David Golumbia

University of Pennsylvania
dgolumbi@sas.upenn.edu

 

Some of liberal democracy’s deepest convictions rest on assumptions about free (or nearly free) and complete access to information. These assumptions, tied to our dreams about liberal American democracy at least since the passage of the Bill of Rights, go something like this: more information is generally better than less information; the more widely information is disseminated, especially throughout the general populace, the better; perhaps most crucially, the wider, cheaper and more comprehensive the popular access to information the better. We might imagine the most radical element of this liberal dream of democratization in the utopian (and not coincidentally, Borgesian) image of a vast library containing accessible copies of every printed, public or significant (but how to decide this, and who?) document in human history, open all hours, admitting all, forbidden and forbidding to none.¹

 

Yet in several domains today, radical doubts have begun to be raised about the project of total information access, and even moreso about the liberal-democratic vision it is supposed to inform.² Often, these doubts have been phrased politically, especially with regard to underlying theoretical politics that are, to be sure, crucial for understanding the structure of our public and private life. ³ In less academic spheres, grave concerns about the ultimate effects of multinational conglomerate, corporate control of the media (especially journalism) have been raised, most strongly though not at all exclusively by Noam Chomsky. ⁴ Yet these various criticisms have not yet come full circle: for what is unexamined–or more accurately what is displaced–in the dream of total information access itself is precisely capital, and the inextricable linkages of capital to the American democratic project.

 

The dream of total access endures even in many of the most radical critiques of capitalist society–if nowhere else than in the implicit claims for the value of additional information that arise in the seemingly endless processing of textual and cultural critique. To the degree that every interpretation is another text, every additional text advances the implicit belief that more information can contribute, in some minor way at least, to a better world.

 

Moreover, the state of much recent “media,” “culture,” and “information” phenomena suggests a rapid conglomeration of knowledge-technologies, within which the total processing and also the general neutralization of information remain largely unexamined. As profound as their impact on the state of culture may be the rows of cultural studies and feminist and race-critical volumes lining our bookstores, the glossy (or more often today, matte-coated) journals that accompany them, speak to a version of the dream of ultimate information, a state of pure processing power in which just telling the story under enough pressure and from the right angle will make it available for the right agents, perhaps even provoke emancipatory action.

 

But to what degree is this implicit vision a covert version of the dream of total information access? For however deliberately difficult (and here, just for a second, can one not begin to understand their canny prescience in this regard) Jacques Derrida’s critical texts, or those of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Jacques Lacan, Hélène Cixous, even Michel Foucault, is not part of the vision of cultural studies to “interpret” these texts, to “do things” with them, to make their critical energy available? And what does it mean to carry out these actions–in the name of a personal professionalism, a personal egotism, an institutional necessity, to which almost none of us can claim meaningful resistance–what does it mean to put them forward as part of a system of information whose very essence may not be primarily, as we thought, accessible and useful knowledge, but instead the “filthy lucre” of capital?

 

Hyperactivity

 

We must set aside some of the most directly urgent of these issues for the remainder of what follows. For in order even to suggest that they have substance, we have a great deal of work to do at their heart, which is namely the equation, or isomorphism, or at the very least proximity, of what we today call “information” and what we have historically called “capital.” It may well be–and this again would require an analysis outside the scope of this essay–that this isomorphism has existed throughout the history of capitalism. There is certainly a hint of this view in some recent writings on the development of print technology and print culture.⁵ But whether it has created the isomorphism, or merely exposed it, or both, the current development of hypertext, and its specific realization on the World Wide Web, now bring the capital/information relationship forward with special force.

 

For while in many ways the hype surrounding the so-called “information revolution” is all too extreme, all too politically suspect, in other ways–of course the ways less traveled by the popular media–the consequences of this revolution have been radically underplayed. Already we see glimmers of a change in the very notion of disseminated information: we already face imaginative difficulties, unthinkable a few years ago, about what kinds of information-bearing things would fill our ideal library.

 

Furthermore these changes, in a sense mechanical, have been accompanied by “gestalt shifts” so subtle, profound, and rapid as to still be, for all their force, scarcely visible. Once we assumed that information was fragmented, disparate, characteristically hard to access, requiring trips or journeys or hour upon hour in dusty archives. Today for many of us the paradigm is changing. Now we assume that information about what is happening now is available from a small collection of central sources (chiefly television, radio and newspapers, and, more frequently today, online services), and even that the phenomenal quality of an event’s “happening” is determined to a significant degree by its reception in these various media. One encounters more and more a series of rhetorical gestures in which a reporter, a news program, or a talk show becomes a focal stage where events must be reported or else lack full credibility.

 

The default source for information is becoming these centralized spigots: how many of us have rapidly become used to accessing the MLA directory from our home or office or (at worst) library computers, when only a few decades ago no compilation of recent journal articles was available at all, even in print form? If one multiplies the very idea of archived and indexed information both with the rapidly multiplying archives and indexes themselves, and with the logarithmically expanding capacity of computer hardware and software to store and to access information, one has a sense of the scale and force of the liberal dream of total access to information, only better than before: at one’s fingertips, even in one’s own home–even in everyone’s home.⁶

 

Yet the price for this dream is higher than it seems, in many ways directly proportional to the mixing of capital and information in our culture. As the Internet and World Wide Web weave themselves in so many guises into so many parts of our culture, they bring with them the venture capitalists, corporations (from “above the garage” types to multinationals), and entrepreneurial “free spirits” whose actions often seem little more than the glazed, robotic, displaced expressions of the selfish gene, capital. And unlike the direct efforts of capitalists to control information flow by controlling its sources, the Internet and Web provide a fully-distributed system that, paradoxically, naturalizes and ever more profoundly insinuates capital into our own social and psychological economies.

 

To take a specific example, many users of a university information system may tend to think of their Internet and Web access as cost-free. Capitalists, however, note the hardware, software and system maintenance costs and count them as hidden in lower salaries and higher tuition prices. This rationalization in mind, the capitalist asks how he (please allow me the naive demonization of calling the capitalist “he”) might make money from the system. His ability to answer is limited, for his thoughts of “profit margin” and “gross revenue” interrupt other, deeper trains of thought. You or I email a colleague, or use a Web browser to access the contents of the latest issue of Postmodern Culture; the capitalist asks how much the browser costs me, who put up the server, its maintenance costs, and so on.

 

“As One Put Drunk…”

 

More to the point, the capitalist looks at the operation of the Web and the Internet, or at least takes advantage of them, in technical terms. These systems operate via a networking standard referred to as the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (more commonly known by the acronym TCP/IP). The World Wide Web and the Internet, while technically distinct systems, share these protocols where computer networking is concerned. This is visible to users when they access electronic mail–an Internet function–via a Web browser, such as Netscape Navigator, can most often at the same time access electronic mail sent through the Internet. Each computer connected to these systems is assigned a TCP/IP address, which users may occasionally see in its numerical form–a sequence of four integers between 1 and 254 separated by periods. The Internet and World Wide Web operate by computers passing information among these various addresses.

 

What the computers on these networks send each other, taking advantage of the rules set out in the TCP/IP protocols, are called packets.⁷ A packet is some amount of information (for example, the contents of a brief email message, or a segment of a World Wide Web page) stored within a kind of electronic envelope. The envelope is marked with an address–part of which includes one of the TCP/IP addresses for the destination computer–that tells various servers and routers along the network where to pass the packet and what ultimately to do with it (making the forms of information on the Internet quite virus-like, in a sense that Burroughs likely did not have in mind). Depending on the complexity of the operation, even a single transaction on the Internet can involve the exchange of many packets: depending on how the packets are sized, hundreds or thousands of packets can travel between a single personal computer and a host computer in a short period of time.

 

Everything that travels the Internet or the World Wide Web is a packet. A single email message might be broken into one or many packets, each with its own address. Just so my point is not lost, a request for information on the Internet is carried in just the same way as the information itself is carried: as a packet. By clicking on a hypertext link to an article in PMC, for example, you send one or more packets to your server, which sends them on through a series of leaps eventually to PMC‘s server, which opens the packets, interprets the request they contain, and complies with the request by returning to the requesting computer (including the requesting computer’s Web browser) the many packets constituting an article or review.

 

Internet capitalists see these packets, best case scenario for profit-making, as tiny units of money. Sites on the World Wide Web are rated by how many “hits” they receive each day–that is, by the number of requests they receive–or, in more sophisticated business models, by the number of distinct users logging in to the site each day.⁸ This may sound something like a library deciding to buy more copies of a book that is checked out frequently. It is more similar to television networks charging higher prices for advertising on programs with better Nielsen ratings. But it is also fundamentally different from either of these relatively crude feedback systems. For no previous system allows tracking of each user’s actions in precise detail, nor for that tracking to become itself a piece of information in the very system of information which both the consumer and the sponsor use. Even Nielsen ratings have to proceed on the assumption that several thousand Nielsen families form a representative sample of the American populace. The Internet and the World Wide Web promise exact, numerical statistics on every piece of information that goes in–every request, every posting–and every piece that goes out. Lest this strike some readers as hyperbole, I note that already two prominent Web software providers–Open Market and Netscape itself–sell commercial providers of Web sites exactly this kind of microscopic user tracking, of which users themselves likely remain altogether unaware.

 

There exists a significant amount of pressure to turn our online data systems into a (de)centralized information super storage house that becomes more and more authoritative, more and more, in Foucault’s phrase, the “information source of record.”⁹. We are accustomed to accessing much of the best of this information today for free, but we must be attentive to the degree to which that lack of cost may be a culture-wide “loss leader” for a great payout to come–for the moment when so much information has been logged in these systems that we have no choice but to pay up when fees are requested.¹⁰

 

It is a payout whose form we may not immediately recognize. Corporate capitalists would love to charge us per packet–so many cents for each packet sent out, so many for each packet we receive. Unsurprisingly, such proposals are frequently favored by the telephone and cable companies that would most likely profit most highly from them, and opposed by “information advocates” generally. But the more canny capitalist realizes that a better way is to provide access itself at little or no cost–buried in tuition, or cheaply at $9.95 a month–while charging for content. Charging not the user but the sponsor–the advertiser.

 

Online advertising is nothing new. It’s been around with some full force for five or ten years, old hat already in our “rapidly changing technological world.” Many of us have already learned to mock, dismiss or “ignore” the Schwab or Toyota or Sears button at the bottom of our computer screens, in much the same way we (tell ourselves that we) mock, dismiss or “ignore” advertisements on television. But what if every time you access a certain magazine, database, or paper, a “hit” is counted that translates almost instantaneously into higher ad revenues for the sponsor of the page you’ve accessed?

 

Fixity…or, Forget It

 

We continue to understand our short-range information future in metaphors whose terms we know well–email, that’s like a letter or phone call; Web page, that’s like a page of a book or magazine, a segment of a TV program. These are inaccurate or at best incomplete comparisons, in ways corporate capitalists have not fully realized yet, but surely will. New technologies like Java and ActiveX, only the first of many to follow, even recent versions of Netscape’s Navigator, hint at just some of the information-technology changes that may arrive sooner than any of us may realize. Java and Active X, for example, can be used in part to develop what Internet “evangelists” call, somewhat generically, “applets.” Unlike what we know as applications, applets perform specific tasks relatively independent of the totality of system operations.¹¹ Sophisticated applets in some sense resemble the “agents” that have become so entrenched in futurist versions of artificial intelligence in its commercial applications.

 

Whatever the full implementation might look like, it is clear that our future desktop PCs or notepads or PDAs or whatever they are will contain fragmentary or miniature information retrieval and requesting subsystems that fit only loosely into more general architectures. These miniature elements will be highly adaptable and highly customizable. They will also be highly interactive with systems and functions “outside” of our own personal computer interfaces. As Bill Gates has suggested somewhat famously, someday soon intelligent agents will seek out the best-priced airline tickets for us.

 

My system (the one on my home computer or standard Internet server, the one that has logged every request I have made during my use of the system) might not only guess in advance the kind of information I am seeking. It might very well actively seek out that information in response to only the most general sorts of instructions from me. And at every stage as my “agent” combs through the trillions of packets and the trillions of files available, every action my agent takes is logged, compiled and even anticipated, and accommodated for by subtle shifts in the value of the very packets navigated by my agent, which is itself no more than a collection of packets. Furthermore the information about my agent’s activities is collected and transported as packets. Together these packets swim in a largely unregulated, largely unregulatable soup of constantly-self-correcting information.¹²

 

Within that soup, the distinction between “free” and “for profit” becomes obscured if not lost altogether. It seems plausible to suggest that the distinction between “information” and “capital” becomes obscured if not lost altogether. And the name of that soup, at least the word we have that most closely describes it today, is hypertext.

 

Medium/Message

 

The radical potential of hypertext has often been described, by George Landow and others, in terms of its capacity to destabilize the nature of the written page and to conform the flow of information to the user’s cognitive expectations and whims, replacing the stability of the author-function with the inherently variable practice of the user-function.¹³ This is not the place to read in detail Landow’s Hypertext or any of the wide range of other works that offer compelling visions for the radical potentials of hypertext. Nor is it the place to consider in detail the many forms that hypertext may eventually take. What concerns me here is what is so rapidly coming to dominate our contemporary hypertextual field: the overwhelming extent to which the development of that field has been in the service and the control of the forces of capital; the degree to which too much of our theorizing and fantasizing about hypertext’s possibilities have simply overlooked the plain facts of capitalist control and development of a new media tool; and, perhaps most importantly, what the specifics of capital’s influence on hypertext augur about social relations and information relations in the near future. For now, with the first widespread realization of the hypertextual vision, we are beginning to see that our early dreams for hypertext concealed buried prejudices about individualism, liberal democracy and total information access that fail to account for the ever-changing face and power of capital.

 

As such dreams so characteristically do, this vision of the future “forgets” about capital and places us in a psuedo-utopia where the power of capital and commercialism are veiled.¹⁴ As we see in SF movies from the 1950s to today (with the notable exception of “corporation” SF horror films such as Alien), we characteristically forget to “brand” our future. The persistence of this “forgetting” is itself fascinating, and speaks to a crucial and under-remarked feature of capitalism. Buried in that forgetting is some kind of covert dream that the next new technology will somehow eliminate the need for corporations, for branding, even for capital itself: for our utopias often appear neo-socialist in nature, radically “egalitarian” in a way that even our visions of democracy often are not. It is no accident that this forgetting serves so well capital’s need for the most aggressive technological innovation. Perhaps it is this amnesia that led us to forgot that hypertext would be implemented, manipulated, created and owned by capital and its agents. As crucially, we “forgot” that hypertext would be a flexible medium whose agents, applications, utilities, applets, viewers, browsers and compilers would be largely owned and designed by corporations.

 

As theorists have noted, hypertext distinguishes itself from previous “new media” because of its flexibility, its inherent ability to be shaped by not only its users but its designers (think, for example, of the rapid proliferation of features in successive versions of the various Web browsers). But it is this very flexibility that makes it such a powerful tool of capital reappropriation–indeed, hypertext augurs whole new forms of capital, which is to say, whole new instances of the same old thing.

 

Never before have we had sustained and long-term examples of capitalism in which the unit of exchange itself–not merely the means by which the unit of monetary exchange is delivered–is developed and controlled to such a great extent by capital.¹⁵ While every media revolution has brought with it significant emancipatory potential as well as significant potential for exploitation (and we are no longer surprised that exploitative potentialities win out so often over emancipatory ones), I am suggesting here that hypertext is a special case, or more accurately a new kind of case. As importantly, I want to suggest an economic thesis that I lack anything like the space I would need here to develop here: that what we now call information may learn to replace, or to supplement, what we now call money in the systems of exchange, reproduction and circulation of capital. In an explication of the crucial notion of circulation in social production, Marx writes that,

 

Circulation is the movement in which the general alienation appears as general appropriation and general appropriation as general alienation. As much, then, as the whole of this movement appears as a social process, and as much as the individual moments of this movement arise from the conscious will and particular purposes of individuals, so much does the totality of the process appear as an objective interrelation, which arises spontaneously from nature; arising, it is true, from the mutual influence of conscious individuals on one another, but neither located in their consciousness, nor subsumed under them as a whole. Their own collisions with one another produce an alien social power standing above them, produce their mutual interaction as a process and power independent of them. Circulation, because a totality of the social process, is also the first form in which the social relation appears as something independent of the individuals, but not only as, say, in a coin or in exchange value, but extending to the whole of the social movement itself. (Grundrisse, 196-197; emphasis in original) ¹⁶

 

The World Wide Web offers a startling new instance of this process of circulation, and especially of the ways in which capital itself uses the process of circulation to create forms that exist “independent of the individuals.” Something we had until just recently understood to be an unalienated labor process–the composition of one’s own thoughts into written or spoken form–now suggests itself as a commodity that can be fetishized, alienated, abstracted from its individual “maker” and distributed, for profit, disseminated, valued (and this done in some cases without the choice, conscious or unconscious, of the subject herself). And so where hypertext offers itself in terms of emancipatory potential for subjects, the Web suggests a further enmeshment of human subjects into the naturalized economy of capital.

 

Specters, Subjects

 

For what are subjects? What if not the products, the packets, of language, of meaning, of the stuff we obliquely call information, and its transmission? What might it mean for “the subject” to have the guts of the information system to be profitized, commoditized, capitalized?

 

We can only touch on these matters here. But to the extent that we fail to understand how our subjectivities and psyches are themselves produced by the capital-regulated flow of information, ¹⁷ we remain extremely vulnerable to–even prisoners of–changes in that flow, especially when those changes are made and controlled by capital. As Stuart Moulthrop has written of hypertext (in a mode perhaps somewhat more hopeful than mine here), “changes in technology…suggest possibilities for a reformation of the subject, a truly radical revision of identity and social relations” (“Rhizome and Resistance,” 299-300).

 

In Specters of Marx, Jacques Derrida writes that

 

if the "mystical character" of the commodity, if the "enigmatic character" of the product of labor as commodity is born of "the social form" of labor, one must still analyze what is mysterious or secret about this process, and what the secret of the commodity form is. The secret has to do with a "quid pro quo." The term is Marx's. It takes us back once again to some theatrical intrigue: mechanical ruse or mistaking a person, repetition upon the perverse intervention of a prompter, parole soufflee, substitution of actors or characters. Here the theatrical quid pro quo stems from an abnormal play of mirrors. There is a mirror, and the commodity form is also this mirror, but since all of a sudden it no longer plays its role, since it does not reflect back the expected image, those who are looking for themselves can no longer find themselves in it. Men no longer recognize in it the social character of their own labor. It is as if they were becoming ghosts in their turn. (Specters of Marx, 155; emphasis in original)

 

There is a disturbing homology between the “abnormal play of mirrors,” the process by which we fail to recognize the social character of our own labors, the process of becoming “spectral”–and the advent of what I want to call, in a very preliminary fashion, hypercapital. For to the “hard” capital that is its substance, the information superhighway sees us, the subjects of capital, as nothing more than nodes of production, sites for debits and credits, shells of consumerism and fetishism that exist merely to instantiate or to reify the meta-flow of hypercapital. Not that these processes of reification or instantiation are unnecessary; indeed, at least as currently constituted, they are vital to the continued existence of the flow of capital. Yet their roles within that system become increasingly determined beforehand.

 

In this disturbing sense, the subject under hypercapital threatens to become ever more restricted and proscribed than even the kinds of subjects we now observe under late capitalism. For again, the conversion of the majority of textually-based information into digital form–linked by a variety of communications and hypertextual mechanisms–suggests a radical centralization of semantic and social exchange, an exchange lubricated by capital in an unprecedented sense. Talking with one’s neighbors, organizing politically, any number of more and less collective forms of social action have heretofore been largely proscribed only by governments in their more authoritarian modes. Now such activities appear ripe not only for consistent and imperceptible monitoring and (nigh-permanent) recording, but also for exchange as units within a global system of capital that may readily compensate for, even anticipate, subversive or dissenting movements within the system.

 

Internationalists

 

Perhaps even more significant than its threats to Westernized subjects, the glare of a fully-capitalized information flow poses tremendous challenges to developing countries and whatever hope they currently have for non-capitalist development (or even capitalist development apart from the control of Western-based multinational corporate culture).

 

These threats start with the most basic usages of language. For not only has the medium of communication on the Internet been mainly English and almost entirely Western; not only do current communication systems make usage of non-Western alphabets nearly impossible; not only does the usage of English on the US Defense Department-created Internet represent yet another kind of “loss-leader” to the prepaid Westernization of the subject throughout the world–but the very language of the packets, switches, applets and programs that fuel the machines making the information system operate are themselves almost entirely dominated by Western languages, mainly English. While other Western languages–especially Spanish, French, and German–generally can be accommodated through this media, it is still the case that the Internet and World Wide Web represent the most significant opportunity since mass-market publishing for broad-based lexical, discursive and linguistic standardization. (And this when we have only begun to understand what linguistic standardization has meant for the continued growth and power of capitalism.)

 

While these criticisms extend mostly to the power of capital to maintain all aspects of subjectivity in extremely disturbing ways, they fail to capture what is perhaps most disturbing about the global information extension of capital. For as Marxian economic theorists have argued with great vigor over the last fifty or so years, classical Marxist theory provides an inadequate account of the reliance of “developed” capitalist economies on the exploitation of “underdeveloped,” “third world” economies and labor.¹⁸

 

While we in the West can pretend to understand the effects of hypercapital on the creation of Western subjectivities and suggest critiques within a system that may always already be compensating for these critiques, developing countries outside of the West and developing populations within the Western context face even more brutal challenges. Talk of information “haves” and “have-nots” obscures the extent to which whether to have or not have access to the global information superhighway presents developing populations with a very real Hobson’s choice–a choice between two equally impossible choices. For to remain “off” the superhighway in any effective sense may come to mean staying away from huge swaths of information that are absolutely vital to any sustainable economy. Yet to get on may mean contributing to an economics designed to exploit not only individuals and their subjectivities but whole cultures and subcultures. (And of course this presentation of the subject avoids any mention of the degree to which many “developing” countries lack the basic infrastructure necessary for information technologies like telephones.)

 

To the extent that Western capitalist development inaugurates a process of underdevelopment, in which the very lifeblood of the West is formed from the labor and raw materials of non-Western peoples, the global medium of exchange that is hypercapital suggests whole new ways of refining that process for the service of Western capital. The globalization of corporate capitalism increasingly makes governmental and national borders irrelevant though they remain highly relevant for the nationalist and fundamentalist fervors that capital at best incubates and at worst creates as the marks of its own displacement. Intellectual labor mimics the global mobility of capital as, for example, when students from India and East Asian countries attend classes in the US in computer science and engineering, where they learn to program in versions of the current master Western language. With foreign investment dollars and the backing of the corporations and governments that have facilitated this “knowledge transfer,” many of these young people will return home as neo-capitalists to set up vast networks of information retrieval and manipulation, whose centralized functions, we can surmise, make any hope for anti-imperialist governance that much more remote.

 

Insofar as hypercapital appears abstracted and metaphorical, it is nevertheless a powerful construct built upon the lives and blood of real persons (ourselves included), whose labor becomes the stuff of capital through direct exploitation and through the processes of alienation.

 

Il n’y a pas de hors-tissu

 

For all of this essay’s quasi-apocalyptic fervor–not meant to be taken unambiguously, not meant to suggest that technological development is always or only wrong–it can only hint at the base fear that lurks in opposition to the more optimistic dreams beneath hypertext. For as capital comes to control so many aspects of our instantaneous and personal interactions to degrees it could not have imagined before, it comes to a new level in what has been a chief mission, a chief raison d’etre, of capital all along: not only to shape but to define, not only define but to own in the sense unique to capital–our selves.

 

As a writer and interpreter, I cannot help but participate in the dream with which this essay began: a dream of total access and also total knowledge that will, somehow, prove emancipatory “in the end.” Such a dream seems unavoidable to me, at least as I as subject am constituted. In the great “Outwork” to Dissemination, Derrida writes of a similar dream as it is instanced in earlier moments in our tradition, specifically in the works of Mallarme and Hegel. Derrida writes of Mallarme’s vision of “all finite books [becoming] opuscules modeled after the great divine opus, so many arrested speculations, so many tiny mirrors catching a single grand image,” and suggests that

 

The ideal form of this would be a book of total science, a book of absolute knowledge that digested, recited, and substantially ordered all books, going through the whole cycle of knowledge. But since truth is already constituted in the reflection and relation of God to himself, since truth already knows itself to speak, the cyclical book will also be a pedagogical book. And its preface, propaedeutic. The authority of the encyclopedic model, a unit analogous for man and for God, can act in very devious ways according to certain complex mediations. It stands, moreover, as a model and as a normative concept: which does not, however, exclude the fact that, within the practice of writing, and singularly of so-called 'literary' writing, certain forces remain foreign or contrary to it or subject to violent reexamination. (Dissemination, 46-47; emphasis in original)

 

Like all products of capitalism, our most strident attempts to totalize information contain the marks of their own deconstructions; they inscribe contradictions that the full-on spirit of capitalism will neither admit nor condone. Yet the power and force of hypercapital, the enmeshment of the production of “money” and “credit” and capital with the production of information, hint at a world in which dissent, even deconstruction, become so reliably accommodated in the information-capital-feedback flow that we may never consistently know the effects or ends of our political and politico-critical efforts. In this sense hypertext and the World Wide Web amplify, exacerbate, exponentiate the trajectories on which Derrida has always situated “the book.”¹⁹

 

The world of corporate capitalism is dominated by actors who do not truly see the play of which they are a part, and dicta whose consequences are themselves beyond the ken of all but the most foresighted of capitalists. With regard to technological innovation, the guiding principle of corporate capitalism is clearly this: one determines whether something should be done by asking whether it can be done. This ruling–one might in a more classical moment call it “amorality”–puts neither capitalists per se nor dissenters in power. Instead it leaves capital itself, surely as naturalistic a phenomenon as any other, in charge. I mean to suggest here that we do not know what capital has in store for us; and that, unless the chief actors in capitalism’s play learn an altogether new sense of responsibility to our collective future, we may learn what (hyper)capital is thinking all too soon–and all too ambiguously.

 

Notes

 

I appreciate helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper from Stuart Moulthrop, Lisa Brawley and Suzanne Daly.
 

1. For interesting discussions of Borgesian tropes in hypermedia, cf. Brook, “Reading and Riding” and Moulthrop, “Reading from the Map.”

 

2.Most directly in work by critical legal studies scholars and other cultural critics and philosophers surrounding issues like hate speech, freedom of the press, and even free speech on the Internet. For the purposes of this essay I set aside the very complicated questions surrounding these issues, which are both affected by, and have an impact on, the problems I discuss here. It is notable, though, that the current debates surrounding issues of free speech–both left-versus-right debates, and debates between different parties of the left–themselves seem problematically fractured by issues of capital and corporate control, as in the case of sexually explicit material (in that it is largely produced by the most exploitative and abusive capitalists). This essay is meant to suggest that solutions to these problems will not become any more straightforward as information access and production become more universally networked.

 

3. Most of the political critiques of hypertext work at this level–for example, the cited essays by Moulthrop and Landow–but see Brook and Boal, eds., Resisting the Virtual Life, especially the essays by Besser, Hayes and Neill. Spinelli suggests something like the view offered here when he notes that, like ones made for the Internet and World Wide Web, promises for social democratization made in the early days of radio contained the implicit command that “in order to participate in democracy, one must be a consumer” (“Radio Lessons,” 6). Ess, “Political Computer,” offers very much the liberal-utopian view of the Internet, in a somewhat advanced theoretical form, which this essay seeks to mark out as problematic.

 

4.See, for example, Chomsky, The Chomsky Reader, Deterring Democracy, Necessary Illusions, Letters from Lexington, and “Media Control,” and Herman and Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent.

 

5.See, for example, Eisenstein, Printing Press; Warner, Letters of the Republic; and Erickson, Economy of Literary Form; de Grazia and Stallybrass, in their “Materiality of the Shakespearean Text,” offer a theoretically advanced survey of some of the problems regarding print technology in the English Renaissance, on which also see Wall, Imprint of Gender. McGann’s Textual Condition remains a touchstone in the theoretization of print culture and its ideology.

 

6.Some of the consequences of this particular part of current information technology are explored in Chapter 3, “Foucault and Databases: Participatory Surveillance,” of Poster, Mode of Information.

 

7.Arick’s TCP/IP Companion is a widely-used guide to the networking protocols used on the Internet and the World Wide Web, though there are literally hundreds of volumes on the subject.

 

8. A single Web page can be made up of many separate files (for example, several graphic files and a text file). Each access to one of these files constitutes a “hit.” “Hit counts” are therefore not a good measure of the number of actual persons using a given Web page, except for very crude purposes, since a single person accessing a single page can result in ten, twenty, or even more hits. One of the challenges to corporations attempting to profit from the Web has been to develop accurate ways to log individual use. The solutions to this challenge that have been offered so far (and in many cases, implemented without much public comment), as mentioned below, have been remarkably invasive of pre-electronic standards of “privacy.”

 

9.Again, Chapter 3, “Foucault and Databases: Participatory Surveillance,” of Poster, Mode of Information, provides an excellent gloss on these tendencies.

 

10.A certain cultural-technological trajectory deserves comment here. At many points in history, certain database and record-keeping technologies have seemed “stable” or “permanent,” with the attendant sense that the data they contain are permanent in that form. Yet at nearly every stage a future stage of technology has appeared soon enough on the horizon, in which the data stored by the previous technology has found additional, far more centralized, extensive and in some cases insidious uses than would have seemed possible in the earlier stage. This certainly accounts, for example, for the amount of information stored in credit reports, and for the importance of social security numbers. Thus, while an individual’s use of a particular Web site may seem somewhat unimportant if used by a single marketer or Web site producer, it seems quite plausible that this information will very shortly be available on a much more global and integrated basis. That is, although this information may seem at least partially local today, its growth into a centralized and highly invasive system may not only be inevitable; it may be imminent.

 

11.This is oversimplified; the line between “operating system” and “application” and “applet” may in fact blur considerably as technology develops. Java, for example, which was developed largely for applet creation, has already been used to create fully-featured applications.

 

12. I should emphasize that one of the key features of the Web implementation of hypertext is precisely its strong reliance on sophisticated feedback mechanisms (mechanisms which do not seem implicit in the idea of hypertext itself, but which do seem ever-present in capitalism, in a variety of more-and-less crude forms). Feedback and recursive systematization are hallmarks of recent work in computer science no less than in what we might loosely call “consumer technology”–they are no less present in professional products for advertisers than in sophisticated academic research programs like artificial intelligence and connectionism. I can only nod toward the degree to which much of the latter research has been carried out, unsurprisingly, with capital from the military and from technology-drenched corporations. It is important as well to note the degree to which value itself is a largely feedback-based concept–from the crudest capitalist notions (wherein, famously, an item is worth what a buyer is willing to pay for it) to far more sophisticated economic analyses, Marxist and neoclassical.

 

13.See, most famously, George Landow’s Hypertext. The exchange in Rosenberg, “Physics and Hypertext,” and Moulthrop, “Rhizome and Resistance,” includes interesting speculation on the terms that have been used to state the politics, emancipatory and otherwise, of hypertext.

 

14.As such it is striking how rarely Landow in Hypertext, or the authors in his edited volume Hyper/Text/Theory (but for brief parts of the Moulthrop and Ulmer essays included there), to say nothing of the main part of the recent literature on hypertext, and without denying the emphasis frequently placed on discussions of the politics of hypertext, situates these technological advances in the capitalist system we inhabit. Two exceptions are Moulthrop’s “You Say You Want a Revolution,” which, through a discussion of Marshall McLuhan, at least in principle gestures at some of the problems I discuss here; and Spinelli’s “Radio Lessons,” which includes important reflections on the near-monopolistic control of radio and its implications for future media development.

 

15.In this respect the World Wide Web may be meaningfully thought of in a sequence of the development of the unit of exchange in the world system, a development that has been in modern times largely led by Western interests and powers. I am especially thinking of the movement toward a credit economy and the recent discussions, often hyperbolic, about a cashless society. While it is probably not accurate to say that capital played no role in developing the unit of exchange in early modern society–if for no other reason than the central role played by capital in Western governments–it still seems true that recent developments in electronic funds transfer, electronic credit, “smart cards,” ATMs, and so on, and then the added interest in developing Web-based capital equivalents, represent a new kind of corporate-capitalist intervention in the system of exchange. For a discussion of the effects on Marxist economic theory necessitated by the enormous growth in credit over the last century, see Kotz. For a fascinating account of the history of money and thought about money that has a great deal of significance for the issues discussed here, see Shell, Money, Language, and Thought..

 

16.The locus classicus for Marx’s discussion of circulation is Capital, Volume 2; also see Capital, Volume 1, especially Parts I, II and VII.

 

17.For a telling though largely unconscious instance of this process, see Dretske, Knowledge and the Flow of Information, as well the attendant discussions of that work in recent philosophy of mind.

 

18.A chief advocate for this view in recent Marxist theory is Sweezy, especially in his Modern Capitalism and Theory of Capitalist Development. One of the clearest indications of US hegemony in the World Wide Web and the Internet occurs in the assigning of what are known as domain names. A domain name occurs on the Internet as the part of an email address that follows the “@” sign (for example, in the address yourname@AOL.com, the domain name is AOL.com), or the first part of a World Wide Web address (or URL, for Uniform Resource Locator–for example, the beginning part of PMC‘s URL: jefferson.village.virginia.edu). The final segment of a domain name provides the actual “domain” for the site. In the US, there are six domains: edu, for educational institutions; com, for commercial providers; org, for non-profit organizations, net, for technical providers of network services; mil, for military users; and gov, for governmental organizations. Yet in all other countries, the domain name is a country abbreviation: Britain is uk, Japan is jp, Canada is ca, and so on. Every domain name from these countries ends with the country identifier. The impression left on a casual user is that US domains are multiple, mobile and professional, where non-US domains are essentially foreign. This parallels remarkably certain patterns of racial representation within the US, where non-whites are characteristically stereotyped by singular “foreign” characteristics while whites (most often white men) are represented as having a wide range of defining traits and skills, a formation I discuss at some length in Golumbia, “Black and White World.”

 

19.This is part of Poster’s argument in Chapter Four, “Derrida and Electronic Writing,” of The Mode of Information.

 

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