My experience with digitalization
“We have seen that the hacker model can bring about great things in cyberspace without governments and corporations as mediators. It remains to be seen what great things individuals’ direct cooperation will accomplish in out ‘flesh reality’.” (Himanen 2001, 81)
Born in 1985, with a first family visit to a so-called internet café in the mid-1990s, digitalization is a, every few years surprising, companion to my biography. As a trainer and education officer the onset of collaborative tools inside and outside the classroom re-defined my role greatly. Technological possibilities, content, and chances arising from the content are less a corpus to be taught but a cluster of avenues to be explored together. Experimental and experiential learning across borders and time constraints, especially the rise of project learning, gives learners the opportunity to actually hack prefabricated rules and sets of knowledge.
At the same time, the vastness of knowledge and opinions creates a form of societal vertigo. I witness the rise of snake oil sellers, might they be tech gurus or political pundits, offering clarity and simplicity as a product sold at the price of some money and quite a lot of self-determination. While TED talks in their diversity might be a great balancing act, combining the need of the audience for somebody telling them what is there, what is important, and how to feel about a topic, the emergence of degenerative populisms – from fairy tales about a Mars colony or near-religious charismatic management prophets to Alt Right versions of fascist thought – the realization, that the world is faster and larger than the sum of our knowledge about it, creates pressure on rationality and democracy. Probably the digital Renaissance can learn from former revolutions when in society a cultural and technological push forward was mirrored in a cultural and social push for magical authorities.
This experience merges with my experience as a political operative and union secretary. Digitalization, from data streams to asynchronous communications, changes the way political positions and tactical decisions are being developed. Gatekeeping capabilities change constantly, and broad engagement of activists and stakeholders becomes cheaper. As power becomes more fluid and leadership positions may change quicker, a second kind of political bureaucracy emerges. Technologically savvy facilitators and researchers of new tools and new media platforms create access of political leaders to audiences and to resources. Just like the old caricature of the atomic chain of command, ending not with the president but with the technician installing the red button, the technological and collaborative form of digitalized politics defines the content and the reach of a political group or structure.
In personal life, rather determined in professional life by the emerging properties of the network society, I have to constantly mediate between what is possible and what is important (Castells 2000, 695–96). Of course I do not need photo albums, physical books, printed pictures or, for that matter, an apartment larger than a bed, a chair, and a laptop. As long as technological and financial resources work for me. The realization, that my individuality and my ability to participate in society – via MS Office subscription, internet access via Vodafone, birthday calendar via Google, access to information via an university login or to entertainment via Netflix – depends on electricity running and, foremost, my bank account being supplied constantly with money is proletarizing life experience. Being poor and still being educated is not possible when education is updated daily via a landline subscription. Being poor and still being valuable to society becomes increasingly difficult when access to society and society’s access to me is mediated electronically and is subscription-based. Being poor and being active against capitalism, at last, is out of the question, when opinions, meanings, and people are mediated digitally ad depend on resource access. This massive shift in self-realization – I am just a credit card problem away from a night on the streets, I am myself as long as my employer or my digital service providers to not ban me – does not translate into a class consciousness or an urgent feeling to create subsidiary networks – physical neighbourhoods, self-help networks, etc. – but normalize the existence as comfortable proletarians. We do not have anything and do not own anything except our subscription plans. Not functioning on the job market or in the welfare system becomes an unthinkable thing: There are no more Punks.
If there is no way out anymore, the way through and beyond becomes an unavoidable necessity.
Risks to open digital society
“The bourgeoisie has subjected rural areas to the rule of cities. It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life.” (Marx and Engels 1988, 65)
The central benefit of digitalization is collaboration. The interfacing of data to big data, the interaction of diverse teams, and the shift from information blocks to information flows increase both personal capabilities and industrial growth. This both individual and systemic reliance on growth, whether in its form of scalability or of standardization, creates a monolithic approach to challenges and is in itself precarious: The toolbox becomes smaller.
The effects and the inner logic of digitalization themselves radicalize this risk for growth through collaboration of information and of people. If the space of lows supersedes the space of places, unplanned encounters and instances of incommensurable or at least contradictive sets of information become less frequent. What I mean here derives from Simmel’s concept of urbanity, defined by the unavoidable encounter of the other (Simmel 1995, 128–31). This encounter of cultures, knowledge bases, and behaviours drives urban creativity and innovation, here thought of as combinatory effort to deal with contradicting positions that are both true (Hall 1998, 285–86; Mumford 1961, 99–100).
In the Covid years we see a quickening of the streams of digitalization, including a drive to mobile working as contemporary instance of telecommuting (Graham and Marvin 2004, 250–51). Despite all tools, meetings, and Apps for knowledge management, the creeks and streams of input become deterministic over time. I trust existing team members, existing newspapers, already proven online courses or public speakers. The relative amount of incommensurable information I have to adapt to decreases relatively to my exposure to unplanned encounters – with that, my creativity, here my intellectual ability of recombination, decreases.
Data protection is one of the arenas in which rural idiocy is being negotiated. A pragmatic reaction to the EU privacy legislation and the European legal decision on Privacy Shield by businesses and organzations was to move digital communications and data transfers to secure platforms and structures. The diverse biotope of servers, systems, and applications experienced a clearing when we moved to tested and certificated monopolies such as MS Teams. The interaction of the data protection and privacy debate with emerging legal rituals – such as automated disclaimers and warnings in “external” e-mails – push toward internal, corporate solutions and exchanges. VPN-based networks with their firewalls support a psychology of abstinence towards experiments and cross-organizational sharing. Time will tell in what way the workplaces and workflows will recuperate from the re-nationalization of the web and from the drive toward intranet-like cloud infrastructures.
Organizations are aware of this tendency towards the digital, home-working village idiot. Coworking Spaces support social and mental health for travelling or remote workers. Development teams work from shared apartments, office spaces are re-designed to a mix of pub and living room. Great expenditure accompanies the internationalization of companies and the diversity management of private and public, commercial, and civil society organizations. Barriers between people, from racism to hierarchical silos, are being tackled. A whole consulting industry emerged around the hope, that professionals actually start talking to each other and engage with others with different backgrounds, ideas, and capabilities.
Meanwhile, the actual urban experience diminishes with digitalization. The individual and commercial drive for standardization supplants stores and shops through franchise chains, city centres through shopping centres, physical places of engagement and consumption through app-based delivery services. Social and cultural entities such as the neighbourhood pub, the gay bar, or the political party office are supplanted for convenience and effectiveness by online platforms. The Disney World version of urban spaces in form of coffee bars at the workplace can not stem a tide of de-mobilization and de-urbanization of lived experience. Both public and commercial investments into urban spaces through culture or events are counter-cyclic measures and do not influence the megatrend.
Nevertheless, this risk is just a risk. People have proven to be civil and urban beings. Migration, mobility, and education might be strong drives to re-invent city spaces and healthy areas beyond stagnant comfort zones.
Self-evaluation
“And so the problem remained; lots of people were mean, and most of them were miserable, even the ones with digital watches.” (Adams 1996, 5)
In the course of my studies, I am aware of the change knowledge is going through. Sets of ideas and information are being dynamized and become reflective points within a stream of both productive and reflective capabilities of individuals and groups. At this moment in my thinking this is not a suspension of prior accumulation of knowledge, but an integration of the formerly distinct areas of knowledge. This in itself is not new. Any historical period of transformation gained the insight, that knowledge is in itself a transformative force, is dialectic. Without trying to merge Socrates with Marx, the Italian Renaissance with the Silicon Valley, I am starting to accept, that knowledge and education have their periods and that conservative/ positivist definitions meet in times of change progressive/ dialectic understandings.
Translated into my (political) work, any forecast on what will be important next year or what chances we get to tackle an issue will massively be determined by the stream of emergent technologies and the changing formats of human interaction. Instead of a sociology of a specific technology as a basis we have to develop a democratic discussion about the needs and questions of people in a constant process of learning and a changing (private and professional) environment.
I am still learning or, rather, I still must learn the core of data security and privacy as a civil digital rights topic. The interaction between me and digital networks create data points and identifiable streams that are read as personal and as to be protected. On a functional level regarding virtual property rights or personal finances, this I understand. The emotional level of the experienced ownership of or alienation from data being created by machines through interaction with me is highly important: Legal systems, commercial efforts, and political activism revolve around these issues. What makes these issues “tick” is something I must study and to learn.
Sources
Adams, Douglas. 1996. ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’. In The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide. Complete & Unabridged, New York: Wings Books, 1–143.
Castells, Manuel. 2000. ‘Towards a Sociology of the Network Society’. Contemporary Sociology 29(5): 693–99.
Graham, Stephen, and Simon Marvin. 2004. Telecommunications and the City. Electronic Spaces, Urban Places. London & New York: Routledge.
Hall, Peter. 1998. Cities in Civilization. New York: Pantheon.
Himanen, Pekka. 2001. The Hacker Ethic and the Spirit of the Information Age. New York: Random House.
Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. 1988. The Communist Manifesto. ed. Joseph Katz. New York et al.: Pocket Books.
Mumford, Lewis. 1961. The City in History Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World.
Simmel, Georg. 1995. ‘Die Großstädte Und Das Geistesleben’. In Aufsätze Und Abhandlungen 1901-1908, Georg Simmel. Gesamtausgabe 7 (1), eds. Rüdiger Kramme, Angela Rammstedt, and Otthein Rammstedt. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 116–31.
Comments
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