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.US banks were early cybernetic adopters of ATD machines, automated banking services, and credit card networks, components of the ‘financialization of daily life’ (Martin 2002).Where cybernetics meeting with finance is especially fateful, however, is in the worldwide digitalization of stock exchanges, and in the development of exotic financial instruments such as derivatives and futures that originate as a way of defensively hedging foreign investments against currency fluctuations, but rapidly morph into offensive speculative activities dependent on arcane risk modelling and high-frequency trading (see McNally 2011).Electronic computers did not exist before the 1940s, and computer networks until the late 1960s.The realm of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) thus grew ex nihilo over half a century.The value of ICT industries for the world economy, defined as including communications services, computer and related services, communications goods and semiconductors, and computers and office machinery, measured in constant current dollars, rose from $800,349 million 1990, to $1.5 trillion in 2000, to $2.8 trillion in 2010.The US share was $257,503 million in 1990, $517,907 in 2000, $729,169 million in 2010 (NSB 2012).Since the late 1990s ICTs have accounted for about one-third of private investment in US economy, and between 10 and 25 per cent of that in other advanced economies.Today the ICT sector’s share of the GDP of the global economy as a whole, and of most major economies (including China), is about 6 per cent (OECD 2013a).However, these figures understate the importance of cybernetic technologies because they do not include digital devices incorporated in other products, such as motor vehicles or machine tools.According to the OECD (2013a) ICTs were ‘the most dynamic component of investment in the late 1990s and early 2000s’.Many economists claim their importance cannot be assessed sectorally because they act as a ‘general-purpose platform technology’ that ‘fundamentally changes how and where economic activity is carried out … much as earlier general-purpose technologies (e.g., the steam engine, automatic machinery) propelled growth during the Industrial Revolution’, facilitating broad development of new markets and providing an ‘infrastructure’ that is ‘as or more important than the physical cities, roads and harbors’ (NSB 2012).Although there is neatness in dividing the effects of cybernetics amongst the moments of the vortex – automation in production, networks in circulation, their algorithmic fusion in finance, this is of course false.Production is itself a circulation process, as the commodity must move through the labour (or robot) process, so it too involves networks (e.g.the supply chain linkage of dispersed facilities); circulation entails production, involving its own enterprises of advertising and logistics, exploiting their own workers, and then automating them out of existence; and because, ultimately, money rules all these activities, everything becomes algorithmic.Thus, the most recent ‘mobile’ phase of cybernation makes the smartphone capital’s Star Trek-like ‘universal communicator’ a device for work, purchases and money transfers alike (Manzerolle & Kjøsen 2014).It is the common medium of cybernetics, bits and bytes, which enables the integration and acceleration of capital’s circuit, and by merging its apparently discrete sectors makes ever clearer its singular, vortical process.Compositions and DecompositionsThis cybernetic transformation has complex, contradictory effects on the organic composition of capital.Marx in his era noted a recursive process in industrial innovation, as machinery created the processes for manufacturing new ‘cyclopean’ machines, such as steamships and railways (1977: 506).Computerized advance itself followed a similar path of positive feedback, generating the means to accelerate its own development.But in the case of computers and networks this bootstrapping process proceeded faster than in previous technological revolutions.The captains of digital industry explain this to themselves in terms of two great ‘laws’.Moore’s Law, attributed to Gordon Moore, founder of Intel, specifies that the computer power available at a given price doubles approximately every 18 months: this is the process that yields contemporary laptops with more power than the supercomputers of 40 years ago.Metcalfe’s Law, formulated by John Metcalfe, the inventor of Ethernet, declares that the value of a network increases as the square of its nodes, a principle that encourages investment in wired and wireless connections.In Chapter 3 we will examine how the fulfilment of Moore’s Law arises from the semiconductor industry’s success in applying cybernetic technologies – capable of increasingly microscopic operations and made with escalating quantities of toxic chemicals – to its own manufacturing processes, while globally relocating them towards the cheapest sources of labour, which it then automates nearly out of existence.The kind of ‘value’ that Metcalfe’s ‘Law’ promises will grow exponentially with network expansion was never fully defined in its original formulation, but by implication, and in what has become its normalized usage, it is commercial value; hence the value expansion of networks depends, as we will see in Chapter 4, on a deepening commodification of communication, and the extraction of increasing quantities of free labour from network users [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]