The System

Since the origin of information science and technology, the programming / deprogramming / reprogramming of life has been its implicit objective. One can hardly doubt that this objective is on the verge of being attained today, opening the door to a variety of commercial derivatives. The advancement of systems like GPS, the development of biometrics and genetic identifiers suggests that beyond the control of flows and of all multiple identities, there may today exist capacities for the remote control of things and living beings, and for chemical and electromagnetic interaction with them at a distance. The new version of the Internet protocol, IPv6, will increase the number of addresses – 340 billion billion billion billions – allowing every person to be given an address, but also every object, as the latter are increasingly expected to communicate among each other and with human beings. The computerization of complex societies seems well underway toward the implantation of microchips in human flesh, not only allowing gains in systems security through the surveillance of organic components, but also permitting remote control: “prevent voluntary muscular movements, control emotions and actions, produce sleep, transmit suggestions, interfere with both short-term and long-term memory, and both produce and delete an experience set” (Scientific Advisory Committee, U.S. Air Force, 1996).

Having massively invaded all the spheres of society, information science and technology, with its biological and chemical prolongations, now gives rise to a total governmentality. This governmentality does not just contradict the spirit of the Enlightenment by concentrating and augmenting the power of domination exerted by a global aristocracy. It suppresses the very possibility of Enlightenment. The level of bio- and psycho-political management allowed by information science and technology, the level of systemic integration that they make possible, suggest that a political autonomy or constituent power today, of whatever nature, can only become critical by segmenting the infosphere, by developing non-capitalist markets, by setting up revocable hierarchies.

The governmental power exerted over the planet and the species by a caste actively working toward its own immortality is reinforced and multiplied by the integrated technological systems that allow for the analysis of complexity, increasing the capacity for the accumulation of capital, augmenting the capacities of action on information-reality, and even tending toward the administration of future “human resources” via genetic sorting and non-mammalian reproduction.

The world as normed by globalized technological systems and by the strategies of a shadowy planetary government will on the average be more predictable, more certain and better insured than ever in the past, whatever the cultural and functional diversity of that government may be, and whatever the treachery or accidents that may occur (a good example are the American, Russian, German, Israeli and Pakistani secret services, who all knew that something was being prepared for late 2001, or the institutional speculators who were alert enough to sell their stocks in American air carriers shortly before September 11). Thus world government reduces uncertainty, it reduces the capacity to “make history” opened up by a multiplicity of autonomous or sovereign actors.

If what is fundamentally at stake in humanity is making history, and if this capacity is paradoxically reduced by the development of technological systems, then the segmentation of these systems, the limitation of the productive and normative interdependencies, would appear to be the precondition of politics today. Social democracy is entirely contained within the proposition that workers or employees should not destroy their productive instruments, that it is essentially a matter of changing their use or style of management. Social democracy is finished. By reinforcing dependencies, the normalized and normalizing technological systems have destroyed the range of autonomies. They have reinforced the powers of control, standardization and transformation of populations. At stake today is the (re)creation of sovereign autonomies outside planned futures, outside psycho-politics as it is staged in the media on the four corners of the earth, outside salaried labor depending on the worldwide organization of production, on globalized commercial and financial circuits.