TECHNOCAPITALISM

For many years now, both in conversation and writing, I have used the word “technocapitalism” in preference to either “technology” or “capitalism”, to indicate my sense that those two phenomena, apparently distinct, are in fact aspects of the same underlying cultural/economic process.  This usage is somewhat idiosyncratic, and when friends asked for an explanation I would give one; a somewhat simpler version of the one I am going to go into here.

Recently though, I have begun noticing others using the term, or the similar “technocapital” — not, as I use it, negatively, but positively.  The most recent and widely read example being reactionary VC Marc Andreessen’s bizarre quasi-mystical admonition to “preserve the light of technocapital” in the psychotic screed he calls the “Techno-Optimist Manifesto”.  Since Andreessen owns the means of production, his usage is likely to become normalized; and mine will seem like some kind of mistake or misunderstanding.

So I am taking the opportunity to articulate the sense in which I have been using the term, in case it helps.  No doubt many will disagree with my analysis.  But even so, perhaps it will help clarify their thinking.

Unfortunately, to completely articulate the argument we need a shared understanding of “capitalism”, a word which is used very differently by different cohorts.  So for the sake of this discussion I’m going to ask you to understand the word as Karl Marx did.  This does not mean I am asking you to accept Marx’s conclusions about history, or his prescriptions for action — or certainly the actions of his followers, which have been disastrous by and large.  I do not personally accept those things.  But I am a “Marxist” in the same way I am a “Buddhist”:  In the technical sense that I am convinced by both Marx’s and Buddha’s analyses of the situation.

This may require reconsidering some received knowledge.  In contemporary mainstream discourse, Marx is regarded as the founder of “communism” or “socialism”, words which are both supposed to refer to a system in which the economy is centrally managed by the state.  And indeed, while the founders of historical examples of such state control (probably better called “statist” than “socialist”) claimed to be inspired by Marx, government ownership of the means of production appears nowhere in his writings.  (He argues that workers should own the means of production directly, without state intermediary; the question, sadly, is how to achieve that.)

Capitalism

So let us dive in. In Marx’s lexicon, capitalism is an economic regime in which some people work producing goods for sale, typically using machines, while others, who own the machines, harvest some of the value produced by the workers just by virtue of owning the machines.  These people, who Marx calls “capitalists”, usually justify the profit they receive as compensation for their vision in having purchased the machines and set others to work using them.

The situation in our time is a great deal more complicated than it was in Marx’s, with many layers of management, marketing, and business-to-business services, but the underlying structure is the same.  All the managers, marketers, salespeople etc are  in some sense working at the machines, producing goods for sale.  And the very few who own the machines receive a portion of the value that all those other people produce, while not themselves actually producing anything, but simply by virtue of having at one point had the idea and wherewithal to purchase the machines and set others to work on them.

This economic system is different from a mercantile system, in which a merchant cleverly purchases goods at a time or place when they are cheap, and transports them or holds them until a time or place where they are more valuable.  This is an important part of Marx’s analysis; merchants are not capitalists.  Merchants use money to buy goods, then use their wits to exchange the goods for more money than they paid (hopefully); capitalists use money to buy machines, raw materials, and the labor of workers, who produce goods using the machines.  The capitalist then sells the goods for more money than the total cost of their production.  Viewed from the workers’ perspective, their labor produces goods, and the goods have value; however, the worker only receives a portion of that value.  Another portion goes, sensibly, to pay for the machines and raw materials; and a third portion is pocketed by the boss, for no apparent reason.

However, the worker in this system has no choice.  Even if they think it unfair that the capitalist profits off the sweat of their brow, they cannot afford to purchase the machines they work at.  Their only option is to sell their labor, and they are competing with many other workers.  If they ask too high a price they will starve.

An example may help to illustrate the overall argument.  Imagine a village of small farmers growing wheat on land held in common.  There is no free lunch here; unless you plant, nurture, and harvest your crops you will starve.  In the village there is one rich farmer, who has inherited a mill.  In addition to milling his own wheat, he rents it out; other farmers bring their wheat to his mill, pay him a fee, grind their flour, take it and leave.  They then eat it or sell it or whatever.

This is not capitalism (though it may seem kind of unfair).  The mill-owner here is said by economists to be “extracting a rent”.

Now imagine a village in which the common land on which farmers formerly grew wheat has been privatized, and is the property of the rich farmer, who also owns the mill.  Children born in this village have no option of growing their own grain; their only options are to work for the mill-owner, or starve.  Not wishing to starve, they punch the clock.  They toil in the mill-owner’s fields; they harvest his grain; they grind it on his mill.  Other workers take the flour to market and sell it.  They bring the money to the mill-owner, who pockets it and pays his workers their wages — which are less than the value of the flour.  Indeed, the value of the flour is greater than the cost of the workers’ labor, plus the seed-grain, plus the maintenance of the mill, plus advertising and whatever else.  It is greater than all the costs associated with the enterprise.  It is profit, and the mill-owner lays claim to it, though he need do nothing more to earn it than relax in his chaise longue drinking piña coladas.

Merely by virtue of his ownership of the land and mill, the lucky farmer’s bank account grows and grows, year after year, all by itself; and others produce the goods for which he and he alone is paid.

This is capitalism.

Perhaps some other time we can consider how such an economic system comes to be, and how it is maintained.  Why does everyone agree that the mill-owner is entitled to his profit?  He is providing nothing of value to the village; why don’t the rest of the villagers just excise him from the picture somehow?  How did the arable land, formerly the common property of all, come to be the possession of one man?  These and many other questions are discussed at great length in Marx’s many writings, and are worth considering.

Now, perhaps the situation I have described seems reasonable to you.  Perhaps, for example,  you feel that even if the current mill-owner never lifts a finger, at some point in the past someone must have worked hard to construct the mill, and to accumulate all that land, and it is that immense labor that is still paying off.  Even if you agree that the mill-owner in this example — the capitalist — is entitled to his profit — is entitled to recoup all the costs of the the village’s economy, plus a little extra, just for being there; even if you feel that this situation is perfectly just, at least we have an agreed-upon definition of the word, “capitalism”.

“Capitalism”, we can now agree, is an economic system in which some people produce value by their labor, while others, owners of the means of production, receive the value of that labor; and the producers, in turn, receive somewhat less than the value they have produced.  A further portion of the value they produce goes to maintaining the means of production; and a final portion, great or small, is kept by the capitalist, just … for being there.

Technology

Now let us consider these “means of production”.

This phrase is a little clunky, but meaningfully so.  The capitalist is distinguished from the worker by one thing:  ownership of the means of production.  The worker may be as industrious as all get-out, but they cannot produce anything in a vacuum; they need some raw materials, some tools, and these are the exclusive property of the capitalist.  The means of production may be as simple as land itself, in the above example, or as complicated as, you know, a far-flung media empire or whatever.  They are not necessarily “technological”.  And yet.

And yet, my argument is that the very notion of “technology” is, in our culture, a byproduct of internal tensions within capitalism.

There are several faultlines within a capitalist economy.  Capitalists are at war with workers, obviously.  The incentive of the capitalist is to pay workers as little as possible; the incentive of the worker is to work as little as possible.  

Workers are in competition with one another as well.  If I, a coal miner, require $10 an hour to feed, clothe and house myself, and you are willing to eat garbage from the back of a restaurant and do the job for $5 an hour, the capitalist is going to give the job to you. While our interests are aligned, insomuch as we are both in conflict with the capitalists, unless we are able somehow to set aside our differences, we are engaged, willy-nilly, in a race to the bottom.  There is no possibility of “class consciousness”, of “collective bargaining”, save by some act of grace.

And as it turns out, capitalists are similarly conflicted.  On the one hand, they are brothers in arms against workers; any power gained by workers as a class is power lost by capitalists as a class.  It is in the interests of all capitalists that workers be as powerless, immiserated, uneducated and ill-fed as possible while still able to perform the tasks necessary to produce commodities.

On the other hand, however, capitalists are also at war  with one another.  If I, owner of a warehouse full of weaving machines, get access to some weavers so desperate that they are willing to work for $5 an hour, while yours will accept no less than $10, I am going to drink your milkshake.  If I get access to wool at a cheaper price, or better quality wool, or a new market for my fabric, I will drink your milkshake.  And, most significant for our discussion today, if I invest in a more efficient weaving machine … I am going to drink the fuck out of your milkshake.

If I invent, or invest in, a weaving machine that can make better fabric, or more of it, or make it faster, or — best of all — one that requires fewer workers to make it go, you will have two choices:  purchase one yourself, or go bankrupt.

And why is the best weaving machine one which requires fewer workers?  Because the machine is a fixed cost, a one-time expense; and workers must be paid by the hour or by the job, and must be paid at least some minimum in order to keep them alive, perpetually, as long as the business keeps its doors open.  Workers are a constant drag on profit margins.  The ideal, from the capitalist’s point of view, would be a means of production that produced the product all by itself, requiring neither input nor supervision nor maintenance; one expenditure for a lifetime of profit.  Such a machine does not exist of course.  Someone must always be paid to grease the gears, to check the output.  But it is an ideal to which any capitalist can, indeed must, aspire.

This is really the central part of my argument.  Capitalism is truly a war of all against all:  capitalist against worker, worker against capitalist, worker against worker, and capitalist against capitalist.  For all that the pie may be growing, for the contestants in the pie-eating contest it is a zero-sum game:  Any advantage gained by one is a disadvantage to the others.

So consider.  I, an inventor, develop a novel weaving machine, using an astonishingly elegant new mechanism heretofore unimagined.  Unfortunately for me however, it requires the same number of workers to produce the same quantity of fabric of the same quality as the existing weaving machines that everybody is already using.

Who is going to buy my machine?

Who is going to manufacture and sell it?

No one, that’s who.

People who discuss technology tend to idealize the great days of the Royal Society; of the grand quest to understand the cosmos by a ragtag band of genius amateurs.  But it has been a long, long time since the pure desire for knowledge had any place in technological progress.  It is still possible to find disinterested academics, engaging in pure research, or hackers, pentesting for the lulz.  But any ambitious academic researcher is choosing projects they think stand a chance of yielding monetizable results, so they can solicit VC money, start a company, and retire.  And  ambitious “hackers” “hack” on projects which will turn into startups and make them millionaires.  That’s just common sense.  No one wants to live in a “hacker house” when they’re 40.

Pondering the careers of technologists like this, we can begin to see how “technology” is hard to extricate from “capitalism”.  There are interesting unsolved problems, in every discipline, which have little chance of yielding marketable products, or efficiencies in manufacturing.  But if you are smart, ambitious, good with people, you would be foolish to work on them.  Someone else will harvest the low-hanging fruit you could have grabbed, make the money that could have been yours — and your time on earth will be in vain.

So the end result is, only those who don’t know better or are less capable work on the problems that don’t pay; and little progress is made on them, if any.  While the problems that do pay — now those see progress!

Progress

First of all, did you know that, until sometime in the 18th century, the word “progress” meant moving in a circle?  Look it up.  To make a progress, until a couple hundred years ago, was to ceremonially walk the boundaries of a domain — to circumambulate.  Not to continue infinitely on a line.  Until fairly recently, “progress” had no telos, no direction.

Knowing this, we can begin to reconsider the way we view historical time.  It seems commonsensical — to us — that history moves forwards; that development builds upon development and the world becomes better and more complex as it goes on.  But is it really so commonsensical?

Certainly, for capitalists, time has a clear direction, and new technology is always an improvement.  Because, as we observed earlier, for a capitalist to refuse an  efficiency improvement in the workplace is suicide.  Once a competitor has invested in a technology which increases profit, either through speed, quality, quantity, or, best of all, reducing labor cost, no competing capitalist can afford to ignore it.

For the capitalist, technology is, intrinsically, improvement.  From the standpoint of intracapitalist competition, there is no other kind of change.  It would be ridiculous — paradoxical — to invest in or even waste time thinking about a technological change that did not offer the promise of improvement — in the very specific sense of increasing profit margins.  Do increasing profit margins improve anything else?  Health, housing, safety, the environment?  I think we can safely say they might.  But more likely not.

Pity the poor capitalist!  Caught in the vise of competition, layering technological improvement on technological improvement without end.  There is no way off the treadmill, until with death comes peace.

Anyway, my argument is that our modern definition of “progress” is confounded and conditioned by the pressures of the capitalist mode of production, and with it our sense of history itself.  We imagine that people who do not improve the means of production, but are content to live as their great-grandparents did, have no history.  But what if they do?  What if the improvements they are making, generation by generation, are simply not measured in increasing efficiency of production?

What if they are, for instance, incrementally improving their communities?  Learning to be better listeners?  Embroidering communal stories?

Just consider it for a second:  What if research and development were geared, not toward increasing profit margins, but toward increased flourishing?

You will observe that there is no way to measure this directly, that it cannot be quantified.  Which is exactly my point.  I believe it was JS Mill (no relation to our archetypal capitalist!) who first realized that utility cannot be measured, but money can, and so made the bold and unfalsifiable claim that a quantity (money) could be used as a proxy for a quality (utility — or happiness).  There are many such cases.

Open Questions

Here I will simply enumerate some questions this line of argument brings up for me.  Is progress which cannot be quantified still progress?  For instance, if a society wished to develop “tools for conviviality”, in Ivan Illich’s suggestive phrase, would there be any way of determining whether this “technology” was “developing”?  Any metric by which one could tell whether society was moving forward or backward?  And if not — does this render such a project useless?

Would stepping off the treadmill of capitalist competition necessarily mean stepping out of history?  Is qualitative, yet unquantifiable, change the same as stasis?  And if not — how do we conceive history under a regime of quality?

Rather than progress “forward””, can we speak of “deepening”?  Of progress “outward”?  “Inward”?

Granting that the spirit of the Royal Society, of Xerox PARC, of the Institute for Advanced Study, is not completely dead:  Where can it be found?  How can it be nurtured?  What does curiosity look like, disentangled from the profit motive?

What motives should guide which inventions are constructed?  If we agree that increasing productivity is not the only, or best, criterion for what should be built, is curiosity itself sufficient motive?   Or should society privilege some other motive? (Perhaps to the surprise of some, I am pretty comfortable with curiosity as sole motive.  I tend to feel that values — “conviviality” for instance — are more a matter of demand than supply.  Personally, I think if people want to build fire-breathing robot dogs  or rogue superintelligences they should try.  I doubt in the latter case whether they will succeed, but that is neither here nor there.)

What would technology be if not a byproduct of capitalism?  If not technocapitalism, might we one day speak of technoconviviality?  Technoflourishing?  Technocuriosity?  What would mark these things as “technological”, if they did not function to increase productivity and thereby profit?  How would “technocuriosity” differ from garden-variety curiosity?

And again, if those things exist already, in nooks and crannies protected from the technocapitalist juggernaut — how do we recognize them?  How do we encourage them?  What does a society that encourages them look like?

Touch Fucking Moonflower

24 April 24

Nevada City