the source document is entitled SCIENTIFIC AND TECHNOLOGICAL OPTIONS ASSESSMENT (STOA ). AN APPRAISAL OF TECHNOLOGIES OF POLITICAL CONTROL Luxembourg, 6 January 1998 European Parliament http://www.iwar.org.uk/sigint/resources/stoa/stoa-atpc-so.htm
this is only a summary document. unfortunately the original source document which amounted to approx 100 pages with diagrams can no longer be found
The report contains seven substantive sections which cover respectively:
(i) The role and function of the technology of political control;
(ii) Recent trends and innovations (including the implications of globalisation, militarisation of police equipment, convergence of control systems deployed worldwide and the implications of increasing technology and decision drift);
(iii) Developments in surveillance technology (including the emergence of new forms of local, national and international communications interceptions networks and the creation of human recognition and tracking devices);
(iv) Innovations in crowd control weapons (including the evolution of a 2nd. generation of so called 'less-lethal weapons' from nuclear labs in the USA).
(v) The emergence of prisoner control as a privatised industry, whilst state prisons face increasing pressure to substitute technology for staff in cost cutting exercises and the social and political implications of replacing policies of rehabilitation with strategies of human warehousing.
(vi) The use of science and technology to devise new efficient mark-free interrogation and torture technologies and their proliferation from the US & Europe.
(vii) The implications of vertical and horizontal proliferation of this technology and the need for an adequate political response by the EU, to ensure it neither threatens civil liberties in Europe, nor reaches the hands of tyrants.
"..all the technology of political control has three components, hardware, software and liveware* (the human elements), which are all woven together to form manipulative programmes of socio-political control." - STOA, European Parliament - 1997
=============================================================
Underlying assumptions about power/control are assumed as a 'given' within the official ideological framework of representative 'democracy', the nation-state, 'progress', the 'law', or the global economy - however all these concepts are up for grabs today, whether it be by elites, the middle-class or the lumpenproletariat rabble.
What is apparent from reports such as STOA is that legislation/government can no longer keep up with technology - they can only (at best) hope to regulate it. The inability of the old-guard political elites to regulate economy/technology is a signifier of their demotion to playing second fiddle to that other elite - the 'merchant enterpriser', which temporarily lost predominance for a brief period (50 years) to the various 'communist' and socialdemocratic regimes (app 1920-75). With the re-establishment of the mercantilist paradigm, the relationship of technology to capital accumulation becomes of primary importance, undermining the old order of 'national sovereignty' (e.g. Westphalian system of government) and reducing the role of the state to a safety-net. However such 'winding back of the state' does not, as neo-liberal rhetoric would have us believe, mean less interference into the lives of citizens- it simply means that the bureacracy is 'outsourced' into private hands (unaccountable private states).
As Brian Oliver Sheppard notes; "this (privatisation) is not eliminating the state. The armies of these states, the police forces, the jails, the property laws that protect corporate assets, the hierarchical system of governance that allows corporations to make deals with a minority of "leaders" that ostensibly represent the entire nation - these integral functions of the state are still useful. The most violent aspects of nation-states are retained as corporate power becomes globalised; the ones that get in the way are eliminated."[1]
Because parliaments in representative 'democracies' are unable to control international capital or technology through legislation they must still serve some 'function' and so will legislate in the one place where they still have power - over the lives of citizens. The technologies of "socio-political control" are required to ensure a compliant herd to feed an ever-expanding market [see; Hobson] In the words of the United States Dept of 'Defence': "Expansion is the path to security".[2] This logic not only applies to the individual who may fail to integrate into the micro-macro economy, but also to the 'rogue' state which may for various reasons (political, ideological, economic, cultural) fail to 'integrate' into the New World Order. The policy of integration - being based upon 'scientific' western universalism and developmentalism - must then apply equally to all regimes, whether of the despotic variety or the "threat of a good example." [Chomsky]
The ECONOMIC CONTEXT of MICRO & MACRO MANAGEMENT.
The predominant trend of the last few decades has been to disconnect economics even further from the broader field of the social sciences (politics, philosophy, sociology etc.) and to present it as a 'value-free' or even a 'pure' science. In this utopia the economy is portrayed as a sensitive machine to be touched only by experts, or perhaps more recently as an 'anarchic' system or homeostatic feedback-loop which effectively runs on auto-pilot.[3] The overall result of this bastardisation of economics into a bland functionalism or 'systems theory' has been to further reduce the human element to a disposable production/consumption unit within the grow-or-die economy. "..in economic liberalism, there is no politics and no ethics whatsoever; there are only the economic collisions of monads in the market, watched over by the �neutral� presence of the minimal state."[4]
It's hardly surprising then that 'socio-political control' becomes the material expression of the (formerly)CENTRALISED and HIERARCHICAL MACRO and MICRO economic systems. The visible expression of this system manifests itself in the technologies of control which fulfill the function of both protecting existing capital, and seeking out potential locations for 'footloose' global capital (currently around $7trillion). An interesting feature of the role of new technology is that it assists this process not only in the traditional geographical realms but also in new 3rd-dimensional realms of innerspace-micro (e.g. bio-piracy, nano-technology, pharmaceuticals etc) or outerspace-macro (Starwars etc). Despite the 'liberal' rhetoric, this is in reality the antithesis of what Karl Popper called the 'Open Society, it is a closed and self-feeding system which produces its own internal logic (expansion) and the necessary tools (its own specific technology) for self-replication[5]. It must then by its very nature control the individual (micro-management).
This model is in fact a mechanism which generates a self-fulfilling prophesy as regarding both individual 'victims' as well as 'failed' states.[6] All opponents can be controlled through co-dependency/co-authority (as liveware) or, as a last resort fed into one of the self-expanding feeder institutions (such as the prison-industrial complex). Because the 'model' must either expand or die, it must then, under the guise of 'development', interfere in new territories (the periphery) eroding traditional (non-integrated) societies/ecologies.[7] Once the dubious privilege of 'failed state' (or failed citizen) is achieved, the "technology of socio-political control" is implemented to achieve "full spectrum dominance", reap profit, eradicate the virus and prepare the region for assimilation.
The technology produced by this system is not 'neutral' but takes on the very characteristics of its creator [] -- essentially that of control/manipulation (reflects hierarchy). An alternative form of social/economic order based upon the real needs of people would result in a different form of technology, while existing technology would be adapted for peaceful purposes. However for any such form to come into existence the contradictions of capitalism must be fully overcome.
[1] 'The Anarcho-Syndicalist Answer to Corporate Globalisation' - Brian Oliver Sheppard, Anarcho-Syndicalist Review, (USA) 2002
[2] see: United States D.O.D National Defence Strategy -- March 2005
[3] "capitalist ideologues today... are fetishizing the entire social system as a self-organizing complex totality. As Marx wrote in section 4 of the first chapter of Capital, capitalists attempt to present social relations as relations among things, and to endow things (commodities) with agency. The ontological status between subjects and objects, in other words, is inverted, as subjects become object-like and objects become subject-like." [Best & Kellner; 'Kevin Kelly's Complexity Theory: The Politics and Ideology of Self-Organizing Systems']
[4] CHAMSY OJEILI 'Post-modernism, the Return to Ethics, and the Crisis of Socialist Values'
[5] "..if technology is culture, modern Western culture has become technical, in that it tends to reshape itself in the light of the appropriate conditions for technical innovation." [Samir Amin - MALDEVELOPMENT - ANATOMY OF A GLOBAL FAILURE. UNU press]
[6] "..the real harm of the Washington Consensus (i.e. neo-liberal marketisation model) has yet to be properly recognized: that it is a prescription for generating failed states around the world among developing economies. Even in the developed economies, neo-liberalism generates a dangerous but generally unacknowledged failed-state syndrome." [The failed-state cancer' - By Henry C K Liu - Asia Times]
[7] "A country or region is functioning if it can handle the content flows (ideas, services, money, and media) that come with integrating the national with the global economy. A country or region is functioning when it seeks to harmonize its �internal rule sets� with the emerging global rule of democracy, rule of law, and free markets-for example, by gaining admittance to the WTO. A country is �disconnected� when it fails to gain the confidence of multinational corporations, which limits foreign investment." [Thomas Barnett -senior strategic researcher at the U.S. Naval War College]
The Noose Tightens: Science, Surveillance and the Culture of Control