Marching through the Institutions
Marching through the Institutions
A journey back to 1968
Institutions create shadowed places in which nothing can be seen and no questions asked. (Mary Douglas)
The following video is the visualization of a 2018 lecture I gave at Deutschlandfunk Concert Hall in Cologne. The editor who invited me to give this lecture on the 50th anniversary of the student revolt had read my little booklet on the Cultural Revolution of 1968 - and so the numerous elderly audience members who had gathered there to celebrate their eternal youth found themselves confronted with a highly unusual interpretation of history. Around 2007, what prompted me to delve into this topic was this growing sense of irritation I felt during my time travels across cultural history, which was slowly turning into a real suspicion: namely that every society is unclear about its foundations. It was this realization that, instead of devoting itself to a sober view of reality, even an enlightened epoch takes refuge in a heroic founding myth that virtually forced itself on me while studying the historical sources of 1967. In this sense, the student revolt was less a cause than a symptom that had ignored the actual driving forces of social change, and they had done it in a time-forgotten grandiose, enthusiastic way. Which confronted my unfortunate audience with a truly depressing realization:
Imagine there was a revolution, but nobody was there!
A link to the video can be found here.
L’imagination au pouvoir!
Ladies and Gentlemen,
This text is based on perhaps the most beautiful motto the revolt of 1968 produced - which, after 50 years, has been realized in a strange, unforeseen way: l'imagination au pouvoir. And isn't that true? Hasn't the Power of Imagination [Einbildungkraft] long been in Power [Macht]? Aren’t we surrounded every day by things that would've seemed fantastic a generation ago, more fantastic than a moon landing or color television, whose introduction Willy Brandt solemnly celebrated in 1967? We can talk of unconditional basic income, clean energy; pimping our social media or dating profiles; and, if we haven't blocked it out (Wipe and Go!), we'd know that every one of us carries around a supercomputer far exceeding the performance of the computing behemoths that NASA used to launch its Apollo mission in our pockets. Not to mention the libertinage we enjoy - which allows each and every one of us to become the master of ceremonies for our personal orgies and pleasures. To each animal, his pleasure, and no cock, really no cock crows about it. You could say that the revolution of '68 was a resounding success, that Imagination is in Power. And if we think of AI, robotics, and the promise of human creative power with its keyword: Anthropocene, there is no end in sight; indeed, we could even say that this revolution is set to become permanent. Total disruption! And with this finding, I could come straight to the end of my presentation, declaring this little ceremony is over – with many thanks! Thank you for this great slogan; thank you for the fact that the human spirit, which previously languished on the cold star of scarcity, has been transferred to our post-materialist economy of abundance; thank you for the fact that we’ve been removed from the regimented use and exchange of value, and can – in a tragically hip and überkewl way, as the Americans say - indulge in the trash-factor. Thank you also for the fact that we can finally live unmolested in our personal comfort zones, arranging the world according to our will and imagination. Thank you again, a thousand thanks!
However, it’s with this emphatic expression of thanks – and having nothing to do with the usual cultural criticism and '68 bashing – that our dilemma begins. As much as I'm willing to acknowledge and welcome the cultural revolution of 1968, I'm also deeply embarrassed by the question, which deserves special thanks here. This embarrassment isn't even due to my philosophical scruples; no, that’d be an indignant scandal in the minds of those who have made a name for themselves as combatants of the time.
Let's imagine that Daniel Cohn-Bendit, who, as Dany le Rouge, was almost a folk hero in Paris in May, had died. And there I would be, standing at his open grave, raising my fist to the sky and shouting into a blue and godless sky: Dany, your fight goes on! Didn't you dream about it? The garden of delights, the end of work, Facebook, Snapchat, Tinder, self-driving cars, drones, worldwide delivery service, all-inclusive! Well, you can imagine the beastliness with which the Greying '68ers would react to such poisoned praise at their deserving comrade’s grave, as there’s never been a generation claiming the privilege of eternal youth for itself – but, in today's world, only comes across as stale, unintelligent – even out-of-touch generation with it. But when did this culturally conservative aging process actually begin? My answer is simple. At the latest, it started in the year we are celebrating today, and possibly much earlier.
In this context, the story of Dany le Rouge, who unleashed the Parisian May, is truly enlightening. It begins with the French Minister for Youth, Francois Misoffe, having gifted Nanterre University with a new swimming pool located in an ugly industrial estate. And because the gift needs official dedication, the Minister, accompanied by a few dignitaries, sets off to do the honors. To his astonishment, he’s confronted by a giant phallus guiding his way to the pool. The student's original plan had been to honor the minister with a swimming pool orgy, but too few volunteers turned up for a convincing happening. And this was the hour of the revolutionary: Dany le Rouge. He approaches the minister, whose daughter he's been having an affair with, takes out a cigarette, and asks the minister for a light. The minister, being polite, takes out his lighter, and Dany, taking the opportunity, tells him he's read the ministerial white paper on young French people’s issues - and there's not a single line about their sexual problems in it. The minister replies he’s mainly concerned with their sports training. When Dany continues to insist there are sexual problems, the minister says: Look, there's the new pool; you can jump in and cool off. And with that, the friendly minister (who incidentally fought in the Resistance against the Nazis) hands our Dany the metaphorical match that's needed to ignite a revolution. Dany says That’s what the Hitler Youth used to say. Nazi! Nazi! – you can imagine how the story continues – hissing, shouting, commotion, and the minister's departure. The outraged students explain that living in Nanterre is like living in a kind of suburban Vietnam and that they are, in fact, all German Jews – encouraging each other with energizing slogans such as 'Stand up, you damned people of Nanterre!' to motivate themselves.
Marx and Mao soon appeared on the posters because allies were needed in a State of Emergency. However, the revolutionary program can be boiled down to a reasonably simple logic in its initial phase. You could speak of patricide and, perhaps, denying all authority – with the general suspicion that the previous generations' blessings can only be toxic gifts. The slogan is They only want our best, but we don't give it to them. Because it’s always a good idea to use historical role models, the Enragé group is formed in the style of a splinter group from the French Revolution and decrees: Take your desires as reality, boredom is counter-revolutionary, never work!
This beautifully confirms Marx's dictum that all significant historical events happen twice: once as a tragedy, then as a farce (an interpretation also shared by the historian Raymond Aron, who spoke of a costume and pseudo-revolution). As such, May Day in Paris marks the death of the King with the Enragés; it also resurrects the repression leading to the French Revolution – which, as you will see, because it also accompanies my following thoughts as a theme, I'd like to delight you with a quote from another great dialectician, Karl Valentin, who summed this problem up in a most beautiful way: Everything has been said, but not yet by everyone! But now, in May in Paris, even the last man in the Gestalt of Dany le Rouge has understood what hour has been struck - and when a reporter, between barricades and burning cars, holds a microphone under his nose, he sums up the logic of negation in the shortest possible formula: General strike! General strike! General strike!1 But what happens next is the real miracle. To the students' astonishment, the country is ripe for revolt. Suddenly, dissatisfied and frustrated workers from all camps joined them, as the French workers no longer cared for what France’s Stalinist Communist Party told them to do. A fit of long pent-up anger is venting itself - and it’s no longer just sexually frustrated young people, but workers, salaried employees, and unruly civil servants who are paralyzing the country, even plunging it into anarchic conditions. Even the President of the French Republic, Charles de Gaulle, was forced to leave the country. Nevertheless, the revolt of 1968 is difficult to explain if we measure it with political instruments of economy because never before has there been a time in the last century, neither in Paris nor in Berkeley, in London, or Berlin, when there were such minor differences in the pay between the classes. In those days of the economic miracle, workers were anything but the helpless victims that capitalism was squeezing to the bone. If we compare this with today's standards, the injustices have increased scandalously – and in retrospect, that era seems like the golden age of capitalism. So why the anger and furor?
To resolve this question, let me demonstrate the problem of historical recurrence using a more precise concrete example using Che Guevara's Guerrilla Theory [La Guerra de Guerrillas], which I’d borrowed from the Berlin State Library to familiarize myself with the theme of violence and the RAF. As soon as I opened the copy, I noticed pre-digital era date and loan stamps still stamped into the book, with the last reader dated in 1968 – who’d mistreated the book with a thick pencil in a crude, almost brutal way. The pages were covered with underlining. Sometimes, whole sentences like ‘The strategic goal must be the destruction of imperialism’ or ‘Everything happens in the dark’ were used. In other places, it was individual words like acts of sabotage or initial spark. Obviously, the aim of reading the book was to answer the question of what to do - a question answered for the reader after only 59 pages because that's when the underlining stopped. The last underlining was about how the guerrillas could communicate with each other underground or in the jungle - and there the words, thickly underlined, were: Smoke signals, light signals, and carrier pigeons. Now, it may be that the reader in the State Library had been overwhelmed by childhood memories. Still, it's clear that the dream of the urban Indian, the romance of bush drums, smoke signals, and carrier pigeons, looks like a daydream in the reading room of the State Library on Potsdamer Platz draws its inspiration not from the immediate surroundings – but from remote battle zones like the jungles of Bolivia, Vietnam, or Cambodia where noble savages fight for good causes and justice. That the revered leaders, like Ho Chi Minh, Mao, or Pol Pot, to whom the West Germany Communist League paid homage until well into the 1970s, turned out, up close to be butchers of humanity doesn’t dampen the enthusiasm. After all, it is more about the icon, the color of the hero's tresses, than anything else. But if this has led to the fight against the pig system and the concept of the urban guerrilla, the question arises: Is this a contemporary political issue - or not simply political romanticism, a hopeless Don Quixottery?
Now, I want to conjure up a contrasting program for you that also dates back to 1968: a demonstration by Californian computer scientist Douglas Engelbart. If you are familiar with the history of the computer (or the feature section in FAZ, where I told this story), then you'll know that Engelbart wasn’t just the inventor of the computer mouse but that he inaugurated a series of revolutions at the Stanford Research Institute, which he - in this mother of all demos - presented to an astonished audience. In any case, what the San Francisco Convention Center visitors saw that day was beyond imagination. One author present at the demonstration said what he saw was the next LSD in its power. In the video you can watch on YouTube, Engelbart presents the first computer mouse and a graphic user interface with a modern file system that you can move, copy, and annotate at will. He also demonstrates collaborative working, voice, and text chat with another network node at the Stanford Research Center 5 km away - in short, everything we consider characteristic of today's digital age. Contrasting this with our State Library revolutionary, dreaming of carrier pigeons, bush drums, and smoke signals, we know that the urban guerrilla was already hopelessly outdated when they were dreamt. And insofar as the young man's portrait, who hoped to spark the world revolution with a few nice slogans, is concerned, we can simply say: here is a man with a great future behind him. Applying this to that generation, you see the dilemma of 1968. A few months were created of a carnivalesque, equally tumultuous, and erotic mood – but where did it lead? A few dressed up as urban Indians as they unleashed RAF terror, but the vast majority of these citizen children (with their ideological armaments in their luggage) marched dutifully through the institutions - straight into retirement if you will. The results weren’t encouraging if we look at the institutions in question today. Insofar you could break this generation's baton in half: their future was already behind them in '68 - what came afterwards was post-historie, Post-modern, post-structuralist, post-democratic.
You could say the generation of '68 popularized the historical rift of the French Revolution - and emitted this slogan in the frenzy of revolt: L'imagination au pouvoir, the power of Imagination [Einbildungskraft] to Power [Macht]. If the liberation of imaginative fantasies in everyday life has led to a loosening of lifestyles that nobody wants to do without, then we must conclude that the political harvest has been relatively meager in comparison. Historically speaking, that generation has kept its word. The promise - 'you only want our best, but you won't get it' - has been literally followed by nothing: no vision, no program that could have turned this grandiose theory into reality. You have to have a certain historical masochism to torture yourself trudging through the historical sources of a time when (as the biographer of the revolt, Gerd Koenen, has already noted) these texts were not designed to outlast: They're relics of a revolt that was as prepotent as it was prematurely obsolete, survivors that’ve fallen out of time and which, in retrospect, seem either embarrassing or incomprehensible to the protagonists themselves. Insofar it’s a stroke of luck, as exemplified by the manifesto of a group of artists who see their salvation in flooding museums and galleries with works of art that are as inferior as possible, as a position that's taken up the cause of decapitating the symbolic father as the abolition of his claim to art. If it becomes political, we're dealing with closed spaces where scattered individuals are articulating a delusional system if they're not immediately dismissed as children's dreams or political romanticism. On a structural level, these ephemerides are undoubtedly attractive. For when you have art in front of you that no longer wants to be art, books that no longer want to be books, the spirit of revolt proves to be a logic of negation, a great maelstrom in which an outdated stock of ideas simply drowns in nihilism.
Of course, this leads to the paradox I’ve touched on in my acknowledgments at the beginning. It’s pretty apparent that a significant change was taking place in 1968, except that it had little or nothing to do with the generation of 1968. But how could you imagine that?
A revolution is taking place - but nobody is there?
This is reminiscent of the peace movement’s slogan: Imagine a war and nobody came. In any case, we’re dealing with a battlefield that hasn't been illuminated by the conflicts of suburban Vietnam but is downright obscured. But before we get to the bottom of this puzzle’s tracing, let me remind you again that I'd characterized 1968 as a continuation/repetition of the French Revolution – leading us to the question: What was at stake in the French Revolution? Any serious historian will tell us that this is where capitalism frees itself from the shackles of the estates, where 'the standing and the estates evaporate,' as the Communist Manifesto puts it in a nutshell. The French Revolution marks the beginning of modern mass society and the nation – what Benedict Anderson described as an imagined community that is a product of modern imagination. On the other hand, it abolished the ancien régime's religiously colored, centrally coded concept of rule. Taken structurally, we have the King's head and the great masses demanding a say. Against this schism, the method of killing that removed the unfortunate Louis XVI from the world was entirely appropriate: for the guillotine separates the head from the body - and this means that the people's body, which is the sovereignty of the people, no longer needs a divine leader. Perhaps this explains why the revolutionaries carried the King's body through the streets in an open coffin, allowing everyone to see his headless body. But no, that's not entirely true: Louis de Bourbon's head was placed between his legs, with glassy, wide-open eyes. Now, I’d be easily tempted to interject a short excursion into the guillotine's fascinating history, seen as a headless ruling machine. Still, this ceremony’s inner contradiction is more critical as we’re dealing with two conflicting orders here. We have a top-heavy, representative order (which runs top-down) – and a grassroots democratic version, which we know as a grassroots movement (bottom-up). If the King is cut a head shorter, it’s to give the masses their due. That's why the manner of death is highly symbolic; the separation of head and body stands for a transition of power, from divine right to popular sovereignty, from the elite to the masses - or, as I would say, from the order of representation to the order of simulation.
This conflict between head and body, which I consider to be the real revolution of our time, is articulated in the most diverse fields, from medicine to economics, from the state’s political system to the mode of production. I’d like to set a few historical milestones to ensure this doesn't remain a meatless assertion. It may be that the older generations among you can remember one or two of them - but I’m pretty sure you haven't thought of associating these paradigm shifts with the student revolt of 1968:
a) The first symbolic decapitation, if you will, concerns changed understandings of the human body. After South African surgeon Christiaan Barnard successfully performed the first heart transplant in 1967, an ad hoc committee at Harvard Medical School was forced to redefine death. From that moment on, someone was considered dead if their brain no longer showed any sustained electro-physiologic activity. The defining need for this new standard was the increasing capabilities of successfully removing organs from brain-dead patients and transferring them to potential recipients. This step didn't come as a complete surprise, as it marked the logical progression in a series of re-codings. After the heart-lung machine of the 1950s established a strange twilight zone, the idea of cybernetically augmented astronauts, or cyborgs, for space travel emerged. A further step in mastering or dominating the body was the FDA approval of Carl Djerassi's practical birth control pill (Enovid) in May 1960, making it clear that biological reproduction was no longer a fate but a choice. In any case, the famous slogan of the women's movement, 'My belly belongs to me!'1 is only conceivable based on such decisiveness. The body becomes a body politic - thus a social project, an ego corporation avant la lettre. Abraham Maslow formulated this transpersonal psychology program in 1968: Every person is, in part, 'his own project' and makes himself.2 But this means we step out of the state of fatum and natural growth and create ourselves, like a kind of work of art.
b) Let's move on to the second head-body separation. As you've seen from Douglas Engelbart's video, the great revolutions of our Internet world were already anticipated in the 1960s. And because the Machine's intelligence can detach itself from its body, we have this separation we call hardware and software. Modernity also anticipates this logic in a certain way. If you think of Monsieur Jacquard's punch cards, where the textile program detaches itself from the loom, you can already see a manifestation of this logic in the 19th century. The computer pioneer Charles Babbage, who built the first prototype of a computer, saw this ability to change programs as the surplus that elevates the Modern Superman above the Middle Ages’ Watchmaker God - or, to put it in more modern terms: God is a DJ. And in 1969, the question of hardware and software became a political issue. In a sensational lawsuit, IBM is forced to separate its previously bundled hardware and software packages. Software becomes conceivable as a good that can float freely - and I think you can already see the structural relationship to Abraham Maslow's transpersonal psychology here. We’ll come back to the question of what free-floating software intelligence means for goods production, work, and imagination in a moment, but first, I’d like to introduce you to the third significant head-body separation that we've already announced in Douglas Engelbart's video:
c) Which is the discovery of the network. Nowadays, when the idea of swarm intelligence, as an exemplar of a decentralized system of order or a liquid democracy, is presented, it alludes to the grassroots democratic order traceable back to the network archetype. But how do these networks outstrip our old media of representation? How can the intelligence of the many, as the crowd, deliver greater resilience and better performance than any centrally planned system? An interesting exemplum of this power shift is Linux, which, coincidentally, has become the operating system of today's capitalism. The structural side of the power shift is clear: from centralized planning to self-organization, from Big Brother to the network.
d) Now, let's move on to the last revolution, which engraved itself as the world's defining political change within the previous 50 years, namely the Leviathan's decapitation in terms of monetary policy. What was the situation in 1968? The idea still prevailed that every nation could issue its banknotes at its discretion – and this was guaranteed by the logic of the Bretton Woods system, which provided gold backing for money. Any foreign central bank could approach the Federal Reserve, the American central banking institution, and would receive one troy ounce of gold for 35 US dollars under this system upon request. Since this established and maintained the gold-backing illusion, every state could claim itself as the absolute ruler of its currency’s value. Exchange rates were simply fixed between countries. For a long time, the Deutschmark was exchanged at a ratio of 1:12, then later at 1:4, to the dollar. By the end of the 1960s, however, it was clear that a country like France, as exemplum, had accumulated so many dollar notes that all of Fort Knox's gold reserves wouldn't have been enough to cover the French claims. So what was the solution? It was detaching the currencies from their gold backing and entrusting the task of determining their value to the international speculators. The regime of free-floating, which incidentally caught all players cold and unprepared, marked a genuine revolution, even an outright decapitation of national sovereignty. From then on, Capital no longer resided in the capital of the Nation-States but in the hands of the many anonymous and faceless speculators - a structural change in which the ancien régime once again lost out to the new order.
Considering these four revolutions, the re-coding of the body, the emergence of software, the network, and the free-floating of money, we can see they all follow the same pattern. In each case, what was previously perceived almost as nature is subjected to profound changes in its meaning: the body, work, community, and money. And as we can see for ourselves, the revolution that began in the 1960s has by no means come to an end, let alone to a standstill – Au Contraire! Whereas back then, the body's integrity was confronted with the reality of a cybernetically augmented body or augmentation by foreign organs, we're now faced with strange hybrid beings, entities such as Craig Venter's Synthia 1.0, as exemplar, in which a biological substrate is controlled by software. These different narrative strands intertwine in a certain sense, and deciding whether we're dealing with the body, software, the network, or capital is no longer possible. As exemplified by what happens when someone dissolves a bacterium into code? He can make this code accessible on a website, as Craig Venter's team has done. And if an interested party in Abu Dhabi feels a need to bring this bacterium to life, they can download its code and feed it into their gene printer - immediately creating a population of this bacterium, which, fed with nutrient solution, will then reproduce naturally. Mind you, this isn't science fiction; it's already a reality - and bears the signature of the 1968 revolt. L'imagination au pouvoir, Power of Imagination in Power.
When I bring the four great revolutions of 1968 (the body's re-coding, the abolition of the gold standard, the overcoming of hardware and our institutions) into relief, we are confronted with the revolutionary explosive device that continues to preoccupy us today. In contrast, the heroes of the revolt, like Marx, Mao, Pol Pot, and Ho Chi Minh, appear as a backward-looking band of ghosts, knights of the sad figure, whose writings seem like fighting windmills. For this reason alone, the idea that the '68ers changed society is a myth, as we're dealing with a structural revolution in our societies, which has at best found willing beneficiaries, loudspeakers, or free riders in the revolutionaries of yore. In this sense, the 68ers' assertion that the structures don’t go demonstrating out on the streets should be reversed. Au contraire, we should point out that, indeed, the structures created the shock, which ultimately found expression in the form of the general strike, revolt, and loss of authority. As you’ve seen, what we’re somewhat euphemistically calling structure marks a vast field encompassing medical theory, information technology, economics, and socio-political aspects – and so we don't get lost in the details or meaningless remarks about God and the World, I'd like to briefly show you what the revolution of the imagination is all about, which finally is articulated in the slogan in question - to what extent the revolution that’s relieved-out at the end of the 1960s is an inevitability.
To start the story as effectively as possible, I want to begin with a big bang, the explosion of the atomic bomb. What is a nuclear bomb? You could say that a nuclear bomb is a reified state: a res publica, or more precisely: a res mobilis, a state that's become mobile - all you need is a truck, and you could put one of these things in your garage. Even if we leave aside the James Bond villain, the atomic bomb represents an apotheosis of the state and also leads to its own annulment. What happens when such a bomb falls, say, on San Francisco? All electrical devices in the vicinity are fried from the electromagnetic radiation impulse. And because this also impacts telephone traffic, the Leviathan in Washington may not even realize it's just suffered a fatal blow. How can we protect ourselves against this? By building a network that automatically connects to Washington using the last remaining communication thread. However, this doesn't work particularly well with analog signals. Those who still remember the cassette recorder know that an analog signal drowns in signal-to-noise after four copy cycles - leading scientists to conclude that the future survival network could only be digital. In this light, the Internet plays the role opposite to nuclear fission. If physical atomization occurs, the protective measure consists of a digital network device - because it’s the only way of maintaining the balance of terror. This connection between the bomb and its IT counterpart is by no means arbitrary. The scientific coordinator of the Manhattan Project, Vannevar Bush, had already made a name for himself as a computer pioneer - and while still working on the atomic bomb, he presented the vision of a desktop computer to an astonished public. This is logical. After all, bringing such a complex structure as an atomic bomb into the world requires orchestrating the knowledge of thousands of scientists. And because secrecy makes no sense given its complexity, all scientists must have access to the entire body of knowledge (a fact exploited by the spy Klaus Fuchs, who revealed the secrets to the Soviets). So, on the body side, we have radioactive fallout and nuclear fission; on the mind side, we need swarm intelligence. In any case, I think you'll understand why the U.S. Department of Defense allocated vast sums of money to set up aerial surveillance and a digital communications network. However, they soon had to deal with technical pitfalls. The first computers, based on vacuum tubes, were space-consuming monsters. Suppose you tried building today's smartphone this way. In that case, you'd have to equip the world with a structure surpassing all previous superlatives - not to mention that this monster's hunger for energy would be immeasurable.
To escape this hypertrophy, engineers invented the transistor, which turned the culture of the 1950s upside down, exempli gratis, in the form of solar-powered transistor radios – much to the displeasure of its co-inventor, Walter Brattain, who couldn't come to terms with the musical price of this invention: rock music, which allowed even the whisper of a singer to have a larger-than-life impact heard everywhere. If the transistor, as an amplifier, suddenly gave popular culture a voice, it gave even more impetus to computer manufacturing. Not only were the large vacuum tubes replaced by transistors, but so was the notion of placing various transistors on a single solid-state device. Here, you can see the first integrated circuit from 1959, which shows several transistors on a silicon substrate. The integrated circuit confronts us with a conceptual twisting running counter to classical physics. You no longer increase the speed by shooting bodies faster through space but by reducing the spatiality between the transistors. This is done with the help of printing technology and various chemical etching processes, making it possible to equip the solid body with more and more transistors – and simultaneously decimate the body's hunger for energy. Thus, the core of Moore's Law, which, as you know, promises a doubling of speed every 18 months by constantly shrinking the space between transistors. By 1970, INTEL was able to present the first microprocessor, a mini-computer that could be installed in pocket calculators and elevators - essentially anywhere. Fundamentally, here, there’s an unleashing of the Imagination. The programmer, who can think up any number of things, can simply enter them into the machine without worrying about quantum mechanical implications. Thus turning the computer into a desiring machine, an entity that makes imaginary, virtual worlds possible.
So what happens when you network two such computer chips together? Very simply. Electricity travels at the speed of light, as exemplified by information arriving in San Francisco that can then be beamed to the other end of the world at the speed of light — leading to what we call globalization. Strictly speaking, the term is a misunderstanding. Because it’s more of a digitalisation epiphenomenon - goods follow the information as orders are received by telephone or fax. The birth of the first NGO, Greenpeace, illustrates how quickly the new communication conditions penetrate the political sphere. Founded in 1971 by Canadian journalist Robert Hunter, Greenpeace initially pursued the goal of stopping American nuclear bomb tests off the Canadian coast. So the activists went out to sea and into the restricted area near Amchitka, where their mere presence prevented the detonation of the bomb. There, they became aware of the whale’s fate, who were being brutally slaughtered by Soviet trawlers. Hunter realized if he could feed video footage of these slaughters into the press, he could bring this abuse to the world's attention. He called these films mind bombs, where we find an analogy of what happened in Paris in May when Dany le Rouge shouted, ‘General Strike! General Strike! General Strike!’ into the microphone - a discharging of resentment, which, in turn, miraculously produces effects. Now, we can leap from here into the outraging hashtag culture of today - but first, it seems more important to familiarize you with the architecture of the web, which differs from all traditional media because we’re dealing with a new system of order – a rationality following fundamentally different mechanisms.
I'd like to introduce you to Robert Metcalfe, an American engineer who ended up in Palo Alto in the early 1970s, where the former director of the Darpa program, Robert Taylor (who had spoken out against the Vietnam War), had set up a futuristic computer department for Xerox: Xerox Parc. Strangely enough, no one else was enthusiastic about this networking idea. And why? Everyone felt such networking would invade privacy and that a colleague could simply poach your desktop for personal work and secrets. However, once the network, which Metcalfe christened Ethernet, was up and running, the scientists understood its advantages: not only could you send emails to each other, use a shared printer, and download files from other computers, but you could also remotely supervise, and analyze your computer in terms of performance. After everyone became used to this convenience, when the network went down for the first time, it took less than five minutes for them all to come into Metcalfe's office asking where the network had gone.
As you can see, the masses, which were an amorphous entity in the French Revolution or represented a collective phantasm as a nation-state, found for the first time a form of society on the Internet: People hanging together in a common net. But let's come to the point particularly interesting to us: the question of why the network is, structurally speaking, a more potent power pole than the classical dissemination technique, which can be substantiated with the concept of representation or, better still, with the Central Perspective. As in the ancien régime, from the Central Perspective, there's a prominent authority (a newspaper, a TV station, a book publisher) that delights its audience with its products. Its one-to-many. This position doesn't exist on the Net, where every network node, peer-to-peer, follows the slogan of the French Revolution: Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité. You could say that corresponds to the logic of the telephone network, yes? What's the news? Let's look at what happens when we connect two nodes, we have one connection; with three nodes, we have three connections; with four, we have six – continuing, we see an exponential increase. Suppose we have a network the size of a small town of 20,000 inhabitants. In that case, we are already looking at 199 million 990,000 conceivable connections - and you can imagine that a mind bomb (whatever that is) can spread faster than the local tabloid. And if you translate that onto a national or global scale (Facebook with its 1.3 billion users), you're looking at a number with 18 zeros, a number so large that most of us probably don't even know what to call it. Because the density of such an extensive network ensures a successful meme achieves such a high level of redundancy, the probability that a user will be affected by this message via newspapers, radio, or television is many times higher than before. However, this means - in the long term at least - that the gatekeepers of the past, who, as representatives of good taste, made a pre-selection, are no longer necessary. The network effect, also known as Metcalfe's Law after its originator, is the structural revolution that spread in various misleading ways in 1968. Here were the youth, equipped with transistor radios and amplifiers, articulating a new attitude to life - a feeling of cosmopolitanism and group togetherness at odds with traditional hierarchies. The anti-authoritarian impulse characterizing the 1968 revolt wasn’t merely due to youthful rebelliousness but was an indicator of a profound, structural paradigm shift: from representation to simulation, from lone ruler to cooperative swarm intelligence. And now that everything has been said, and the last one has said it, the beheading of the French King is becoming a reality; even the state employees (as the downfall of Bretton Woods shows) must agree to the beheading of the sovereign.
Perhaps a short anecdote will illustrate this change: Robert Metcalfe tells how, as a young man, he presented his network to the representatives of the major telephone companies. Now, here sits this bearded young man, wanting to tell the Communication Industry Businessmen, all dressed in ties and suits, about their future - and what happens? The network goes down, and nothing works. And when he looks up, red as a beet, he sees a host of cheerful, almost liberated smiling faces - the gentlemen are now convinced that nothing, absolutely nothing, will change in their lifetime. As we know, the gentlemen were thoroughly mistaken. Behind the scenes, the net's rationality has prevailed and spared neither the carrier pigeon nor the old-style apparatchik. The King is dead, and representation has been replaced by the logic of simulation, free-floating network nodes, and swarm intelligence. And because the computer is a wishing-desiring machine, the phantasm becomes a reality: imagination au pouvoir, imagination power to Power.
As you can see, in our celebration of the Cultural Revolution of 1968, we’ve landed in the middle of the present, in the world in which we revolve around filter bubbles and waves of excitement, those mind bombs where the conflict between the old and new world continues intensifying – meaning that the structural revolution that began in 1968 is by no means complete; indeed, it may well be that the actual shockwaves of the digital revolution are yet to come. Here, we’re encountering a dilemma that we’ve already observed in the form of the '68ers - making me doubt my euphoric thanksgivings from the beginning. It’s the fatal tendency to prefer political romanticism to a sober, scrupulous view of the present. It’s simply much more appealing to pose as the master of history than admit that the driving forces of our times are still largely incomprehensible and, therefore, difficult to control. Those dreaming themselves back into the jungle and choosing the noble savage as their role model –a way of thinking taking today the form of Third-Worldism and Ethics of Conviction – have the advantage of not having to deal with the present’s impositions. Instead, they can amuse themselves with past battles, keeping the familiar moral demarcation lines alive. You may make yourself comfortable in such a dream world to indulge in the illusion of eternal youth, but this comfort zone price is the lack of presence of mind. In this sense, the question shouldn’t be addressed to the young man but to us and our society: Would it be possible that we already have our great future behind us?
Thank you for your attention
Translation: Hopkins Stanley and Martin Burckhardt
Mein Bauch gehort mir! - a slogan from the German Women’s movement…
Abraham H. Maslow (2013). “Toward a Psychology of Being,” p.175, Simon and Schuster.
