Mark Featherstone
According to Klaus Schwab we are in the process
of entering the fourth industrial revolution and this will produce enormous
challenges for people in even the most high tech societies. What do we mean by
the fourth industrial revolution?
Essentially, Schwab’s term refers to a new age
of interconnectivity defined by the integration of biological, sociological,
economic, political, and cultural systems under the sign of digital technology
which transforms everything into code. In other words, since we can now
understand life itself in terms of data (DNA code and so on), new levels of high
tech integration are in the process of emerging and it is possible to read
across the natural and human sciences in order to understand this new interconnected
world.
On the one hand there is nothing new about
Schwab’s thesis. Anybody who has studied the work of Karl Marx in any kind of
depth knows that the modern, capitalist economy is essentially premised upon
working on (exploiting) what Vernadsky called the biosphere (the earth itself)
and that there has thus been a high level of integration between natural and
social, economic, and political systems since at the very least the emergence
of capitalism. However, on the other hand what is different about Schwab’s new
industrial revolution is the level of integration allowed by digital
technology, and this is where we must be very careful about celebrating these
new interconnections.
In order to explain why this is the case, let’s
explore the key ideas of the contemporary French writer, Bernard Stiegler.
Stiegler starts by returning to perhaps Marx’s key insight about the emergence
of capitalism in the original industrial revolution. Marx shows how the
original industrial revolution led to the emergence of two new classes – the
bourgeoisie and the proletariat – from the old feudal landscape of landed
aristocracy and peasants and that the struggle between these two new classes
would essentially drive history towards its conclusion in a classless communist
society. However, what interests me for the moment is less Marx’s theory of
dialectical history (though I will return to this later) and the transition from
capitalism to communism and more his theory of the proletariat. This is a key
idea for Stiegler, so let’s explore what it means.
What is the proletariat? What does it mean to
be a proletarian? The answer is that the proletariat is a group of people torn
away from their relation to the land and thrown into an entirely new social
situation which leaves them completely alienated or estranged from the world.
Under these conditions the proletarian is lost and deskilled first, (1) because of their alien situation in the
industrial city, ad second, (2) as a result of the form of discipline
industrial work imposes upon them. What does this mean?
The answer to this question is that the ‘intelligence’
of industrial work is founded in the machine. The new industrial worker
provides labour power – he / she is a cog in the machine – but otherwise he or
she is stupid. The industrial worker does not need to think because the machine
thinks on the basis of its design. I have experienced this first hand in my own
early working life. Working in factories in the North East of England, I did
not think, but instead learned to connect the movements of my body – tipping
fruit onto conveyor belts, for example – to the movements of the machine in
order to make sure I kept up with its movements. The machine – the conveyor
belt – called the shots and I worked hard to keep up. The final product of the
factory (carefully packed fruit for supermarkets) did not matter to me. All that
I cared about was keeping pace with the machine. That was the objective of my
role. This is what the term proletarian means beyond signalling a class position.
That is to say that proletarian means deskilled,
turned into a beast of burden, a labourer who has no idea what they are doing,
beyond contributing labour power.
Of course, sociology emerged in the context of
19th century capitalism and grew up on the basis of different
attempts to understand this new industrial world. Sociologists wanted to oppose
the situation of what Stiegler calls proletarianisation
and understand the new modern society. This is what sociology has always done. Thus,
following Marx’s epoch of industrial factory work, sociology provided a lens to
view more recent transformations in the mode of production – for example, the
turn towards computerisation – which resulted in a new wave of
proletarianisation. This time the old industrial workers were thrown out of
work by computer technology. In this new high society they were left behind,
made redundant, and forced to adapt or die. This was, coincidentally, the fate
of the older members of my own family who grew up with industrial work and knew
nothing else. As I was entering university and working in factories to make
ends meet, they were being made redundant by a new society defined by
knowledge. They were unable to adapt to this new situation having left school
in their early teens and were thus thrown onto the scrap heap of the new
computerised society.
However, there is more to this story than a
history of class struggle based upon a kind of Darwinian survival of the fittest
and most adaptable, because Schwab’s fourth industrial revolution contains the
seeds of a much greater existential threat to humanity itself (everybody, even
those who might imagine they will come out of this new transformation on top,
is now under threat), contained in the way the new integration of coding
systems undermines our very ability to think or, in other words, be human. This
is Stiegler’s key point that I want to unpack in some more detail below.
Although there are similarities between
Stiegler’s thesis and Marx’s original idea of proletarianisation – the worker’s
skill and knowledge migrated to the factory machine in such a way that made him
or her stupid and disposable – the advantage the old industrial worker retained
was the ability to think in his / her free time. The old industrial worker
worked with their body. They sold their labour power. Their mind was redundant,
but they could at least think in their spare time, which is precisely what I
did when I entered university, and my family had always done - thinking and
reading when they were not working for money (the lot of the wage slave). Now we
know that the proletarian was far from stupid beyond his or her work life, and
it was possible for them to reach class consciousness through reading and
becoming part of political organisations and this is precisely what they did in
opposing capitalism and campaigning for better worker’s rights and so on.
But how would this work in the world of the
fourth industrial revolution, code, and cognitive capitalism where the very
object of capital is information, what passes for knowledge, and thinking
(thinking is now a commodity, a thing that can be estranged, taken away from
the person who thinks by virtue of brain mapping systems that know more about
our minds than we do) in a vast globalised system spanning natural, social,
economic, and digital ecosystems? This is Stiegler’s point. Today, that very
space of thinking itself is in the process of being colonised by technologies
for codifying information and circulating it at high speed in such a way that
undermines human thought which is far too slow to keep up with ‘the system’ (I
use this slightly conspiratorial term ‘the system’ to describe the new
integrated high tech bio-social-economic globalised order).
The point of Stiegler’s work is, therefore, to
suggest that the danger of the fourth industrial revolution resides in the
disappearance of the very space of the freedom of human thought itself. Where
will this take place in a world where (1) natural metabolic systems are
entirely bound up with social systems which rely upon them for survival (we
live in a biosphere and civilization built upon fossil fuels and so on that
seem to happen to individuals), (2)
the connection between nature and society is completely commodified (everything
and everybody has a value from the quality of the air we breathe to our social
interactions on Facebook which means that we tend to lose our sense of our
singular value to a new form of algorithmic power), and (3) all of this is
coded within a globalised digital system that materialises everything,
including our very brain processes (the mind itself becomes a thing, a network
of synaptic connections, which can be controlled, managed, and nudged by
experts in behavioural economics, for example)? In other words, how can we
think when everything is transformed into transferable data? This is Stiegler’s
nightmare.
In this totally integrated system it would be
easier to not think – to become un-thinking
– because the system is there to think for us, which is precisely what happens
today when we need ‘to know’ anything. Who can keep up with the system’s reach
and power? In much the same way that it is impossible to predict the weather,
the economic system is also beyond our understanding. Who knew what was
happening when the 2008 economic crash took hold? The basic point here is that
the system knows, while we live in a state of blissful ignorance.
In much the same way that God used to have all
the answers (and I would ask my Priest what God thought about this, that, and
the other), Google now tells us what we need to know based on the infinite
reach of its algorithmic power. Of course, you might respond by saying - ‘what
does it matter if Google tells us the answer, we still find out what we need to
know’. My response would to say that this is not thinking, but rather to be
thought by a system that provides instant informational shortcuts to knowledge,
which cut through the need to translate data into lived understandings (processed
in the mind of the individual) by virtue of computational speeds that exceed
the speed of the human capacity to think. There is no ‘working through’ here,
no process towards knowledge, because this is in the machine, which generates
pre-digested answers for the tech-no-mind (the unthinking individual) on the basis of the law of averages. What is
this but proletarianisation for the fourth industrial revolution?
Let me refer to a basic example to try to
capture this more clearly. When the school kid responds to a teacher’s question
by cutting and pasting from Google they are essentially behaving in an entirely
rational manner in a society where the objective is to move data from here to
there as quickly as possible. Of course, they are not learning anything, not
thinking (beyond the decision involved in identifying the information to be
moved from here to there), and not expanding their own knowledge, but rather
simply moving information around. Yet there is clearly a kind of perverse rationality
about this behaviour in the world of the fourth industrial revolution where the
frictionless ability to move data around is everything. Back to sociology - this
is precisely the kind of madness the sociologist Max Weber wrote about in his
work on irrationality or hyper-rational systems (see his massive book, ‘Economy
and Society’), because what is taking place in this example is the destruction
of thought by the acceleration of rational calculation. Here, thinking is taken
out of the equation on the basis that it is simply too slow and also
potentially too subversive for a system based on the speed of data transfer
without the friction of a remainder (the remainder here would be thinking) that
somehow resists instant communication and slows the entire process down.
Let me explain what I mean.
In the world of hyper-integration information
is everything. We know this today. We are buried by metrics, but we know
nothing. Who knows what any of this information means? There is no space for
knowledge in this situation because knowledge relies on the individual
processing information (thinking) and translating it into something they
understand on their own terms (i.e., through their own individual experiences).
The problem of this is, of course, that this process of individualisation, this
process of thinking, corrupts the identity of informational code
(who knows what the individual will make of information when they process
it on their own terms, but it won’t be absolutely objective – absolutely
transferable to anybody) because knowledge breaks the coherence of the
hyper-rational system which has become the central objective of information
processing today.
This is why in the contemporary school system
exams rely on the repetition of information, rather than knowledge-based
responses founded in individual interpretation. There is no space for this in a
system fixated on the reproduction of its own coherence, rather than individuals
that possess knowledge and can think for themselves, outside of the coordinates
of the system.
But surely this is madness in an education
system set up to produce ‘knowledgeable’ people who can make a difference in
the future? The entire point of the person who possesses knowledge is that they
might think differently, they might process information in a particular way
that transgresses the taken for granted models of the present, and solve
problems that others have not been able to solve. Surely this is what education
is about, rather than the production of ever more information proletarians? The
danger of the new industrial revolution is that it will lead to this – the
emergence of an education system that produces ever more techno proletarians
and completely blocks the development of individuals. Why is this the case? The
reason the new industrial revolution threatens to cause this disaster is
because it essentially industrialises thought in technology and takes it away
from people. This is what Stiegler calls proletarianisation.
Let’s restate this key point - the precise
danger of Schwab’s fourth industrial revolution resides in the short-circuiting
of the process of the individualisation of information in new knowledge and the
emergence of a system of endless repetition based upon the relentless
circulation of information which becomes increasingly less valuable the more
widely it circulates until it is essentially worth nothing (a commodity which
is absolutely available has no value). Thus we reach the conclusion of the
system of totally transparent information. This system, which we might imagine would
make us more intelligent and more knowledgeable, ends up transforming into a factory
for (1) producing worthless information that nobody wants because everybody
already has it and that (2) prohibits anybody from knowing anything since the
very process of knowing involves breaking the rules of a system committed to the
frictionless commensurability and transparency of everything. The headline here
is ‘no thought allowed’.
Although Schwab’s idea has only recently come
to the fore in educational debate, the problem of the industrial digitisation
of knowledge in the form of colourless information (colourless, meaning
absolutely transparent and transferable) has troubled me for many years in my
role of teacher. In the early part of my career there was a sense in which
everybody understood the need to process information in order to create
knowledge. One would read difficult books and struggle to understand them in
the name of advancing one’s own knowledge of a particular topic.
In the early days of the internet I was
convinced that we would only benefit from the democratisation of knowledge (I
could access the world’s library online), but what has happened in the period
since the late 1990s is that the industrial digitisation of knowledge in the
form of endless information has undermined processes of thinking to the extent
where every type of knowledge (reduced to simple information) seems somehow
equal and commensurate. Plato, Hobbes, Darwin, and Einstein – from the point of
view of the internet it’s essentially all the same. There is nothing ‘to know’
here, but only information to be blindly and unthinkingly consumed without the
intervention of reason or critique. Why would this prove difficult? If all
information is essentially the same, learning the classics is more or less the
same as learning a nursery rhyme or a shopping list. What, then, can we do
about this situation?
Stiegler’s answer to this question explains why
we should be opposed to any educational systems that puts the student in the position
of passive consumer. This should not and must not happen. Let me explain this
position, providing my own take on what Stiegler calls ‘contribution’. Before
Marx wrote about the proletarian whose ability to think had been alienated in
the machine, the German philosopher Georg Hegel imagined the emergence of
society itself from the struggle between primitive humans. Hegel’s proto-Darwinian
idea was that the natural battle for survival between these primitive humans –
think chimpanzees fighting for supremacy - would establish a class system upon
masters and slaves. This would be the first society.
But while Hegel’s philosophical version of ‘The
Planet of the Apes’ explained the emergence of society, the irony of his class
system made up of masters wallowing in luxury and slaves working themselves
into the ground to keep their masters happy is that the slaves overtook the
masters precisely because of their work which saw them learn, progress, and
become more human. Thus Hegel’s key point - the negativity of the slave’s
original position – his or her slavery – thus becomes the source of his escape
into positivity – his or her humanisation. Work is everything, but this is ‘active
work’, learning through engagement, rather than mindless labour or passive
consumption, which is, of course, how the master lives.
What does this have to do with the future of
the humanities and social sciences today (the topic of this post)? The answer
is that I think that Hegel’s theory is a model for the future of knowledge,
education, and the human sciences (the humanities and social sciences) in the
fourth industrial revolution by virtue of the way in which it shows how it is
possible to translate negativity (the endless useless information circulating
around Google) into positivity (lived knowledge, skills, and centrally
understanding how to learn) in the service of humanisation. We cannot allow
information to wash over us, to transform us into techno proletarians, but must
work on it, and transform it into knowledge that makes us more human.
Of course, a key question remains – how can we
achieve this in a system that is about the rapid, passive processing of information?
My answer is that this easy passivity is precisely what we must oppose by
moving away from models of learning and teaching that position students as
passive consumers because this is, in the long run, to cheat them of the possibilities for humanisation set out by Hegel. We know that we possess the long
established techniques to realise Hegel’s theory – the entire point of the
dialectical model which he adapted from Plato’s dialogic method was to move thought forward or in the context of the student, to essay, to carefully (and I emphasise the
idea, ‘carefully’ here) compare, to contrast, and to weigh alternatives in such
a way that required critical thought and the translation of information into
knowledge in the name of the development of reason (where reason means the
ability to find a middle way) – but it is absolutely
essential that these methods are not estranged into technologies that end
up thinking for us.
Although it may seem easier to let machines
think for us in a consumer society where everything is for sale, it is
impossible to buy knowledge. Information is everywhere today - in fact, there
is so much of it that it is virtually worthless – but I repeat: it is not
possible to buy and passively consume knowledge. Knowledge is never for sale. As
Hegel and then Marx taught, it takes time, effort, and work to learn, to become
skilled in a particular field, and become more human. This is Stiegler’s key
message. Under these conditions, the problem of passivity, of surrendering
‘know how’ to the machine, is that it leads to proletarianisation. It is
precisely this situation that I think Schwab’s fourth industrial revolution
threatens simply by virtue of the totally integrated system – the biological,
the social, the economic, the political, and the cultural – that thinks and
processes everything and leaves no space for humans to translate information
into knowledge, ‘know how’, and skill.
I think that we must oppose this situation for
a number of reasons. First, consider the ethical
disaster of this form of proletarianisation. Since the individual is
essentially no longer human, but rather a cog in a vast information transfer
machine, they are objectified and only valuable so long as they are functional
for the wider system. The moment they no longer function, they are redundant
and should be thrown on the scrap heap. Of course, this is what capitalism
does, and has always done, but the current situation is more problematic than
previous waves of redundancy precisely because it impacts upon the general
human ability to think in toto, rather than in a particular workspace (i.e.,
the factory where the machine thought and the labourer provided power).
But under conditions of the globalisation of the
digital system, there is no escape from the reach of capitalist processes that
translate everything into data. There is no outside. There is no place and no
time where we are free to think since our smart phones connect us to work 24 /
7 in an entirely networked world. According to Jonathan Crary, even sleep offers no escape today, since information has even abolished our ability to dream! How, then, can we think inside this maelstrom of
information? How can we process information in order to create knowledge in
order to understand our world where we are drowning in so much information
produced at such an accelerated rate? The answer is that we cannot, which is
why we see the shift from deep attention to hyper attention taking place today.
This is the second problem of the fourth
industrial revolution which we can talk about in terms of a kind of psychological disaster. This new form of
hyper attentiveness, though this mode of ‘paying attention’ is not really
worthy of the name, is reflected in the behaviour of people who scan several
screens at once in order to try to keep up with everything that is happening
around them. Of course, they can only do this by dividing their attention, not
really paying attention to anything in any kind of depth, and not really
processing anything. Although this individual possesses high tech attention, and
there is a kind of futurism about this, it is also paradoxically a base, animal
form of attentiveness that undermines the achievements of civilization that
make us human.
In a survival situation – and there is no other
situation in the natural world – the animal must be hyper-aware of threats that
may come from any direction. The animal must be prepared to ‘fight’ or ‘take
flight’ at a moment’s notice. Is this not precisely how we feel sat before our
various screens, bombarded by events hitting us from every angle, unable to
keep up with the pace of events, permanently on the edge of falling behind,
struggling to survive?
No wonder anxiety is the dominant mental health
condition for the new age, because the anxious person is in a constant state of
hyper-awareness to the extent that their nerves are destroyed and they can no
longer cope with normal events that might tip them over the edge. Of course,
anxiety is closely followed by depression in the new landscape of the
contemporary mental health catastrophe we are currently living through. What is
depression if it is not the condition of people who are completely exhausted,
burnt out, and unable to see a way out of a situation that seems completely
hopeless? My point is obviously not to say that all individual cases of anxiety
and depression are entirely brought about by these broader social conditions
(there are individual circumstances), but this situation forms the cultural
backdrop that makes these pathologies more likely to take hold in ever greater
numbers, simply because of the stress it causes people to experience.
We might argue that hyper attention has value
today because it allows us to try to survive the maelstrom of information we
must endure, but we must also see Stiegler’s point - that this storm of
information proletarianises and prevents individuals from really thinking about
their situation simply because it prevents them from developing symbolic
structures and narratives to make sense of their world. Instead, they survive
by responding and reacting to events, in much the same way that a wild animal
might respond or react to a particular situation. There is no time to think.
One must react. But where is the long term future in reaction?
There is, of course, a sense in which thinking
is passé, old fashioned, a relic of the past in the contemporary world. We want
the adrenaline of explosive events. We want things to happen because we are
essentially addicted to hyper-activity. In a way we love the violence of the
informational maelstrom, even though it leaves us sleepless and in a state of
exhaustion. By contrast thinking is boring because it requires us to carefully connect
ideas and think our way through a situation. This is extremely difficult in our
fast paced world because it requires time, concentration, and deep attention,
but this is exactly what we must try to do if we are to overcome the problem of
proletarianisation threatened by the fourth industrial revolution. We need to
take our time, slow down, log off, sit in silence, and think.
I was taught to think by a sociology professor,
John O’Neill, who provided me with a mental framework (reason, a system for thinking, and
a series of tools to develop this system) to understand and interpret the world
around me. He turned me into a craftsman, able to carefully connect ideas and
make sense of situations, and I am committed to sticking to this approach
through thick and thin. However, I must confess that in my darkest days I
struggle to think, struggle to manage the kind of cognitive overload caused by
the new informational capitalism, and struggle to make sense. The stress and
strain brought about by the attempt to take the time to think my way through
the contemporary vortex of information leaves me with pounding headaches which
I think are probably symbolic of the effort to try to make sense of a world
which is becoming increasingly senseless.
In the end I suppose this is where I think the
real value of the humanities and social sciences resides today. Despite people
wondering about their value today (what is their precise instrumental, economic value?),
they are actually more important than ever before simply because the potential
fall into senselessness (the inability to think in a vortex of information) is
the fall into proletarianisation, what Stiegler calls systemic stupidity, and
animality, with all its consequences for a civilized society (increased
violence and so on). This is precisely what we must resist by maintaining our
human ability to think beyond information. Against this potential catastrophe,
a disaster which various thinkers, including Stiegler, have seen coming in the
mental health crisis impacting so many people today, what the humanities and
social sciences can teach is a system of first, mental self-defence and
second, a model of human thought to better understand the world. They can
provide an ethical lens to make sense of events and narrow the bandwidth of our
connection to the new digital leviathan so that we are better able to manage
the storm of information that surrounds us today.
The natural sciences achieve this through the
laboratory method which creates a methodological boundary in order to limit the
number of variables the scientist must consider, and they are no doubt at the
frontier of knowledge. However the humanities and social sciences represent a
different kind of epistemological frontierism because their object of knowledge
is the human world, which is currently under siege by new technological
convergences that appear spatially and temporally boundless and for this reason
threaten to destroy processes of knowledge production in storms of information.
In response to this situation that threatens to destroy the human as a thinking
being, I think that the humanities and social sciences can teach models for
making sense of the new world and what we might call following Peter Sloterdijk
‘spheres of tolerable cognitive operation’ (in the past we might have used a
German word to capture this idea, bildung).
On the basis of my reading of Stiegler’s work, I think this is the ethical and
political challenge of the human sciences today – to save the human from a
post-human future where we will become so many objects circulating around the
vast global bio-economic system produced by Schwab’s fourth industrial
revolution.