roundtable: David Noble- Truth about Infobahn(FWD:CITS)
roundtable: David Noble- Truth about Infobahn[FWD:CITS]
David Noble- Truth about Infobahn[FWD:CITS]
W. Curtiss Priest (BMSLIB@mitvma.mit.edu)
Fri, 17 Feb 95 08:58:44 EST
Message-Id: <9502171400.AA05052@a.cni.org>
Date: Fri, 17 Feb 95 08:58:44 EST
From: "W. Curtiss Priest" <BMSLIB@mitvma.mit.edu>
To: Telecommunications Policy Roundtable <ROUNDTABLE@CNI.ORG>
Subject: David Noble- Truth about Infobahn[FWD:CITS]
I've known David for a long time. He is dedicated to the rights of workers.
Curt Priest
Center for Information, Technology & Society
<bmslib@mitvma.mit.edu>
----------------------------Original message----------------------------
From: crawford@cs.ucdavis.edu (Rick Crawford)
The enclosed article by David Noble appears in issue 13 of
"CPU: Working in the Computer Industry" (2/15/95). CPU is a
project of the "Working in the Computer Industry" working group
of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility / Berkeley Chapter
(though views expressed herein are not necessarily those of CPSR).
For contact and email-subscription info, see the end.
-rick
______________________________________________________________
4. FEATURE: THE TRUTH ABOUT THE INFORMATION HIGHWAY
by David Noble
At the end of November, the truth about the information highway
finally got out. Protesting the announcement of another 5600
layoffs, 1200 Bell-Atlantic employees in Pennsylvania wore T-
shirts to work which graphically depicted themselves as
Information Highway Roadkill. The layoffs were just the latest
round of cutbacks at Bell-Atlantic, which have been matched by the
elimination of jobs at the other giants of the telecommunications
industry -- ATT, NYNEX, Northern Telecom -- supposedly the very
places where new jobs are to be created with the information
highway. In reality, the technology is enabling companies to
extend their operations and enlarge their profits while reducing
their workforce, and the pay and security of those who remain, by
contracting out work to cheaper labor around the globe and by
replacing people with machines. The very workers who are
constructing the new information infrastructure are among the
first to go, but not the only ones. The same fate is facing
countless workers in manufacturing and service industries in the
wake of the introduction of these new information technologies.
What is most striking about the Bell-Atlantic episode is not just
the provocative fashion statement of the workers, members of
Communication Workers of America District 13. Rather, it was the
company's exaggerated response. Bell Atlantic demanded that the
workers remove the T-shirts and when they refused, their employer
suspended them without pay. According to Vince Maison, president
of the union, the employer suspended the employees out of
expressed fear that their message would be seen by the public.
Significantly, management was concerned about adverse publicity
not just for Bell Atlantic but, more importantly, for the
information highway itself. This was the first time the
information highway was unambiguously linked with unemployment,
by a union and workforce presumably best situated to reap its
promised benefits. Apparently the company believed there was too
much riding on the information highway bandwagon to allow this
sober message to get around. But it did anyway. The (probably
illegal) management action backfired. Rather than a few hundred
customers catching a glimpse of the T-shirts during the course of
the day's work, millions throughout North America saw them through
the media coverage of the suspensions; within hours, the union was
inundated with phone calls of support and orders for the T-shirts.
The truth was out.
By now probably everyone has heard of the information highway, as
a result of the massive propaganda blitzkrieg of the last year.
Announcements heralding the dawn of a new age emanate incessantly
and insistently from every quarter. The media gush with the
latest info highway traffic reports (but not the fatalities), all
levels of government are daily pressured into diverting public
monies into yet another private trough, every hi-tech firm, not to
mention every hustler and con artist in the business and academic
worlds is rushing to cash in on the manufactured hysteria. The
aggressive assault on our senses is aimed at securing public
support and subsidy for the construction of the new commercial,
infrastructure. Its message, which has become the mind-numbing
multinational mantra, is simple and direct: We have no other
choice. Our very survival, it is alleged as individuals, a
nation, a society, depend upon this urgent development. Those
without it will be left behind in the global competition. And
those with it? A recent "Futurescape" advertisement supplement to
the _Globe and Mail_ by Rogers Cantel and Bell Canada warned that
the information highway "raises the ante in competition. If we
don't act, Canada and Canadian companies will be left behind....
the information highway is not a luxury technology for the rich.
It is the way of the future. And those who do not get on the
highway will not have any way of reaching their ultimate
destination."
And what exactly is the destiny advanced by the information
highway? Ask the Bell-Atlantic employees. The propaganda never
mentions the roadkill, of course, but that is the future for many.
Most people in Canada instinctively seem to know this already.
According to a 1993 Gallup poll, 41% of those currently employed
believe they will lose their jobs. But, despite this intuition,
people have been terrorized into a hapless fatalism. It's
inevitable. Or else they have been seduced by the exciting array
of new tools and diversions: home-shopping, home-videos, home-
learning, home-entertainment, home-communication. The operative
word is home, because home is where people without jobs are -- if
they still have a home. The focus is on leisure, because there
will be a lot more of it, in the form of mass unemployment (Some
lucky few will get home-work, as their job takes over their home
in the sweatshops of the future). This is where we are headed on
the information highway.
To see where we are headed requires no voodoo forecasting,
futuristic speculation, much less federally-funded research. We
just need to take a look at where we've been, and where we are.
The returns are already in on the Information Age, and the
information highway promises merely more of the same, at an
accelerated pace.
In the wake of the information revolution (now four decades old --
the term cybernetics and automation were coined in 1947). People
are now working harder and longer (with compulsory overtime),
under worsening working conditions with greater anxiety, stress,
and accidents, with less skills, less security, less autonomy,
less power (individually and collectively), less benefits, and
less pay. Without question the technology has been developed and
used to deskill and discipline the workforce in a global speed-up
of unprecedented proportions. And those still working are the
lucky ones. For the technology has been designed above all to
displace.
Structural (that is, permanent and systemic as opposed to
cyclical) unemployment in Canada has increased with each decade of
the information age. With the increasing deployment of so-called
"labor-saving" technology (actually labor-cost saving) official
average unemployment has jumped from 4% in the 1950's, 5.1% in the
1960's, 6.7% in the 1970's, and 9.3% in the 1980's, to 11% so far
in the 1990's.
These, of course, are the most conservative estimates (actual
unemployment is closer to double these figures). Today we are in
the midst of what is called a jobless recovery, symptomatic and
symbolic of the new age. Output and profits rise without the jobs
which used to go with them. Moreover, one fifth of those employed
are only part-time or temporary employees, with little or no
benefits beyond barely subsistence wages, and no security
whatever.
In 1993, an economist with the Canadian Manufacturers Association
estimated that between 1989 and 1993, 200,000 manufacturing jobs
were eliminated through the use of new technology -- another
conservative estimate. And that was only in manufacturing, and
before the latest wave of information highway technology, which
will make past developments seem quaint in comparison.
None of this has happened by accident. The technology was
developed, typically at public expense, with precisely these ends
in mind by government (notably military), finance, and business
elites -- to shorten the chain of command and extend
communications and control (the military origins of the Internet),
to allow for instantaneous monitoring of money markets and funds
transfer, and to enable manufacturers to extend the range of their
operations in pursuit of cheaper and more compliant labor.
Thus as the ranks of the permanently marginalized and impoverished
swell, and the gap between rich and poor widens to 19th century
dimensions, it is no mere coincidence that we see a greater
concentration of military, political, financial, and corporate
power than ever before in our history. In the hands of such self-
serving elites -- and it is now more than ever in their hands --
the information highway, the latest incarnation of the information
revolution, will only be used to compound the crime.
Visions of democratization and popular empowerment via the net are
dangerous delusions; whatever the gains, they are overwhelmingly
overshadowed and more than nullified by the losses. As the
computer screens brighten with promise for the few, the light at
the end of the tunnel grows dimmer for the many.
No doubt there has been some barely audible and guarded discussion
if not yet debate about the social implications of the information
highway focusing upon such issues as access, commercial vs. public
control and privacy. There is also now a federal advisory
commission on the information highway although it meets in secret
without public access or scrutiny, doubtless to protect the
proprietary interests of the companies that dominate its
membership. But nowhere is there any mention of the truth about
the information highway, which is mass unemployment.
For decades we have silently subsidized the development of the
very technologies which have been used to destroy our lives and
livelihoods, and we are about to do it again, without debate,
without any safeguards, without any guarantees. The calamity we
now confront, as a consequence, rivals the upheaval of the first
industrial revolution two centuries ago, with its untold human
suffering. We are in for a struggle unlike anything any of us
have ever seen before, as the Bell-Atlantic employees testify, and
we must use any and all means at our disposal. It's time we came
to our collective senses, while there is still time. We must
insist that progress without people is not progress. At the very
least, as a modest beginning, we pull the public plug on the
Information Highway.
[David Noble is a professor at York University and a historian of
technology. He taught for nearly a decade at M.I.T. and was
curator of the industrial automation at the Smithsonian
Institution in Washington, DC. He is the author of numerous
books, including _Forces of Production: A Social History of
Industrial Automation_ (Oxford University Press) and, most
recently, _Progress Without People_ (a Canadian edition will be
published this spring by Between the Lines). He lives in Canada.]
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