Data Trash: The Theory of the Virtual Class

Geert Lovink

Vol 1 #4, Spring 1996

Canadian media theorist, Arthur Kroker, is the author of The Possessed Individual, Spasm and Hacking the Future. In recent years, he and Marilouise Kroker have often been in Europe and made appearances at Virtual Futures, V-2, Eldorado/ Antwerpen, etc. Recently, they have also been discovered in German-speaking countries. Both are noted for their compact jargon, which makes their message seem to drown somewhat in over-complex code. But Data Trash: The Theory of the Virtual Class (1994) changed all that.[1] The long trek through squashy discourses had not been in vain. Firmly rooted in European philosophy, without being submerged, Arthur Kroker has found his topic: the virtual class.

The ongoing worldwide commercialisation of the net has produced a new sector in economic, and hence social, categories. Kroker’s virtual class appears to be remarkably aggressive and cynical and, as anyone can observe, has little to do with grassroots democracy or issues of public access. In today’s exploding digital markets, it’s about grabbing as much as you can. Now that he has been able to define the adversary in such clear terms, Kroker is understandably thriving. The critics in the media are outraged: Why such pessimism? Aren’t the good intentions of the media pioneers there for all to see? The rapping Kroker is becoming a nuisance. Apparently, he is kicking where it hurts.

Kroker wrote Data Trash together with Michael Weinstein, a political philosopher, rap poet and photography critic for The Chicago Tribune. According to Kroker, he is also ‘a Nietzschean underground man who thinks deeply about the United States.’ Arthur and Michael met during the Vietnam years and have collaborated for the past 20 years on the Canadian Journal for Political and Social Theory (now the electronic magazine CTHEORY). Data Trash is hyper-topical, which is remarkable for such a slow medium as a book. It leaves manuals, introductions and speculations behind in favour of a pincer movement, telling the story of the rise of a new class while, at the same time, reflecting upon its consequences. This is a far cry from the usual activities of media theorists for whom the net is still more something of a rumour than a concrete experience.

I asked Kroker how it is that his book can be so topical and reflective at the same time. His response was: ‘My body does a lot of travelling. I like to take deep plunges in San Francisco, spreading psychosis. I visit MIT and the Boston area, and I spend time in Europe as well, roaming between Grenoble and Munich, to understand the cybermatrices. And I spend a lot of time on the net.’ Data Trash was written on the net; the writers haven’t seen each other face to face in five years. ‘We experienced that there was a third person, the third mind, who wrote the book. The computer had come alive and Data Trash was the result.’

The cultural strategy followed in this book is called ‘Hacking the Media’. ‘We like the notion of over-identifying with the feared and desired object, to such a point of obsession that you begin to take a bath in its acid juices. You travel so deeply and quickly in cyberculture that you force it to do things it never wanted to. I try to live my philosophy through cyberculture.’ For Michael Weinstein, too, it was an unique situation because he largely resists the glowing horizon of technoculture and does not live in the corporate capital of America. Instead, he dwells in the twilight zone of Chicago, which produces rough Midwestern thinkers who reflect on the howling winds of sacrificial violence and the decline of the American empire.

Why does this emerging class not have a class consciousness of its own?

AK: ‘If it did, it would be doomed as the emergent class. Data Trash is on suicidal and passive nihilism, as the radical Nietzsche predicted it in his Genealogy of Morals. Virtual Reality (VR) means to us the humiliating reduction of human beings to servo mechanisms, or, as Heidegger would say, a standing reserve – the humiliation of the flesh as you are poked and proved and sucked by the harvesting machines of the virtual reality scanners.’

To Kroker and Weinstein, VR does not mean head-mounted scanners and data gloves. In their terminology, VR is a whole assemblage of experiences involving a traditional class consciousness, the spread of the ideology of technoculture and the hegemony of ‘liberal fascism’ and its swing back into ‘retro fascism’ as the political force behind the so-called ‘Will to Virtuality’. Data Trash seems the purest consummation of Marxism, the severance of the commodity form from its economic base, into the notion of the pure aestheticisation of experience. Kroker explains: ‘We talk about the recombinant commodity form, in an economy run by the biological logic of cloning, displacing and re-sequencing. Or virtualised exchange, the replacement of a consumer culture by the desire to simply disappear, from shopping to turning your body into a brand name sign.’

Now that the Berlin wall has crumbled and everyone has left Marxism, Kroker and Weinstein have gone back to Marx for a close reading of the transition of capitalism into the phase of pure commoditisation. Living in America is not a question of trying to catch up with the media. The body is always moving to the rhythm of the media itself. Data Trash begins with two fundamental rejections: the techno-utopian stance taken by Howard Rheingold in his book, Virtual Communities (not the same Rheingold after his HotWired experience), and Neil Postman’s neoconservative position. On the other hand, it critiques all brands of technological determinism which state that we don’t have choices; there are real contradictions and lots of fractures, even in the supposedly closed virtual class. For Kroker and Weinstein, the field of political contestation is wide open.

GL: But is this class in itself not already virtual, in the sense of being invisible, dispersed and without clearly formulated class interests?

AK: We have done our investigations in many countries to try to understand the different class fractions. How would the virtual class be actualised in France as opposed to America or Canada? In every case, it turns out to be this curious mixture of predatory capitalism and computer visionarism, but it strikes us that it is a coherent class with pretty straightforward ideological objectives: It has to suppress the working class. In North America, one should position it within the framework of the NAFTA agreements. It freezes the working class and lower middle class in place so that they cannot move easily over national borders. When the workers complain, then they bring in the mechanism of a disciplinary state: the punitive side of the virtual class.

It’s commonplace rhetoric now: they have to stampede everybody on the information superhighway, and every businessman knows that, if you’re not going on it soon, you are going to be eliminated, economically and historically. And this whole notion has been appropriated by the virtual class. But, at the same time, it is not a traditional class because it does not operate in the traditional logic of the political economy. The very notion of capitalism has already mutated, not really into technology but into virtuality. Our work is a prolegomenon to the study of the virtual class, about the coming to be of a much more sinister and demonic force and that’s the ‘Will to Virtuality’, a deeply disturbing, nihilistic aspect of the culture in which we live. It’s about this suicidal urge to feed human flesh into image processing machines, in such intensity, hyper acceleration and suicidal seductiveness that flesh appears humiliated before it.

In the end, you have to choose an existence as an ‘honoured collaborator’, in Whitehead’s sense of technoculture, rather than not act at all. For a lot of thinkers, the position of the human species as honoured collaborator of technoculture is their idea of a modernist position, what I call ‘technological emergentism’. The human species is being superseded by technology. All right, they say (the Shannons, McLuhans, et al.), but we can still be an honoured collaborator, we can probe around the world and we can have media extensions of man. The notion of exteriorisation is the possibility of discovering new religious epiphanies of technological experience. We reject that perspective. It is not about ‘reaching out’ but about ‘reaching in’.

GL: How does the virtual class relate to neoliberalism?

AK: The political programme of the virtual class goes way beyond the Reagonomics and Thacherism of the ’80s. The agenda of the corporate class is to remove all barriers for the transnational movement of products. The knowledge industry, which is computer-based, should also move freely and universally. The technocratic class is not so much conservative as liberal;

it stands in opposition to national political forces that would obstruct pure transnationalism. President Bill Gates and President Bill Clinton have a common class ambition: to get everyone on the cybernet as fast as possible, through ‘policies of facilitation’. Cyberspace promises better communication, greater interactivity, speed, a whole seductive rhetoric is on offer. Once everyone is on, there’s going to be privatisation, what we call the ‘politics of consolidation’: shutting down the net in favour of commercial interest or pay in order to have your body accessed.’

GL: Yet, to outsiders, this virtual class doesn’t appear to have an aggressive policy at all. Its daily work, writing software, seems to be pretty dull and harmless.

AK: A characteristic of the virtual class is that it is autistic. It’s an absolute meltdown of human beings into these autistic, historically irresponsible positions with the sexuality of juvenile boys, being happy with machines. Shutting down the mental horizon while communicating at a global level and preaching disappearance. And, why not, because you’ve already disappeared yourself? But, as the guide at Xerox Parc said, ‘Who needs the self anyway?’ Privacy, for these people, has always been imposed on human beings by corporations; it’s not something they claim they wanted. The Xerox Parc of the future is not about copying paper anymore but copying bodies into image processing machines. And who needs privacy in such a situation?

The other mental characteristic of the virtual class is that it is deeply authoritarian. It believes that virtuality equals the coming to be of a fully free human society. As CEOs of leading corporations used to say, ‘adapt or you’re toast’, and they utter this with the total smugness of complacency itself. The other side of cyber-authoritarianism is the absolute outrage that grips them in the presence of opposition. Qualms about the emergence of the virtual class, or about the social consequences of technology, are met with either indifference or total outrage. Quite on the contrary, members of the virtual class see themselves as the missionaries of the human race itself, the avant-garde, in their terms, of the honourable collaboration with the telematic machines.

The virtual class has this aspect of seduction and then, on the other hand, the policy of consolidation, which is the present reality in which we live. It is a grim and severe and deeply fascistic class because it operates by means of the disciplinary state, imposing real austerity programmes in order to fund the research efforts benefiting itself. At the same time, it politically controls the working classes by severe taxation in order to make sure that people cannot be economically mobile and cannot accumulate capital in their own right. When it comes to Third World nations, they act in a classically fascistic way. They impose strict anti-emigration policies in the name of humanistic gestures. They shield their own local populaces from the influx of immigrants by creating a ‘bunker state’, by going for a ‘Will to Purity’.

We’re not dealing here with a ‘Will to Power’ or a ‘Decline of the Western Society’ but with a ‘Recline of the West’ and a ‘Will to Virtuality’. The recliner is a new representative persona on the stage of world history. The recliner is best captured by the US TV series, The Simpsons, ‘Just blame it on the guy who doesn’t speak English, oh, he works for me.’ Truly retro-fascistic ideas put into the mouth of cartoon characters. Bill Clinton is the perfect representative of the weak will, full of moral vacillations, yet authoritarian at the same time.’

GL: Still, you are not moving into a technophobic position, you use computers yourself and enjoy them. How can we make a distinction between the goals of this virtual class and opposite, alternative ways of using technologies?

AK: I have to be honest with myself, it’s hard to think of life without computers. On the basis of real struggle and reflexion, I genuinely believe that these technologies do offer alternative possibilities from domination, towards certain forms of emancipation. Data Trash is also written as a manifesto for the coming to be of geek flesh, a realistic look at the world.

It would be interesting to look at the role of traditional political strategies in cyberspace itself. For example, the notion of ‘Squatting the Media’ is, for me, a fundamental point of media contestation and a theory in itself. Just as interesting would be the question of subversive forms of sexuality in cyberspace, like what the cyberfeminist group, VNS-Matrix, from Australia is doing: trying to make the stable science systems as unstable as possible to open up possibilities for ambiguity and paradox and for the reversal of reversionary mechanisms. That is done now through these playful, but deadly serious, interventions into the media-net itself, enriched with imagination. It attacks the system exactly in its own language and opens up possibilities for democratic consensus, without in any way being dogmatic.

‘Squatting the Media’ is, after all, politically significant, but it does not want to be explicit about it. When Karl Jaspers wrote Man and the Modern Condition, he said that the fundamental act of political rebellion today is the human being who refuses, who says no. It marks the end of any hegemonic ideological position and the beginning of politics again. ‘Squatting the Media’ represents a refusal and marks a return of morality into politics. It would be important to take practical examples of subversive intentions that operate deeply in cybernetic language itself, not outside of the media-net but inside it.’

Footnote 1:

Arthur Kroker and Michael A. Weinstein, Data Trash, the Theory of the Virtual Class, New York: St. Martin's Press, 1994