Word of the Day: 'Endo-colonialism'

. . . Virilio suggests that political economy cannot be subsumed under the political economy of wealth, with a comprehension of the management of the economy of the state being its general aim. Indeed, for him, the histories of socio-political institutions such as the military and artistic movements like Futurism show that war and the need for speed, rather than commerce and the urge for wealth, were the foundations of human society. . . .

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, then, Virilio's cultural theory is concerned with what he calls the third, or, the transplant revolution — the almost total collapse of the distinction between the human body and technology. Intimately linked to the technological enhancement and substitution of body-parts through the miniaturisation of technological objects, the third revolution is a revolution conducted by militarized technoscience against the human body through the promotion of what the Virilio calls 'neo-eugenics'. Such developments range across Virilio's criticisms of the work of Stelarc, the Australian cybernetic performance artist, to his concerns about the eventual fate of the jet-pilots in the Kosovo war. This is because, for Virilio, both Stelarc and the jet-pilot represent much the same thing: "the last man before automation takes command".  Nevertheless, it should be stressed that Virilio's criticisms of automation are closely connected to the development of his concept of endo-colonization — what takes place when a political power like the state turns against its own people, or, as in the case of militarized technoscience, the human body.

I've had Paul Virilio's Information Bomb on my shelf for several years and finally got around to reading it.  It's not a book you can enter into easily, so I started hunting around for articles to provide some context.  The best I found was the one quoted from above by Brit John Armitage.

Virilio is in that world of 'French Theory' with Baudrillard, Lyotard and other French postmodernist cultural theorists, but rejects 'postmondern' as a word that describes his work.  He's a Christian, probably with more in common with guys like Jacques Ellul and Rene Girard--or even Marshall McLuhan--than the academic postmodernists. He's all about defending the 'human' against what appears to be an inevitable mechanomorphic transformation. In an interview Virilio says,

People agree to say that it is rationality and science which have eliminated what is called magic and religion. But ultimately, the ironic outcome of this techno-scientific development is a renewed need for the idea of God. Many people question their religious identity today, not necessarily by thinking of converting to Judaism or to Islam: it's just that technologies seriously challenge the status of the human being. All technologies converge toward the same spot, they all lead to a Deus ex Machina, a machine-God. In a way, technologies have negated the transcendental God in order to invent the machine-God. However, these two gods raise similar questions.

The machine God, to use a wobbly Star Wars analogy (since I've been rewatching those films recently), is the dark side of the force, and so it's a question whether there will be any kind of robust opposition from those who have any feel for the light side. In other words, the only stance from which human resistance to the machine God and its project to dominate the human is in some embrace of that which transcends the machine.  We will have to chose at some point--if not already--between the seductiveness of the machine God and the freedom offered by the transcendent God.

But that's an issue for another day.  I'm more interested today to discuss his idea of 'endo-colonialism', which formulates more precisely what in a more inchoate form I've been groping to articulate here in this blog, particularly when it comes to the disappointments I feel about the Obama administration. 

We're seeing in Egypt now what happens when the people revolt against an endo-colonialist regime. But that kind of revolt could never take place in the U.S. because America has already in place the technologies and legal infrastructure that would enable the state to nip any such revolt in the bud. Those kinds of revolts are still only possible where governmental control is still rather primitive. It has become abundantly clear since Obama has taken over that he has no intention of retarding America's long-term trend toward becoming a tightly sealed cage, a surveillance state in which traditional civil liberties will be easily and legally disregarded in the name of national security.

The U.S. does not have currently an intolerably repressive endo-colonialist regime--and so no one except militia types on the far right are thinking about violent resistance. But here's the point: Should such a repressive regime assume power and with it control of these sophisticated technological surveillance and control tools, there's nothing the rest of us could do about it. This is where the anti-statists on the Right have a point. The rest of us are just hoping that the power elites in control are committed to a more enlightened despotic style that won't lead in twenty or thirty years to what we're currently witnessing in Egypt.

Virilio, of course, is not concerned about what happening in America, except insofar as it seems to be the society in which this technologically driven endo-colonialist impulse appears to be most advanced. As such it will be model to be emulated by those who can afford to do so. His concern rather is broader focused more on what is happening to us without our really being aware of it, how we are losing our grip on what the 'real' means, how we are slowly losing our grip on what 'human' means. His diagnosis of the disease is power lust rather than greed. His big picture narrative is that power-and control obsessed militarism is the real evil to be feared, and in its name--national security--the greatest evils ever committed and yet to be committed are justified.

Sorry, Wall Street, you're just the second string. Your greed is prodigious, but cannot come close to the destructive and dehumanizing impacts foisted on us by the paranoid, powermad folks over in the military-technology sector. And remember that those folks are obsessed with command and control, and the logic of their technologies is simply to increase their capacity for command and control.  And it can be used--most especially on the nano-technological level--against American citizens who resist them as well as anybody abroad who resists them. Even ways now invade and colonize our bodies.

We all, if we're sane, are repulsed by the brutality and massive destructive power of chemical warfare--wait until they start dispersing nanobots for us all to inhale. It will be so much more humane, it will be argued.  People won't even know why they've been turned into docile wetware obedient servants of the machine.

In the same  interview quoted from above  Virilio says,

Technologies first equipped the territorial body with bridges, aqueducts, railways, highways, airports, etc. Now that the most powerful technologies are becoming tiny--microtechnologies, all technologies can invade the body. These micro-machines will feed the body. Research is being conducted in order to create additional memory for instance. For the time being, technologies are colonizing our body through implants. We started with human implants, but research leads us to microtechnological implants.

The territorial body has been polluted by roads, elevators, etc. Similarly, our animal body starts being polluted. Ecology no longer deals with water, flora, wildlife and air only. It deals with the body itself as well. It is comparable with an invasion: technology is invading our body because of miniaturisation. (Referring to the interviewer's microphone: "next time you come you won't even ask - you'll just throw a bit of dust on the table!")

There is a great science-fiction short story, it's too bad I can't remember the name of its author, in which a camera has been invented which can be carried by flakes of snow. Cameras are inseminated into artificial snow which is dropped by planes, and when the snow falls, there are eyes everywhere. There is no blind spot left.

Comments

[spark]

"...inevitable mechanomorphic transformation..." Good phrasesmithing.

I'm very interested in the Singularity-as-religion/rapture of the nerds/transhumanism thing. Need to find more books on it.

[spark]

The big advances in intrusive tech are likely to be pioneered by the Pentagon, but it'll be the private sector that really runs with it. We are standing on the edge of a massive revolution in information where all "made" objects will be sensorized and interlinked, capable of broadcasting their location and status.

It'll be your insurance company, updating your policy in real time as your car records every move you make on the road.

The military-industrial-information complex wields almost unimaginable computing power, but it's a blunt instrument with them. For truly fiendish ingenuity, you need people like the brains behind Google and Facebook.

Amitai Etzioni did a good book on this.

[Jack Whelan]

Spark--

Interesting point--let me just riff off it for a bit here:

Virilio's argument seems to be (I'm just beginning to grok him) that the military need for speed and information are the primary drivers of technological innovation There are other drivers, but they are secondary. Civilizational/commercial uses of these technologies are spinoffs. He's not the only one or the first one who says that--but he seems to be taking it in an interesting direction.

The whole history of warfare has been driven by the need of a central authority to assert sovereignty, if by sovereignty we mean a monopoly on the legal use of violence--the most successful early attempts to assert this kind of sovereignty were the ancient empires in Egypt and Mesopotamia. And while we tend to use the term 'empire' pejoratively, there's something positive to be said for empire--at least from the point of view of the typical peasant or shop owner. When a central authority has a monopoly on violence, there's less of it, and the ordinary joe is less frequently drafted to perform it or have his family trampled by it as armies do their thing.

Short digression: You know, we always make this big deal about how great it was that the Greeks resisted the Persians. Western free spirits defeat oriental hive people, etc, etc. But what did the Athenians do with their victory except turn around and create their own damn brutally repressive exploitative empire? Which within a few decades brings on the brutal 30-year Peloponessian War, which in turn leads to subjugation of these free-spirited Greeks once and for all by the Macedonians and eventually Rome. Had the Persians won, maybe your regular joe Greek would have had a few centuries of peace and even prosperity until the Romans came, and then a little more peace and prosperity.

The Persians let locals do their thing in the cultural sphere, so long as the Persians got their tribute. The Persians were extraordinarily tolerant--the Jews loved them. There's no reason all the great things we associate with golden-age Greece--the drama, the philosophy, the sculpture (probably not the architecture--it depended on the tribute paid by Athenian Delian League vassals) would not have developed--and spread through the Persian imperial infrastructure rather than through the Alexandrine.

But here's my point, there's something to be said for centralized sovereignty. Historically the worst violence is local violence--local warlords jockeying for preeminence and sucking everyone around them into their bloody fantasy. It was awful living in the Balkans under the Soviets, but it was worse once the Soviets left and the locals started their ethnic cleansing. Look at the horn of Africa, look at England during the War of the Roses, or Germany in the period after the Reformation--look anywhere where there isn't centralized sovereignty. It's a bloody awful time and place to have to live a life.

So there's something to be said for centralized authority. Ask the blacks who live in the American south--it was the Feds not the locals that cared about them and their rights. So small is beautiful, and local is great, but not necessarily and often enough not.

So an argument can be made that centralizing legitimate or legal violence is a good thing, so long as the people in control at the center are the good guys and there are mechanism that hold them accountable. A democratic republic is supposed to be the best governmental form to insure that by keeping holding the guys in control in the center accountable at the ballot box.

Well that clearly isn't the case anymore--because the guys in control see the ballot box as an irrelevancy--people come and people go, but the guys in control are not elected and they mainly inhabit what you call the military-industrial-information complex. Sovereignty lies with them, not with the people, and really not with the officials they elect.

Elected officials learn quickly, as Obama apparently did, who's in charge. His reversals on almost all his early positions on surveillance, wire taps, civil liberties just shows that anyone can have his opinions if he's not in power, but being in power means changing your opinion to conform to the will of those who have permanent sovereignty. (It wouldn't surprise me to learn this is something the Kennedys found out the hard way--but it's not something I obsess about.)

These people don't care about anything except maintaining central control and command. They work with corporations and others in the private sector to enlist them in achieving their objectives (as we saw with the wiretaps a couple of years ago), and they don't care what is done in the private sector so long as it doesn't infringe on their sovereignty. And they let the private sector use their technological innovations to apply them in the ways that you describe. They don't care to what degree these applications might be oppressively used.--not their bailiwick. That can be worked out in the legislatures, which of course are largely bought by these corporations.

So here's my point--there are two things going on, the one driven by the need for complete sovereignty in the military sector and the other driven by greed in the private. The greedheads get to do what they want so long as they don't impinge on the sovereignty concerns of the militarists. The militarists keep feeding their technological innovations to the private sector to enable them to meet their own objectives. And the rest of us are powerless--we've lost any ability to hold them accountable, and we are completely at their mercy.