Robert Hassan

Network Time and the New Knowledge Epoch

This article analyses the temporal dimensions of knowledge production. Specifically it discusses the mechanics of the process and how these have changed through what are termed ‘knowledge epochs’. It argues that with the widespread dissemination of clock-time through the Industrial Revolution, the production of knowledge was significantly shaped by the temporality of the clock. Through the convergence of neoliberal globalization and ICT revolution a new powerful temporality has emerged through which knowledge production is refracted: network time. The article concludes that the spread of network time into the realm of the everyday has profound implications for the production of critical and reflexive knowledge in contemporary culture and society.

Does cloud computing have a silver lining

Despite the language of immateriality and weightlessness, network communications have a significant materiality and weight when considered from the standpoint of production, consumption and recycling. In this paper, we concentrate on the energy signatures of the server industry on which internet communications depend, with special consideration of Google server farms. The move towards thin clients and cloud computing raises the stakes for the server farm business, and makes it more urgent to confront the finite environment in which information circulates. We assess recent and near-future growth in server traffic, and suggest that business models and regulatory systems have yet to recognise the challenges they pose.

The Speed of Collapse: The Space-Time Dimensions of Capitalism’s First Great Crisis of the 21st Century:

The essay analyses the global economic crisis from a critical perspective on the function of capital accumulation in space-time. It argues that the relative ‘speed of collapse’ is a historically new phenomenon that has been generated through the neoliberal and ICT driven mode of capitalism that has dominated since the 1970s. The ‘speed of collapse’, I argue, will be followed by a rapid financially led recovery that signals not that the system is self-stabilizing and durable, but that the system is out of control. This lack of control and the irreconcilable effects of space-time upon a constantly accumulating capital with fewer and fewer profitable outlets mean that a future system crisis is both inevitable and will carry greater destructive resonance.

The MIT Media Lab: techno dream factory or alienation as a way of life?

This article critically analyses the work and the ethos of the MIT Media Lab in the context of globalizing capital and the ICT revolution. It argues that the Media Lab owes its tremendous success in part to the public relations strategies of its founder, Nicholas Negroponte, and to the very real need for the Lab’s products to ‘fill in the gaps’ left by the broad and irregular dynamics of globalization and the ICT revolution. The Media Lab and its research products insert information technologies into the interstices of cultural, social and temporal life, stitching together an ‘informational ecology’ of interconnectivity. This ecology has its own temporality, a synchronized ‘chronoscopic’ temporality or real-time duration that obliterates the many other temporalities that interpenetrate our lives and give them meaning. It is argued the ‘informational ecology’ of interconnectivity constructed by the Media Lab and many other emulative ‘start-ups’, lead not to a world of ‘diversity’ as Negropontean philosophy insists, but a one-dimensional world of alienation.

Embrace Your Fate

How are we to understand the Information Society? More, how are we to extend this understanding and develop it into a critique of this society? In his Critique of Information, Scott Lash argues that, for starters, we’d better understand that the old rules have been torn up. The processes of social, cultural and economic informationization that have stemmed from the ICT revolution have been so comprehensive and totalizing that there is no longer the ‘space’ in which to stop and reflect and develop critique. Lash is persuaded, too, by much of Paul Virilio’s theories on the ‘age of speed’, and so not only is there no ‘space’, there is also, literally, no ‘time’ due to the ICT compression of clock time into the real time of information networks. The conceptual frameworks through which most of us, consciously or unconsciously, have made sense of the world, have acted as a basis for critique of the world—or just have allowed for a subjective orientation within it—have been superseded. Thus Lash argues that the categories of modernity, postmodernity, industrialism and postindustrialism, and the ontologies they produce are now wholly inadequate as ways both to comprehend and critique information and the society it generates. The traditional spaces for critique that have shaped thought and action for over 200 years have been subsumed under the avalanche of just two decades of informationization. Traditionally, critique has evolved along two closely related pathways. One is of the critique of the particular though the universal. In Marxism, for example, capitalism is the particular critiqued through the universalism of the Marxist worldview. The other well-known idea of critique comes from the Kantian-inspired critique of the universal– particular couple itself, operating from the critical space of ‘the other’. Fundamentally, both these spaces of critique operated upon a dualism, implying a realm of transcendence, an elsewhere, from where the ‘outside’ critiques the ‘inside’. For Lash, these dualisms evolved out of and were specifically suited to ‘the era of national manufacturing societies’, whereas ‘the global information culture ... tends to erase the possibility of a transcendental realm’ (p. 9). What does this totalizing information space consist of? Primarily, argues Lash, the ICT revolution has finished the job begun by the ‘first media age’ of mass media over a century ago. The convergence of telecommunications, computing and the media have

The worldly space: the digital university in network time

Abstract This article considers the effect of information technology upon teaching, learning and research in the ‘digital university’. In less than a generation the university has become a business like any other. It does so in the determining context of neoliberal globalisation and the computer revolution. The university develops through what we may now see as a disastrous ‘category error’. The article argues that humans are analogue creatures who have constructed analogue worlds that they recognise in large measure, in nature. Digital logic is nowhere recognised in nature, and is ultimately alien to us. The university is the key institution for enabling us to understand who and what we are, yet it is being undermined through the suffusion of the market logic and the digital technologies that drive it from a past we look to less, to a present we dwell in more, and a future we are less able to shape.

Time, Neoliberal Power, and the Advent of Marx’s “Common Ruin” Thesis:

Marx and Engels warned that class struggle would result “either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.” This essay argues that through the effect of neoliberal networked economy, we have had both a “revolutionary reconstitution of society” and the “common ruin” of both bourgeois and proletarian classes. Their “common ruin” is expressed through their lack of viability as the basis for their respective democratic projects—liberalism and socialism. The revolution in information technologies and the rise of the neoliberal network society has transformed the nature of political power that had been founded upon traditional industrial forms of production and social–political organization. The essay develops a theory of technological change and a subsequent transformation in our relationship with time. By emphasizing the dialectic of technological–temporal change in the nature and quality of political power, we see that the very basis of both power and politics has become transformed in ways that negatively affect the potential of democratic forms of power, liberal, or socialist. The essay ends with a call for a new political approach to time, a “temporal sovereignty” to revive and renew the basis of democracy within a networked society.

Network Speed and Democratic Politics

Through a systematic foregrounding of temporality as a framework of analysis, the dynamics of neo-liberal globalization and the revolution in ICTs constitute a new epistemological context. From this perspective the world as an economic, social, cultural, and political postmodernity becomes apparent. The article argues that liberal democracy was created and evolved in a specific context too. It was one formed through the interactions of Enlightenment thought and capitalist action—both of which were suffused by the temporality of the clock. For nearly three-hundred years we have taken for granted its meter of the clock as the measure of temporal reality, and have similarly accepted that liberal democracy functions on the same temporal basis. This has blinded us to a “social acceleration” that has developed through the convergence of neo-liberal economics and ICTs to the point where liberal democracy and its clock time functioning simply cannot synchronize with the times of the network society. Classical liberal democracy has been rendered ineffectual as a means of democratic action, and neo-liberal globalization offers nothing to replace it.

Digital, ethical, political: Network time and common responsibility:

The essay argues that a proper ethical foundation for the political processes underlying liberal democracy is unattainable in a globalized society made possible through networked computers – and the transformed relationship with temporality that is generated by them. The essay brings together the computer ethics of Norbert Wiener and the temporal ethics of Hans Jonas to show that both original visions for a better world are unrealizable in the unanticipated context of what is termed ‘network time’. The essay argues further that to develop an ethical basis for liberal democracy, digital logic and its effects must be contrasted with that which they ceaselessly colonize and marginalize today: an irreducibly analogue world, with analogue politics, analogue technologies and analogue humans who conceived and developed liberal democracy as a cornerstone of the project of Enlightenment. Through contrast and critique, the essay reveals the difficulty for any ethico-political project within the digital and argues that the present post-modern relationship with computing, in which ‘market forces’ determine technological forms and applications, is socially destructive and must be brought under a new aegis of democratic and common responsibility.