Hi everyone, This is the third issue of this newsletter about the left and technology. If you have no Fully Automated Luxury Communism Newsletter This newsletter is about fully automated luxury communism: how technology can help bring about a high-tech, post-work, post-capitalist society. Every two weeks you will receive technology stories from areas such as labour-saving technology, self-driving cars, space exploration, reproductive technologies and of course leftist shenanigans. Hi everyone, This is the third issue of this newsletter about the left and technology. If you have not done so yet, you can subscribe at the following link Every two weeks this newsletter brings links, snippets and interesting facts about technology from a left perspective. It hopes to spark a greater discussion among the left about the opportunities and threats that tech brings. This week I talk about net neutrality and a socialised internet. This newsletter and my own thoughts are very much a work in progress, so any tips, comments, messages or corrections are strongly welcomed.

So let me know at: fullyalc@gmail.com or via Twitter @AutomatedFully Net neutrality and the left Ajit Pai On the 14th of December (next week Thursday), the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (F.C.C.) will most likely vote to repeal Obama-era regulations under influence from its right-wing chairman Ajit Pai. With them they would also repeal net neutrality regulations, essentially allowing internet service providers (ISPs) to leverage their control over internet infrastructure to prioritise certain types of internet traffic over others. If you are in the U.S. you can take action here: Join the Battle for Net Neutrality www.battleforthenet.com The FCC is trying to kill the Internet again. This time, it’s even worse. Here’s how to stop them… In a Jacobin interview the University of Pennsylvania’s Viktor Pickard summarises it as such: Net neutrality protections are essentially safeguards that prevent internet service providers (ISPs) from interfering with the internet. Net neutrality gives the FCC the regulatory authority to prevent ISPs like Comcast and Verizon from slowing down or blocking certain types of content. It also prevents them from offering what’s known as paid prioritization, where an ISP could let particular websites or content creators pay more for faster streaming and download times. With paid prioritization an ISP could shake down a company like Netflix or an individual website owner, coercing them to pay more in order to be in the fast lane. Net Neutrality Is Just the Beginning www.jacobinmag.com Appointed to the commission by Barack Obama in 2012, Pai was elevated to the chairmanship of the FCC by Donald Trump in January. Tubes You see, the internet, for all the metaphors about clouds, is actually a physical infrastructure. The internet works because we connected many of the computers in the world through telecommunication towers, cables and satellites. The internet originated as a U.S. military and academic communication network funded by the U.S. state in the context of the Cold War (specifically by ARPA or later DARPA, the R&D agency of the U.S. Department of Defense). The internet was originally developed under two important principles: state investment and an open-source ethic. For all their talk about innovation, the internet would probably have not existed if left to the private sector. Or as Ben Tarnoff explains: The Air Force had tried to persuade AT&T to build such a network, without success. ARPA even offered ARPANET to AT&T after it was up and running, preferring to buy time on the network instead of managing it themselves. Given the chance to acquire the most sophisticated computer network in the world, AT&T refused. The executives simply couldn’t see the money in it. Their shortsightedness was fortunate for the rest of us. Under public management, ARPANET flourished. Government control gave the network two major advantages. The first was money: ARPA could pour cash into the system without having to worry about profitability. The agency commissioned pioneering research from the country’s most talented computer scientists at a scale that would’ve been suicidal for a private corporation. And, just as crucially, ARPA enforced an open-source ethic that encouraged collaboration and experimentation. The contractors who contributed to ARPANET had to share the source code of their creations, or risk losing their contracts. This catalyzed scientific creativity, as researchers from a range of different institutions could refine and expand on each other’s work without living in fear of intellectual property law. The Internet Should Be a Public Good www.jacobinmag.com On October 1, the Internet will change and no one will notice. A Soviet, cybernetic internet Interestingly, other countries also developed their own computer networks during this time, most notably the Soviets. They, however, failed, and for unexpected reasons. The plans for a Soviet internet got relatively far, with a proposal to link up massive amounts of factories all across the Union. The researchers even developed their own cybernetic subculture.

They christened their group ‘Cybertonia’ at a New Year’s party in 1960, and organised regular social events such as holiday dances, symposia and conferences in Kiev and Lviv, even publishing tongue-in-cheek papers such as ‘On Wanting to Remain Invisible – At Least to the Authorities’. Instead of event invitations, the group issued pun-filled faux passports, wedding certificates, newsletters, punchcard currency and even a Cybertonia constitution. In a parody of Soviet (council) governance structure, Cybertonia was governed by a council of robots, and at the head of that council sat their mascot and supreme leader, a saxophone-playing robot – a nod to the US cultural import of jazz: The Soviets, one would expect, would be the leaders in state investment and cooperation. Yet Soviet government agencies, instead of cooperating on building their own form of the internet, competed and got bogged down in bureaucratic infighting for scarce funding, in contrast to the U.S. where researchers were forced by the state to cooperate. One man stood in Glushkov’s way: the minister of finance, Vasily Garbuzov. Garbuzov did not want any shiny, real-time optimised computer networks governing or informing the state economy. He called instead for simple computers that would flash lights and play music in hen houses to stimulate egg production, as he had seen during a recent visit to Minsk. His motivations were not born out of common-sense pragmatism, of course. He wanted the funding for his own ministry. In fact, rumour holds that he had approached the economic-reform-minded prime minister Alexei Kosygin in private before the 1 October gathering, threatening that if his competitor ministry, the Central Statistical Administration, retained control over the OGAS project, then Garbuzov and his Ministry of Finance would internally submarine any reform efforts it might bring about, just as he had done to Kosygin’s piecemeal liberalisation reforms five years earlier. There is an irony to this. The first global computer networks took root in the US thanks to well-regulated state funding and collaborative research environments, while the contemporary (and notably independent) national network efforts in the USSR floundered due to unregulated competition and institutional infighting among Soviet administrators. The first global computer network emerged thanks to capitalists behaving like cooperative socialists, not socialists behaving like competitive capitalists. How the Soviets invented the internet and why it didn't work | Aeon Essays aeon.co Soviet scientists tried for decades to network their nation. What stalemated them is now fracturing the global internet Back to today So the U.S. won the internet race. During the nineties it then sold off its internet infrastructure to the private sector. Partly because the state could not keep up with increasing traffic over it, and partly because of the reigning neoliberal hegemony. This leaves us in our current predicament: in most parts of the world (mirroring the U.S. situation) the internet infrastructure is owned by oligopolies of private companies, think AT&T, Verizon and Comcast. This market structure goes to the heart of the net neutrality problem: the market is so concentrated, and infrastructure is so owned by a small group of companies, that they could use their power to control traffic. In many part of the U.S. there is even only one ISP available. Net neutrality is a counter to their potentially dangerous monopoly power. Inter-capitalist struggle Yet, as the left, we should caution as viewing this as straightforward anti-corporate activism. Net neutrality is also part of a conflict between sections of capital. It is no coincidence that large firms such as Google and Facebook oppose loosening Obama-era net neutrality rules. A BBC article gathers their concerns: Facebook said: “We are disappointed that the proposal announced this week by the FCC fails to maintain the strong net neutrality protections that will ensure the internet remains open for everyone. In its statement, Google said the current rules "are working well”. Meanwhile, content giant Netflix tweeted: “This current draft order hasn’t been officially voted, so we’re lodging our opposition publicly and loudly now.” And, in an open letter to the FCC, a group, made up of 1,000 small businesses from around the US, wrote: “The success of America’s start-up ecosystem depends on more than improved broadband speeds. "They could impede traffic from our services in order to favour their own services or established competitors.”

Facebook, Google and start-ups oppose net neutrality U-turn - BBC News www.bbc.com Opponents say the proposed changes could threaten the US’s start-up ecosystem. Essentially we have monopolistic platform capitalists afraid that the people who provide them their internet infrastructure will use that control to either blackmail them to pay more, or strangle them when they compete with their own service offer (for example when Netflix competes with the cable offer of telco’s). What is to be done? What role should the left play in all of this then? Clearly we should fight for net neutrality, not only in the U.S. where it is quite popular, but everywhere it rears its head. We cannot allow a regressive section of capital to use its monopoly power to hinder progress. Besides that the potential for censorship and reactionary politics are clear. Viktor Pickard shows one example: And more than that, we could start to see scenarios where ISPs don’t like the political views that are being disseminated from a particular news outlet. Without net neutrality they would be free to block or slow down content from those sites. There have been cases like this already. In 2005, the company Telus, which is the second largest telecommunications company in Canada, began blocking access to a server that hosted a website that supported a labor strike against Telus. In short: Net neutrality often gets treated as a sort of technocratic squabble over ownership and control of internet pipes. But in fact it speaks to a core social contract between government, corporations, and the public. What it really comes down to is, how can members of the public obtain information and services, and express ourselves creatively and politically, without interference from massive corporations? For a socialised, luxury internet But net neutrality is fundamentally a defensive struggle. A struggle to defend our direct interests in the here and now against the predatory power of capitalism. Even when it means that another section of predatory capitalism makes the same arguments. Meanwhile we should radicalise this defensive struggle into an offensive struggle for a socialised, luxury internet. This means we should argue for a publicly and collectively owned internet infrastructure, that invests significant resources in pushing network technology as far forward as possible, and makes sure to offer citizens high-quality, cheap or even free internet with high-quality customer support. This argument contains three elements. Socialised ownership To counter private ownership of internet infrastructure, we should argue for democratic, socialised control over it. An already existing movement in this direction is municipal ISPs, essentially city governments offering their own internet connections. Often these are much higher speed than what private ISPs can offer, and have noticeably better customer service. Chattanooga, Tennessee has become an example of this movement. They built a smart-electricity grid because of the requirements of a number of factories in the area, and based on that offered internet connections. EPB stands for the Electric Power Board of Chattanooga, a municipally-owned utility. And now the company is deploying ten-gigabit-per-second service. The EPB’s story points us toward a future in which we may no longer have to worry about a broadband duopoly. Chattanooga Has Its Own Broadband—Why Doesn’t Every City? www.thedailybeast.com A few years ago, the city of Chattanooga became an internet service provider, and since then the city has become a thriving tech hub. Where the state cannot go in, cooperatives offer another already existing alternative. Smaller cooperatives that offer internet have been growing recently, particularly in rural areas. ISPs have long been hesitant at expanding their infrastructure into rural areas because it does not offer enough return on investment. In many cases this is relatively slow internet, but fast cases exist. Dutch rural cooperatives for example provide fiber. The Future of Owning the Internet - VICE www.vice.com If we’re going to depend on the internet, we should be able to trust where it comes from.​​ These two alternatives already exist at this time, and the left can build on it. Interestingly it offers the possibility of democratising internet infrastructure in the here and now, without national political power. Accelerate ISPs are a clear example of capitalism not being able to push technology forward. The rent-seeking behaviour of capitalist firms here hampers the extension of new internet across the world.

This is particularly clear in the U.S. which pays extremely high fees for slow internet. But also in Europe telecoms hold technological advance back. In 2016 for example European telecoms threatened to hold back on investment in 5G connections if net neutrality regulation would not be loosened. A group of 20 major telcos including Deutsche Telekom, Nokia, Vodafone, and BT promise to launch 5G networks in every country in the European Union by 2020 — so long as governments decide to weaken net neutrality rules. The coalition’s plans are outlined in its “5G Manifesto,” a seven-page document that details how the companies will roll 5G out across the continent over the next few years. However, by warning against regulation that would ensure an open internet and encouraging nations to water rules down, the companies are effectively holding the new technology for ransom. Major telecoms promise 5G networks if EU cripples net neutrality - The Verge www.theverge.com A group of 20 major telcos including Deutsche Telekom, Nokia, Vodafone, and BT promise to launch 5G networks in every country in the European Union by 2020 — so long as governments decide to weaken… 5G is a new iteration of mobile internet technologies which will allow faster data speeds and more reliable service. This would allow smartphone’s to have faster mobile internet, but more importantly contribute to a range of new technologies. Data intensive technologies such as self-driving cars, completely automated factories and VR would hugely benefit from 5G connections. 5G would, however, require extensive infrastructure investments (it needs a more dense tower network). Telco’s and ISPs have been hesitant to make this investment, and prefer to extract rents. Essentially we are leaving a key future technology in the hands of people who at worst do not want to invest in it, and at best would use it as a weapon in their fight for more deregulation. Capitalism thus runs into its limits, and a socialised internet is needed to push technology forward. Luxury internet now What a campaign for a socialised internet offers furthermore, is the possibility of shifting the discussion of luxury. Luxury in fully automated luxury communism is often regarded as a frivolity. It is not.

Luxury under capitalism is associated with conspicuous consumption: private jets, expensive watches and sport cars. And even though nothing is too good for the working class, socialists should work to shift the meaning of luxury. Capitalism makes unnecessary conspicuous consumption into luxury, yet makes the majority of us consume bad goods and services for high prices. It over-values products with low use value yet undermines quality in key goods. For many Americans a fast, low-priced, democratically owned internet with great customer service would be luxury, same for healthcare, mobility and education. By pushing for cheap, high quality internet the left can shift the discussion on luxury away from frivolity and towards the areas in which capitalism fails to deliver. Bye... Credit: 9kand1 This was the third issue of the fully automated luxury communism newsletter. This newsletter and my own thoughts are very much a work in progress, so any tips, comments, messages or corrections are very much welcomed. Please let me know at: fullyalc@gmail.com or via Twitter @AutomatedFully Also feel free to share and subscribe to the newsletter. If you want to refer anyone, you can through this link Did you enjoy this issue? If you don't want these updates anymore, please unsubscribe here Powered by Revue