Harvard University Press Blog

“Revolutions” and the Politics of Networks

... with special reference to the role played by the internet during the recent developments in Iran.

A few posts back, I talked up a new book by former software designer David Golumbia on the repressive potential of the computational turn in culture and society. The Cultural Logic of Computation stands counterposed to the pronouncements of the techno-evangelists who dominate media discourse around the cultural and political potential of computing. In short, Golumbia's thesis is that computers enable the exercise of already-existing power much more fully than they provide the masses with means to distribute or contest it. During a recent e-mail conversation, we asked Golumbia what he thought of the idea, promoted by many in the media, that the use of services like Twitter has fundamentally changed the nature -- and the chances for success -- of political dissent aimed at creating more open and democratic societies. Here's what he had to say.

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Few words have been heard more often lately than revolution. The word occurs in two ways, but the connection between them is at best fuzzy. First, commentators wonder if Iran is going through a political revolution. Second, they speculate about an “internet revolution”—not merely a change in communications technologies, but something more significant for democracy, for political organization.

Jeff Jarvis calls it “the API revolution” (referring to the ability, via software called an API, to for third-parties to “use” other applications—for mobile phone providers, for example, to route messages onto Twitter). Clay Shirky calls it “the big one”:

... this is it. The big one. This is the first revolution that has been catapulted onto a global stage and transformed by social media. I've been thinking a lot about the Chicago demonstrations of 1968 where they chanted "the whole world is watching." Really, that wasn't true then. But this time it's true ... and people throughout the world are not only listening but responding. They're engaging with individual participants, they're passing on their messages to their friends, and they're even providing detailed instructions to enable web proxies allowing Internet access that the authorities can't immediately censor. That kind of participation is really extraordinary.

When Shirky said this it was still plausible that the revolution in Iran would “take.” It didn’t. And what Shirky says about the benefits of “the big one” are odd: “people … are engaging with individual participants, they’re passing on messages to their friends.” I am absolutely positive that these have been critical aspects of every political revolution, regardless of technology. So what does Twitter change? “The whole world is watching.” Well, we outside Iran can watch in much more detail than we could before. But since when is external observation an important part of revolution? It can help. But “we” have watched many failed revolutions from the outside. Does “our” knowing more of the details of the failure really change the situation?

At the very least, the failure of the Iranian revolution shows that the thesis that “network openness” leads automatically or directly to democracy is false—we have plenty of network openness, we keep celebrating it, and yet all we saw in practice was a near-revolution very similar to hundreds we have seen in the past. Other than the evidence we see on computer screens—other than the Twitter feeds and Neda YouTube videos—what actually changed in the process of or progress toward revolution in any substantive fashion?

The point I hope to make here, and one that I make at greater length in my book The Cultural Logic of Computation, is that so many of our commentators appear to live in a world where the equation between positive political change and network openness, or technological evolution, is so obvious as to be transparent. The hidden and most dangerous underside of this is that the only politics such people want most to examine are the liberatory potentials they have already decided are there.

As Chris Rhoads and Loretta Chao discuss in an article this week in the Wall Street Journal, though—raising issues that are well known to those of us who pay close attention to what governments and businesses do with computer networks—the fact is that the Iranian government is using the network to surveil its citizens, to anticipate their plans, to identify dissidents, and to counter them. In an interview on NPR, Rhoads explained what seems never to occur to the techno-evangelists: Iran has kept the internet open because it provides them with much richer information to spy on its citizens.

I am not suggesting and not hoping that we see a new generation of Clay Shirkys and Jeff Jarvises who blog exclusively about the advent of a new, real Big Brother. But there is a reason that it was a former Bush national security advisor who suggested, amidst the revolution-that-failed, that the Twitter developers deserve the Nobel Peace Prize, when in fact Twitter is being used to control and monitor dissidence. We have to find a way to explore in a sober way the political consequences of all parts of the computerization of the world, whether they fit or do not fit with our own hopes, and even to resist those parts of computerization that ultimately do not serve democratic ends.

A New Literary History of America - Bookstore Display Contest

In the fall, we are publishing a massive work, edited by Greil Marcus (Lipstick Traces, Mystery Train) and Werner Sollors (Neither Black nor White yet Both), that represents the culmination of decades of effort. A New Literary History of America is 219 entries, 1,000-plus pages on how America has been made through literature, and how American history and American literature have made, unmade and re-made each other over the centuries since 1507, the first time the name "America" appeared on a map. The theme is poesis, writ large -- appropriate because in our view there is no country more "made-up" than America. Contributors you will recognize include Gerald Early, Sean Wilentz, Lawrence Buell, Jonathan Lethem, Ishmael Reed, Camille Paglia, Luc Sante, Bharati Mukherjee, Paul Muldoon, Walter Mosely, Sarah Vowell, Michael Kazin, Cass Sunstein, Gish Jen, Mary Gaitskill, and Kara Walker. Each has sought to identify, as Marcus and Sollors put it, "points in time and imagination where something changed: when a new idea or a new form came into being, when new questions were raised, when what before seemed impossible came to seem necessary or inevitable." This is always happening in America, and the New Literary History is both a reflection of and a contribution to that ongoing process.

As a way to celebrate the publication of this gloriously unwieldy tome, we are running a little contest for bookstores who want to create a display that somehow features, reflects, or interprets the book, its contributors, its subjects, its themes. Anything goes -- get as weird as you want to -- and we will choose a winner on the highly subjective basis of perceived creativity and overall panache. The prize is $500 plus a framed, limited-edition color silkscreen of Chuck Sperry’s cover for the Twentieth Anniversary Edition of Greil Marcus’s Lipstick Traces, signed by the artist. Two honorable mentions will also receive a copy of the poster.

To enter, just send two digital photos and a one-paragraph précis outlining the conceptual underpinnings of your masterpiece to contest_hup [at] calists.harvard.edu. We'll post all submissions here on the blog as they come in. The deadline to submit is November 15; after that we'll hunker down in an undisclosed location to evaluate all entries and will emerge to announce the winner on December 1.

||| A New Literary History of America, out this September.

White House joins blog fray

Via Braniac, we learn that White House Office of Management and Budget Director Peter R. Orszag has got a blog, and he's using it to engage commentators and critics, including our own Richard Posner (link | link | link), on the question of how, in these trying economic times, we are going to pay for health care reform.

||| "Debating Health Care" at the OMB Blog

Global academic reaction to Obama's Cairo speech

After the President's long-awaited and much-discussed speech in Cairo last week, we solicited the reactions of several current and forthcoming HUP authors, many of whom hail from the Muslim world. We may not have hit first news cycle with this, but instead of "instant analysis" (oxymoron?), we're in the business of taking the long and considered view. A fantastic range of perspectives here and I suspect you will find some takes that are going to be missing from the mainstream media coverage of "what it all means."

||| HUP authors react to Obama's Cairo speech

The true story of Katie, a meter-long western diamondback rattlesnake

We are pleased to note that our friend Kate Jackson, who detailed her fieldwork adventures in Mean and Lowly Things: Snakes, Science, and Survival in the Congo, which has been called "an inspiration to future field biologists" (Choice) and which contains some of the most explicit descriptions of maggots burrowing into a researcher's skin that you'll find in any Harvard Press book, has taken a somewhat different tack with her next project. Katie of the Sonoran Desert: Based on a True Story is a bilingual children's book from the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum Press that gives us "the true story of Katie, a meter-long western diamondback rattlesnake, and her adventures as she struggles to make a life for herself in the harsh Sonoran Desert." Nothing better for the burgeoning bilingual herpetologist in your family.

Kate is pictured at right, in a photo from Mean and Lowly, wrangling Grayia ornata, which goes by many names, including the Ornate African Water Snake.

The Cultural Logic of Computation

Do computers by definition set us free? Advocates make sweeping claims for their inherently transformative power: new and different from previous technologies, their widespread use constitutes a fundamental shift in our orientation towards established power, and by their very existence they effect positive political change in an “open,” “democratic” direction. Just keep in mind that the people who hold real power are probably OK with you thinking that.

In The Cultural Logic of Computation, David Golumbia, software-design veteran turned Professor of English, Media Studies, and Linguistics at the University of Virginia, confronts this orthodoxy, arguing instead that computers are cultural “all the way down”—that there is no part of the apparent technological transformation that is not shaped by historical and cultural processes, or that escapes existing cultural politics. From the perspective of transnational corporations and governments, computers enable the exercise of already-existing power much more fully than they provide the masses with means to distribute or contest it. Despite this, our thinking about computers has ossified into an ideology, nearly invisible in its ubiquity, that Golumbia dubs “computationalism”—an ideology that shapes our thinking not just about computers, but about economic and social trends as sweeping as globalization.

Driven by a programmer’s knowledge of computers as well as by a deep engagement with contemporary literary and cultural studies and poststructuralist theory, The Cultural Logic of Computation establishes a forceful and considered corrective to the glib, uncritical enthusiasm for computers that dominates the popular cultural discourse around them.

A couple of quick takes on the book:

Golumbia's argument is that contemporary Western and Westernizing culture is deeply structured by forms of hierarchy and control that have their origins in the development and use of computers over the last 50 years. I look forward to pressing this book on friends and colleagues, starting with anyone who has ever recommended The World is Flat to me. (Lisa Gitelman, author of Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture)

The Cultural Logic of Computation is a fascinating and wise book. It takes us with great care through the history of the computational imagination and logic, from Hobbes and Leibniz to blogging and corporate practice. Its range includes the philosophy of computation, the ideology of the digital revolution, the important areas of children’s education and education in general and glimpses of brilliant literary insight. Required reading for the responsible citizen. (Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak)

||| The Cultural Logic of Computation is available now.

Contra Rawls, toward a truer equality

In Monday's post I remarked something to the effect that anyone concerned with justice, or with political philosophy more broadly, has little choice but to reckon with Rawls, whose work in some ways functions as a sun around which present-day Western political philosophy revolves. Today I came across this anecdote in G. A. Cohen's Rescuing Justice and Equality, which we've just learned has won the Best Book in Social Philosophy Award, given by the North American Society for Social Philosophy, which underscores the point:

My friend Marshall Berman told me that the Columbia philosopher Morris Raphael Cohen would give a seminar every year on Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Spirit, and that Cohen’s contribution to the seminar proceedings  was to criticize Hegel mercilessly, so that the text lay in shreds by the end of the semester. Then, when a photograph of the Columbia Department was to be taken, Cohen appeared with the Phenomenology under his arm, to be displayed in the picture. A surprised colleague said, “But you’re always attacking it! Why did you bring that book?” Cohen’s answer was “What other book is there?”

I feel something like that about John Rawls’s Theory of Justice. I believe that at most two books in the history of Western political philosophy have a claim to be regarded as greater than A Theory of Justice: Plato’s Republic and Hobbes’s Leviathan. I shall not try to say what I think is great about those books. But among what contributes to the greatness of A Theory of Justice, and of the entire Rawlsian achievement, is that, to put the matter as Hegel would have done had he agreed with me, John Rawls grasped his age, or, more precisely, one large reality of his age, in thought. In his work the politics of liberal (in the American sense) democracy and social (in the European sense) democracy rises to consciousness of itself.

Cohen maintains this warm tone throughout the remainder of his outstanding book, in which he presents a serious challenge to Rawlsian liberalism, in particular the tendency of its adherents to tolerate economic inequality. Reading Cohen has the added benefit that you get to enjoy his writing, which is straightforward, friendly, and actually quite funny -- in short, a pleasure.

||| Rescuing Justice and Equality

"Society is well governed when its people obey the magistrates, and the magistrates obey the law"

So said the ancient lawgiver Solon. Anyway, need to impress friends with your thoughtful and perspicacious take on the Sotomayor nomination? Intellectual ammo is available in the form of the the following ten legal reasoning must-reads.

In no particular order:

The Supreme Court and the American Elite, 1789-2008
Lucas A. Powe, Jr.
A powerful reubuttal from a leading legal mind of the notion that Supreme Court deliberation and decision can somehow be separated from "politics."