ACFM - ACFM Trip 24: Technology

Episode Date: May 22, 2022

What defines each era? Historians often lean on terms that point to technology: bronze, steam, carbon, silicon. So is technology a fundamental aspect of being human? On this wide-ranging Trip, the gang take on one of their biggest topics yet. Starting from the basis that technology is an application of knowledge for a practical purpose, […]

Hello and welcome back to ACFM. This is producer Matt. At several points in the episode we're about to listen to, the gang make reference to the microdose we released to accompany this trip. However, they don't call it by its name, so I'm going to do that now. The microdose is entitled Mothers of Invention and is a fascinating conversation between Nadia and the writer and journalist Katrina Marsal. It's available now up on Novara So do check it out in good time But don't worry It won't affect your enjoyment of what we're about to hear If you haven't listened to it yet Okay on with the show

This is AsiCla ACFM, the home of the weird left. I'm Jeremy Gilbert. I'm here as usual with my friends Nadia Idol. Hello. And Keir Milburn. Hello. And today we are going to talk about the subject of technology. Yeah. So I came up with this subject because I came across a book by Catherine Marcell and it had some fascinating stuff in it that really made me think about the relationship between technological development and gender, but also economics, and just the really basic question of when we call something a technology and when we don't and how these things develop over history. And it got me thinking about questions like the relationship of the left to technology

and stuff around technological determinism as well. So I thought it's a fascinating subject, so I thought something we might want to discuss on our show. So there we go. I mean, the other thing, I suppose, is we've been living through a period in which a lot of our social relations are being mediated through technology. We're not in the same room today, of course. We're doing this via cast, and we've been having a lot of our interactions via Zoom and these sorts of things. I suppose that brings the idea of technology to the fore or the way that technology interacts of our social relations, and therefore it will lead to other questions such as, you know, why does technology take the shape it does? what's driving the direction of technology, what's driving the pace of technology. Are we in an age of technological acceleration? Are we in an age of technological stagnation?

I think we can cover all of those things in an episode on technology. I guess we want to start off a little bit thinking about definitions. Technology is one of those terms. It's always really interesting to think about. Because typically, certainly in my experience, there's a lot of students, if you use the word technology that what they think you mean is computing actually computing and maybe communications we use the term technology as a shorthand for those things because we've been living through a historical period when the most obviously new and socially transformative technologies are those ones but historically technology the term technology really can mean a much broader set of

things. We often think of it as meaning just the application of scientific knowledge to some sort of practical purpose. But in a more general sense, you know, the French philosophers who were all very well grounded in their classical Greek always like to point out. And also Heidegger, the German phenomenologist of the early 20th century who wrote about this as well, also referring to the ancient Greeks. They like to point out that the term technology derives from the technique and techney it has the same route as technique it just sort of means like any sort of systematic organized thought through deliberate way of doing things that isn't simply instinctual or organic the term technology can come to mean a general assemblage of techniques

it can of any kind so they might involve external devices they might not do there's other uses we can come back to which are related to these like Foucault's notion of the technology of the South, technologies of governance but I guess maybe if we think about the first of

those first, the idea that we think of technology is the application of scientific knowledge to a practical purpose of some kind and then we end up habitually thinking of some things belonging in that category and some things

not really doing, that was part of the theme of your discussion, wasn't it, Anardia? Yeah, I mean, I think it's interesting what you say that I guess, I mean, it makes sense that a lot of young people would see technology as in related to, you know, like computing or software, which is like a massive technological development. But in between those definitions are some kind of hard material things, so to speak, which in a sense are quite simple, but over, you know, prehistory and history have had a massive effect on, you know, the development of human human civilization.

And the big one, obviously, is the wheel and then stuff like, you know, spinning thread or, you know, yarn and stuff like that. And putting the spinning wheel, spinning and the wheel together, created a lot of advancement in society and kind of changed economic models. I suppose one of the things that connects

that observation about how students use, the term to what you were talking about that interview with Katrin is this idea of technology as being the thing that somehow defines epochs of human development culture. So it's understandable that in the age, the historians are going to remember our period, I think, for two things really, which is computers and the massive transformation of gender relations. That's what people are going to remember about now in like 500 years. Or if civilization lasts 500 years. Exactly.

They'll also remember the fact that it almost ended. So that's understandable. But Katrin made that really interesting point, didn't she? There's still this convention in naming earlier epochs of prehistory and very early history in terms of what were supposedly the dominant technologies like bronze, metalworking, stone. But you could just as well have named the stone age, the string age, she says, doesn't she? Yeah.

I mean, basically, that's the main argument that she's making around, that's one of the central pieces in her book about gender, is that there's various different technologies, but how history is written is, you know, like you said, associated with a lot more with hard metals and stuff like bronze and rather than ceramic or string, which both had massive impacts on how we developed other machines. and processes. I suppose there is the Beaker people as the counter example of that. But you're right, you know, string doesn't survive, does it? So the string people is not going to take off. And we tend, archaeology has got this bias towards what survives. And so you have this bias to privileging civilizations, which produce big monuments, etc., etc.,

which probably just basically hides the huge, the biggest proportion of human activity that's ever taken place which is just social reproductive technology sure but you know exactly to that point

you know we don't call I don't know whenever it was I don't actually know this date but we don't call a certain era the washing machine age or the you know kitchen advancement age and you know the inside of a kitchen

and what it looks like now is it quite a big deal I think you were making this point care when we talked about it. Yeah, I mean, perhaps we should call it the washing machine age. A number of people have made the argument that, you know, if we think about technological developments through the 20th century, the washing machine is an example of a technology that's had a huge impact on people's lives,

perhaps more than something like the iPhone. So perhaps we do need to change our perception of what the dominant technology is or how we think about technological change. I think we think about, like, you know, the idea that something technology reduced to the word tech is synonymous with digital technologies, with computer technologies of some kind, is probably due to the dominant, the sort of dominant dynamic that in technology has been like the shrinking of computers, basically, which is dominated by this concept of Moore's law, which is basically every two years, the number of transistors. that can be printed onto a silicon chip doubles. Yeah, that's what leads lots of Silicon Valley ideologists to conclude that the emergence of conscious artificial intelligence is inevitable because obviously once you can get enough transistors

on a sheet of silicon, it's going to become self-aware. That's obvious. Yeah, I think that's bizarre. It's a bizarre idea. Well, it's based on not, it's based on a complete, missed a complete conflation of the concept of processing information digital information processing with consciousness which they're exactly they're not the same thing no they're not they're really really not maybe we should do a whole episode on that but i mean

i can't press enough i know i know we've just talked about it but like i don't have a microwave and i don't have a dishwasher i basically live in the 1970s house but i have a washing machine what would my life be like if i didn't have a washing machine or access to a washing machine or a Andrette. How much time? I mean, it's so massive. And the fridge is another big one, especially if you live in a hot country. It changes the economy of how you deal with, especially, you know, the rearing and selling and buying and cooking of meat. It's massive. Yeah, it is. Yeah. This is one of those moments. I'm always really conscious that not everybody got taught undergraduate history by feminist social historians, because I didn't, because when you said it, initially when you made the

point about washing machine, I just thought, yeah, everybody knows that. Of course, that's obvious, but obviously it's not. Let's play the classic, Welcome to the Machine by Pink Floyd. I love that song. It's very dystopic, but I do love it. Welcome, my son. Welcome to Machine. where have you been it's all right we know where you've been on the one hand

it's a cliche of historical anthropology and people who study material culture that all technologies become as they call it inculturated so they become part of culture

they become part of the background so we're so used to Tom out roads being all over the place that we just think of them as just part of the environment because that is actually how we experienced it we experienced them as things that have always been there we can't really imagine not being there they're just there even though if we stop to reflect on it we might of course be aware that they've been put there and they have to be maintained etc and even really young people are sort of conscious that computing and mobile computing and all this stuff is relatively new so we're conscious of it's technological

status. But then there's also the issue that even when we look back to the past and think about what were the crucial transformatory technologies, it's true. We don't habitually, not in, well, I think probably, I think this is not true if people are saying on a degree, doing a degree course in social history, or even contemporary archaeology, where feminism has been really influential on the way these things are taught. So I don't think it would be true to say today that, I mean, in terms like Bronze Age, for example, you know, a lot of archaeologists are really sniffy about, like partly for these reasons. These are terms that were made up in the Victorian era. So when we say,

but they exist. But they exist in the common vernacular. People, you know, that's how they refer to time. No, they do. They do. And the washing, I mean, the washing machine is a great example, because I think it's absolutely true. It just isn't really, unless you're a special history specialist, it's just not part of our everyday thinking about what were the definitive events of the 20th century, that the end of the end of wash. as defining the week for most women, women in social classes, but they couldn't afford servants. And indeed, the necessity of paying servants to do your washing for you

if you were in those social classes were really, they were absolutely definitive features of everyday life for people of all social classes. And washing without a washing machine, watching without a washing machine is one of those things. I think people really don't get how hard it is. It's so hard. Like it was really hard work.

It basically was generally accepted that it was one to two full days work every week to wash the linen and laundry of a family, of a moderately sized family. And yeah, it's completely true that the washing machine is, you know, has been really, it is a really transformative technology in those ways. Of course, it also raises the question of who has ended up fully benefiting from that because on the one hand, indeed, the, you know, women and other people have been liberated from the drudgery of laundry, but mostly so they can then have that, have that labour power exploited by somebody else. The other thing that I think has tended to happen with sort of labour-saving devices, such as the washing machine is, you know, sort of in the domestic sphere,

if we want to use those terms, is standards tend to go up as well. So like the standards of expected cleanliness. forth go up. And so, you know, the labour-saving aspects of those tend to get diminished from that sort of angle as well. Is this an argument for like bodily filth? Just checking where we are on hygiene. Bodily filth is quite a lot. You know, I'm in favour of hygiene. I wouldn't go as far as bodily filth. No, no, but it's just that, it's just that trying to think about, you know, what What drives technology? How autonomous is technology? It's technological discovery from other sorts of drivers such as social relations, capitalism, etc. Yeah. And then what happens,

what happens to those impacts? I mean, it's a really famous part of the whole debate around automation that, you know, in the 1930s, Keens wrote an essay called The Economic Possibilities of Our Grandchildren, like projecting ahead, actually to the year 20, So two years ago, in which he predicted, extrapolating from, you know, productivity increases, partly to do with technological innovation, he predicted that mankind would have solved as economic problems by 2020, basically. And we'd all be working something like three hour shifts or a 50, three hours shifts a day or a 15 hour work week. Right. And he was wrong. That's not what's happened. In fact, over the last 30 years, the work week has gone up, you know. I can't remember what it is. Is it something like one in 20 people work like more than 60 hours a week or something like that? You know, his other thing he thought was that he was predicting that by 2020, we'd basically have the end of capitalism. He called it the euthanasia of the rentia, basically, that there'd be such an abundance of capital.

So, you know, technology invested in sort of like, you know, productive plants, et cetera, and et cetera, that basically there would be no possibility for capitalists to exploit the scarcity of capital, he said. so he thought that we know we'd basically living in not quite fully automated lecture of communism but you know fully automated luxury Keynesianism so yeah and and you know that was that that idea that like that technology would push us towards a freer society you know that was quite a shared across at least a large proportion of the of the political spectrum you know Keynes was no no revolutionary you know He always said, you know, he'll be on the side of the educated bourgeoisie in the class war. That's his side.

He knew what side he was on. I was just going to say, you know, that's an interesting question. Like, what drives technology? What drives technological change? But also, I think there's this question, not just of what drives technology. It's like, is technological innovation and scientific innovation, is it a force which is autonomous to things, such as the dynamics of capitalism? because I think we'd also, alongside the washing machine, we'd probably also point to the contraceptive pill

as this thing that got invented and got rolled out because of the particular sort of historical moment, but then had effects, which would have been quite hard to predict, I think, and like really, really world historic effects, such as the impact of second wave feminism and the change position of women in society, which in a Victorian age had got to a low point

in the 1950s had got to a low point but basically the sort of the liberation of women to a certain degree is a really big change in world history I think and you could argue that that's to do with social movements

you could argue it's to do with the states of capitalism at that moment but you could also argue it's the effect of these couple of technological innovations which create a whole sphere of possibility And I like that. I think there's something that is unpredictable about all of this. I think, you know, with hindsight, you can have all sorts of different sets of analyses on this.

But I think the example that Catherine makes of the electric car, I mean, maybe this was common knowledge. I had no idea that there were electric cars at the turn of the 19th or 20th century. But because of a complex set of factors, both like economically, and, you know, gender roles at the time and, like, what was understood by marketing and how the markets worked and, you know, global power, all the rest of it, it didn't thrive.

And we went on to motorized cars. And if you look back at the detail of how that went about, you wouldn't have necessarily, you think, oh, why has that outcome? Why have we had this outcome? And I think that sort of almost answers the question of why Keynes is, vision didn't come to be because in a way it sounds like from what you're saying

Keir, he's basically saying if you have this technological development, it will drive us towards freedom. But of course, that's not true because that's not how power and interests work and that's not how the global politic operates. I don't think Keene's, for example, was necessarily naive. I don't think he necessarily naively believed that technology as such would liberate humanity, he recognised correctly that technological advance would lead to a situation in which it was definitely hypothetically technologically possible for everybody to work a 15 hour week, which it definitely is and has been since the 70s. But he was naive about the extent to which class forces and the very nature of capital and capitalism would do everything in its

would obstruct that objective. And I think you could say, I mean, you can make similar comments about Katrin's really important and interesting analysis of the way in which the internal combustion engine ended up being promoted and supported as opposed to electric cars and it's definitely true and really interesting the way that that's partly because of the way in which the electric car ended up being coded as feminine from very early on but I would also say I haven't read the book actually so I don't know how much details you can gets into the about this in the book. But it's also clearly because the oil industry was geopolitically much more powerful than the sectors of capital who are investing in electric cars. And then of course

they're going to use things like gender ideology to further their interests. I'm not really convinced that it's the gender factors that were necessarily completely causal in that instance. I think I think the bottom line is that the oil industry was very closely tied. up to the emerging American Empire and the dying remnant to the British Empire in a way that the electric car industry wasn't. So they absolutely wanted to promote those things. But it is really fascinating. It's clearly there is a really fascinating example of how gender and capital,

gender relations and class relations and all these things interact with each other. Exactly. It's the combination of this. The whole soup, isn't it? Yeah, it's all those things. And I think without that kind of gender analysis, You can't really explain some of the features of even the capital, even like the petrol engine car industry in the 20th century.

I mean, it is just, it is completely ridiculous when you think about it. The car industry for decades and decades revolved around turning out cars that were much more powerful than you were legally allowed to use, much more powerful than you were legally allowed to use on any of the roads in the countries they were selling them. You know, it's kind of great. without car culture being partly invested with all these masculine fantasies of power and speed and, you know, it wouldn't be the case that you would have had, you know, hundreds of millions,

billions of dollars of consumer, retail consumers money being wasted on machines that they were actually never going to be allowed to use in the way that they were being designed to be used, which it is sort of crazy. The other way to think about that is basically a battle within fossil fuels because when we're talking about electric cars and electricity particularly in the first half of the 20th century we're talking about

coal and the move towards oil was in some ways driven by the desire to move away from coal because coal was the source of really strong unionisation you get strong unions in dangerous work etc etc and coal production was taking place

in the the core countries whereas all production was taking place in countries in the Middle East, etc., countries in which there could be some sort of influence of control exercised over them

by a combination of like the big companies tied up with and those big companies were tied up with the big imperial companies, etc. BPs tied up with the British state, etc. That's totally correct, I think. That's a really good point.

In post-war Britain, if the motor car network, the motoring network, is dependent on the national grid, the same way everything else is, then you've got a socialist revolution in the city. That is just happening because the miners were already, the British miners were already one of the most militant and powerful sections of the European working class at that time. And it's because so much of the power grid ran on coal. So, yeah, that's a good point.

Yeah, that's a really good angle. No, I was just going to say we could follow that argument a little bit up and sort of bring out a sort of Marxist analysis of like what drives technological change because we could follow that on. And in capital, Marx writes, it would be possible to write a whole history of inventions made since 1830 for the sole purpose of providing capital with weapons against working class revolt. And that's a quote, that quote, that sort of like working class revolt,

Drives technological innovation because capital tries to use technology in order to escape from those moments where Labor or the working class can hold power. You can put it into much more economic terms and just say basically high wages drives technological, perhaps technological innovation or technological take-up, something like that. Why would you move your technological base, invest in new plant, this expensive thing if wages are low enough that you can just get the same effect by building new plant base

with the same technological base. It's only when human labour gets expensive that capital invest in new technology and there's all sorts of theories about how that takes place. I mean, this all comes down to the question of what's the relationship between capital accumulation, the pursuit of profit and actual technological innovation?

and the capitalist story, a central part of the liberal capitalist story since the 17th century is the thing about capitalism that legitimates it is it generates innovation. It generates technological innovation and commercial innovation, which end up having beneficial effects for the vast majority of humans. And this is the thing, I would have to say, this is the thing that like Tories or even Blairites, like liberal or even conservative advocates of capitalism, deeply believe. They deeply believe that what causes, what creates innovation is capitalism.

And then there's at least two versions of the kind of Marxist response to that. And one is a certain strand of Marxist thinking, which basically says, yes, that is true. But every mode of production, including capitalism, reaches the point where it was innovating and now it isn't. Now it's stifling innovation. And that's what creates the conditions for, you know, revolutionary forces to emerge and makes it sort of socially necessary to move on to a new state. So that's one version. And there's another version which says, actually, no, capitalism as such, is not what's creative. But the industrial revolution isn't the same thing as capitalism. The industrial revolution was a sort of technological revolution and it would have happened in some form,

whatever social arrangements you had. And what capitalism does is it might facilitate certain kinds of technological development, but it's always very prescriptive about which ones it's going to facilitate in which it isn't, and it's always trying to control the outcomes. And to some extent, capitalism is always sort of running behind, trying to catch up with both new forms of technological innovation and new forms of social organisation that emerge in response to it. And I sort of, I mean, my own view, you know,

something I've thought about a lot and studied a lot, is that sort of all of those stories are true a bit. The truth is a very complex sort of interaction between all those processes. But I've got this little thought experiment that I always like to do to think about the relationship between like technology, technological change, power relationships, which I think we can do something with probably. And that is, well, first,

Firstly, I thought about this in response to, you know, we've been through several waves of optimism and pessimism about just about cybernetic technologies and the internet and computing. I mean, I published an academic journal article about this a year or two ago, and one of the things I did in it was just go point out that even in my lifetime, there's a wave in the early 90s that we've talked about before when people are really optimistic about the way the internet is going to make democracy possible and liberate information. And then there's a wave of pessimism sort of following the dot-com crash and everybody says, oh, that was all bullshit. It was all just a dream. Then there's another wave of optimism around the time of things like Myspace, sort of destroying the music industry and good riddance to it. And the first emergence of social media when people are excited about the organizational

prospect, and there's the idea that Twitter is facilitating the 2011, you know, uprisings in the Middle East and elsewhere. where... Which it didn't, but... And then there's... And now we're going through quite a deep wave of pessimism at the moment now that everybody is seeing

that Silicon Valley has consolidated itself into half a dozen mega monopolies. There's always this question then, well, is our new technology is liberating or are they not liberating? And my general approach to that question is to say that, well, well, there's still two different questions, really.

One question is just how autonomous are the emergence of new technologies or do technologies themselves only emerge from research programs which are serving the interest of the powerful? But if you part of that for a moment and just say, well, what happens when a new technology emerges? I think as a general default position, when a new technology emerges, it will usually benefit the people who already have power

because any new technology is usually expensive. And it's usually the people who have power already are able to make use of it. And then the only way that people, the less powerful can respond to that is by coming up with new forms of organization to eventually make it possible for them to reclaim some of their power or even get more power. But that, sorry to interrupt, but that doesn't work for the argument that Keir was making earlier about the contraceptive pill because it's not women who are in power and it's women who benefit from having control over their bodies. Yeah, that's, well, that's, there is a feminist response to that. Hold on. Let me just, let me finish a little bit and I'll come back to that. My thought experiment version of that is about gender.

Because I always say, well, what is the simplest form of technology you can possibly imagine? It's somebody just picking up a stick and hitting something with it. And what is the simplest form of power imbalance, you can imagine? It's the physical power imbalance between adult men and adult women. And you imagine a kind of state of nature image, which is adult men and adult women. Well, once men start using sticks to hit things, it's only going to increase their power over women. But then conversely, the only way women are going to be able to respond to that is by finding some form of self-organisation, some way of organising themselves. This is partly why people like Chris Knight came up with the theory of the sex strike, the idea that some form of women's autonomous organisation must have been the basic form which human civilisation took, which, I mean, there's no evidence for or against it because they can't be.

But it's an interesting thought experiment. Anyway, and so in that thought experiment, eventually women will hopefully find some way of organizing themselves to counterbalance that or that power which men have accrued to themselves and increased by developing this new technology. And then so if men want to keep maintaining their power, they're going to have to come up with some other new technology. And that's analogous to the way in which the autonomous tradition thinks of the relationship between class struggle and technological development, that it thinks that will basically, you know, the industrial, the form of the, you know, that really the history of capitalism and the industrial revolution actually begins with the concentration of people in cities in the late Middle Ages. And the concentration of cities is actually what's threatening to make populations ungovernable because the cities want to be self-governing and they've got all these

artisans and craftspeople who don't want to do what they're told. And that, and that they, I mean, at its most extreme, they'll argue that's what motivates imperialism. That's what it motivates the aristocratic elites of late medieval Europe to go out and find new sets of people who don't have city so they can kick around. And then similarly, it's what motivates, you know, key elements of the industrial revolution that you've got to disrupt the peasant communities to the countryside. You've got to disrupt the emerging forms of urban community so that you can keep maintaining authority. And then the bit of Marx that Keir was talking about, It's pointing out that many of the key innovations in the use of industrial technology,

the use of automation, systems of factory organization, over the course of the 19th century, and you can extend this into the 20th century, they're reactive. They're reactive to workers finding ways of organizing themselves to try to avoid exploitation. So I think it is, I think as a general way of thinking about that relationship, it's potentially quite useful. It's potentially useful because it avoids both being naive. about the idea that technology will always liberate us and being pessimistic about the idea

that new technologies can only lead to dystopias. And I think that's what we're seeing with social media. Like I think, of course, they're going to, of course, social media are all other things being equal, mainly going to benefit our enemies, because our enemies are the ones with all the money and power. But that doesn't mean we can't figure out ways of using them to organise ourselves in ways which are liberatory and democratic.

I know I've been going on for ages now, But that point about the pill, well, look, there is a feminist critique of the contraceptive pill. I'm not saying I endorse this view, but it is a view taken by some feminist historian. And the view is, look, yeah. Okay, the contraceptive pill did enable individual women to take control over their fertility without having to massively restrict their sexuality. Conveniently, at a historical moment when capitalists were about to have a massive appetite for women's labor in the new post-industrial economy.

But it ultimately, the point that's often made by feminist is that still ultimately made women the people who had to be responsible. And it also came incited with the emergence of a culture in which women were expected to be sexually available to men much more widely. And the point that is made by those feminist critics is, well, if the research agendas that had led to the female contraceptive pill had been not governed by patriarchs, then we would have had a male contraceptive.

a long time ago because the female contraceptive pill, I mean, it is a, I mean, it's a weird technology, the female contraceptive pill. And, you know, it's not that, I mean, there's all kinds of arguments about whether it's really that healthy, whether using it over a really long period is good for you, whether completely fucking with women's hormonal cycles is actually a good way of resolving the dilemma of the fact that people want to have lots of sex without having children. And it was, you know, the argument is. Yeah, but there was no invent, but that's the whole point, isn't it? Is that society does not invest in putting the money where there could have been a different solution because you're not trying, because controlling women's fertility is like

the number one thing that patriarchy is trying to do. Yeah, yeah, that's right. Yeah. And that is always the big question for historians of technology, this is a good example, but there's loads of others, it's always, look, is it the case that technologies just emerge when powerful groups want them? Because they chuck in the research. So is it the case that, like, the Romans could easily have done the Industrial Revolution, but they didn't have any motivation to do it because they had a massive slave economy? Is it the case that the Romans, if they wanted to, could have developed electricity radio and television? There are some historians of technology who say, look, you know, the Roman, you know, the late Roman Empire, you know, the level of technology

is only about 100 years away, of a quarter down certain paths from being able to invent television, so why don't they? And then, I'm not saying I endorse that. I'm not an expert enough to know, but the, but then, so there's this extreme sort of social constructionist argument, which is associated with some strands of science and technology studies, people like Raymond Williams in his book on television, which tends to say, yeah, basically anything could emerge any time, and it's all about just who, what the people in power want to get researched and get produced. And then there's another argument that says, well, it might be true to an extent, but once technologies get out in the world, they do all kinds of stuff and then enable

all kinds of stuff that nobody was really expecting or predicting. I think there's a compounded kind of exponential effect to technology. So you build one thing and at the same time something else is happening and then you layer on top of that some form of social change and then you get an outcome that you can't always predict I mean it seems crazy but you know I accept that theory exists that the Romans could have had TVs maybe they were chilling out too much they didn't need it they had other entertainment when people think about about music and technology that perhaps a band that might pop into their mind is craftwork who were a band from Dusseldorf based around around the duo of Florian Schneider and Ralph Hutter.

One of the interesting things about craft workers, they emerge out of this sort of scene in Germany, which in the Anglo world is called Crout Rock. It's certainly not called that in the Germanic world, but like a set of bands, which you can include people like Cannes, Faust, Amund, Dool, etc, who were basically trying to escape from the blues and rock music, the sort of prison they thought that that had put onto music.

They wanted to sort of a sort of reinvention of music. They were inspired by people such as Stockhausen. And some of the people from Cannes, for instance, Holkazuka was a student of Stockhausens. And so there's this sort of interesting story of they're trying to escape from this American black American music, such as the blues. They're trying to escape from that.

You know, it takes different forms and craftwork in particular. They sort of embrace. this sort of technological aesthetic, which sort of takes, goes on and to become, you know, there's sort of almost a sort of a cliche in a way. But this music they produce, which is, you know, based on sort of, the whole crout rock music is based on sort of like loops and repetitions rather than like the classic sort of rock music or pop music structure. And it's based on synths. It's all using, it's all since. So there's no, there's no non-synthetic instruments. Yeah. So that's, that's craft work when they get to become craftwork.

the classic craftwick early on they're using flutes and so forth but later on it's all synth and they're really experimenting with early synthetic music and so the nice story is they aim to escape there's this movement to escape from the sort of structures of the blues basically and they create this music where perhaps they're sort of like the American blues

and African tradition is removed and yet in the 80s and not 90s, it goes on to become, like, one of the communities that really, really, really embrace craftwork in particular are African-American community. So, first of all, it's people like African-Mabartan and Solsonic Force who do Planet Rock, which sort of samples craftwork. They invent like electro-funk and basically a whole set of music from that or musical traditions from that.

And then the other people who'd really point to really, really influenced, being really influenced by craftwork in particular are techno outfits such as underground resistance and Dorexia. So it's just this really interesting, why did black and African-American communities sort of recognise themselves in this really European sort of modernist aesthetic? Dave Stubbs in his book on Crout Rock called Future Days makes this argument that craftwick are really, really influenced by the artistic and design movement Bauhaus, who sort of saw technology and art is something that cannot be separated, basically. Technology and art should be unified and through the medium of design

and used to restructure the way people live. So there's this idea that that's attitude towards craft work. It's not good or bad technology. It's something to be used. Of course, the other thing about craftwork is that they stopped making music in 1986 or stopped making new music in 1986 and then just become this nostalgia act, basically. They just go around the world touring, they're putting stasis. They go around the world touring the same songs,

and they sort of improve their show. So it's this like stasis of futurism, if you want to put it that way. Perhaps we should play The Robots from 1978 as an example. We are the robots. We are the robots. We are the robots. as a robot okay well there's a couple of really important examples of those African-American artists indeed being directly influenced by craft work amongst other things in the mid-80s which is really the moment which is really the moment of the birth of modern electronic dance music,

as much as I dislike the term EDM. Juan Atkins, recording as Model 500, recorded this arguably the classic Detroit Techno-track in 1985. This is a track called No Euphos. And famously you'll see them fly. They say there is no hope. They say no youth out. Why there's no head on high.

Maybe you'll see them fly. And famously, Juan Atkins and contemporaries like Derek May, also from Detroit, from the Detroit suburbs, would comment on the irony or the appropriateness of the fact that they were trying to develop this self-consciously digital, self-consciously technology. self-consciously futuristic, almost science-fictional kind of music in the city that had been the birthplace of the American motor industry and also arguably the graveyard of the American motor industry. They very self-consciously saw themselves, although they wouldn't have had this terminology available as charting a post-forwardist landscape of a computerized world. Although like

Crawford themselves actually, it's very unclear. Like, are they just celebrating this fully computerized world? And if so, why?

Like, what is there even to celebrate about it given that their own aesthetic seems to emphasize the alienness, the non-humanness of that landscape?

And you can read that in a lot of different ways. Historically, it's been quite popular to see craft and the Detroit techno artists as sort of anti-humanist in some way and is in a positive sense kind of wanting to transcend the limits of ordinary humanism. I tend to think that it's understandable,

but I'm not sure I really buy it as a reading of what their aesthetic is trying to do. I think it's more about the radicalism of the gesture, the pure radicalism of finding beauty in the workings of these machines, which are largely being rolled out and popularised for the purpose of making industrial workers unemployed. I mean, that's the purpose to which digital cybernetic technologies are being put on a global scale. But the fact that those technologies can be used

through the use of circuitry and keyboards to make actually quite beautiful music and a music which is very moving, a sort of human way, I think is a pretty radical gesture. chat. Okay. How about we talk about the left's relationship with technology? Because what interests me, going back to your point from, I don't know how long ago in this chat, Jeremy, when you're talking about, you know, the Blair rights and, you know, the centrist basically saying if the left took over, like everything would stagnate. And I think there's an interesting

aesthetic, which I'd like us to think about as we're underlying these kind of questions. which is this, I do think there are people out there think, you know, if there is a socialist revolution, like, you know, we would basically be like cavemen and women, et cetera, and, you know, everyone's going to, we won't be able to use iPads and, you know, this is what the left want. They want everything to kind of regress when actually the 20th century vision, left vision was very much one of, and I've spoken about this on the show before progress with a capital P, like we want more, and the concepts of like development and, you know, more technology and these are good and I think this was kind of something I think that the left

thought that it encompassed in part of its identity that's my impression from kind of my the readings that I yeah totally yeah and I'm interested about whether like if we go back maybe we should talk a little bit about the Luddites and maybe we should talk about like now because I don't I'm not sure if the left has a position or can have a position on technology and maybe it's right that it doesn't have a position on technological innovation. And innovation, again, going back to your point, Jeremy, is that personally, I quite like the idea of innovation and dynamism, you know, and I want us to have a left that is pro those things. But it's so captured within the aesthetic of neoliberalism, that it's almost, you know, telling, trying to get

things to stop a bit so we can have a moment to organize ourselves, seems to be where we're at and how we experience talking about technology in day-to-day life. Because we haven't managed to, you know, as in one of the games that when we've gamified these things, you know, the games that I don't know what the game is called that Keir came up with that we've done in certain events. You know, if those alliances between different bodies and society that, you know, like the hackers and the innovators and whatever, to be able to bring about the kind of disruption to neoliberalism is not where we're at. So therefore, it feels like the left is at a position where we're not, I mean, obviously the left is not like one lump of a thing.

but I can't see accelerationism as something that's really taking hold. Well, let's talk about that history of Luddism to accelerationism. Kier, you can talk about Luddism, I'm sure. Yeah, so Luddism, the Luddites were sort of a movement that took place quite a lot of it around me in West Yorkshire and further afield, in which workers would organise, workers who would organise to try to smash up looms, basically, industrialised looms. The new wave of automated looms.

Yeah, the new wave of automated looms, basically, because it would put them out of a job. And, you know, it wasn't just, it wasn't an anti-technology thing. It was a class movement, of course, and, you know, they were organised. Typical of the backwards attitudes of the Yorkshire working class, in my view. We're still quite scared of computers up here. Unlike the forward-looking vanguardism of the Lancashire working class. quite different.

Well, okay, I'm not sure we can get into War of the Roses on ACFM right now, right? But in all seriousness, unlike that preposterous remark, basically the Luddits were seen as like a revolutionary threat. You know, they basically people would organise in large groups and go and attack the mills, and mills were like fortified and had soldiers. inside and there'd be exchange of fire. People would be killed, etc. You know, it was seen as like a,

it wasn't seen at the time as like an anti-technology thing. It was seen as like a revolutionary threat. Yeah, and so then the term Luddite comes to be a term for just anyone who fruitlessly, pointlessly, tries to resist the onward marks of technology. Yeah, to resist the future. It's used as a pejorative. Yeah, and even within the left tradition,

I mean, I was joking, but they are. I mean, within the kind of historical, memory of the British left. It's true. The Luddites are remembered as a sort of failure and as backward-looking and reactive, whereas, you know, the real heart of the real heart of the radical proletariat was to be found in Lancashire, in Manchester, where the newly automated industrialised weaving industry really took off and formed the kind of modern proletariat. But then E.P. Thompson, the great Marxist historian in his most famous book, The Making of the English Working Class. One of his major interventions is to try to

reclaim the Luddites and to say Luddism was not just a kind of reactive, you know, it wasn't just reactive and reactionary and conservative. It was a nascent form of class consciousness. And it was central to the process by which some kind of radical class consciousness eventually emerged. We should say they're called the Luddites because their mythical leader was an imaginary character called Ned Ludd. But there has been, there clearly has been a historical dialectic between sections of the left who seemed to be trying to resist technological change in industry and elsewhere because it would disrupt their existing situation and lead to unemployment and weaken the unions and those who weren't. I mean, my favourite historical example, as usual, is probably from the

70s. And if you, the standard mainstream media narrative about British industry in the 70s is that the unions were obstructing the process of automation and making industry more efficient. And that's why Thatcher eventually had to completely demolish the unions in order for British industry to recover. Of course, the problem with that narrative is it didn't recover at all and still hasn't and never has done. But if you get into the detail, you know, there were people on the far left, People in the Communist Party and the shop stewards movement, people of the far left, were often arguing indeed that forms of automation, the containmentisation of the shipping ports, etc, were really necessary,

but that they could only really go forward if there was much more high levels of investment in industry. And they should only go forward in a way that enable people to transition to having different jobs or be part of the process without causing mass unemployment. And it was all those demands which the British ruling class and their political agents didn't want to meet. But the narrative that these unions, like they don't want to automate the shop floors, that's why we're falling behind the Germans and the Japanese in car manufacturing or whatever. That was a really powerful part of the right-wing narrative. And it was at best only ever partially true.

A lot of the time, what was really true is that the left of the unions were saying, Look, we do have to modernise our industry, and this is how you would do it in a way that wouldn't destroy everybody's lives. And the bosses were looking at those plans and seeing that they would cost them money and would be a hassle and just saying no, forget it. I mean, that follows through into Blairism, doesn't it? And here's the forces of conservatism. This idea that there's a direction to history is driven by technological innovation, and it will lead to benefits for everybody. That's the story, I think, that is not believable now. Basically, it's not believable for a few reasons.

One, because of the absolute stagnation of the economy and the stagnation of productivity. Technology has not improved productivity. And, you know, there's not huge amounts of money going into trying to develop new technology. It should increase productivity. Yeah, but also show me technology that's going to get us out of this so-called cost of living crisis.

Yeah, yeah. There isn't a technological thing. fix to this. It's a policy fix. And that proves your point. I'm not sure. I'm not sure. I mean, there's all sorts of arguments about why we're in a state that we're in. I mean, the main reason for that is wages are not rising. And the main reason for wages not rising is because workers aren't organized. It's just a one-to-one relationship. And of course, that's where that's where Keynes was wrong. Keynes, you know, when he thought that we would be working three hours a day, 15 hours a week. He was assuming that wages would remain sticky downward. It'd be very hard to

push wages downward, which is the situation in the 1930s because there was a big wave of unionization. And we don't know how that's going to go. There may be a new wave of unionization and then perhaps that will influence the direction of technology. An overall sort of like frame for thinking about like a Marxist attitude towards technology is just this idea that like capital is, you is always seeking to flee from labor, right? It's always trying to escape from labor, and it does that in various ways, perhaps geographically, you know, flees from the global north to the global side

because wages are lower, or it does it through technology, or perhaps it does it through things such as debt and assets, which it flees it temporarily. It pushes struggles over resources into the future, which is what debt does, basically. This idea that, like, labor, because it's human beings, that has the potential to be insubordinate,

demand things, technology cannot be insubordinate. And so that's why you'd flee it into technology. And that's reflected in films like The Matrix or this constant return to the idea of basically robots become insubordinate and rebel against humanity. It's one of the founding myths of accelerationism, what became known as accelerationism, around the cybernetic culture's research unit in Warwick in the 1990s.

I can take right-wing or left-wing angles, depending on where you think that's that sort of what the role of that sort of imagine you might play, I think. I think that that notion of the flight of capital from labour is really important. It's a great image as well. I'm amazed that's not been produced in different kind of artistic forms. The basic idea there, isn't it, is that basically capitalists are completely dependent upon workers to generate value, but they hate the fact that they are dependent upon workers.

They are never reconciled to their dependence on workers. And that is why class struggle carries on. Whether it's wage labour or it's free labour that is being made to sustain. Yeah. It's all kinds of labour. Yeah, and including consumers as well who somehow have to be part of the process or nothing gets done. And the dream of Keynes, the dream of the liberal progressivists for the past 200 years, has been somehow reconciling workers and capital to each other.

And it's somehow, the dream is the dream of a good capitalist who accepts that they are dependent upon labour and therefore accepts the need to limit some of their desire for limitless accumulation, you know, in order to reward labour. And of course, it's just, it never happens. It doesn't work like that. Because capitalism drives people to being sociopaths. Yeah, because it's just, yeah, it's the nature of capitalism. is that the drive to unlimited accumulation can't be just stopped. You can't, it becomes something other than capitalism as soon as you try to stop it. Mark's talked about this guy, Mr. Moneybags. He doesn't say, it doesn't matter with Mr. Moneybags is a sociopath or not.

He may go to church. He may be a very nice man. But basically, he's got to meet or beat the market average of profitability. And if not, he goes out of business. And so it can be very nice people caught in a dynamic that they are not in control of, right? That's the thing that drives. That's something that captures us and channels behavior in a certain direction. It's these economic dynamics that we're caught up in and we can't control.

Which is why it's so hard to make those arguments about structural causes for things, because as human beings, you want to associate yourself or disassociate yourself from individuals. So if individuals are marketed as, or groups of people are marketed as, you know, he's a nice guy, but it then becomes very difficult to organise against them. Almost contemporary and almost neighbouring the Detroit techno artists like Juan Atkins was the output of the early Acid house producers. So the classic example there would be this track called Acid Tracks by Future, Future spelled PH. Future was one of the names used by a guy called DJ Pierre.

and they've realized I've forgotten even what his real name is. But DJ Pierre Future pioneered the so-called acid house sound, and he pioneered this very abstract, almost non-melodic, purely textural, electronic sound, the acid house squelch, which you hear on that sound. And he pioneered that by using the, what I think in some ways, the last iconic instrument before. music all just ended up being made on laptops. And that's the Roland 303 bass synthesizer.

And the Roland 303 was intended just to be a practice aid for guitarists. It wasn't intended to be used in actual musical production. But it was very unsuccessful commercially because it was very hard to program. So these redundant bassists were available secondhand or end of line very cheaply in music shops in the early to mid-80. and so they ended up getting used by these experimental techno and house producers to produce this incredible sort of science fictional sound and it became the sound of Acetown.

And I think that's a really great example of how technologies do have sort of material properties of their own. They have what theorists of technology call affordances, which are sort of built into them, even if they're not intended by the people who design them. And they can be exploited in very productive ways. I've got a whole line on the idea that the whole history of 20th century and early 21st century music culture is basically about musicians of the African diaspora, finding ways of using technologies that they didn't really design usually, but that they are using in ways completely different from how the designers imagined them being used to create fantastic new kinds of music. And I think you can trace that history continuously going back to the early 20th century.

This is something we've talked about a lot on the podcast I do with Tim Lawrence. Love is the message. The single most, like, extraordinary, like, fact of British chart music history, in my view, is the fact that this record got to, I think he got to number two, I think, in the British top 40 singles charts, it's definitely got in the top 10. At the moment, the early 80s, which was the global, no, the historic peak of British singles sales. So you have to sell a lot of records to get in the charts in 1982. this record did, is Laurie Anderson. Laurie Anderson, American conceptual artist and musician.

And it's, I mean, it's a sort of soundtrack. It's a piece of audio art. It's barely music. But it was obviously its popularity was directly building on the popularity of craft work, who were really popular, you know, not just with, you know, black kids on estates in America. You know, they were really popular with, you know, kids on the estate I lived in in Lancashire, you know, in Skelmersdale.

And when my dad lived in St. Helens as well, people really, loads of people really into traffic. So the Laurie Anderson really built on that. And it is absolutely, Lorry And is the whole aesthetic of the music and the whole aesthetic of the video, which is really famous. And Laurie Anderson's whole mode of self-presentation,

absolutely anticipates that Donna Harroway essay by three or four years, that idea that somehow the kind of technologized, a technologised cyborg aesthetic is partly a way of escaping from restrictive ideas of gender. It's an idea that this is also going on with craftworks aesthetic a lot. One reason why the idea of the robot is attractive or the cyborg is attracted is because it's inherently androgynous and it's a way of escaping restrictive ideas of masculinity or femininity. And it's just mind-blowing that it's mind-blowing that this was a massive hit. this record. And it really, you know, it says something about that moment, the early 80s.

I mean, this is precisely the moment of the GLC in London. It's the moment where it's, it's arguably the high point of British radical culture, I think, actually, in 1982. Arguably, it's a sort of high point. And I think it's only at that high point that a record like this, like it becomes a chart here. It's just unbelievable. I really, really recommend anyone interested in that historical moment. Look at Andy Beckett's book. I promised you a miracle, Britain 80 to 82, because it does paint the picture of that moment as a kind of high point for British radicalism. Oh, Superman.

Oh, job. Oh, Mom and Dad. I was also just thinking that one of the implications of this analysis of what's happened to the British industrial economies or post-industrial economies since the 70s is the neoliberal idea is that if you suppress labour, if you disaggregate, disorganise and suppress the power of workers to organise as workers or to organise in any way at all. actually, then what you will do is you will liberate the creative potential of entrepreneurs, of capital and of a newly empowered petty bourgeoisie as well. And they will generate a dynamic forward-moving economy. That was what was supposed to happen. That isn't what's happened.

What happened is what Marxist would have said would happen is what you will end up with, is a massive Rontier landlord class extracting rents from everybody and actually not dynamic generating innovation at all because part of the motivation to generate innovation has always come from it's come from organised labour pushing and pushing and pushing and without that you just get a fat complacent degenerate even a capitalist class even from their own

from a sort of Keynesian perspective and shit loads of bureaucracy like really shitty bureaucracy yeah because that's necessary to keep I mean that's just necessary to keep disciplining labour I always think that's part of why Mark Fisher was so concerned about this argument around cultural stagnation. Because the neoliberal promise is that we're going to be living in this innovative world. And you can trace that intellectual inheritance or that back to people like Joseph Schumpeter, for instance,

who was like this first half the 20th century economist in the Austrian school. So sort of like a right-wing economist, but basically somebody who'd probably read Marx. and not a million miles away from the story we've been telling from a marketist analysis of technology. Well, he's famously the right-wing economist who understands capitalism. Yeah, from a Marxian point of view. Like he's in favour of it and he's against socialism, but he understands how it actually works. Even his ethic of capitalism is we can define when capitalism is well-functioning,

but when the rate of innovation and technological innovation is accelerating, basically. So famously, he's sort of against the sort of neoclassical economists who basically think that, you know, the moral determinant of a functioning economy or not is could be determined by low prices. He says, no, that's not true. It's nothing to do with like competition and all this sort of stuff. He says, you know, you can have monopolies and monopolies are great. As long as those monopolies are producing, you know, entrepreneurial activity and technological innovation. And of course, that's an angle on which you can, you can just use that and say, well, okay, let's apply that to. contemporary world and you see innovation absolutely nowhere, right? And that is, well, that was the argument

Mark Fisher was putting forward around, Mark Fisher was putting forward around culture. You can totally make that sort of argument around technology and that like there's, in fact, there's lots of people who put it, who make this argument that we may think we're living in a time of technological acceleration, but we're in a time of technological stagnation. And so this image that I, I was telling you to when we were in, in a preparatory meeting was this, this sort of conservative economist called Tyler Cowan who says, look, if we want to think about the important technologies, let's not think

about the mobile phone, let's think about the kitchen, the domestic sphere. And he has this image. He says, if somebody from the 1930s walked into a 1950s kitchen, they basically would not be able to make dinner. They wouldn't know what was going on because you have all of these innovations that occur.

Basically, a kitchen from today would be completely understandable from somebody from 1970s. they say, oh, these are nice and shiny. These are a bit smaller. What's that, what's that iPad thing that's on the counter? But basically, the general coordinates of the technologies in which we use to structure our lives, they'll just go and get into a car. They may, oh, there's a button you press as a sort of a key, perhaps, in this car.

But basically the same technologies, a lot more efficient, et cetera, et cetera, but not these big, big changes. But they had better wages. Yeah, well, this is also, this is an argument that gets made about the interest. internet, which is interesting. I mean, the argument is you can make a whole argument that says, for a start, things like France's Minitel Network in the mid-80s show that we could have had had full fibre broadband by 1996 if governments had actually wanted to implement it. We could have had that. The stuff that is undeniably useful and fun, like real-time video

calls, we could have had all that 20 odd years ago. It's all, it's all stuff that was envisaged by the late 60s and that the basic underlying technologies had all been created by the late 60s. Or we shouldn't be really grateful because now we can chat on Zoom. We should have been able to chat in Zoom on Zoom by 1993. And that would have been the equivalent of the great technological revolution of the late 1930, 20th, 20th, 20th, 20th century, which sees photography, cinema, the internal combustion engine, powered flight, telegraphy, telephones, audio recording, all that stuff, all that stuff, none of which had existed before invented within about 50 years.

And the equivalent to that would have been a situation where, Yeah, we've got Zoom calls by the early 90s. And by now... Can you imagine how that would have effective rave? That would have been... Well, in this alternative timeline, by now, we've got a global solar power grid, which is all powered by the Sahara Desert. I know. Tell me about that.

In this alternative, that's what we should have had by now, if we've been living through something on an equivalent scale. We could have had solar powered planes that made no pollution and cost virtually nothing to run. That's the world we should have been living in by now. We've talked before on the show about the idea of the early 90s as a kind of lost moment of radical promise. And in musical terms, a couple of things probably express that. On the one hand, there's the brief moment when people thought that the ambient dub music of the orb was going to be the music of the 90s.

And perhaps even more strikingly and poignantly, there's the moment when great British music critic, friend of the show, Simon Reynolds, named this new emergent genre of what he called post-rock. And the great exemplar of post-rock was to be this Stratford East London-based band called Disco Inferno. And Disco Inferno were a band who had started off sounding like Joy Division and then decided they wanted to copy what they saw New Order as doing when they moved from being Joy Division to being New Order in the early 80s. And that was to adopt the newest environment.

musical technology to change their sound and so they started trying they were trying to mix traditional rock instrumentation with sampling and synthesizer technology they were using midi triggers and things to trigger samples on their guitars and bass and drums while also using those in a fairly conventional way to produce this really unique soundtrack so a track like even the sea size against us from their 1993 album di go pop. really exemplifies this. And I was hugely excited by Disco Inferno. I loved seeing them live. I really bought into Simon's argument that this was the wave of the future for British music. And of course, that went sort of nowhere. Post Rock didn't really develop, although it did

produce Pram, the greatest British band of the 90s, no argument to be had about that. And but the really interesting thing about Disco Inferno and their music is it produced this very self-consciously contemporary sound. But it was a sound that couldn't really develop because actually that particular branch of music technology just didn't really develop. It didn't, things like MIDI triggers, live sampling, et cetera, especially when using actually played instruments, the technology has barely moved on since the early 90s. You can do live triggering of samples using things like Ableton, if you just want to do loops. But basically, it really exemplifies the way in which the development of musical technology since the early 1990s has almost

all been about facilitating just two things. Solo music making on laptops and solo music listening on mobile devices on headphones. The practice of making music together, of using live instruments, of mixing live instruments with electronics and digital technology, all of that stuff, it's moved on a little bit since 93, but it's just in terms of how far people would have expected it to have moved on by now, barely at all. And I think that is really exemplified.

some of the things we've been saying about the cultures of technology that, you know, what forms of technology have actually been developed and rolled out compared to what could have happened has been very clearly shaped by the ideological preferences of neoliberalism

and those class interests which have benefited from it. So, tragically, DiGo Pop still that out of their album from 93, it still sounds like a document of a music that could have happened and really didn't. hasn't done yet. kind of accelerationism debate I think has passed now. I mean, accelerationism was a term created by Benjamin Noyes and it was a critical term for the positions taken by people like

Knitland and the CCRU at Warwick that thought that what you should do is try to accelerate the process of capitalism so that you end up abolishing the horrible strictures of humanness that we're still stuck with. And then there's this left-wing version of accelerationism associated with early writing by people like Alex, Williams and Nick, Cernichet, which is really, it's not really saying anything more than, well, actually, we should be demanding much higher rates and better technological innovation and socially egalitarian and liberatory uses of technology. And that should be part of our demands.

And they were reacting against what they saw as a certain sort of primitivist aesthetic that was quite prevalent on activist culture around the time of things like the climate can, for example. I sort of think, I suspect that if we were, if we were to say, well, actually, what, you know, what, what is our opinion on all this? I don't think any of us would really disagree, would we? We wouldn't disagree that, yeah, we should be critical and demanding in terms of asking, well, who gets to decide what technology emerges? That we all probably acknowledge that technologies, once they emerge, do have a degree of autonomy. They have social and political consequences that can't be predicted. And part of the job of the left is to work out.

what to do with them creatively and constructively. And not be co-opted, not be co-opted, but also I think, I mean, this is kind of like an underlying issue that kind of has been implied by what we're saying. But I think this conflation of creativity with entrepreneurship or like capitalist entrepreneurship is really problematic. And the idea that we will not get advancement in things if you don't have. capitalism, I think is crazy because it just depends on where you put the funding. Like, obviously, people are going to do things. Like, people want a wage. People want to be able

to live comfortably. And you will not go and become a scientific researcher and X or Y or Z or whatever if there's no money in it. Like, that kind of makes sense. But you don't, you don't need capitalism for that. It's not just you don't need it. It's that pure capitalism is the historical, the jury of history now has returned its verdict on that. Pure capitalism doesn't deliver it. I mean, the point made by... Pure capitalism delivers what we've got now. Fucking stagnation, basically. It's what delivers here.

And the point made by these historians and economists, not at all leftist, really. People like Mariana Matsukato, in this country, some of the historians of Silicon Valley in the States. They're always making this point. You know, Silicon Valley didn't, wasn't, or the core technologies of Silicon Valley weren't developed by freewheeling entrepreneurs. They were developed by massively state-funded university. Exactly. They were being funded by the military. That's a whole other issue. But they were having huge amounts of state capital. There was absolutely zero way the market could have coordinated and concentrated the necessary allocations of capital to make those things happen. It never has done. And it's the coordination is a big, big point there to be able to move assets and skills and into one place. You know, that requires national policy. It's a cultural, it's one of the, it's one of the, those cultural assumptions, I think, that exist in culture is because, again, of what I was referring to earlier, the aesthetic around, you know, who innovates and what innovation is and how these things move and how you set up businesses and the whole capture of the world of entrepreneurship on top of creativity and innovation means that there's a lens that people are looking through, how its discourse is set around how innovation and kind of creative forces happen.

No, I think you're right. I think that's right. We are left accelerate. If we're taking this position, I think we are left accelerations. I don't feel the need to take positions as much as you guys. But I'm not sure that I would call myself an accelerationist because I think there's a lot implied in that as well that I would want to kind of tease open. No, of course. Well, I mean, my critique of the whole concept of left accelerationism is to be fair, a lot of the people associated or some of the people associated with it did just accept and stop you. using the term years ago, not just because of me, because of lots of people saying similar things,

was that, look, what they were calling left acceleration is just the normal position of literally everyone on the left for the past 200 years. Like, there's no one, but there's, there's no one on any part of the organised left over the past 200 years who, when asked, would it be a good idea to use technological research and innovation to reduce the overall amount of work most people do? Nobody has said no to that. Like, it's not, it's just, yeah, that's what it means. to be on the left in some sense for most of the past couple of hundred years is you think that's what should be happening? There has been a sort of technophobic element in the left,

particularly around the green movement. I know, and it's most extreme you get like anarcho-primitivism by you can see in writers such as John Zezan who basically say agriculture was a mistake, right? We need to go back to hunter-gatherer societies. I think at some point he says language is a mistake as well. That's where it all went wrong. And of course, there were elements of people who were into that, into primitivism and it was sort of put alongside ultra-left sort of theories, such as Jacques Camat and these French ultra-left sort of theorists.

But the problem with that is that, you know, the carrying capacity of the earth, if we all, if Hunter Gathering is a mode of production is, you know, many multiples less than it is now, I think it's something like less than a million people. or something like that. And so, you know, if you are a primitivist, you have to look around the world and decide which of your hundred friends is going to survive. I presumably it'd be you, wouldn't it? And which of the hundred friends are going to have to kill off in order to get to this society?

It's a non-starter, really. But that's the extreme angle of that, of that primitivism, rejection of technology. Well, I just, I'm very sympathetic to that on a certain level. I mean, I'm not sympathetic to killing off people or primitivism. It's the yoga. You just hate language. The properly, you know, marks an Engel's own position, as I take it,

which I think has been pretty much borne out, actually, by most of the relevant researches yet, of course, in terms of general human well-being, the shift to agriculture was a terrible mistake, but we're stuck with it now. So we've got to, all we can do is go forward to something better. Like, we're not going backwards. So in some sense, the whole point of socialism is to recognize,

the extent to which the division of labour, the introduction of hierarchy, probably even the introduction of sedentary lifestyles, had a horrible effect. And it did. It's there now. It's in the genetic and the fossil record, the shift from agriculture, from hunter gathering made people shorter, less healthy, had all kinds of really bad effects, you know, created hierarchy, created, you know, despotic societies. But the one thing it did was enable territories to support much larger populations

and especially allowed populations to survive catastrophic climate change, which hunter-gatherer cultures were often just wiped out by. And we're stuck with it now. We're stuck with tens of thousands of years of agricultural and post-agricultural society. So you've got to accept that it was a disaster, but work out, you know, how on the basis of where we are now, we build a society which can mitigate as much as possible the effect of what was obviously a bad idea in the first place.

I was reading an article about anthropological study on Hunter-Gaverage societies and they'd been sort of like tagging the activities and by far the biggest activity that they tagged was doing nothing, like literally not doing anything, not even doing like leisure activity, just sitting around and you know just not doing anything basically yeah it's a stupid idea it's completely stupid idea moving this far from the equator as far as where most of us live it's ridiculous it's obviously it's just it's obvious going to make you just really moody if nothing else like living on a part of the planet where it's like it's really hot and it's too bright to sleep like in the middle of

summer and then it's really dark it's like freezing cold and miserable in the winter that was just stupid I curse my ancestors who thought living this far from the equator was a good idea. It's bloody stupid, but we're stuck with it now. You're taking this anti-Brexit thing too far. But we're stuck with it now. There is a nice story, though, isn't there, basically? The whole, like, faux science of evolutionary psychology valorises these hendergatherer societies in which we developed our bloody, blah, blah, blah.

But those are societies in which you had huge amounts of time, free time, basically. and then we had to move through, we had to move through agriculture, which massively increased the amount of work that I had to do, really had detrimental effects on people's health and lifespans, etc. Then you have to move through like the Industrial Revolution, capitalism, etc. In order to get to a society in which we can have free time again. And the sort of favoured route for that is technology, but added to the correct social relationships.

Yeah, exactly. You can make all of that argument in the idea that, that Marx and Engels talked about primitive communism, and then communism, basically. So in evolutionary psychology terms, surely we're just trying to return to our natural state. I don't agree with any of those arguments. It's a bogus side. I mean, natural state is a problematic. I hate using the word problematic, but it's a problematic term. I did renounce my own statement straight away. You did.

But anyway, look, that's sort of like primitivism taken to its concerns. but there has been a general sort of idea, a general sort of technophobia, which has emerged into the left, I think. You know, obviously for very good reasons, you know, the idea that technology and progress and modernism would automatically lead to, or technological innovation and science, etc.,

would automatically lead to progress was, you know, people found it very hard to maintain that position in the aftermath of the First World War, the aftermath of the Second World War, after the Holocaust. These only things have shaken this idea of technological progress, you know, and of course we're living through another moment now. Yeah, it's the point made by people I call it back.

One of the things that characterizes contemporary culture as distinct from even the culture of, say, up to the 1970s is the fact that people just, we're conscious. The biggest threat to most of us now are the effects of a highly technology in society. It's pollution. It's climate change, it's traffic accidents, it's heart disease from processed food. You know, we've shifted from a world in which the biggest threats to most humans were famine and disease to the biggest threat being the consequences of industrialisation, actually,

the advanced consequences of industrialisation, those chickens coming home to roost. Fluorinated chickens. Yeah. And it's also true that from a political perspective, ideologically, the biggest threat, is the naive technophilia of those who basically want to believe that we don't need radical social change because sooner or later there'll be a technical fix to climate change. The oil will run out.

We'll transition everything to renewable, so we don't need any kind of massive social change. And that is, I mean, I do think that is the default position if you're a typical member of relatively elite social groups in highly developed countries who is not, who is not doing anything significant to mitigate climate change. But then one of the areas of thought where that debate around primitivism and its others has been most acutely argued out as in feminist thought, isn't it?

So one analogue of anti-technological primitimism historically and still is forms of eco-feminism at their most extreme forms of goddess worshipping, primitivist, eco-feminism, which identify industrial society in general, maybe even agricultural society in general, with patriarchy and that sees some kind of veneration of nature as such, some kind of rejection of technological society as part of a package of spiritual and political attitudes and practices. Which also therefore codes.

linking that to what Catherine was saying is that that effectively codes technology as male which is the problem. Yeah, exactly. It accepts the view. The technology is male. Yeah.

And so there's been really strong pushback against that over the past few decades by a string of thinkers. Probably the most important of whom is Donna Harroway, but if we're just sticking with the English-speaking world, we could talk about Shunamid Firestone, the author of the Dialectic of Sex is book in the late 60s who argued

that basically look if you want to achieve sexual equality just accept the reality that the thing which has disadvantaged women for tens of thousands of years is having to bear children and let's just have children let's just have all babies in test tubes just forget about women carrying babies

to term that is what will produce sexual equality and it's a really interesting argument and it's one that's been revived a few times over the years and it is a it is an argument that, look, it's a really simple argument is that, look, there are biological sources of women's relative weakness to men. They're partly around fertility and they're partly around just physical weakness. Therefore, we should use technology to overcome those differences.

And then a much more sophisticated version of comparable arguments, not the same really, is Donna Harroway's classic 1980s essay, which is usually now just referred to as a cyborg manifesto. The full title was something like a manifesto for cyborgs, blah, blah, blah, socialist, feminist, something. And it was framed as a direct critique of Californian goddess feminism in the mid-80s. And she says, famously, she says, I'd rather be a cyborg than a goddess. And it's a quite, it's a complicated argument which gets into the idea, on the one hand, technology should be good for women, technology, you know, women, as you've been saying, Nadia, shouldn't see technology as a, a male domain, that it should be enabling, et cetera, that there's a whole history of women

having productive relationships with technology, and that's idea that's been taken up by various commentators in the 90s and 2000s, the idea that, for example, women historically have been associated with technologies like weaving, and the argument made by people like Deplant in the 90s, there's some sort of affinity between the complexity. Women and soft, It's like a soft, hard analogy. Yeah. In a very literal sense, with fabric and versus, you know, metals. And software as well.

Yeah. And there's an affinity. There's this idea there's an affinity between the complex meshwork of the loom and the complex meshwork of the network and of the computer processing network, etc. And there's contemporary iterations of those cyberfeminist ideas in people like the group who published the Xenofeminism books a couple of years ago. I've never totally worked out how to differentiate xenofeminism from other iterations of cyberfeminism.

But it's obviously a powerful contribution. There's interesting stuff. And there's a couple of things implied. On the one hand, there's a general feminist agenda of simply not accepting that technology is a domain of male power and can only be that. There's also a fundamental set of meditations on the nature of the human. So I think Harroway's ideas are very close to the ideas of people like Benar Stiegler

and other people who point out that, well, actually, look, in some ways, technology and culture are just the same thing. And actually, what it means to be human is to be a cyborg. It is to be dependent on prostheses, as Stiegler puts it. It is that you have to go back into our revolutionary history to pre-human ancestors before you find beings who are not dependent upon tool use and some form of textiles just to be able to survive the environment on planet Earth. So from that point of view, what it means to be human or whatever your gender in some ways is to always already be a cyborg, to be an mediated, technologized relationship with the rest of the world.

That's what makes us what we are. And so from that point of view, primitivism isn't even really sort of very useful on its own terms. At least insofar as it's appealing to any notion of the organic human. So as people interested in, you know, AC themes, acid communism, psychedelic socialism, acid communism, we've always been interested in this idea of technologies of the self. And that's a term from Michel Foucault. But by technologies of the self, he really means any sort of collection of technique. like psychological, physical, institutional,

which enable people to constitute themselves, to create themselves or to change themselves. So from that point of view, a technology of the self might be like psychology, psychotherapy, but it might also be yoga or martial arts. Like it might be any assemblage, any collection of techniques, that might or might not involve machinery of some kind, that sort of helps make you what you are.

And I think a lot of the stuff we've talked about on the show is the technology of the self. So exercise, for example, a lot of these are forms of exercise. And when we talk about exercise, drugs, I mean, I suppose one of the problems with the notion of technology of the self is when you start thinking about it, it's not clear what isn't to technology of the self. Because sort of food is bound up with technologies of the self. But it's non-instinct, isn't it? That's what separates. I think there's something there that separates it out is it's an assembly. of all of these different techniques

and it requires some kind of intent, consciousness and intelligence to put them together in an organised practice. Yeah, exactly. Of some sort. Otherwise, it's not reactive. Exactly. And I guess our usual point about this

is that neoliberalism and whatever kind of post-neoliberal capitalism we're in now, it very much promotes technologies of the self of a kind which enforce a sense of the private self and private life as being the site of authentic experience. I think that's the thing, isn't it? But it could be also read as co-option

and the building of this kind of like coping mechanisms of self-help and how that fits in late capitalism, which is different. I think that's a reading or a version of, but not necessarily just the core of what it, technology of the self could be. When Foucault's writing as well, I suppose he's writing just at that moment where the introduction of new technologies of their self or experiments of new technologies

of the self, you know, around the counterculture in the 1960s and 70s, these sorts of technologies, they start to turn inwards and be much more focused on a more inward-looking version of the self. They turn into things such as the self-esteem movement. and est and these sorts of things. And so he's sort of sensing this, this movement, this sort of the way that these countercultural things are going to go and feed into this movement towards individualism, I suppose, something which really, really is reinforced by neoliberalism.

Yeah, I think that's exactly right. I mean, Foucault's own early writing on this subject is really, it's quite ambivalent, and there's a lot of disagreement over how to read it, because he's really, he had been writing about things like the history of the Christian idea a confession and how that leads into psychoanalysis and psychotherapy and one of Fouca's things was

always basically getting into polemics against psychoanalysis like he really didn't like the Freudians so the idea that actually the psychoanalyst is just a direct descendant of the father confessor is a sort of a way of having a pop at them for him but then he's also

at the time when he's developing this idea of technology of the self he's writing this stuff around the history of sexuality and he's got really excited about of the idea that the ancient Greeks had all these very different attitudes to sexuality, which might be much less repressive than sort of Christian-derived attitudes. I've got to say, he does a really, he's very unpersuasive. It's very unpersuasive that Athenian culture is not very, very oppressive to everyone

apart from the tiny handful of aristocrats who he's actually right talking about. But nonetheless... How does this stuff intersect with? I mean, this might be a really big topic, but intersect with stoicism, I was just trying to think. Yeah, no, well, Stoicism is one, I think in the second book in the history of sexuality, the second or third. He is really interested in the fact that Stoicism and the way in which Stoicism promotes a kind of self-monitoring and a kind of constant attention to the self and a desire to control the self, but also a belief that the self can be improved. He sees that as a really interesting kind of staging post towards the Christian,

of the self as having this kind of this immortal soul you're constantly cultivating but I think he also suggests or implies that well it could have gone a different way and in the same way I think this comes back to Keir's point I think his whole point what he's really responding to and he doesn't really know a lot of the time you know where it's all going he's responding to the sense that indeed in the 70s there's all this opening up of new ways of being in the world you know there's everything

from the jogging movement to the popularisation of yogurton new drugs to gay people coming out and sort of casual sex in bathhouses. There's all this new kind of dancing. There's all this vast proliferation of lifestyles and new techniques for being in the world. And they could go all kinds of different ways. We could have been on the cusp of a culture which was just fantastically inventive and liberated and emancipated, which is what the counterculture was dreaming of. Or we could have been on the cusp of a culture in which we were just presented

with countless new ways to become neurotic, to going to constantly monitor ourselves and to compete with each other. And at the time when he's writing, like Keir said, it's not clear which of those is going to emerge. And maybe it's still not clear. I mean, I would tend to take the view that, well, to some extent all of those things are true.

Like, it's true, as we all know, that we've ended up in a world in which hedonetic neoliberalism will tend to try to co-opt all technologies of the self to its own ends. But it is also a world where, you know, you can go and learn yoga or you can go and or you can play football or you can talk to your mate on the other side of the planet in in new kinds of ways which shouldn't be entirely dismissed as just features of capitalist culture. So Nadia found this track and suggested it even though this is a group that from where I grew up and I grew up in various places but mostly in West Lancashire and this is the Horton Weavers who are a folk group formed in the 70s from Bolton. But Nadi, you just found the song randomly

looking for songs about like... Yeah, because I wanted to put something in that had an aesthetic that wasn't electronic and technological and hard and metallic. And we were talking about and thinking about both in the interview with Catherine and in this episode about the different kinds of technology. So I wanted something associated with weaving.

And I found this traditional song which I really liked the sound of. So I thought we'd put that in. Yeah, well, that was fantastic. You know, Horton Weavers were a big folk act in Lancashire where I grew up. I remember my parents and their friends going to see the Horton Weavers. And I remember this song, the song of their weavers, was their big anthem. And it celebrates the weaving industry, the textile industry in Lancashire,

which has a good claim to be the birthplace of the global socialist movement, frankly. And that was the culture of the political culture that grew up in the factories of Lancashire in the automated and semi-automated industrial textile factories, which sort of replaced the earlier weaving industry, which was the thing that the Luddites were protesting against. And, you know, the weaving industry in Lancashire was still a really big part of the British economy until the mid-20th century.

We're really through to the 60s. And interestingly, given some of our themes today, the weaving industry was one of the few sectors of the British industrial economy, where by the end of the 19th century, women had managed to win equal pay. Women had managed to organise, and women had been recognised partly because it was recognised that this was a manually skilled job, but not one that required physical strength, like operating the big industrial looms.

And partly because there was a long tradition of militant organisation anyway. And it was one of the great historic centres of militancy. You know, the Lancashire cotton mills going back to the late 19th century, had acted in solidarity with the union side during the American Civil War, in solidarity with Gandhi's Indian independence movement in the early 20th century, despite the fact that in all of those cases it was costing them jobs and business, the British cotton industry. And, you know, it was still really part of the ambient culture when I was growing up in Lancashire.

It was still the part, you know, it's easy to romanticize those regions. And of course, in Lancashire, where I grew up, as in South Wales, you know, where Keir grew up, there were always plenty of Tories knocking around, especially in the affluent suburbs. But nonetheless, it was the case, like in Lancashire, for example, that, well, there was a much higher chance than if you'd grown up, say, in the home counties,

that somebody's nan, somebody's grandmother might well have been like a weaver and would have some sense of socialism as being part of the sort of political culture they belong to. very much formed part of the general ambient atmosphere of the region, the sense that socialist ideas were just more normal for people and more familiar than they would be in many other regions of the world. And that was largely the legacy of the weavers.

Of course, that's partly why a band calling themselves the Horton Weavers, singing songs about weaving, became really popular, mostly with public sector workers. In the 70s, professional public sector workers in the 70s and 80s, there weren't any weavers left by then. And if there were, they were probably listening to Northern Seoul rather than the haught and weavers. When trade is low, the looms move slow, there's not much cloth to be made. King cotton is side for the working lab, where you starve at the weaving trade.

When the shuttle goes click, the looms move quake, there's plenty of cloth to be made. King cotton is glad for the working lad for there's brass in the weaving trade. My final point would be that technological development should lead us to a space where you can automate a lot of things, but you won't be able to automate care and affection and things like that. And I think especially when it comes to caring in society, those should be the most highest paid jobs. Yeah, I completely agree, yeah. Yeah. Support independent journalism and set up a regular donation to Navarra Media from just £1 a month.

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