THE ROAD TO FREEDOM (PART TWO)
When Hayek wrote his book there was no Internet. Nobody was a blogger. Not one video had been uploaded. There was not a single Wikipedia entry, not one modded videogame. Linux and bitcoin were not words in anyone’s vocabulary. Now, such things are a ubiquitous part of modern life and most of them are free, part of the collaborative commons. OK, the price of bitcoin went crazily high but its founder provided the underlying blockchain of technology gratis, and made its white paper public knowledge so anyone could improve and expand upon it to create stuff like a decentralised social media site built on a blockchain.
Indeed, there’s now a great many things we can do on a voluntary basis. Much of the content of the web owes its existence more to passion than the pursuit of money. Jeremy Rifkin calls this ‘collaboratism’. Collaboratism means engaging in work not because financial pressures or some authority compels you, but because the means of producing and distributing stuff has become cheap enough that anyone with any drive to do something has the means to flex their creative muscles, and to connect with others with complementary skills and weaknesses.
This kind of technological progress changes many things. For example, when you have ready access to manufacturing or logistical systems it makes more sense not to have private ownership of stuff (which nearly always entails that stuff sitting in storage not being used for most of its life) but rather using stuff as and when you need it, and then making it available for others to use when you don’t. Think, for example, of driverless cars that could be there when you need transport and make themselves available for others to use if not. If that car was your own private possession, it would probably be parked somewhere not being used by anyone for long stretches. What a waste of resources!
This is the kind of world advocated by the Zeitgeist Movement. Critics of Peter Joseph tend to dismiss him using the same arguments Hayek used in ‘Road’. But this is to fundamentally misunderstand Joseph’s position. He is in no way advocating any centralised control, but rather more efficient decentralised methods than the corrupt monetary systems that are leaking value from today’s markets.
As to why neo-liberals tend to mistake Zeitgeist’s resource-based economy for central planning, maybe it can be traced back to concept drawings by Jacques Fresco? His Venus project shows plans for cities whose infrastructure is organised into a circle, at the centre of which sits a big computer monitoring the various flows of information a city generates. Such an illustration sure makes it seem like a centralised authority is in charge.
(Image from The Venus Project)
But you have to bare in mind that this city-wide perspective is only one viewpoint. If we could zoom out, we would see that the spokes of this ‘wheel’ radiate out beyond the confines of the city to connect with other cities, such that it becomes a node in a web of interconnected smart cities. Or, you could zoom in to a more personal level, and see that each person is a node in the network thanks to the web-enabled devices they have ready access to. Just shift perspective and what seems like a centralised master computer turns out to be a node in a network.
(Image by author)
I would make an analogy with the web of life. Imagine telling somebody that there is a digital programme, encoded in DNA, running evolution. Imagine that person demanding to know where, precisely, the computer running this programme is located, and also telling you evolution can’t possibly work because Hayek proved centralised planning is hopeless. This would be a fundamental misunderstanding, because the code of life is not to be found in any particular location, but rather distributed throughout the world. Nobody is in charge, there is no top-down authority commanding natural selection.
Similarly, when confronted with Zeitgeist’s outline for systems of feedback that would enable us to track the world’s resources and manage them according to the principles of technical efficiency, it’s always denounced by critics as central planning. It’s almost as if such people forget the Internet ever existed.
When Hayek wrote ‘Road,’ mass production was the most obvious manifestation of market competition’s drive to produce sellable commodities, and mass production at that time was largely dependent on factories powered by large stations. Those were hugely expensive means of production that only a minority could afford to own, and which were most efficiently run along fascist lines. You might have been free to quit your job but once you clocked in you become part of a vertically-integrated management structure and had authorities whose orders had to be obeyed (and who, for the most part, were more interested in lining their own pockets and those of the banking and governmental masters they answered to than rewarding your efforts).
In marked contrast, the technologies of the 21st century could enable production by the masses, for the simple reason that the means of production and distribution could become ever more accessible in terms of cost and ease-of-use. Few can own a factory but if the price-performance of atomically-precise manufacturing goes far enough, what is effectively a factory in a box could sit beside your printer, and if robots follow the same trajectory as computers they should go from being very limited, expensive and largely inaccessible labour-saving devices to cheap, versatile, user-friendly, ubiquitous helpers. We could all become owners of the means of production. Such a decentralised form of production works best when we act as collaborating individuals united by complementary strengths and weaknesses in laterally-scaled networks, which is quite different from the vertically-integrated management that jobs have traditionally been designed around.
CONCLUSION.
When Hayek wrote ‘Road’, the only alternative to free markets he could imagine was central planning. But really, who could blame him? There was no satellite communication, hardly anybody had access to computers and the World Wide Web did not exist. In short there was none of the infrastructure that the digital commons needs to get off the ground, making it perfectly reasonable for Hayek not to consider collaboratism as a viable alternative to the selfish pursuit of money.
Now, the infrastructure is beginning to fall into place. We have a communications web, an information web, and the beginnings of a logistic web and energy web too. Thanks to advances in artificial intelligence, robotics, nanotechnology and more, we are approaching the point of near zero-marginal cost for the creation and delivery of all kinds of content, not just digital stuff but physical stuff too. We can now work together, forming groups and collaborating on projects out of passion rather than out of some selfish pursuit of monetary gain.
‘The Road To Serfdom still stands as an effective argument that market competition is preferable to central planning. But when you consider how laissez-faire principles brought about the financial crisis of 2008 (Wall Street really did take advantage of Ayn Rand devotee Alan Greenspan’s deregulation and the commodifying of political influence to make fraudulent activity legal and prey on people’s financial gullibility) and the impossibility of sustaining free market principles in anything that resembles the way market competition actually developed (covered in my essay series ‘This Is What You get’) I suspect that, were he alive today, Hayek would be championing the Zeitgeist movement as the best way of bringing about prosperity. In 1944 there may have been no viable alternative to neo-liberalism, but that’s changing.
REFERENCES
“The Road To Serfdom” by Hayek
‘Zeitgeist Movement Defined’
‘The Zero-Marginal Cost Society’ by Jeremy Rifkin
‘Age Of Spiritual Machines and ‘The Singularity Is near’ by Ray Kurzweil
‘The Meaning Of The 21st Century’ by James Martin.
“Bullshit Jobs: A Theory” by David Graeber