Everything Solid Melts Into Laissez-Faire

Here is a statement I read over on the European Tribune (one of my favorite blogs), and which I quote here without much in the way of considered comment, but more as a solicitation of comments:

Most software indulges in version numbering along an unbounded trajectory. It seems that those applications can endure an almost endless progression of added features for the next release. It seems quite in line with the neoliberal consensus that better is always more, in an ever increasing amount… [T]he tendency of the dominant software releases to use unbounded version numbering seems symptomatic of the neoliberal pathology that will not recognize the convergent nature of maturing technologies, in an effort to encourage consumption of ever 'new' products.

There were so many comments and associations that occurred to me immediately and simultaneously upon reading this that I haven't really put them together in any kind of systematic or properly argumentative way.

I find myself thinking of Jeron Lanier's snarky Fifth Law: "Software inefficiency and inelegance will always expand to the level made tolerable by Moore's Law"…

I find myself thinking of PR practices of "repackaging," which seek to elicit the "experience" of progressive emancipation through consumption by continually trumpeting as new features traits that commodities have already had all along (especially hilarious to me is the recent commercial in which some insipid environmentally toxic bottled-water company has some appealingly crunchy Green athlete -- natch, up is down, it's the Bush era -- straining up some cliff face and clutching at his water bottle while the voiceover enthuses, and I'm paraphrasing, at long last capitalism has provided us with a bottle cleverly designed by our geniuses of innovation so that one can actually hold it in one's hand!)…

I find myself thinking of the basic contradiction of capitalist societies highlighted by eco-socialists and others, of the different dynamisms of reckless Grow or Die! expansionism confronted with the limits and complex interdependencies of the ecosystems in which all enterprise and production always take place and on which it always depends…

I find myself thinking of the technocrats and especially the current crop of digital utopians, from Daniel Bell to the irrationally exuberant WIRED magazine set of the 1990s through to the corporatist-militarist "revolutionaries" of the technophiliac and science-phobic (these attitudes are continuous, this is not a paradox) Bush Administration with their Total Information Awareness and Shock and Awe "smart bombs" and abstract "ownership society" and anti-democratizating master plan of debt, deregulation, and dismantlement of civic institutions, all of whom would seek continually to "dematerialize" both production and the performative substance of political contestation in their theories, the better to compel the intransigent material resistances of the furniture of the world and the plurality of its stakeholders into a shape that conforms to the restless and idealized flows of capital, desire, and incumbent fancy…

I find myself thinking of four decades of public intellectuals declaring the "end of ideology," the "end of philosophy," the "end of history," the "death of distance," foregrounding services and then marketing and then financialization and then information in the influential daydreams they mistook for documentation and deliberation, all the way through to contemporary Superlative technocentric fantasies of selves reduced to streams of spiritualized digital data (a formulation preceded by and prepared for by decades of reductive accounts of selves reduced to "expressions" of genetic information), commodities reduced to "instantiations" of software instructions by angelic nanoabundance (a formulation preceded by and prepared for by, among other things, decades of PR accounts of commodities as indifferent sites for the distinguishing emblemization of designer logos), deliberative politics reduced to the consequentialist computation of "optimal" outcomes by Robot Gods (a formulation preceded by and prepared for by the anti-democratic Cold-War politics of neoliberal incumbency, with its corporate think-tanks, technocratic military experts, and corporate broadcast-mediated manufacturing of consent)…