Jihad vs. McWorld - Benjamin R. Barber [153]
Futuristic idealism must then be treated with a certain skepticism. The history of science and technology is at best a history of ambivalence. In each of the instances explored here, we can speak only of potentiality, not of actuality. The double edge of technology’s sword has been well known to us at least since Mary Shelley first told the story of Dr. Frankenstein’s monster, and our technologies today possess potentialities as monstrous as any she imagined.
Telecommunications technology has the capability for strengthening civil society, but it also has a capacity for unprecedented surveillance and can be used to impede and manipulate as well as to access information. Left to the market, which is where McWorld leaves technology, monsters may end up with a free and mightily profitable reign. As we have already noticed, the market has no particular interest in the civic possibilities of technology—unless they can generate a respectable profit (generally they cannot). When profitability is the primary object, technological innovation is likely to reinforce extant inequalities, making the resource-and-income-poor information-poor as well. Computer literacy has become as important as language literacy and numeracy in the job market, and is likely to be vital to civic literacy as well. The division of labor into symbolic analysis workers and more traditional durable goods and service sector workers has actually accelerated the growth of social inequality in America.
Robert Reich has drawn a disturbing American portrait in which privileged information/communication workers increasingly withdraw public support from the larger society. His grim analysis portrays them moving to insular suburbs and buying private recreational, schooling, security, and sanitation services for their own gated communities, which the public at large cannot afford. They are then positioned to refuse to pay taxes for the declining public services they no longer need. Their withdrawal (Reich labels it the politics of secession) leaves the poor poorer, the public sector broke, and society ever more riven by economic disparities.3 A similar pattern of “secession” by the new symbolic elites can be discerned on a global scale where elite nations secede from their global public responsibilities as fast as elite professionals secede from their public responsibilities within elite nations. The Third World becomes a series of urban ghettos within every First World society as well as a series of poor nation ghettos within international society. The “restructuring” of the global economy to meet the demands of the new age information/entertainment sector further reinforces the boundaries between the privileged and the rest.
Even when we set social and class issues aside, the market in technology can have untoward consequences. Technology can as easily become an instrument of repression as of liberation. Thoreau worried about how easily we become the “tools of our tools;” the new tools of the post-Gutenberg age of electronics confirm his fear. Interactive television is a powerful surveillance instrument: as consumers tell shopping networks what they want to buy and tell banks how to dispense their cash and tell pollsters what they think about abortion, those receiving the information gain access to an extensive catalog of knowledge about the private habits, attitudes, and behaviors of consumers. This information may in turn be used to reshape those habits and attitudes in ways that favor producers and sellers massaging the marketplace. The current antiregulatory fever means that the new information banks being compiled from interaction and surveillance are subject neither to government scrutiny nor to limitation or control (such as