Postdigital Knowledge Socialism

• In Event: Knowledge Socialism and the Rise of Peer Production: Collegiality, Collaboration, and Collective Intelligence

Abstract

The Internet, developed as a non-centralised communication device for the US military, can be used to support ideologies other than those which supported its creation. Since early days, the US military was very well aware of these tendencies. In 1969, the US Army Foreign Science and Technology Center Washington issued a 500-page report entitled Cybernetics in the service of communism (Berg, 1969). Media theorists did not lag far behind. In the same year, analysing Cold War propaganda at the Bilderberg conference, Marshall McLuhan made a thought probe that media technologies of the day had not perhaps been as capitalist and freedom-loving as they were cracked up to be. In his words: “I asked the group: ‘What are we fighting Communism for? We are the most Communist people in world history!’ There was not a single demur” (McLuhan, 1987[1969]: 373). Four decades later, McLuhan’s probe has inspired Richard Barbrook’s thought probe ‘Cyber-communism: How the Americans are superseding capitalism in cyberspace’ (Barbrook, 2000). Reflecting on this paper, which he calls an “update [of] McLuhan’s joke for the dotcom 1990s”, Barbrook says: “Channeling McLuhan, my plan was to argue the exact opposite by saying that the Americans had invented the only working model of communism in human history – and it is called the Internet!” (in Jandrić, 2017: 88)
We now live in a postdigital age, where digital technology is no longer “separate, virtual, ‘other’ to a ‘natural’ human and social life” (Jandrić et al. 2018: 893). “The postdigital is hard to define; messy; unpredictable; digital and analog; technological and non-technological; biological and informational.” (Jandrić et al. 2018: 895). In the postdigital context, ownership and agency of hardware is dialectically intertwined with ownership and agency of software. Within various sociomaterialist perspectives, and further in the light of the biologization of the digital reason, there is no such thing as “hardware socialism” or “software socialism”: knowledge socialism is inherently postdigital. This article explores postdigital reconfiguration of existing research developments in cybernetic communism / socialism, dot.com communism / socialism, digital communism / socialism, and the similar, with a focus to social innovation, knowledge cultures, and collective intelligence. It develops postdigital knowledge socialism as a philosophical concept, and examines some of its consequences for practice of knowledge making and dissemination.

References
Barbrook, R. (2000). Cyber-communism: How the Americans are superseding capitalism in cyberspace. Science as Culture, 1(9), 5–40.
Berg, A. I. (1969). Cybernetics in The Service of Communism. Washington DC: Army Foreign Science and Technology Center. http://www.dtic.mil/docs/citations/AD0695085. Accessed 26 October 2018.
Jandrić, P. (2017). Learning in the Age of Digital Reason. Rotterdam: Sense.
Jandrić, P.; Knox, J.; Besley, T.; Ryberg, T.; Suoranta, J. & Hayes, S. (2018). Postdigital Science and Education. Educational Philosophy and Theory. Doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2018.1454000
McLuhan, M. (1987) [1969]. Letter to Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, 14th May 1969. In M. Molinaro, C. McLuhan, & William T. (Eds.), Letters of Marshall McLuhan (pp. 372–373). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Author

• Petar Jandric, Polytechnic of Zagreb