Sketch 3: Trashing the modernization paradigm
After Melentie has identified "history" as "our biggest imprisonment", he does not go explicitly into how to deconstruct and destabilize it, but goes on to speak of modernization, of "cutting-edge technology such as nanotechnology and bio-technology", "reaching the higher European [sic! so the Balkans are outside Europe?] standards, and surpassing them", economic growth, foreign investment, innovative thinking — all this while maintaining that this will be to the benefit of "all", aiming "not to harm anyone", hoping "everyone could find his or her potential". What could modernizing and progress have to do with freedom or breaking chains? Freedom for whom? In modern philosophy and state theory based on Rousseau’s "social contract", but also in modern revolutionary theories in the wake of Lenin and Bakunin, modernizing and progress are seen as promising freedom for "all", at least if the technologies are not in the wrong hands. When liberals, Marxists and anarchists pretend that technology can benefit "all", they come close to the Orwellian description of the ancient polis of Athens as "democracy": a small percentage of people (citizens) work little or not at all and live well, while the majority slaves away. In fact, I find "all", "everyone", "anybody" to be among the most misleading and ideological words ever. Whose sweat and blood stains the glass-fibre cables we use to communicate with each other? the sound card that turns our computer into a radio studio? the airplane we take to meet face to face once in a while? or even just the bed we use to sleep on?!
The violence of capitalism does not lie in the private ownership of the means of production by a ruling class as such, but in the formalization of work processes that comes with modernization and "progress", which is imposed through the private ownership of the means of production. If one day someone comes along and shows me how to produce a "high-performing info-communications infrastructure" without exposing people (workers) to formalized and demeaning work processes which impoverish their perceptory experience for days on end and can well be equated with torture — somewhat reminiscent of detention in isolation as practiced by the German and other states to break the will of political prisoners — maybe I might be able to casually speak of modernization towards a better life (for "all"). As it is, however, I prefer not to speak abstractly and detached from history, of some utopia in which technology will help "everyone" to be nice to each other. I prefer not to ignore that I am, like Melentie and most of our "syndicate" and "The Future State of Balkania" friends, part of a new elite whose privileges derives from the fact that they have developed skills in the field of using new technologies. Skills which, without the blood and sweat of less privileged contemporaries that goes into disconnected and alienating subtasks of constructing high-tech communication networks, would be plainly useless.
In the meantime, as net artists and activists, we are likely to legitimize the use and further development of modern technologies and, along with it, the continued attacks of a modernizing elite against people, be it through the destruction of subsistence and social structures through Nato’s war against Yugoslavia and Kosov@, be it through the formalizing of work processes in the wake of Ford and Taylor, be it in the streamlining and impoverishment of perceptory experience in modern and professionally planned shopping centers, malls and inner-city pedestrian zones — always in an effort to do away with the blockades of capital accumulation. We are likely to be among those who help launch the next wave of "creative destruction", to use the term shamelessly coined by the liberal economist Josef Schumpeter, contributing to the development of instruments of social control using the newest technologies, and in the same process helping to destroy the barriers that people oppose with their lives to capital accumulation.