Ciberincidentes de secuestro de dispositivos médicos (medjacking)

While many worry about technology and the labour market, others are optimistic about technology’s capacity to save the world from the exis-tential problem of climate change. For the most part, Marxism has been comparatively slow to engage with the issue of climate. It is relatively easy to use Marxist thought to draw some fairly glib conclusions: given that capitalism needs to keep expanding and consuming more resources, and given that we have already seen the weakness of governments to interfere in this process, we might surmise that capitalism dooms the world to climate disaster.

technology . ¹⁴⁵

Jason Moore coins the term ‘capitalocene’ as a twist on the trendy (in academic circles) ‘anthropocene’.²⁵ The latter term is intended to indicate that we have now entered a period of history in which human activity, rather than anything out of our control – such as continental drifts or colliding asteroids – exerts a decisive influence on the world’s climate. Moore does not like this term because it imposes a vague collective responsibility on all humans, whereas in fact fossil fuel con-sumption is overwhelmingly conducted by the world’s elite businesses.

So the ‘anthropocene’, from a Marxist perspective, is a bit of a sick joke, since it implies guilt shared across an entire species when in fact the vast majority of that species are completely shut out from any say over how fossil fuels are used and consumed.

It is usually assumed that action on climate change can only function if it is conducted ‘at the international level’. This is, evidently, because there is no incentive for individual countries to regulate over issues like carbon emissions on their own, especially in the ‘competition state’ described in Chapter 4. Because international cooperation weakens the pressures on states to compete by slashing environmental regulations or strength-ening labour discipline, it is worrying to capital.²⁶ But the problem is that, precisely because of these competitive pressures acting on states, it is dubious to what extent a proper ‘international level’ actually exists.

Any international institution is a product of its constituent parts, i.e.

national-level governments, and the urgent need for national govern-ments to push the agendas that will best benefit capital accumulation in their particular territories presents powerful obstacles to genuine trans-national cooperation. The ‘structural power of capital’ inclines trans-national governments to compete, not cooperate.²⁷

Consequently (particularly following the US’s withdrawal from the Paris Agreement), there is pessimism about the prospects of governments intervening effectively around climate change. Some have responded with wishful thinking about the prospects of ‘new’ forms of ‘socially responsible’ capitalism emerging. This kind of thing usually involves a seemingly bottomless faith in ‘the market’ and the supposed human ingenuity it conjures: why not just rely on capitalists’ desire for profit to prompt them to invent some new commodity that can solve the problem of climate change?²⁸ In this sense, the world being saved depends on the brilliant whims of telegenic entrepreneurs like Elon Musk. Maybe some form of new technology will be invented that saves the world from these

146 . class matters

terrible problems, without us having to make any significant changes to our economic system.

In Marxist terms, there is little value in speculating about the transfor-mative power of technology unless we also consider how this technology may affect the kind of social and economic structures we have (and vice versa). This is difficult to do. Steven Shaviro, for instance, has criticised science fiction authors for the way they have imagined ‘post-Singularity’

worlds²⁹ – in other words, worlds where technology has progressed to such an extent that human existence is totally transformed and all needs can be fulfilled more or less instantly. He notices that many authors that write about this sort of thing seem unable to imagine how this might actually affect human society, and tend to assume that various things – ‘private property, capital accumulation, branding and advertis-ing, stringent copyright enforcement and, above all “business models”’

– would largely still exist in the same forms as they do today. The point here is that just as it is strange to imagine technological change without considering how that effects society, it is equally bizarre to suppose that technology alone can save the world from ecological disaster without corresponding changes to the way society is organised.

This obsession with technological change as the main motor of human advancement, has, for some people, become a ridiculous and pitiful cult.

Consider the following account of an Apple product launch, which illus-trates the perfect intersection between smoke-and-mirrors bullshit and hard-line control freakery on the part of capital:

[Steve] Jobs’s demonstration of the new phone … was a tremendous piece of salesmanship. It’s all the more impressive in retrospect, because we now know that the iPhone was nowhere near ready. The music player had a tendency to conk out mid-song, the battery died at random, it would let a user send an email and surf the net in that order but the reverse sequence would crash it. Phone reception was a weak point (it still is) so AT&T set up a special tower to boost the signal;

also the phone Jobs used on stage was rigged to display five full bars of signal at all times. He had done what seemed like a hundred rehearsals and things kept going wrong. During this process he was, according to one of the engineers present, relatively restrained. ‘Mostly he just looked at you and very directly said in a very loud and stern voice, “you are fucking up my company” or “if we fail, it will be because of you”’.³⁰

technology . ¹⁴⁷

All this bullshit for what is essentially a slightly zazzed-up mobile phone.

As David Graeber points out, it is hardly the flying cars and robots with laser eyes that sci-fi writers from the 1950s liked to imagine we’d have by now.³¹ There is a significant gap between the kind of technological revo-lutions capitalists praise themselves for, and the actual extent of progress that capitalism as a system can tolerate.

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