Technology as Information
Technology is the collection of techniques, skills, methods and processes used in the production of goods or services or in the accomplishment of objectives, such as scientific investigation. Technology can be the knowledge of techniques, processes, etc. or it can be embedded in machines, computers, devices and factories, which can be operated by individuals without detailed knowledge of the workings of such things.
- Wikipedia
We constantly fetishize technology. To a consumer technology brings to mind images of electronics and home gadgets. If we think about it in the productive sphere we imagine computers and robots. But, at its heart, technology is a collection of cultural knowledge about techniques and processes. The knowledge of how a lever works or what it is capable of doing, for example, is independent of having one on hand. It can exist in the mind alone.
With knowledge of a lever we can create one, even ad hoc. If all the levers in the world were to disappear instantaneously, we would simply make more. This is, of course, true of more complicated things — we know how to make computers out of machine parts, water, even aggregations of people using paper and pencil.
If we use information theory to view these questions more abstractly, we can say that human technology is an information process — the organization of atoms in the universe in a way that gives meaning to us. This organization can come in the form of tools, DNA, cultural or individual knowledge, etc. Language and looms are both technologies and have existed long before Capitalism.
But, under Capitalism technology takes on the unique characteristic of organizing productive processes to create value by way of commodities. That is, there exists a drive in Capitalism to develop new techniques to make things.
It is precisely the process of leveraging technology that lowers the value of commodities. When we don’t have to do much work to produce things, we value them less. The point of developing a new technique is to decrease the costs of production; therefore, it is the technique that is costly to develop, not the actual thing. It takes a lot of work to figure out how to do something without much work.
That is because technology is cumulative. We can design and build LCD screens without re-writing Newton’s Opticks every time. We don’t even have to read it. But, we do have to figure out how we are going to add new value to the giant mass of social and cultural knowledge we are leveraging.
Marx wrote that over time, more and more technology would be used to produce things with less and less value. This would cause crises in the Capitalist system because Capitalists would have to invest increasing amounts of money in technology to get decreasing profits in return.
Many Marxist thinkers since have hypothesized that Capitalists would respond simply by demolishing the means of production — or productive technology. But, they are making a fetish of machinery. Destroying a machine is not the same as destroying all of the cumulative information that went into its corporeal realization.
Any process that alters the amount of information in something is said to be irreversible. That is, you can’t just switch between knowing and not knowing a technique — learn Calculus, unlearn Calculus, learn Calculus. The information has to be dissipated. But because machines are just physical manifestations of information (the “power of knowledge, objectified” in the words of Marx), destroying the means of production means destroying only the latest round of technological development.
We would still have all previous rounds of technological development at our disposal as well as the social knowledge they embody. And, here is the key: that information is cheap as we don’t have to incur the costs of re-discovering it. “The productive force of capital grows with this general progress, which capital appropriates free of charge.” Last year’s tech is cheap bordering on free. That’s why you can read Newton’s Opticks online at no cost.
Demolishing the means of production could boost value production in the short term and thus get an economy out of a recession or depression. This is what happened with World War II. But, it cannot alter the inevitability of production without value. And, because we’re talking about a cumulative effect, the results are increasingly diminished. For example, it took Liberia only 10 years to rebuild the capacity destroyed in 20 years of civil war and they did so at twice the rate of the previous productive cycle (see above.)
To reverse the inevitability of what Marx called the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall, you would have to truly unmake technology by erasing all of the cumulative information that it embodied. It would mean rewinding the tape of technological development by annihilating the aggregate surplus we have created over the centuries. It would entail destruction of people, things, culture, and ideas on a large enough scale to send us backwards in time…metaphorically speaking. And, no Capitalist is interested in giving up the surplus they have in order to increase the rate at which they accumulate.
These points may seem overly pedantic, but they become all the more relevant as we approach what I believe to be the end of the last cycle of technological innovation. Artificial intelligence and green energy will drive the profit rate to zero. They represent the culmination of Capitalist technological development — “an automatic system of machinery, set in motion by an automaton, a moving power that moves itself; this automaton consisting of numerous mechanical and intellectual organs.” Humans will no longer be universal workers capable of doing any job. Instead, machines will be capable of producing commodities with no value; they will be free.
In my next essay I’ll argue why the current technological innovation cycle is the last innovation cycle. I’ll talk about the implications of that fact and how it should inform the immediate work of 21st Century Marxists.
All quotes are from the Grundrisse. Charles Seife’s Decoding the Universe is an engaging, accessible introduction to information theory. César Hidalgo’s recent Why Information Grows looks like an interesting application of information theory to economics; it’s on my reading pile. Lastly, Classical Econophysics by Cockshott, et al. includes a fantastic chapter on information theory and the productive process.
