KEY POINTS:
Since the 1960s, politicians and pundits have predicted the imminent arrival of a digital utopia in which robots would do the washing up and we would live in peace and harmony in an electronically connected, global village, thanks to the net.
So why are the utopian visions of
40 years ago strangely similar to the ones we hold today?
Because business and political leaders have consistently pushed a carefully orchestrated fantasy of the future to distract us from the present, says Richard Barbrook, who explores the subject in Imaginary Futures - From Thinking Machines to the Global Village.
Barbrook, a senior lecturer in politics at the University of Westminster, wants to show how ideology is used to warp time. "In other words, how we're told that the importance of a new technology lies not in what it can do in the here and now, but what the more advanced models might be able to do one day."
He is particularly interested in exposing the "nonsense of technological determinism", which he describes as "the theory that someone builds a machine, the machine sprouts legs and runs around the world changing it".
Barbrook believes we can trace today's views of technology to the Cold War; when the USSR and the United States dedicated huge resources to demonstrating which empire better represented progress and modernity.
During that period, the US repackaged the space rockets, atomic reactors and computer mainframes it was developing in the pursuit of atomic Armageddon into prototypes of better things to come.
"Nasa's spaceships would evolve into luxurious interplanetary passenger liners," says Barbrook.
"General Electric's nuclear fission reactors would become fusion plants providing limitless energy for all. IBM's computers were prototypes of artificial intelligence."
Soon, the implication went, loyal obedient robots would be at humanity's beck and call.
But America's packaging of the internet in the service of anti-communism has been the most significant influence on our thinking today, by Barbrook's analysis.
Otherwise, why do most of us pick the internet as the technology that has transformed our lives? After all, if we really considered what has made a difference, "it's as likely to be soap or the contraceptive pill or antibiotics, which you could argue are more important than the convergence of computing, telecommunications and the media".
So in 2007, with our mobile phones, computers and high-speed broadband connections, are we still hypnotised by Cold War spin, patiently waiting for technology to deliver our utopian future? In his book, Barbrook outlines how the internet was always a political and ideological project.
America decided to build it because the CIA discovered the Russians were building it first.
The central idea was that the fusion of broadcasting, computing and telecommunications would create a new - and better - social order. The "information society" came from a US Government remix of the ideas of Marshall McLuhan, the professor who coined the phrases "the global village" and "the medium is the message". We have been living with the belief that technologies "transform society" ever since, he claims.
Moreover, the same idea has been recycled with different terminology for at least four decades.
"In the 1970s it was futurology, in the 1980s Silicon Valley hype, in the 1990s the dotcom bubble and now we have Web 2.0," Barbrook points out.
So why do we continue to believe that some sort of digital utopia is just around the corner?
Barbrook says it is partly because the concept of the information age came complete with new types of workers who, instead of producing goods and services, would create "knowledge".
He describes these "knowledge workers"along the lines of the Leninist vanguard party. "Lenin always appeals to people on the left selling newspapers because Lenin said the people who sell the newspapers are leading the revolution."
In this case, the "vanguard" comprises technologists, academics and journalists who perpetuate the idea that technology is changing the world.
"People who are writing about technology love a theory that says they are the most important people in society," Barbrook says.
But as he admits, technological determinism is also appealing because of the complex society we live in.
"When you use your Oyster [prepaid travel] card in the Tube, you're not thinking that you're creating a relationship between the work you're doing and all the people who are working on the Tube," he says.
"But that is exactly what's going on. We don't see it because it is all mediated through technology."
In a final effort to destroy any vestiges of belief in technological determinism, Barbrook says: "Although they would see each other as ideologically opposite, Tony Blair and Osama bin Laden both have the same view of the world - they are both McLuhanists."
Five years before 9/11, the leader of al Qaeda was declaring that the "world is becoming like a small village", says Barbrook, referring to a passage in Abdel Bari Atwan's book, The Secret History of al-Qaida. "Three years ago Tony Blair stood up at the Labour Party conference and said we are entering the knowledge economy."
Barbrook has an amusing take on our distorted - if not delusional - relationship with technology, but his underlying point is serious: future visions of technology are used to distract us and control us.
-OBSERVER
