The Bleeding Edge. Bob Hughes
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had poured effort into it for the sheer pleasure of taking on an impossible-looking challenge and pulling it off in style. Not only did they want nothing for it; they did not particularly care which team or individual finally cracked the problem. It was good enough that somebody had cracked it. To claim proprietorship of such a thing seemed obscene.
Twenty years later, in 1995, Gates’s Microsoft Corporation was becoming a global economic force and its monopolistic tendencies were the subject of a US government investigation – only the fourth company in US history to have merited that kind of intervention. The distinguished science writer James Gleick pointed out that here, for the first time ever, was a major company that ‘does not control a manufacturing industry (as IBM did), a natural resource (as Standard Oil did) or a regulated public utility (as AT&T did).’ Instead, by strenuous assertion of legal rights and precedents, it had come to own ‘the standards and architectures that control the design of modern software’. Gleick made it very clear that Microsoft seriously intended at the time to corral as much of the world’s knowledge as it could get away with, and extract astronomical rental income from it. At the time, there was a widespread sense of amazement that a business could even attempt such a thing, and achieve so much power simply from ‘owning’ knowledge.
Another two decades on, the idea that great fortunes are built on intellectual property has become totally normalized and uncontroversial, and is even enshrined in international trade treaties. Business empires cross fresh social and personal boundaries as routinely as they do official, international ones – and our technologies help them do it.
Each time, somehow, we adapt swiftly to the ‘new normal’. But a point comes when we no longer have the right to give way so gracefully.
I argue in this book that escalating human impact on the earth has gone hand in hand with successful encroachments on egalitarian culture, as with the neoliberal onslaught since the 1970s but extending far back in history. The issues go far beyond computers and electronics, intellectual property law, or even modern global capitalism. To get to the root of the matter we will need to wind the tape back to where it all began, when mercantile elites first acquired ‘the right’ (because they made the laws) to own whatever they needed to own and to disown anything and anyone that might be a liability; to the time when we became ‘modern’ inasmuch as we learned to stand by while others starve, and to tolerate and even to respect those who take more than their share.
We are involved in the endgame of something that began in the squalor of medieval Europe. The challenge cannot be resolved until we tackle the social failure that set it in motion: entrenched inequality, and the genteel acceptance of it.
Bob Hughes
St André de Rosans, France, April 2016
Technofatalism and the future: is a world without Foxconn even possible?
The routine assumption is that progress – particularly high-tech progress – depends on inequality, on a world of capitalist entrepreneurs, low-paid factory workers and toxic waste dumps. Yet every major development in the computer’s history arose from voluntary initiative or public funding rather than corporate research. The historical evidence suggests that innovation and creativity thrive in egalitarian settings and are stifled by competition. Far from deserving credit for the computer revolution, capitalism has driven it down a narrow and barren path, and might even have turned it into ‘a revolution that didn’t happen’.
In May 2010 world media picked up a report from the Hong Kong-based China Labour Bulletin that desperate workers were killing themselves by throwing themselves out of the windows of the vast Foxconn factory in Shenzhen, in China’s Guangdong province, where the Apple iPhone was being manufactured.1 Newspaper columnist Nick Cohen wondered what could be done to alleviate the situation, or even to stimulate some sense of outrage about it, but drew a blank:
A boycott of Foxconn’s products would not just mean boycotting Apple, but Nintendo, Nokia, Sony, HP and Dell too. Boycott China and you boycott the computer age, which, despite the crash, effectively means boycotting the 21st century, as we so far understand it.2
Cohen’s ‘as we so far understand it’ does at least hint at a recognition that ‘another world is possible’, but he did not pursue the idea. The phrase ‘a quick trip back to the Stone Age’ seems to lurk not far away.
It’s drummed into us that all good things come at a price. If we want nice things, someone must pay for them: you can’t have modern, high-tech luxuries and happy workers, clean rivers, lovely woodlands and country lanes thick with butterflies in summer.
It seems impossible to live what we think of as ‘a normal life’ in what we’ve learned to call ‘a modern country’ without being complicit in human immiseration or environmental destruction. Not even the poor can avoid complicity; in fact, they least of all – from the 19th-century factory-hands in their slave-grown cotton clothes, sustained by Indian tea sweetened with slave-grown sugar, to the 21st-century migrants whose very existence can depend on having a mobile phone. ‘Progress’ apparently requires inequality.
The range of a modern economy’s inequality is astonishing and all of it is packed into its most popular products. As technology advances so does the range of the inequality that’s drawn into its web. Must it be so? Today’s iconic electronic products, like yesterday’s cotton ones, embody the greatest range of human inequality currently possible. Most of us know at least some of the facts: the toxic waste mountains; the wholesale pollution of the environments where the copper, gold, tin and rare-earths are extracted, in countries where life itself has never been so cheap; the sweated labor; and so on.
TWO PARADOXES ABOUT NEW TECHNOLOGY
Yet here’s the first of two key paradoxes: when you look at what actually happens when technological progress is made, you find very little to support the idea that progress demands inequality – and even some mainstream economists recognize this. World Bank economist Branko Milanovic, for example, concluded a large-scale study of inequality and economic growth in history like this:
The frequent claim that inequality promotes accumulation and growth does not get much support from history. On the contrary, great economic inequality has always been correlated with extreme concentration of political power, and that power has always been used to widen the income gaps through rent-seeking and rent-keeping, forces that demonstrably retard economic growth.3
This is especially and manifestly true when looking at the present system’s ‘jewel in the crown’: the computer. The thing we know (or think we know) as ‘the computer’ emerged in conspicuously egalitarian settings, and it wouldn’t go on functioning for very long if inequality ever succeeded in its quest to invade every nook and cranny of the industries that support it.
The computer in your hand may have arrived there via a shocking toboggan-ride down all the social gradients known to humanity, but inequality was conspicuously absent at its birth, largely absent during its development, and remains alien to computer culture – so alien that the modern economy has had to create large and expensive ‘egalitarian reservations’ where the essential work of keeping the show on the road can be done in a reasonably harmonious and effective manner. The New Yorker’s George Packer has described4 how the leading capitalist companies (Google, Microsoft, Apple and the like) have even built their own, luxurious, egalitarian ‘villages’ and ‘campuses’ where their programmers and other creative types are almost totally insulated from the extreme inequality around them, and can believe they have moved beyond capitalism into a new egalitarian age.
More than half of the world’s computers and smartphones, more and more of its electronic appliances, and nearly all of the