, the wired revolutionaries can think they are changing the world, comforted all the while that nothing really changes (except the price of compact discs).

The technological fetish covers over and sustains a lack on the part of the subject. It protects the fantasy of an active, engaged subject by acting in the subject's stead. The technological fetish "is political" for us, enabling us to go about the rest of our lives relieved of the guilt that we might not be doing our part and secure in the belief that we are, after all, informed, engaged citizens. The paradox of the technological fetish is that the technology acting in our stead actually enables us to remain politically passive. We don't have to assume political responsibility because, again, the technology is doing it for us.

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The technological fetish also covers over a fundamental lack or absence in the social order. It protects a fantasy of unity or wholeness, com pens at� ing in advance for this impossibility. Technologies are invested with hopes and dreams, with aspirations to something better. A technological fetish is at work when one disavows the lack or antagonism rupturing (yet producing) the social by advocating a particular technological fix. The "fix" lets us think that al we need is to extend a particular technology and then we will have a democratic or reconciled social order.

Gamson's account of gay websites illustrates this fetish function. Gamson argues that in the United States, the Internet has been a major force in transforming "gay and lesbian media from organizations answering at least partly to geographical and political communities into businesses answering primarily to advertisers and investors:'35 He focuses on gay portals and their promises to ofer safe and friendly spaces for the gay community. "What he notes, however, is the way that these safe gay spaces now function primarily "to deliver a market share to corporations:' As he explains, "Community needs are conflated with consumption desires, and community equated with market:'36 Qp.a fetish, the portal is a screen upon which fantasies of connection can be projected. These fantasies displace aten.; tion from their commercial context.

In communicative capitalism, the technological fetish has three primary modes of operation: condensation, displacement, and denial.

Condensation occurs when technology fetishism reduces the complexi� ties of po¥tics-of organization, struggle, duration, decisiven�ss, division, representation, and so on-to one thing, one problem to be solved and one technological solution. For example, democracy might be treated as a singular problem of information: people don't have the information they need to participate efectively;37 Bingo ! Information technologies intervene to provide people with information. This sort of strategyj however, occludes the problems of organizing and political wil. For example, as Mary Graham explains in her study of the politics of disclosure in chemical emissions, food labeling, and medical error policyj transparency started to function as a regulatory mechanism precisely at a time when legislative action see.med impossible. Agreeing that people had a right to know, politicians could argue for warning labels and m.ore data while avoiding hard or unpopular decisions. Corporations could comply-and find ways to use their reports to improve their market position. "Companies often lobbied for national disclosure requirements," Graham writes. "They did so;' she continues, "because they believed that disclosure could reduce the chances of tougher regulation, eliminate the threat of multiple state requirements, or improve competitive advantage . . . . Likewise, large food processing companies and most trade associations supported national nutritional labeling as an alternative to multiple state requirements and new regulations, or to a crackdown on health claims. Some also expected competitive gain from labeling as consumers, armed with accurate information, increased demand for authentically healthful productions:'38 Additional examples of condensation appear when theorists and activists emphasize singular websites, blogs, and events. Such spikes in the media sphere may well seem impressive, but they conform to the dictates of broadcast media spectacle, momentary eruptions that anchor people to their screens, calling upon them to register their opinions, to contribute. They don't provide alternative practices of collective engagement, challenge corporate ownership of the telecommunications infrastructure, or redirect financial flows toward the most disadvantaged.

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The second mode of operation of the technological fetish is displacement. A tendency among some political and new media theorists is to displace politics onto the activities of everyday or ordinary people as if academics, activists, and politicians were somehow extraordinary. ^"What everyday people do in their everyday lives is supposed to overflow with political activity: conflicts, negotiations, interpretations, resistances, collusions, cabals, transgressions, and resignifications. The Internet-as well as cell phones, beepers, and other communications devices (though, weirdly, not the regular old telephone, likely because of its confinement in domestic and ofice space) -is teeming with politics. To put up a website, to deface a website, to redirect hits to other sites, to deny access to a website, to link to a website are construed as real political actions. Bloggers and blogging allegedly reactivate politics, operating as forces reshaping politics and j ournalism, despite the continued role of the mainstream media · even for bloggers and the continued domination of large-scale financial interests in electoral politics. The emphasis on networked communication strategies displaces political energy from the hard work of organizing and struggle. It also remains oddly one-sided, conveniently forgetting both the larger media environment of these activities, as if there were not and have not been left print publications for years, and the political setting of networked communications. After all, the Republican Party as well as al sorts of other c;onservative organizations and lobbyists use the Internet just as much as, if not more than, progressive groups.

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