I’ve long enjoyed the blog posts by Richard Jones on economic productivity and growth – his perspective from physics is always interesting. As I met him in real life for the first time this past week, I also downloaded his free e-book Against Transhumanism (download here) – a brief, compelling demolition of the idea that digital technology is hurtling us towards a ‘singularity’. The most famous transhumanist is Ray Kurzweil, I suppose, of [amazon_link id=”0715635611″ target=”_blank” ]The Singularity is Near[/amazon_link]. Prof Jones points out that:

a) exponential growth (as per Moore’s Law) cannot deliver a singularity, as the value of expnential functions is finite – unless the rate of technological improvement is constantly increasing without limit. Seems a stretch, looking at either current productivity figures or any history at all.

b) transhumanism is an apocalyptic religion, not a scientific theory.

c) To quote the e-book: “The idea that history is destiny has proved to be an extremely
bad one, and I don’t think the idea that technology is destiny will necessarily work out that well either. I do believe in progress, in the sense that I think it’s clear that the material conditions are much better now for a majority of people than they were two hundred years ago. But I don’t think the continuation of this trend is inevitable. I don’t think the progress we’ve achieved is irreversible, either, given the problems, like climate change and resource shortages, that we have been storing up for ourselves in the future. I think people who believe that further technological progress is inevitable actually make it less likely – why do
the hard work to make the world a better place, if you think that these bigger impersonal forces make your efforts futile?”

It’s well worth a read, along with the Soft Machines blog.There is a super-clear explanation of the implications of nano-technology,as you might expect from the author of the [amazon_link id=”0199226628″ target=”_blank” ]Soft Machines [/amazon_link]book.

[amazon_image id=”0198528558″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Soft Machines: Nanotechnology and Life[/amazon_image]

There’s also a chapter on why it’s unlikely you’ll ever be able to upload your brain to the cloud. Above all, though, the book explains why transhumanism is a Dangerous Idea. The idea of a Singularity has been described as the ‘Rapture of the Nerds’ (attributed to [amazon_link id=”1857238338″ target=”_blank” ]Ken McLeod[/amazon_link]), which makes it sound like the lunatic fringe. But as Prof Jones points out, the Silicon Valley crowd are seriously influential; and their view that technology has its own irresistible dynamic – the techno-determinism – elbows aside the truth that the results of technological discovery are socially determined: “Why would you want to think of technology, not as something that is shaped by human choices, but as an autonomous force with a logic and direction of its own? Although people who think this way may like to think of themselves as progressive and futuristic, it’s actually a rather conservative position, which finds it easy to assume that the way things will be in the future is inevitable and always for the best.”

Written by a physicist but like a true social scientist. The future is multiple, not singular.

The physical location of the Internet has always fascinated me, so I’ve been enjoying reading [amazon_link id=”0262029510″ target=”_blank” ]A Prehistory of the Cloud[/amazon_link] by Tung-Hui Hu (a network engineer turned English professor). The first half of the book is pretty much entirely about the physical infrastructure and the mismatch between our idea of ‘the cloud’ as something dematerialised operating to new social/political rules and its reality in cables and buildings in specific places. The introduction starts: “A multi-billion dollar industry that claims 99.999 percent reliability breaks far more often than you’d think because it sits on top of a few brittle fibres the width of a few hairs.” It goes on to say that the idea of the cloud as a metaphor for society or organising principle for the economy is sometimes uncomfortably at odds with the material, technological platform. Indeed, he points out, the cloud was responsible for 2 per cent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions in 2008, since when there has been a rapid increase in the number of data centres.

[amazon_image id=”0262029510″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]A Prehistory of the Cloud[/amazon_image]

The book then starts with the geography of US fibre optic cables, laid under old railroad tracks: an old-economy, centralised network beneath the cloud as “a vision os globalization that follows the dictates of a multinational corporation – a coalition of geographic arease that move capital and resources through the most efficient path.” We have the impression of the internet as a decentralized network, but it is not – the idealised distributed network described in a famous 1962 article by Paul Baran was never built. The idea that the network got its shape because of the threat of nuclear war is a kind of ‘how he leopard got its spots’ [amazon_link id=”1405279613″ target=”_blank” ]Just So[/amazon_link] story. “Virtually all traffic on the US Internet runs across the same routes established in the 19th century.” (The same is true in the UK, with the east and west coast spines.) Interoperability via IP has only increased the concentration of power, the book argues. Six telcos control the US internet; it is fewer in the UK. Yet there is, “A collective desire to keep the myth alive despite evidence to the contrary.” This chapter ends with an intriguing section on the inherent paranoia of seeing the world through a network lens. If the system is a logical construction overlaid on a physical network, anything and everything can become part of it: the cloud has nebulous edges. Therefore anything and everything – or everyone – can cause breaks or errors.

The second chapter discusses time sharing and virtualization in the cloud – the creation of the illusion that we have our own private part of it. The book presents this is part of a shift away from waged labour toward a flexible economy with a nebulous boundary between paid and unpaid: “By positioning users as intimate partners of the computer, time sharing yoked users to a political economy that made users synonymous with their usage and allowed them (or their advertising sponsors) to be tracked, rented or billed.” The concept of multi-tasking developed out of time share computers, and now refers to flexible working more generally. “Real time actually functions as an ideology of economic productivity.” I am intrigued by the link between time and productivity – not new of course; think of EP Thompson’s famous article about industrial time keeping. Still, time spent using the computer is the work time now to be tracked. “The underlying logic of freeware capitalism is consumption – of time.” The chapter goes on to discuss the privacy debate as the result of the transformation of what had been envisioned as a public utility into a set of private ones, or gated communities, albeit only brought about by virtualization software. The book argues that concerns about privacy contribute to the logic of (dread word) “neoliberalism.”

The n-word put me off quite a lot, as it seems a pretty empty concept, and the third chapter vanishes down the rabbit hole of critical theory, although I like (again) its preoccupation with the built structures of the internet, the data centres – some in old military bunkers. “Computers, like horses, overheat when worked hard.” However, the chapter is about the links between cloud computing and the surveillance state. The basic point is the re-emergence (as if it ever went away) of the claims of sovereign territories and state power over the internet.

With the final chapter the book re-emerges from its rabbit hole, opening with a section on the use of big data as a tool of power. He notes: “Targetted marketing came out of the Eisenhower era science of geodemography … GIS was a by-product of the military’s need to convert populations intro targettable spaces.” The chapter argues that opting out of the connected world is nearly impossible, so we ought to start by acknowledging its structural inequalities of power. “The cloud is a subtle weapon that translates the body into usable information.” Well, everything, perhaps. Airbnb turns housing into a housing cloud; we have car clouds drifting around major cities, and labour markets that deliver “humans as a service.” Although I certainly do not see the world through the prism of neoliberalism (which no doubt confirms me as a neoliberal, as if being an economist wasn’t enough to do so), I found this book a very thought-provoking essay about the economic and political underpinnings of our connected lives. We surely need to have more discussion about the ownership of ‘the cloud’, its physical reality and energy consumption, and the political power that flows from its roots in those old railroads.