Plan and control

Conclusion

“Is closer and closer social control the inevitable price of ‘progress,’ a necessary concomitant of the continued development of modern social forms?” We believe that this is indeed the case. Against those who see the new communications technologies as the basis for a coming “communications era,” and the new information technologies as the panacea for our present “Age of Ignorance,” our own argument is that their development has, in fact, been closely associated with processes of social management and control. The scale and complexity of the modern nation state has made communications and information resources (and technologies) central to the maintenance of political and administrative cohesion.

The “Information Revolution” is, then, not simply and straight-forwardly a matter of technological “progress,” of a new technological or industrial revolution. It is significant, rather, for the new matrix of political and cultural forces that it supports. And a crucial dimension here is that of organizational form and structure. Communication and information resources (and technologies) set the conditions and limits to the scale and nature of organizational possibilities. What they permit is the development of complex and large-scale bureaucratic organizations, and also of extended corporate structures that transcend the apparent limits of space and time (transnational corporations). They also constitute the nervous system of the modern state and guarantee its cohesion as an expansive organizational form. Insofar as they guarantee and consolidate these essential power structures in modern society, information and communication are fundamental to political-administrative regulation, and consequently to the social and cultural experience of modernity.

The exploitation of information resources and technologies has expressed itself, politically and culturally, through the dual tendency towards social planning and management, on the one hand, and surveillance and control, on the other. In historical terms, this can be seen as the apotheosis of Lewis Mumford's megamachine: technology now increasingly fulfils what previously depended upon bureaucratic organization and structure. But the central historical reference point is the emergence, early in the twentieth century, of Scientific Management (as a philosophy both of industrial production and of social reproduction). It was at this moment that “scientific” planning and management moved beyond the factory to regulate the whole way of life. At this time, the “gathering of social knowledge” became “the normal accompaniment of action,” and the manufacture of consent, through propaganda and opinion management, was increasingly “based on analysis rather than on rule of thumb.” If, through Scientific Management, the planning and administration of everyday life became pervasive, it also became the preeminent form and expression of social control. Planning and management were, necessarily and indissociably, a process of surveillance and of manipulation and persuasion. To the extent that these administrative and dominative information strategies were first developed on a systematic basis, it was at this historical moment, we believe, that the ‘Information Revolution’ was unleashed. New information and communications technologies have most certainly advanced, and automated, these combined information and intelligence activities, but they remain essentially refinements of what was fundamentally a political-administrative “revolution.”

Recent innovations in information and communications technologies have generally been discussed from a narrow technological or economic perspective. It has been a matter of technology assessment or of the exploitation of new technologies to promote industrial competitiveness and economic growth. This, in the light of our discussion, seems a partial and blinkered vision. The absolutely central question to be raised in the context of the “Information Revolution” of the eighties, is, we believe, the relation between knowledge/information and the system of political and corporate power. For some, knowledge is inherently and self-evidently a benevolent force, and improvements in the utilization of knowledge are demonstrably the way to ensure social progress. Information is treated as an instrumental and technical resource that will ensure the rational and efficient management of society. It is a matter of social engineering by knowledge professionals and information specialists and technocrats. For us, the problems of the “information society” are more substantial, complex, and oblique.

This, of course, raises difficult political and philosophical issues. These are the issues that Walter Lippmann comes up against when he recognizes in the Great Society “that centralization of power which deprives [citizens] of control over the use of that power,” and when he confronts the disturbing awareness that “the problems that vex democracy seem to be unmanageable by democratic methods.” They are the issues that Lewis Mumford addresses when he argues that “the tension between small-scale association and large-scale organization, between personal autonomy and institutional regulation, between remote control and diffused local intervention, has now created a critical situation.” And they are the monumental issues that concern Castoriadis in his analysis of instrumental reason and the “rationalist ideology,” those “myths which, more than money or weapons, constitute the most formidable obstacles in the way of the reconstruction of human society.”

Among the significant issues to be raised by the new information technologies are their relation to social forms of organization, their centrality to structures of political power, and their role in the cultural logic of consumer capitalism. Sociological analysis is naïve, we believe, when it treats the new telecommunications, space, video, and computing technologies as innocent technical conceptions and looks hopefully to a coming, post-industrial Utopia. Better to look back to the past, to the entwined histories of reason, knowledge, and technology, and to their relation to the economic development of capitalism and the political and administrative system of the modern nation state.