[PEN-L:8241] Re: Re: Re: Re:Information revolution?

[Hsin-Hsing Chen <chenh2@xxxxxxx>]

Peter Dorman wrote:

> ps: Electricity also had its failed utopias.  See Kropotkin's
> interesting but false speculation in FIELDS, FACTORIES, AND WORKSHOPS OF
> TOMORROW.
>

Also, a very interesting parallel of eletricity to today's enthusiasm about
computer and its
world-shattering power can be found in Lewis Mumford's work. Almost exactly 50
years
after the advent of wide-spread use of electricity, Lewis Mumford argued in
Technic and
Civilization (1934) that electricity has the yet-to-be-fulfilled potential to
change modern society
from mechanical to organic. It can vastly change the social landscape, from
congested industrial
cities, smoke stacks, and their sundry of social ills, to a network de-centered
small shops, situated
in the pleasant suburbs and countryside, which inevitabily manifest more
egalitarian democratic values
than the steam-powered mill town. Mumford even participate enthusiastically in
TVA and other
elctrification projects of the New Deal era so as to fulfill his democratic dream
through technology.

After the TVA project led to Los Alamos and then to Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
Mumford was totally
shattered. Historian Tom Hughs said, in his American Genesis (1964), that Mumford
fell into a deep
shock and could not speak for weeks after he heard of Hiroshima. Afterward,
Mumford became a
staunch critic of the "Power Complex" of modern technological society. Yet he
still hoped that
someday, human agency can create an "organic" society filled with creativity,
sensitivity, dynamics, etc.
(See Mumford's Pentagon of Power (1970))

It is amazing to see so many phrases Mumford used on electricity are now
re-circulated and attached
to the computer: flexible, organic, decentered, , ,. It seems that the radical
technologcial changes that
have always been featured in capitalism have a common ideological effect, namely
appearing to people
that the established hierarchy is gonna be overthrown by the new machine, and we
the people can
finally live in a true democracy with the new machines. I wonder what would it
take for the computer
utopians to say "oops, this is not it, gotta wait for next time" as Mumford did.

Hsin-Hsing