b2o: boundary 2 online

  • Audrey Watters – Public Education Is Not Responsible for Tech’s Diversity Problem

    Audrey Watters – Public Education Is Not Responsible for Tech’s Diversity Problem

    By Audrey Watters

    ~

    On July 14, Facebook released its latest “diversity report,” claiming that it has “shown progress” in hiring a more diverse staff. Roughly 90% of its US employees are white or Asian; 83% of those in technical positions at the company are men. (That’s about a 1% improvement from last year’s stats.) Black people still make up just 2% of the workforce at Facebook, and 1% of the technical staff. Those are the same percentages as 2015, when Facebook boasted that it had hired 7 Black people. “Progress.”

    In this year’s report, Facebook blamed the public education system its inability to hire more people of color. I mean, whose fault could it be?! Surely not Facebook’s! To address its diversity problems, Facebook said it would give $15 million to Code.org in order to expand CS education, news that was dutifully reported by the ed-tech press without any skepticism about Facebook’s claims about its hiring practices or about the availability of diverse tech talent.

    The “pipeline” problem, writes Dare Obasanjo, is a “big lie.” “The reality is that tech companies shape the ethnic make up of their employees based on what schools & cities they choose to hire from and where they locate engineering offices.” There is diverse technical talent, ready to be hired; the tech sector, blinded by white, male privilege, does not recognize it, does not see it. See the hashtag #FBNoExcuses which features more smart POC in tech than work at Facebook and Twitter combined, I bet.

    Facebook’s decision to “blame schools” is pretty familiar schtick by now, I suppose, but it’s still fairly noteworthy coming from a company whose founder and CEO is increasingly active in ed-tech investing. More broadly, Silicon Valley continues to try to shape the future of education – mostly by defining that future as an “engineering” or “platform” problem and then selling schools and parents and students a product in return. As the tech industry utterly fails to address diversity within its own ranks, what can we expect from its vision for ed-tech?!

    My fear: ed-tech will ignore inequalities. Ed-tech will expand inequalities. Ed-tech will, as Edsurge demonstrated this week, simply co-opt the words of people of color in order to continue to sell its products to schools. (José Vilson has more to say about this particular appropriation in this week’s #educolor newsletter.)

    And/or: ed-tech will, as I argued this week in the keynote I delivered at the Digital Pedagogy Institute in PEI, confuse consumption with “innovation.” “Gotta catch ’em all” may be the perfect slogan for consumer capitalism; but it’s hardly a mantra I’m comfortable chanting to push for education transformation. You cannot buy your way to progress.

    All of the “Pokémon GO will revolutionize education” claims have made me incredibly angry, even though it’s a claim that’s made about every single new product that ed-tech’s early adopters find exciting (and clickbait-worthy). I realize there are many folks who seem to find a great deal of enjoyment in the mobile game. Hoorah. But there are some significant issues with the game’s security, privacy, its Terms of Service, its business model, and its crowd-sourced data model – a data model that reflects the demographics of those who played an early version of the game and one that means that there are far fewer “pokestops” in Black neighborhoods. All this matters for Pokémon GO; all this matters for ed-tech.

    Pokémon GO.
    Pokémon GO

    Pokémon GO is just the latest example of digital redlining, re-inscribing racist material policies and practices into new, digital spaces. So when ed-tech leaders suggest that we shouldn’t criticize Pokémon GO, I despair. I really do. Who is served by being silent!? Who is served by enforced enthusiasm? How does ed-tech, which has its own problems with diversity, serve to re-inscribe racist policies and practices because its loudest proponents have little interest in examining their own privileges, unless, as José points out, it gets them clicks?

    Sigh.
    _____

    Audrey Watters is a writer who focuses on education technology – the relationship between politics, pedagogy, business, culture, and ed-tech. She has worked in the education field for over 15 years: teaching, researching, organizing, and project-managing. Although she was two chapters into her dissertation (on a topic completely unrelated to ed-tech), she decided to abandon academia, and she now happily fulfills the one job recommended to her by a junior high aptitude test: freelance writer. Her stories have appeared on NPR/KQED’s education technology blog MindShift, in the data section of O’Reilly Radar, on Inside Higher Ed, in The School Library Journal, in The Atlantic, on ReadWriteWeb, and Edutopia. She is the author of the recent book The Monsters of Education Technology (Smashwords, 2014) and working on a book called Teaching Machines. She maintains the widely-read Hack Education blog, and writes frequently for The b2 Review Digital Studies magazine on digital technology and education.

    Back to the essay

  • Gavin Mueller – Civil Disobedience in the Age of Cyberwar

    Gavin Mueller – Civil Disobedience in the Age of Cyberwar

    a review of Molly Sauter, The Coming Swarm: DDoS Actions, Hacktivism, and Civil Disobedience on the Internet (Bloomsbury Academic, 2014)

    by Gavin Mueller

    ~

    Molly Sauter’s The Coming Swarm begins in an odd way. Ethan Zuckerman, director of MIT’s Center for Civic Media, confesses in the book’s foreword that he disagrees with the book’s central argument: that distributed denial of service (DDoS) actions, where specific websites and/or internet servers are overwhelmed by traffic and knocked offline via the coordinated activity of many computers acting together, should be viewed as a legitimate means of protest.[1] “My research demonstrated that these attacks, once mounted by online extortionists as a form of digital protection racket, were increasingly being mounted by governments as a way of silencing critics,” Zuckerman writes (xii). Sauter’s argument, which takes the form of this slim and knotty book, ultimately does not convince Zuckerman, though he admits he is “a better scholar and a better person” for having engaged with the arguments contained within. “We value civic arguments, whether they unfold in the halls of government, a protest encampment, or the comments thread of an internet post because we believe in the power of deliberation” (xv). This promise of the liberal public sphere is what Sauter grapples with throughout the work, to varying levels of success.

    The Coming Swarm is not a book about DDoS activities in general. As Sauter notes, “DDoS is a popular tactic of extortion, harassment, and silencing” (6): its most common uses come from criminal organizations and government cyberwar operations. Sauter is not interested in these kinds of actions, which encompass the vast majority of DDoS uses. (DDoS itself is a subset of all denial of service or DoS attacks.) Instead they focus on self-consciously political DDoS attacks, first carried out by artist-hacker groups in the 1990s (the electrohippies and the Electronic Disturbance Theater) and more recent actions by the group Anonymous.[2] All told, these are a handful of actions, barely numbering in the double digits, and spread out over two decades. The focus on this small minority of cases can make the book’s argument seem question-begging, since Sauter does not make clear how and why it is legitimate to analyze exclusively those few instances of a widespread phenomenon that happen to conform to an author’s desired outlook. At one level, this is a general problem throughout the book, since Sauter’s analysis is confined to what they call “activist DDoS,” yet the actual meaning of this term is rarely interrogated: viewed from the perspective of the actors, many of the DDoS actions Sauter dismisses by stipulation could also be–and likely are–viewed as “activism.”

    From its earliest inception, political DDoS actions were likened to “virtual sit-ins”: activists use their computers’ ability to ping a server to clog up its functioning, potentially slowing or bringing its activity to a stand-still. This situated the technique within a history of nonviolent civil disobedience, particularly that of the Civil Rights Movement. This metaphor has tended to overdetermine the debate over the use of DDoS in activist contexts, and Sauter is keen to move on from the connection: “such comparisons on the part of the media and the public serve to only stifle innovation within social movements and political action, while at the same time cultivating a deep and unproductive nostalgia for a kind of ‘ideal activism’ that never existed” (22-3). Sauter argues that not only does this leave out contributions to the Civil Rights Movement that the mainstream finds less than respectable; it helps rule out the use of disruptive and destructive forms of activism in future movements.

    This argument has merit, and many activists who want to move beyond nonviolent civil disobedience into direct action forms of political action appear to agree with it. Yet Sauter still wants to claim the label of civil disobedience for DDoS actions that they at other moments discard: “activist DDoS actions are not meaningfully different from other actions within the history of civil disobedience… novelty cannot properly exempt activist DDoS from being classified as a tactic of civil disobedience” (27). However, the main criticisms of DDoS as civil disobedience have nothing to do with its novelty. As Evgeny Morozov points out in his defense of DDoS as a political tactic, “I’d argue, however, that the DDoS attacks launched by Anonymous were not acts of civil disobedience because they failed one crucial test implicit in Rawls’s account: Most attackers were not willing to accept the legal consequences of their actions.” Novelist and digital celebrity Cory Doctorow, who opposes DDoS-based activism, echoes this concern: “A sit-in derives its efficacy not from merely blocking the door to some objectionable place, but from the public willingness to stand before your neighbours and risk arrest and bodily harm in service of a moral cause, which is itself a force for moral suasion.” The complaint is not that DDoS fails to live up to the standards of the Civil Rights Movement, or that it is too novel. It is that it often fails the basic test of civil disobedience: potentially subjecting oneself to punishment as a form of protest that lays bare the workings of the state.

    Zuckerman’s principle critique of Sauter’s arguments is that DDoS, by shutting down sites, censors speech opposed by activists rather than promoting their dissenting messages. Sauter has a two-pronged response to this. First, they say that DDoS attacks make the important point that the internet is not really a public space. Instead, it is controlled by private interests, with large corporations managing the vast majority of online space. This means that no arguments may rest, implicitly or explicitly, on the assumption that the internet is a Habermasian public sphere. Second, Sauter argues, by their own admission counterintuitively, that DDoS, properly contextualized as part of “communicative capitalism,” is itself a form of speech.

    Communicative capitalism is a term developed by Jodi Dean as part of her critique of the Habermasian vision of the internet as a public sphere. With the commodification of online speech, “the exchange value of messages overtakes their use value” (58). The communication of messages is overwhelmed by the priority to circulate content of any kind: “communicative exchanges, rather than being fundamental to democratic politics, are the basic elements of capitalist production” (56). For Dean, this logic undermines political effects from internet communication: “The proliferation, distribution, acceleration and intensification of communicative access and opportunity, far from enhancing democratic governance or resistance, results in precisely the opposite – the post-political formation of communicative capitalism” (53). If, Sauter argues, circulation itself becomes the object of communication, the power of DDoS is to disrupt that circulation of context. “In that context the interruption of that signal becomes an equally powerful contribution…. Under communicative capitalism, it is possible that it is the intentional creation of disruptions and silence that is the most powerful contribution” (29).

    However, this move is contrary to the point of Dean’s concept; Dean specifically rejects the idea that any kind of communicative activity puts forth real political antagonism. Dean’s argument is, admittedly, an overreach. While capital cares little for the specificity of messages, human beings do: as Marx notes, exchange value cannot exist without a use value. Sauter’s own “counterintuitive” use of Dean points to a larger difficulty with Sauter’s argument: it remains wedded to a liberal understanding of political action grounded in the idea of a public sphere. Even when Sauter moves on to discussing DDoS as disruptive direct action, rather than civil disobedience, they return to the discursive tropes of the public sphere: DDoS is “an attempt to assert a fundamental view of the internet as a ‘public forum’ in the face of its attempted designation as ‘private property’” (45). Direct action is evaluated by its contribution to “public debate,” and Sauter even argues that DDoS actions during the 1999 Seattle WTO protests did not infringe on the “rights” of delegates to attend the event because they were totally ineffective. This overlooks the undemocratic and illiberal character of the WTO itself, whose meetings were held behind closed doors (one of the major rhetorical points of the protest), and it implies that the varieties of direct action that successfully blockaded meetings could be morally compromised. These kinds of actions, bereft of an easy classification as forms of speech or communication, are the forms of antagonistic political action Dean argues cannot be found in online space.

    In this light, it is worth returning to some of the earlier theorizations of DDoS actions. The earliest DDoS activists the electrohippies and Electronic Disturbance Theater documented the philosophies behind their work, and Rita Raley’s remarkable book Tactical Media presented a bracing theoretical synthesis of DDoS as an emergent critical art-activist practice. EDT’s most famous action deployed its FloodNet DDoS tool in pro-Zapatista protests. Its novel design incorporated something akin to speech acts: for example, it pinged servers belonging to the Mexican government with requests for “human rights,” leading to a return message “human rights not found on this server,” a kind of technopolitical pun. Yet Raley rejects a theorization of online political interventions strictly in terms of their communicative value. Rather they are a curious hybrid of artistic experiment and militant interrogation, a Deleuzian event where one endeavors “to act without knowing the situation into which one will be propelled, to change things as they exist” (26).

    The goal of EDT’s actions was not simply to have a message be heard, or even to garner media attention: as EDT’s umbrella organization the Critical Art Ensemble puts it in Electronic Civil Disobedience, “The indirect approach of media manipulation using a spectacle of disobedience designed to muster public sympathy and support is a losing proposition” (15). Instead, EDT took on the prerogatives of conceptual art — to use creative practice to pose questions and provoke response — in order to probe the contours of the emerging digital terrain and determine who would control it and how. That their experiments quickly raised the specter of terrorism, even in a pre-9/11 context, seemed to answer this. As Raley describes, drawing from RAND cyberwar researchers, DDoS and related tactics “shift the Internet ‘from the public sphere model and casts it more as conflicted territory bordering on a war zone.’” (44).

    While Sauter repeatedly criticizes treating DDoS actions as criminal, rather than political, acts, the EDT saw its work as both, and even analogous to terrorism. “Not that the activists are initiating terrorist practice, since no one dies in hyperreality, but the effect of this practice can have the  same consequence as terrorism, in that state and corporate power vectors will haphazardly return fire with weapons that have destructive material (and even mortal) consequences” (25). Indeed, civil disobedience is premised on exploiting the ambiguities of activities that can be considered both crime and politics. Rather than attempt to fix distinctions after the fact, EDT recognized the power of such actions precisely in collapsing these distinctions. EDT did criticize the overcriminalization of online activity, as does Sauter, whose analysis of the use of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act to prosecute DDoS activities is some of the book’s strongest and most useful material.

    Sauter prefers the activities of Anonymous to the earlier actions by the electrohippies and EDT (although EDT co-founder Ricardo Dominguez has been up to his old tricks: he was investigated by the FBI and threatened with revocation of tenure for a “virtual sit-in” against the University of California system during the student occupations of 2010). This is because Anonymous’ actions, with their unpretentious lulzy ardor and open-source tools, “lower the barriers to entry” to activism (104): in other words, they leverage the internet’s capacity to increase participation. For Sauter, the value in Anonymous’ use of its DDoS tool, the Low Orbit Ion Cannon, against targets such as the MPAA and PayPal “lay in the media attention and new participants it attracted, who sympathized with Anonymous’ views and could participate in future actions” (115). The benefit of collaborative open-source development is similar, as is the tool’s feature that allows a user to contribute their computer to a “voluntary botnet” called the “FUCKING HIVE MIND” which “allows for the temporary sharing of an activist identity, which subsequently becomes more easily adopted by those participants who opt to remain involved” (130). This tip of the hat to theorists of participatory media once again reveals the notion of a democratic public sphere as a regulative ideal for the text.

    The price of all this participation is that a “lower level of commitment was required” (129) from activists, which is oddly put forth as a benefit. In fact, Sauter criticizes FloodNet’s instructions — “send your own message to the error log of the institution/symbol of Mexican Neo-Liberalism of your choice” — as relying upon “specialized language that creates a gulf between those who already understand it and those who do not” (112). Not only is it unclear to me what the specialized language in this case is (“neoliberalism” is a widely used, albeit not universally understood term), but it seems paramount that individuals opting to engage in risky political action should understand the causes for which they are putting themselves on the line. Expanding political participation is a laudable goal, but not at the expense of losing the content of politics. Furthermore, good activism requires training: several novice Anons were caught and prosecuted for participating in DDoS actions due to insufficient operational security measures.

    What would it mean to take seriously the idea that the internet is not, in fact, a public sphere, and that, furthermore, the liberal notion of discursive and communicative activities impacting the decisions of rational individuals does not, in fact, adequately describe contemporary politics? Sauter ends up in a compelling place, one akin to the earlier theorists of DDoS: war. After all, states are one of the major participants in DDoS, and Sauter documents how Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) used Denial of Service attacks, even though deemed illegal, against Anonymous itself. The involvement of state actors “could portend the establishment of a semipermanent state of cyberwar” with activists rebranded as criminals and even terrorists. This is consonant with Raley’s analysis of EDT’s own forays into online space. It also recalls the radical political work of ultraleft formations such as Tiqqun (I had anticipated that The Coming Swarm was a reference to The Coming Insurrection though this does not seem to be the case), for whom war, specifically civil war, becomes the governing metaphor for antagonistic political practice under Empire.

    This would mean that the future of DDoS actions and other disruptive online activism would not be in its mobilization of speech, but in its building of capacities and organization of larger politicized formations. This could potentially be an opportunity to consider the varieties of DDoS so often bracketed away, which often rely on botnets and operate in undeniably criminal ways. Current hacker formations use these practices in political ways (Ghost Squad has recently targeted the U.S. military, cable news stations, the KKK and Black Lives Matters among others with DDoS, accompanying each action with political manifestos). While Sauter claims, no doubt correctly, that these activities are “damaging to [DDoS’s] perceived legitimacy as an activist tactic (160), they also note that measures to circumvent DDoS “continue to outstrip the capabilities of nearly all activist campaigns” (159). If DDoS has a future as a political tactic, it may be in the zones beyond what liberal political theory can touch.

    Notes

    [1] Instances of DDoS are typically referred to in both the popular press and by hacktivsts as “attacks.” Sauter prefers the term “actions,” a usage I follow here.

    [2] I follow Sauter’s preferred usage of the pronouns “they” and “them.”

    Works Cited

    • Critical Art Ensemble. 1996. Electronic Civil Disobedience. Brooklyn: Autonomedia.
    • Dean, Jodi. 2005. “Communicative Capitalism: Circulation and the Foreclosure of Politics.” Cultural Politics 1.1. 51-74.
    • Raley, Rita. 2009. Tactical Media. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
    • Sauter, Molly. 2014. The Coming Swarm: DDoS Actions, Hacktivism, and Civil Disobedience on the Internet. New York: Bloomsbury Academic.

    _____

    Gavin Mueller (@gavinsaywhat) holds a Ph.D. in Cultural Studies from George Mason University. He is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Emerging Media and Communication at the University of Texas-Dallas. He previously reviewed Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous for The b2 Review.

    Back to the essay

  • Zachary Loeb – Mars is Still Very Far Away

    Zachary Loeb – Mars is Still Very Far Away

    a review of McKenzie Wark, Molecular Red (Verso, 2015)

    by Zachary Loeb

    ~

    There are some games where a single player wins, games where a group of players wins, and then there are games where all of the players can share equally in defeat. Yet regardless of the way winners and losers are apportioned, there is something disconcerting about a game where the rules change significantly when one is within sight of victory. Suddenly the strategy that had previously assured success now promises defeat and the confused players are forced to reconsider all of the seemingly right decisions that have now brought them to an impending loss. It may be a trifle silly to talk of winners and losers in the Anthropocene, with its bleak herald climate change, but the epoch in which humans have become a geological force is one in which the strategies that propelled certain societies towards victory no longer seem like such wise tactics. With victory seeming less and less certain it is easy to assume defeat is inevitable.

    Molecular_Red_300dpi_CMYK-max_221-dc0af21fb3204cf05919dfce4acafe57

    “Let’s not despair” is the retort McKenzie Wark offers on the first page of Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene. The book approaches the Anthropocene as both a challenge and an opportunity, not for seeing who can pen the grimmest apocalyptic dirge but for developing new forms of critical theory. Prevailing responses to the Anthropocene – ranging from faith in new technology, to confidence in the market, to hopes for accountability, to despairing of technology – all strike Wark as insufficient, what he deems necessary are theories (which will hopefully lead to solutions) that recognize the ways in which the aforementioned solutions are entangled with each other. For Wark the coming crumbling of the American system was foreshadowed by the collapse of the Soviet system – and thus Molecular Red looks back at Soviet history to consider what other routes could have been taken there, before he switches his focus back to the United States to search for today’s alternate routes. Molecular Red reads aspects of Soviet history through the lens of “what if?” in order to consider contemporary questions from the perspective “what now?” As he writes: “[t]here is no other world, but it can’t be this one” (xxi).

    Molecular Red is an engaging and interesting read that introduces its readers to a raft of under-read thinkers – and its counsel against despair is worth heeding.  And yet, by the book’s end, it is easy to come away with a sense that while it is true that “there is no other world” that it will, alas, almost certainly be exactly this one.

    Before Wark introduces individual writers and theorists he first unveils the main character of his book: “the Carbon Liberation Front” (xiv). In Wark’s estimation the Carbon Liberation Front (CLF from this point forward) represents the truly victorious liberation movement of the past centuries. And what this liberation movement has accomplished is the freeing of – as the name suggests – carbon, an element which has been burnt up by humans in pursuit of energy with the result being an atmosphere filled with heat-trapping carbon dioxide. “The Anthropocene runs on carbon” (xv), and seeing as the scientists who coined the term “Anthropocene” used it to mark the period wherein glacial ice cores began to show a concentration of green house gases, such as CO2 and Ch4 – the CLF appears as a force one cannot ignore.

    Turning to Soviet history, Wark works to rescue Lenin’s rival Alexander Bogdanov from being relegated to a place as a mere footnote. Yet, Wark’s purpose is not to simply emphasize that Lenin and Bogdanov had different ideas regarding what the Bolsheviks should have done, what is of significance in Bogdanov is not questions of tactics but matters of theory. In particular Wark highlights Bogdanov’s ideas of “proletkult” and “tektology” while also drawing upon Bogdanov’s view of nature – he conceived of this “elusive category” as “simply that which labor encounters” (4, italics in original text). Bogdanov’s tektology was to be “a new way of organizing knowledge” while proletkult was to be “a new practice of culture” – as Wark explains “Bogdanov is not really trying to write philosophy so much a to hack it, to repurpose it for something other than the making of more philosophy” (13). Tektology was an attempt to bring together the lived experience of the proletariat along with philosophy and science – to create an active materialism “based on the social production of human existence” (18) and this production sees Nature as the realm within which laboring takes place. Or, as Wark eloquently puts it, tektology “is a way of organizing knowledge for difficult times…and perhaps also for the strange times likely to come in the twenty-first century” (40). Proletkult (which was an actual movement for some time) sought “to change labor, by merging art and work; to change everyday life…and to change affect” (35) – its goal was not to create proletarian culture but to provide a proletarian “point of view.” Deeply knowledgeable about science, himself a sort of science-fiction author (he wrote a quasi-utopian novel set on Mars called Red Star), and hopeful that technological advances would make workers more like engineers and artists, Bogdanov strikes Wark as “not the present writing about the future, but the past writing to the future” (59). Wark suggests that “perhaps Bogdanov is the point to which to return” (59) hence Wark’s touting of tektology, proletkult and Bogdanov’s view of nature.

    While Wark makes it clear that Bogdanov’s ideas did have some impact in Soviet Russia, their effect was far less than what it could have been – and thus Bogdanov’s ideas remain an interesting case of “what if?” Yet, in the figure of Andrey Platonov, Wark finds an example of an individual whose writings reached towards proletkult. Wark sees Platonov as “the great writer of our planet of slums” (68). The fiction written by Platonov, his “(anti)novellas” as Wark calls them, are largely the tales of committed and well-meaning communists whose efforts come to naught. For Platonov’s characters failure is a constant companion, they struggle against nature in the name of utopianism and find that they simply must keep struggling. In Platonov’s work one finds a continual questioning of communism’s authoritarian turn from below, his “Marxism is an ascetic one, based on the experience of sub-proletarian everyday life” (104). And while Platonov’s tales are short on happy endings, Wark detects hope amidst the powerlessness, as long as life goes on, for “if one can keep living then everything is still possible” (80). Such is the type of anti-cynicism that makes Platonov’s Marxism worth considering – it finds the glimmer of utopia on the horizon even if it never seems to draw closer.

    From the cold of the Soviet winter, Wark moves to the birthplace of the Californian Ideology – an ideology which Wark suggests has won the day: “it has no outside, and it is accelerating” (118). Yet, as with the case of Soviet communism, Wark is interested in looking for the fissures within the ideology, and instead of opining on Barbook and Cameron’s term moves through Ernst Mach and Paul Feyerabend en route to a consideration of Donna Haraway. Wark emphasizes how Haraway’s Marxism “insists on including nonhuman actors” (136) – her techno-science functions as a way of further breaking down the barrier that had been constructed between humans and nature. Shattering this divider is necessary to consider the ways that life itself has become caught up with capital in the age of patented life forms like OncoMouse. Amidst these entanglements Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto” appears to have lost none of its power – Wark sees that “cyborgs are monsters, or rather demonstrations, in the double sense of to show and to warn, of possible worlds” (146). Such a show of possibilities is to present alternatives even when, “There’s no mother nature, no father science, no way back (or forward) to integrity” (150). Returning to Bogdanov, Wark writes that “Tektology is all about constructing temporary shelter in the world” (150) – and the cyborg identity is simultaneously what constructs such shelter and seeks haven within it. Beyond Haraway, Wark considers the work of Karen Barad and Paul Edwards, in order to further illustrate that “we are at one and the same time a product of techno-science and yet inclined to think ourselves separate from it” (165). Haraway, and the web of thinkers with which Wark connects her, appear as a way to reconnect with “something like the classical Marxist and Bogdanovite open-mindedness toward the sciences” (179).

    After science, Wark transitions to discussing the science fiction of Kim Stanley Robinson – in particular his Mars trilogy. Robinson’s tale of the scientist/technicians colonizing Mars and their attempts to create a better world on the one they are settling is a demonstration of how “the struggle for utopia is both technical and political, and so much else besides” (191). The value of the Mars trilogy, with its tale of revolutions, both successful and unsuccessful, and its portrayal of a transformed Earth, is in the slow unfolding of revolutionary change. In Red Mars (the first book of the trilogy, published in 1992) there is not a glorious revolution that instantly changes everything, but rather “the accumulation of minor, even molecular, elements of a new way of life and their negotiations with each other” (194). At work in the ruminations of the main characters of Red Mars, Wark detects something reminiscent of tektology even as the books themselves seem like a sort of proletkult for the Anthropocene.

    Molecular Red’s tour of oft overlooked, or overly neglected thinkers, is an argument for a reengagement with Marxism, but a reengagement that willfully and carefully looks for the paths not taken. The argument is not that Lenin needs to be re-read, but that Bogdanov needs to be read. Wark does not downplay the dangers of the Anthropocene, but he refuses to wallow in dismay or pine for a pastoral past that was a fantasy in the first place. For Wark, we are closely entwined with our technology and the idea that it should all be turned off is a nonstarter. Molecular Red is not a trudge through the swamps of negativity, rather it’s a call: “Let’s use the time and information and everyday life still available to us to begin the task, quietly but in good cheer, of thinking otherwise, of working and experimenting” (221).

    Wark does not conclude Molecular Red by reminding his readers that they have nothing to lose but their chains. Rather he reminds them that they still have a world to win.  

    Molecular Red begins with an admonishment not to despair, and ends with a similar plea not to lose hope. Granted, in order to find this hope one needs to be willing to consider that the causes for hopelessness may themselves be rooted in looking for hope in the wrong places. Wark argues, that by embracing techno-science, reveling in our cyborg selves, and creating new cultural forms to help us re-imagine our present and future – the left can make itself relevant once more. As a call for the left to embrace technology and look forward Molecular Red occupies a similar cultural shelf-space as that filled by recent books like Inventing the Future and Austerity Ecology and the Collapse-Porn Addicts. Which is to say that those who think that what is needed is “a frank acknowledgment of the entangling of our cyborg bodies within the technical” (xxi), those who think that the left needs to embrace technology with greater gusto, will find Molecular Red’s argument quite appealing. As for those who disagree – they will likely not find their minds changed by Molecular Red.

    As a writer Wark has a talent for discussing dense theoretical terms in a readable and enjoyable format throughout Molecular Red. Regardless of what one ultimately thinks of Wark’s argument, one of the major strengths of Molecular Red is the way it introduces readers to overlooked theorists. After reading Wark’s chapters on Bogdanov and Platonov the reader certainly understands why Wark finds their work so engrossing and inspiring. Similarly, Wark makes a compelling case for the continued importance of Haraway’s cyborg concept and his treatment of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy is an apt demonstration of incorporating science fiction into works of theory. Amidst all of the grim books out there about the Anthropocene, Molecular Red is refreshing in its optimism. This is “Theory for the Anthropocene,” as the book’s subtitle puts it, but it is positive theory.

    Granted, some of Wark’s linguistic flourishes become less entertaining over time – “the carbon liberation front” is an amusing concept at first but by the end of Molecular Red the term is as likely to solicit an eye-roll as introspection. A great deal of carbon has certainly been liberated, but has this been the result of a concerted effort (a “liberation front”) or has this been the result of humans not fully thinking through the consequences of technology? Certainly there are companies that have made fortunes through “liberating” carbon, but who is ultimately responsible for “the carbon liberation front?” One might be willing to treat terms like “liberation front” with less scrutiny were they not being used in a book so invested in re-vitalizing leftist theory. Does not a “liberation front” imply a movement with an ideology? It seems that the liberation of carbon is more of an accident of a capitalist ideology than the driver of that ideology itself. It may seem silly to focus upon the uneasy feeling that accompanies the term “carbon liberation front” but this is an example of a common problem with Molecular Red – the more one thinks about some of the premises the less satisfying Wark’s arguments become.

    Given Wark’s commitment to reconfiguring Marxism for the Anthropocene it is unsurprising that he should choose to devote much of his attention to labor. This is especially fitting given the emphasis that Bogdanov and Platonov place on labor. Wark clearly finds much to approve of in Bogdanov’s idea that “all workers would become more like engineers, and also more like artists” (28). These are largely the type of workers one encounters in Robinson’s work and who are, generally, the heroes of Platonov’s tales, they make up a sort of “proto-hacker class” (90). It is an interesting move from the Soviet laborer to the technician/artists/hacker of Robinson – and it is not surprising that the author of A Hacker Manifesto (2004) should view hackers in such a romantic light. Yet Molecular Red is not a love letter to hackers, which makes it all the more interesting that labor in the Anthropocene is not given broader consideration. Bogdanov might have hoped that automation would make workers more like engineers and artists – but is there not still plenty of laboring going on in the Anthropocene? There is a heck of a lot of labor that goes into making the high-tech devices enjoyed by technicians, hackers and artists – though it may be a type of labor that is more convenient to ignore as it troubles the idea that workers are all metamorphosing into technician/artist/hackers. Given Platonov’s interest in the workers who seemed abandoned by the utopian promises they had been told it is a shame that Molecular Red does not pay greater attention to the forgotten workers of the Anthropocene. Yet, contemporary miners of minerals for high-tech doodads, device assemblers, e-waste recyclers, and the impoverished citizens of areas already suffering the burdens of climate change have more in common with the forgotten proletarians of Platonov than with the utopian scientists of Robinson’s Red Mars.

    One way to read Molecular Red is as a plea to the left not to give up on techno-science. Though it seems worth wondering to what extent the left has actually done anything like this. Some on the left may be less willing to conclude that the Internet is the solution to every problem (“some” does not imply “the majority”), but agitating for green technologies and alternative energies seems a pretty clear demonstration that far from giving up on technology many on the left still approach it with great hope. Wark is arguing for “something like the classical Marxist and Bogdanovite open-mindedness toward the sciences…rather than the Heidegger-inflected critique of Marcuse and others” (179). Yet in looking at contemporary discussions around techno-science and the left, it does not seem that the “Heidegger-inflected critique of Marcuse and others” is particularly dominant. There may be a few theorists here and there still working to advance a rigorous critique of technology – but as the recent issues on technology from The Nation and Jacobin both show – the left is not currently being controlled by a bogey-man of Marcuse. Granted, this is a shame, for Molecular Red could have benefited from engaging with some of the critics of Marxism’s techno-utopian streak. Indeed, is the problem the lack of “open-mindedness toward the sciences” or that being open-minded has failed thus far to do much to stall the Anthropocene? Or is it that, perhaps, the left simply needs to prepare itself for being open-minded about geo-engineering? Wark describes the Anthropocene as being a sort of metabolic rift and cautions that “to reject techno-science altogether is to reject the means of knowing about metabolic rift” (180). Yet this seems to be something of a straw-man argument – how many critics are genuinely arguing that people should “reject techno-science”? Perhaps John Zerzan has a much wider readership than I knew.

    Molecular Red cautions its readers against despair but the text has a significant darkness about it. Wark writes “we are cyborgs, making a cyborg planet with cyborg weather, a crazed, unstable disingression, whose information and energy systems are out of joint” (180) – but the knowledge that “we are cyborgs” does little to help the worker who has lost her job without suddenly becoming an engineer/artist, “a cyborg planet” does nothing to heal the sicknesses of those living near e-waste dumps, and calling it “cyborg weather” does little to help those who are already struggling to cope with the impacts of climate change. We may be cyborgs, but that doesn’t mean the Anthropocene will go easy on us. After all, the scientists in the Mars trilogy may work on transforming that planet into a utopia but while they are at it things do not exactly go well back on Earth. When Wark writes that “here among the ruins, something living yet remains” (xxii) he is echoing the ideology behind every anarcho-punk record cover that shows a better life being built on the ruins of the present world. But another feature of those album covers, and the allusion to “among the ruins,” is that the fact that some “living yet remains” is a testament to all of the dying that has also transpired.

    McKenzie Wark has written an interesting and challenging book in Molecular Red and it is certainly a book with which it is worth engaging. Regardless of whether or not one is ultimately convinced by Wark’s argument, his final point will certainly resonate with those concerned about the present but hopeful for the future.

    After all, we still have a world to win.
    _____

    Zachary Loeb is a writer, activist, librarian, and terrible accordion player. He earned his MSIS from the University of Texas at Austin, and is currently working towards an MA in the Media, Culture, and Communications department at NYU. His research areas include media refusal and resistance to technology, ethical implications of technology, infrastructure and e-waste, as well as the intersection of library science with the STS field. Using the moniker “The Luddbrarian,” Loeb writes at the blog Librarian Shipwreck and is a frequent contributor to The b2 Review Digital Studies section.

    Back to the essay