Red Plenty Platforms

• Article: RED PLENTY PLATFORMS. By Nick Dyer-Witheford. CULTURE MACHINE VOL 14 • 2013

URL = http://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/article/view/511/526

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From the introduction, by Nick Dyer-Witheford:

"This paper takes Spufford’s novel as a starting point from which to embark on an examination of the computing platforms that would be necessary for a contemporary ‘red plenty’. It is not a discussion of the merits and demerits of hacktivism, digital disobedience, electronic fabrics of struggle, tweets in the street and Facebook revolutions, but of digital communism. This is a topic that has already been touched on by the wave of rethinking life after capitalism triggered by the 1989 implosion of the USSR, in proposals for ‘participatory economics’ (Albert & Hahnel, 1991), a ‘new socialism’ (Cockshott & Cottrell, 1993), ‘twenty first century socialism’ (Dieterich, 2006), or forms of ‘commonwealth’(Hardt & Negri, 2009). Unlike some of these sources, however, this essay does not aim to provide detailed, often competitive, ‘blue-prints’ for a new society, but rather what Greig de Peuter, in a personal conversation, once called ‘red-prints’- approximating orientations to revolutionary possibilities.

In discussing computing and communism it is almost impossible to escape accusations of abandoning struggles and subjects to a machinic determinism. Certainly all automatic, teleological, and evolutionary models, including schematic choreographies of forces and relations of production, should be rejected. Just as important, however, is the avoidance of a contrary humanist determinism, which overstates the autonomy and ontological privilege of ‘man versus machine’. Here, modes of production, and the struggles that convulse them, are understood as combinations of human and machine agents, entangled, hybridized and co-determined Deleuzo- DeLandian ‘assemblages’ (Thorburn, 2013).

That is why the estimate sent to me by Benjamin Peters, historian of Soviet cybernetics, that, compared with the machines available to the planners of Red Plenty in, say, 1969, the processing power of the fastest computer in 2019 will represent ‘roughly a 100,000,000,000 fold increase in operations per second’, is exciting, a factoid that is, as Peters remarks, ‘not itself meaningful but still suggestive’. The argument that follows explores this suggestivity. This article thus looks at the most direct through-line from Soviet cybernetics’ continuing attempts to theorize forms of economic planning based on labour time algorithms and super-computing. It then discusses how concerns about authoritarian central planning might be affected by social media and software agents, before going on to consider whether planning is redundant in a world of automata, copying and replication. In partial answer to that last question, ‘Red Plenty Platforms’ scans the role of cybernetics in the planetary bio-crisis, concluding with some general observations about cybernetics on today’s ‘communist horizon’ (Dean, 2012)."

More Information

• see the book, Red Plenty