The centre cannot hold

Nowadays it is an article of faith for our great and good that we are living in the Information Age and building the Knowledge Society. That’s why we should be moving faster on broadband. It’s why we want our children to have access to computers in school. It’s why we see ourselves moving up the food chain in terms of the kind of jobs we see ourselves doing, individually and collectively.

In this new society, information and knowledge are commodities, tradeable and valuable. But what do we mean by these two words?
Certainly, the present Governments of Ireland and the United Kingdom (to name but two) encourage the entrepreneurs of the Knowledge Society and the use of the Internet and information technologies. But when you look at what they do, as opposed to what they say, it appears that they have a less expansive definition of the terms than many of us might like.
Indeed, to these politicians the Knowledge Society is either a way to reduce the need to employ civil servants – it’s hard to get a human voice answering a phone and most information is posted on a website. Alternatively, they see it as a shopping process, envisaging the Internet as a virtual mall.
For all the positive hype, information and knowledge are always potential casualties of power and such utilitarian views make this all the more likely. Ireland has yet to see overt official endorsement for the kind of totalitarian Big Brother total surveillance that has been so enthusiastically espoused in the UK, but it’s not far from the surface.
This is odd, given that one of the Government parties claims to be a liberal reforming party strongly committed to the defence of individual freedoms.
Actually, the degree to which the PDs practise the opposite to what they preach can be mind-boggling. During the last election campaign Michael McDowell said that if Labour were elected they would tax and spend. He promised that the PDs wouldn’t allow this. Well, okay, personal taxes haven’t been raised to pay for public services, but we have seen an unprecedented escalation of stealth taxes and tolls under the present regime. Like, there’s a difference?
Politicians regularly conflate ‘information’ with ‘spin’ and, like many of his colleagues, McDowell has proved no slouch in this regard. Even Peter Mandelson would have been impressed at the urgency with which he rushed out a statement that 2002’s huge rise in serious crime had been reversed.
Maybe, but over the last week two cars have been broken into outside my door. An attempt was made to steal a car belonging to a family member and in the case of another relative, a motorcycle was stolen.
Everywhere you go, you hear of robberies and attacks. Newspapers report the activities of literally dozens of gangs. Apparently paramilitaries are closely involved, and, as RTE’s Prime Time Investigates alleges, some Gardaí aren’t much better. The idea that the present regime’s policies are reducing crime levels is laughable.
But McDowell got his message out before anyone had the chance to get stuck into the figures contained in the Garda Commissioner’s report…
Well, that’s one of the perks of being in power – you have knowledge and you have control over information. That, I suppose, is why democrats and dictators alike pay such close attention to influencing (or indeed, controlling) the media.
A control culture pervades our political and local authority elite. Indeed many commentators have argued that the present Government has created a nanny state every bit as contemptuous, controlling, authoritarian and intrusive as Sweden in the 1970s and 1980s.
Perhaps this is unduly pessimistic. But consideration of the reaction of Charlie McCreevy to reservations about civil service decentralisation or dispersal doesn’t give much cheer. Why wouldn’t senior civil servants move from Dublin, he asked. Won’t they be able to sell their big houses in Dublin for big prices and buy even better houses down the country?
You’d swear he was doing them a favour. Like handing them a winning lotto ticket. No thought that these people might actually like where they live or that they and their families might be embedded in their communities. He seemed to see their houses as mere commodities. Is this what is meant by the phrase ‘he knows the price of everything and the value of nothing’?
The thing is, a sense of ‘value’ is actually a defining characteristic of the Knowledge Society. Far from engaging in frenzied upward mobility, commodification and consumerism, its advance guard is emerging as hip, subversive, questing, centred and, for all the virtuality and technical wizardry, grounded.
And it has a way of turning control systems on their head. Like the use of mobiles to gather the crowd that overthrew Milosevic and the use of camphone snaps by hip-hop fans in Portland Oregon to expose police racism.
Nothing will be quite like we think. Happy New Year...