Keynote:

Global Uprisings Conference Amsterdam 15

November 2013

Paul Mason

***


Revolution in highly complex, information driven
societies very different to old revolutions.

Instead of from thought to action ours keeps going
back to thought: repress the action but cant repress
the thought.

Let me show you why that has to be read differently.

Look at an advanced manufacturing facility = people
on computers.

Look like they are designing things but they are not:
they are virtually manufacturing them. On the
computer, each screw has the properties of a screw,
each sheet of carbon fibre the properties. They design
a wing, build it, fly it on the mainframe, land it. When
they build it, it is defect free.

Revolution in an information society is as different to
1917 as virtual manufacturing is to analog
manufacturing.

1. PICTURE OF GEZI BARRICADE + 3

a. Whats driving the revolution gives people

the power to do this:
i. End of an economic narrative
ii. Activism and thinking are newly
empowered by technology
iii. New kind of person is emerging
2. PICTURE OF OCCUPY LSX
a. Strength is that they embodies the core
values of people that want to remake the
world in human shape
b. Weakness is that it does not have a coherent
strategy
i. Thats also a strength
ii. ASSANGE
1. But it means those with a coherent
strategy weirdly dominate the
debate so class, gender
iii. ANGER. Also means movement has a
tendency to obsess about the negativity
of power, elites, militarism, wars
1. Thats been the easy part of being a
radical in favour of social justice
for 2000 years
3. PICTURE MOVEMENT EXISTS
a. Shirky explains why - tech
b. Lacks a narrative: about how capitalism
becomes post-capitalism; carbon economy
becomes a non-carbon economy; how
society based on womens oppression
moves beyond that
c. And it needs an understanding of the
timescale issues:

i. Death of economic model and

emergence of new kind of capitalist,
and consumer, have happened before
about once every 50 years.
ii. The emergence of a new technology,
and a new kind of thinking about the
world Elizabeth Eisensteins work
shows the impact of the printing press
on the whole renaissance, reformation
and rise of capitalism. If network
technology is as big as the printing
press then we are at a 500 year turning
point;
iii. We are awed and stunned by the
prospect can it really be that I, who
lived through 50 years of the old
capitalism, can live to see the new
capitalism, post capitalism?
iv. Well consider this. The difference
between virtual manufacturing and real
is a 20,000 year change. The
reproductive shock that comes when
women gain control of their
reproductive systems is a 40,000 year
change. Its impact is only starting to be
felt. The panic among men is spilling
out in the form of rape threats on
twitter, misogeny.
4. We have to undertand we are in a prolonged
transition, and that what we design at this stage
might have to be tested on a small scale, revised
at the design stage

a. If I am right, then we also have to not be

proprietorial about this revolution. It has
been made on the streets, but there will also
be people who are simply scientists, simply
even business consultants etc who get it
5. The transition will be based on three economic
developments that are happening now:
a. the first of which is: work is becoming un-
necessary; if you read the sociology of the
early 1960s workforce, one word keeps
leaping out at you absurdity the
absurdity of work. They understood that
even then levels of automation meant what
they were doing was not really necessary.
b. The moment the worker stands aside from
the machine, to mind it, is the moment a
thinking machine could take over.
c. Now capitalism is deploying technologies
that abolish the need for work but not the
need for exploitation. Unless it can create a
whole new souce of high value work then
the real meaning of austerity will become
clear in the next 10 years.
d. It wont be fiscal austerity but the austerity
that combines low wages with high credit
and high state intervention to maintain the
lifestyles of the rich. This is non-sustainable.
Without high wages in return for high skill
the whole capitalist narrative becomes a
fiction.
6. Information goods are destroying price
mechanisms

a. There are two reasons physical goods are

subject to the laws of scarcity and private
property: if I am using it, you cant use it;
and in any case I own it.
b. With information goods there is only one
reason: the law of copyright, intellectual
property.
c. Price mechanisms are based on scarcity and
ownability of property.
7. Collaborative production has begun. There is the
collaboration of necessity like in the co-ops and
seed banks and time banks of hard hit countries
like Spain and Greece; and there is collaboration
born of inspiration, like Wikipedia.
a. 19k authors on Encyclopedia Britannica
18k were dead. 30k authors on Wikipedia,
and 100k irregulars. Even if you could
employ 18k people, you could not make
Wikipedia. It is a better product.
8. How to progress these tendencies towards a
coherent social and economic programme? Is the
old way of thinking.
9. SKYRIM
10.
Not like a programme but like Skyrim.
a. Skyrim is a collaborative game; whoever
you are, and wherever you are, and through
whatever quest you are passing, the
ultimate possibility is you kill all the
dragons and free the world
11.
In Skyrim there are alliances of tribes or
clans. In the 20c there were just two sides
workers and capitalists. Now there are at least 3

tribes in every big city: urban poor, workers,

educated youth.
12.
3 tribes: urban poor, working class,
educated youth strength during the Arab
spring, and Occupy, was their alliance. They dont
look so different but social reality creates
different mindsets, different overhead costs of
activism,
13.
Global elite. Tiny. Lacks consent and
legitimacy. Lives utopians.