But if and when such devices [ed: new types of communication technologies with different displays and interfaces] are introduced (and no doubt labeled as revolutionary), they will simply be facilitating the perpetuation of the same banal exercise of non-stop consumption, social isolation, and political powerlessness, rather than representing some historically significant turning point. And they too will occupy only a brief interval of currency before their inevitable replacement and transit to the global waste piles of techno-trash. The only consistent factor connecting the otherwise desultory succession of consumer products and services is the intensifying integration of one’s time and activity into the parameters of electronic exchange. Billions of dollars are spent every year researching how to reduce decision-making time, how to eliminate the useless time of reflection and contemplation. This is the [ed: final] form of contemporary progress—the relentless capture and control of time and experience.
As many have noted, the form that innovation takes within the capitalism is the continual stimulation of the new, while existing relations of power and control remain effectively the same. For much of the twentieth century, novelty production, in spite of its repetitiveness and nullity, was often marketed to coincide with a social imagination of a future more advanced than, or at least unlike, the present. Within the framework of a mid-twentieth century futurism, the products one purchased and fit into one’s life seemed vaguely linked with popular evocations of eventual global prosperity, automation benignly displacing human labor, space exploration, the elimination of crime and disease, and so on. There was at least the misplaced belief in technological solutions to intractable social problems. Now the accelerated tempo of apparent change deletes any sense of an extended time frame that is shared collectively, which might sustain even a nebulous anticipation of a future distinct from contemporary reality. 24/7 is shaped around individual goals of competitiveness, advancement, acquisitiveness, personal security, and comfort at the expense of others. The future is so close at hand that it is imaginable only by its continuity with the striving for individual gain or survival in the shallowest of presents.
My argument may seem to contain two inconsistent threads. On the one hand I am affirming, along with some other writers, that the shape of contemporary technological culture still corresponds to the logic of modernization as it unfolded in the later nineteenth century—that is to say, that some key features of early-twenty-first-century capitalism can still be linked with aspects of the industrial projects associated with Werner Siemens, Thomas Edison, and George Eastman. Their names can stand emblematically for the development of vertically integrated corporate empires that reshaped crucial aspects of social behavior. Their prescient ambitions were realized through (1) an understanding of human needs as always mutable and expandable, (2) an embryonic conception of the commodity as potentially convertible into abstract flows, whether of images, sounds, or energy, (3) effective measures to decrease circulation time, and (4) in the case of Eastman and Edison, an early but clear vision of the economic reciprocities between “hardware” an “software”. The consequences of these nineteenth-century models, especially the facilitation and maximization of content distribution, would impose themselves onto human life much more comprehensively throughout the twentieth century.
On the other hand, sometime in the late twentieth century it is possible to identify a constellation of forces and entities distinct from those of the nineteenth century and its sequential phases of modernization. By the 1990’s, a thoroughgoing transformation of vertical integration had taken place, exemplified most famously by the innovations of Microsoft, Google, and others, even though some remnants of older hierarchical structures persisted alongside newer, more flexible and capillary models of implementation and control. Within this emerging context, technological consumption coincides with and becomes indistinguishable from strategies and effects of power. Certainly, for much of the twentieth century, the organization of consumer societies was never unconnected with forms of social regulation and subjection, but now the management of economic behavior is synonymous with the formation and perpetuation of malleable and assenting individuals. An older logic of planned obsolescence continues to operate, propelling the demand for replacement or enhancement. However, even if the dynamic behind product innovation is still linked to the rate of profit or to corporate competition for sector dominance, the heightened tempo of “improved” or reconfigured systems, models, and platforms is s a crucial part of the remaking of a subject and of the intensification of control. Docility and separation are not indirect by-products of a financialized global economy, but are among its primary aims. There is an ever closer linking of individual needs with the functional and ideological programs in which each new product is embedded. “Products” are hardly just devices or physical apparatuses, but various services and interconnections that quickly become the dominant or exclusive ontological templates of one’s social reality.
. . .
. . .
This unrelenting rhythm of technological consumption, as it has developed over the past two or three decades, prevents any significant period of time elapsing in which the use of a given product, or assemblage of them, could become familiar enough to constitute merely the background elements of one’s life. Operational and performative capabilities assume a priority that overrides the significance of anything that once might have been thought of as “content.” Rather than being a means to a larger set of ends, the apparatus is the end itself. Its purpose is directing its user to an ever more efficient fulfillment of its own routine tasks and function. It is systematically impossible that there might be a clearing or pause in which a longer-term time frame of trans-individual concerns and projects might come into view. The very brief lifespan of a given apparatus or arrangement encompasses the pleasure and prestige associated with its ownership, but simultaneously includes an awareness that the object at hand is tainted with impermanence and decay from the outset. Older cycles of replacement were at least long enough for the consensual illusion of semi-permanence to hold sway for a while. Now the brevity of the interlude before a high-tech product literally becomes garbage requires two contradictory attitudes to coexist: on one hand, the initial need and/or desire for the product, but, on the other, an affirmative identification with the process of inexorable cancellation and replacement. The acceleration of novelty production is a disabling of collective memory, and it means that the evaporation of historical knowledge no longer has to be implemented from the top down. The conditions of communication and information access on an everyday level ensure the systematic erasure of the past as part of the fantastic construction of the present.
Inevitably, such short cycles will, for some, produce anxieties about outmodedness and frustrations of various kinds. However, it is important to acknowledge the attractive incitements to align oneself with a continually evolving sequence based on promises of enhanced functionality, even if any substantive benefits are always deferred. At present, the desire to accumulate objects is less important than the confirmation that one’s life is coinciding with whatever applications, devices, or networks are, at any given moment, available and heavily promoted. From the vantage point, accelerated patterns of acquiring and discarding are never something regrettable, but rather a tangible sign of one’s access to the flows and capabilities most in demand. Following Boltanski and Chiapello, social phenomena that are characterized by the appearance of stasis or slow rates of change are marginalized and drained of value or desirability. Committing to activities where time spent cannot be leveraged through an interface and its links is now something to be avoided or done sparingly.
Submission to these arrangements is near irresistible because of the portent of social and economic failure–the fear of falling behind, of being deemed outdated. The rhythms of technological consumption are inseparable from the requirement of continual self-administration. Every new product or service presents itself as essential for the bureaucratic organization of one’s life, and there is an ever-growing number of routines and needs that constitute this life that no one has actually chosen. The privatization and compartmentalization of one’s activities in this sphere are able to sustain the illusion one can “outwit the system” and devise a unique or superior relation to these tasks that is either more enterprising or seemingly less compromised. The myth of the lone hacker perpetuates the fantasy that the asymmetrical relation of individual to network can be creatively played to the former’s advantage. In actuality there is an imposed and inescapable uniformity to our compulsory labor of self-management. The illusion of choice and autonomy is one of the foundations of this global system of auto-regulation. In many places one still encounters the assertion that contemporary technological arrangements are essentially a neutral set of tools that can be used in many different ways, including in the service of an emancipatory politics. The philosopher Giorgio Agamben has refuted such claims, countering that “today there is not even a single instant in which the life of individuals is not modeled, contaminated, or controlled by some apparatus.” He contends convincingly that “it is impossible for the subject of an apparatus to use it ‘in the right way.’ Those who continue to promote similar arguments are, for their part, the product of the media apparatus in which they are captured.”
...
...
– Jonathan Crary “24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep" (pg 40–43, 44–47, & 58-60)
As many have noted, the form that innovation takes within the capitalism is the continual stimulation of the new, while existing relations of power and control remain effectively the same. For much of the twentieth century, novelty production, in spite of its repetitiveness and nullity, was often marketed to coincide with a social imagination of a future more advanced than, or at least unlike, the present. Within the framework of a mid-twentieth century futurism, the products one purchased and fit into one’s life seemed vaguely linked with popular evocations of eventual global prosperity, automation benignly displacing human labor, space exploration, the elimination of crime and disease, and so on. There was at least the misplaced belief in technological solutions to intractable social problems. Now the accelerated tempo of apparent change deletes any sense of an extended time frame that is shared collectively, which might sustain even a nebulous anticipation of a future distinct from contemporary reality. 24/7 is shaped around individual goals of competitiveness, advancement, acquisitiveness, personal security, and comfort at the expense of others. The future is so close at hand that it is imaginable only by its continuity with the striving for individual gain or survival in the shallowest of presents.
My argument may seem to contain two inconsistent threads. On the one hand I am affirming, along with some other writers, that the shape of contemporary technological culture still corresponds to the logic of modernization as it unfolded in the later nineteenth century—that is to say, that some key features of early-twenty-first-century capitalism can still be linked with aspects of the industrial projects associated with Werner Siemens, Thomas Edison, and George Eastman. Their names can stand emblematically for the development of vertically integrated corporate empires that reshaped crucial aspects of social behavior. Their prescient ambitions were realized through (1) an understanding of human needs as always mutable and expandable, (2) an embryonic conception of the commodity as potentially convertible into abstract flows, whether of images, sounds, or energy, (3) effective measures to decrease circulation time, and (4) in the case of Eastman and Edison, an early but clear vision of the economic reciprocities between “hardware” an “software”. The consequences of these nineteenth-century models, especially the facilitation and maximization of content distribution, would impose themselves onto human life much more comprehensively throughout the twentieth century.
On the other hand, sometime in the late twentieth century it is possible to identify a constellation of forces and entities distinct from those of the nineteenth century and its sequential phases of modernization. By the 1990’s, a thoroughgoing transformation of vertical integration had taken place, exemplified most famously by the innovations of Microsoft, Google, and others, even though some remnants of older hierarchical structures persisted alongside newer, more flexible and capillary models of implementation and control. Within this emerging context, technological consumption coincides with and becomes indistinguishable from strategies and effects of power. Certainly, for much of the twentieth century, the organization of consumer societies was never unconnected with forms of social regulation and subjection, but now the management of economic behavior is synonymous with the formation and perpetuation of malleable and assenting individuals. An older logic of planned obsolescence continues to operate, propelling the demand for replacement or enhancement. However, even if the dynamic behind product innovation is still linked to the rate of profit or to corporate competition for sector dominance, the heightened tempo of “improved” or reconfigured systems, models, and platforms is s a crucial part of the remaking of a subject and of the intensification of control. Docility and separation are not indirect by-products of a financialized global economy, but are among its primary aims. There is an ever closer linking of individual needs with the functional and ideological programs in which each new product is embedded. “Products” are hardly just devices or physical apparatuses, but various services and interconnections that quickly become the dominant or exclusive ontological templates of one’s social reality.
. . .
. . .
This unrelenting rhythm of technological consumption, as it has developed over the past two or three decades, prevents any significant period of time elapsing in which the use of a given product, or assemblage of them, could become familiar enough to constitute merely the background elements of one’s life. Operational and performative capabilities assume a priority that overrides the significance of anything that once might have been thought of as “content.” Rather than being a means to a larger set of ends, the apparatus is the end itself. Its purpose is directing its user to an ever more efficient fulfillment of its own routine tasks and function. It is systematically impossible that there might be a clearing or pause in which a longer-term time frame of trans-individual concerns and projects might come into view. The very brief lifespan of a given apparatus or arrangement encompasses the pleasure and prestige associated with its ownership, but simultaneously includes an awareness that the object at hand is tainted with impermanence and decay from the outset. Older cycles of replacement were at least long enough for the consensual illusion of semi-permanence to hold sway for a while. Now the brevity of the interlude before a high-tech product literally becomes garbage requires two contradictory attitudes to coexist: on one hand, the initial need and/or desire for the product, but, on the other, an affirmative identification with the process of inexorable cancellation and replacement. The acceleration of novelty production is a disabling of collective memory, and it means that the evaporation of historical knowledge no longer has to be implemented from the top down. The conditions of communication and information access on an everyday level ensure the systematic erasure of the past as part of the fantastic construction of the present.
Inevitably, such short cycles will, for some, produce anxieties about outmodedness and frustrations of various kinds. However, it is important to acknowledge the attractive incitements to align oneself with a continually evolving sequence based on promises of enhanced functionality, even if any substantive benefits are always deferred. At present, the desire to accumulate objects is less important than the confirmation that one’s life is coinciding with whatever applications, devices, or networks are, at any given moment, available and heavily promoted. From the vantage point, accelerated patterns of acquiring and discarding are never something regrettable, but rather a tangible sign of one’s access to the flows and capabilities most in demand. Following Boltanski and Chiapello, social phenomena that are characterized by the appearance of stasis or slow rates of change are marginalized and drained of value or desirability. Committing to activities where time spent cannot be leveraged through an interface and its links is now something to be avoided or done sparingly.
Submission to these arrangements is near irresistible because of the portent of social and economic failure–the fear of falling behind, of being deemed outdated. The rhythms of technological consumption are inseparable from the requirement of continual self-administration. Every new product or service presents itself as essential for the bureaucratic organization of one’s life, and there is an ever-growing number of routines and needs that constitute this life that no one has actually chosen. The privatization and compartmentalization of one’s activities in this sphere are able to sustain the illusion one can “outwit the system” and devise a unique or superior relation to these tasks that is either more enterprising or seemingly less compromised. The myth of the lone hacker perpetuates the fantasy that the asymmetrical relation of individual to network can be creatively played to the former’s advantage. In actuality there is an imposed and inescapable uniformity to our compulsory labor of self-management. The illusion of choice and autonomy is one of the foundations of this global system of auto-regulation. In many places one still encounters the assertion that contemporary technological arrangements are essentially a neutral set of tools that can be used in many different ways, including in the service of an emancipatory politics. The philosopher Giorgio Agamben has refuted such claims, countering that “today there is not even a single instant in which the life of individuals is not modeled, contaminated, or controlled by some apparatus.” He contends convincingly that “it is impossible for the subject of an apparatus to use it ‘in the right way.’ Those who continue to promote similar arguments are, for their part, the product of the media apparatus in which they are captured.”
...
...
Because of the permeability, even indistinction, between the
times of work and leisure, the skills and gestures that one would have been
restricted to the workplace are now a universal part of the 24/7 texture of one’s
electronic life. The ubiquity of technological interfaces inevitably leads
users to strive for increasing fluency and adeptness. But the proficiency one
acquires with each particular application or tool is effectively a greater harmonization
with the intrinsic functional requirement continually to reduce the time of any
exchange or operation. Apparatuses solicit a seemingly frictionless handling,
dexterity, and know-how that is self-satisfying, and that can also impress
others as a superior ability to make efficient or rewarding use of
technological resources. The sense of individual ingenuity provides the
temporary conviction that one is on the winning side of the system, somehow
coming out ahead; but in the end there is a generalize leveling of all users
into interchangeable objects of the same mass dispossession of time and praxis.
Individual habituation to these tempos has had devastating
social and environmental consequences, and has produced a collective
normalization of this ceaseless displacement and discarding. Because loss is
continually created, and atrophied memory ceases to recognize it as such. The
primary self-narration of one’s life shifts in its fundamental composition. Instead
of a formulaic sequence of places and events associated with family, work, and
relationships, the main thread of one’s life story now is the electronic
commodities and media services through which all experience has been filtered,
recorded, or constructed. As the possibility of a single lifetime job vanishes,
the enduring lifework available for most is the elaboration of one’s relation
to apparatuses. Everything once loosely considered to be “personal” is now
reconfigured so as to facilitate the fabricating of oneself into a jumble of
identities that exist only as effects of temporary technological arrangements.
The frameworks through which the world can be understood
continue to be depleted of complexity, drained of whatever is unplanned or unforeseen.
So many longstanding and multivalent forms of social exchange have been remade
into habitual sequences of solicitation and response. At the same time, the
range of what constitutes response becomes formulaic and, in most instances, is
reduced to a small inventory of possible gestures or choices. Because one’s
bank account and one’s friendships can now be managed through identical
machinic operations and gestures, there is a growing homogenization of what
used to be entirely unrelated areas of experience. At the same time, whatever
remaining pockets of everyday life are not directed toward quantitative or
acquisitive ends, or cannot be adapted to telematics participation, tend to
deteriorate in esteem and desirability. Real-life activities that do not have
an online correlate begin to atrophy, or cease to be relevant. There is an insurmountable
asymmetry that degrades any local event or exchange. Because of the infinity of
content accessible 24/7, there will always be something online more
informative, surprising, funny, diverting, or impressive than anything in one’s
immediate actual circumstances. It is now given that a limitless availability
of information or images can trump or override any human-scale communication or
exploration of ideas.
