Transnational capital and the technology of domination and desire

Financialisation and information technology

Because financialisation characterises the current capitalist era, international financial institutions occupy a strategic place in class formation and power. These institutions act as centres of organisation for the investment of capital and the extraction of surplus value. An ongoing circulation of global accumulation flows through international financial institutions, with investments coming from capitalists the world over. Through this activity a transnational economy becomes structured, giving formation to the transnational capitalist class.

The establishment of global manufacturing and the construction of regulatory structures by national governments and international institutions are also key building blocks. The World Trade Organization reported that 70 per cent of global trade is now in intermediate goods and services – commodities used in products that are exported once again. As the Financial Times observed, this vast global supply chain is ‘linked via complex cloud-based IT systems that shepherd everything from the ordering and movement of parts to the payment of invoices and are linked to new forms of trade financing’. ¹⁰ While information technology is key to modern manufacturing, our particular focus here is the technological innovations and capabilities that allowed the unfolding of capitalist logic through new tools of financial production.

Economist Costas Lapavitsas explains the deep structural relationships between technology, financialisation and the relations of production in his analysis of contemporary capitalism. As he states,

Financialization has to be understood more deeply, as a systemic transformation of capitalism, as a historical period … think in terms of the forces and relations of production. We’ve got to think in terms of the deepest material development of capitalism, things like the technological revolution that has taken place in the last four decades, the transformation of work, and similarly basic factors of the economy. When we look at the technology, for instance, it is obvious that there has been a revolution in terms of information technology and telecommunications … What it has done is to boost finance, and to transform the way in which finance and real accumulation interact. It has also transformed labor, the way we work. The deepest roots of financialization, then, must be sought in the transformed interplay of the forces and relations of production. ¹¹

The deep and systemic transformations Lapavitsas refers to have resulted in trillions of dollars flowing through the global economy every day. To get a concept of this circulation, compare one million seconds, which runs just twelve and a half days, to one trillion seconds which covers 36,000 years. To manage, account for and profit from such enormous sums would be impossible without the abilities of information technology systems. Additionally, the hundreds of new financial products created over the past two or three decades depend on the capabilities of information technology. The financial markets simply would not exist as they do if they were based on the telephone lines of the 1970s. Information technology is the nervous system of the global financial economy, and the transnational capitalist class swims in these electronic circuits of global accumulation.

We can also obtain a picture of the transnational capitalist class and the importance of international financial institutions by examining individual wealth and how it is invested. The big picture shows 13.7 million people who hold $52.6 trillion in wealth. ¹² But the Knight Frank Wealth Report 2014 breaks down the data on top earners, reporting 167,669 people with $30 million to $100 million, 37,104 with $100 million to one billion, and 1,682 billionaires. ¹³ As Credit Suisse states, ‘the wealth portfolios of [these] individuals are likely to be similar, dominated by financial assets and, in particular, equity holdings in public companies traded in international markets’. ¹⁴ Tracking these flows everywhere and every day comprises the new tools of financial production. Allocating funds, analysing markets, making decisions and informing choices, computers, servers, routers, fibre optics and algorithms whirl away in their electronic matrix of reality.

Another key study, by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, provides significant insight into the dominance of international financial institutions by tracing ownership of transnational corporations. Investigating a database of 37 million companies and investors, the study examined shareholding networks, focusing on a core group of 147 predominantly financial institutions that control the most important sectors of the entire network. ¹⁵ The study found, situated in these financial institutions, 47,819 individual and institutional shareholders from 190 countries, holding principal positions within the world’s largest 15,491 TNCs. ¹⁶ This mode of global accumulation is based upon trillions of digital dollars rocketing around the world. Consequently, the circulation of capital through international financial institutions is key to understanding the current era of capitalism, the emergence of the transnational capitalist class, and the role of technology.

BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, with $4.4 trillion, gives us one important example of how cross-border financial flows are key to transnational capitalist class investments. In the first three months of 2014, retail investors poured $14 billion into BlackRock funds, $9.8 billion from outside the US. ¹⁷ In turn, BlackRock dispenses this capital into funds spanning the globe. Although BlackRock is headquartered in the US, it does not function as a national champion of American finance, but as an organisational centre for transnational capital. A look at KKR, one of most powerful global hedge funds, tells us the same story. By 2006, half of its funds came from outside the US. ¹⁸ Another small but telling example is my own money invested with Capital Group’s American Funds, which in turn has a EuroPacific Growth Fund with investments in over twenty countries. Reading through its annual report, I find my American Fund has investments in the Japanese conglomerate Softbank that owns 37 per cent of China’s internet giant Alibaba, which is preparing the most sought after Initial Public Offering of 2014. ¹⁹ So from the most wealthy retail investors to small stock-holders such as myself, information technology has opened the door to a complex and highly interdependent web of global investments that permeates virtually every niche of the capitalist economy.

Financial speed driven by computers promotes the dominance of finance over manufacturing. The velocity of capital to invest or withdraw funds can drive stock prices up or down, and enforce neoliberal efficiencies. For example, the withdrawal of billions within hours helped precipitate the devastating Asian crash of 1997. With such power, holders of stocks, bonds, equities, securities and derivatives can determine the corporate decisions that affect the lives of workers everywhere. Owners of capital, whose use of direct labour is minimal, drive the real economy where the vast majority of labour works. Consequently, their neoliberal ideology has become hegemonic within the capitalist class and has penetrated much of society. Of course technology is not the only source driving neoliberalism; Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek were developing its ideological foundations on typewriters, not personal computers. But information technology has helped shape its current outlook and culture, and is an important element that must be taken into account.

One of the most telling statements on financialisation was issued by Bain Capital. It reported that, by 2010, financial assets reached $600 trillion, or ten times the value of global output of all goods and services. As Bain noted, the ‘relationship between the financial economy and the underlying real economy has reached a decisive turning point’. ²⁰ This ‘decisive turning point’ indicates the rupture between socially necessary labour time and the creation of wealth, and is a key development determining the current relations of production, the character of the transnational economy and the capitalist class.

Examining steel production reveals the break between mass employment and the formation of value, and how the tools of production impact social relations. For a number of years I worked for US Steel in south Chicago, along with over 6,000 other men and women. The entire community was structured around the mill, not just employment, but home ownership, small businesses, union baseball teams in the park, local politics, the future of your kids and the security of your family. The profits of US Steel were also tied to the mass employment and concentrated working-class neighbourhoods surrounding the mill. But the expropriation of those profits could only occur when workers walked through those gates and on to the factory floor. The great integrated mills were built around a co-ordinated use of industrial large-scale technologies, creating a social structure of accumulation that permeated south Chicago. But new steel technologies and globalised production undercut the older integrated mills that gave identity to Chicago’s working-class community. When the mills closed, the community lost its character, the remnants offering only a vague picture of the past. Unemployment spread, stores went bankrupt, gangs grew and the union hall became a fundamentalist church with parishioners seeking answers to life that capital could no longer provide.

Today principal sectors of the financial industry make billions from computers working with little human labour. Technology has always been used to reduce the amount of labour time necessary to complete a task. But the ruling class has never been so free of the labouring class as in the current era. Obviously hundreds of millions still work at the behest of capital, but the growing rupture between socially necessary labour time and wealth is one element that gives the transnational capitalist class growing freedom from any nationally based working class. When the point of production is inside a computer and labour is carried out by an algorithm, it undermines the relations of production with profound social implications. An exploration of high-frequency trading can offer important insights.

High-frequency trading accounts for between 50 to 65 per cent of all daily trades on the thirteen US stock markets. But high-frequency trading firms have no clients, and at the end of each day they aspire to hold no stock. Speed is everything because high-frequency trading algorithms are programmed to find, buy and sell orders. This search takes place in milliseconds and microseconds, that is one thousandth to one millionth of a second. Their profits come by front-running orders. This means high-frequency trading firms obtain advanced notice of trades by a few microseconds, use the information to buy stocks, increase the price, and then sell as the original orders are processed in the following second. Fibre optic cables make this possible by transmitting data at about a billion feet per second – speed enough to circumnavigate the earth 7.6 times a second. High-frequency trading firms access orders by paying hundreds of millions of dollars to large banks and brokerage firms to nestle inside their computers where trades are carried out. Consequently, orders themselves, and the information they carry, are turned into a commodity worth billions to high-frequency trading firms. Just nine banks control 70 per cent of all US stock trades. Credit Suisse is the largest, followed by Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, Barclays, UBS, Citi and Deutsche Bank. ²¹ While orders to buy and sell are logged by humans, the actual work in which profits are produced is carried out by algorithms, servers, switchers, routers and the quality of glass in your fibre optics. The faster the software and hardware, the more competitive a firm becomes, and so speeds of 40 milliseconds are considered an important advantage. Citadel spent $300 million to run fibre optic lines from Chicago to New Jersey and rents out access for $10 million per firm.

Although high-frequency trading is operating in microseconds, trade records are updated only every second. In other words, a whole world of trading exists that the official records are too slow to record. The Securities Information Processor assumes its information on all trades is registered in real time. But research done at UC Berkeley showed how the price of Apple stock was outdated 55,000 times per day, compared to prices seen by high-frequency trading. ²² Investors without the proper technology had no idea of the arbitrage that made billions for such firms as Citadel and Knight Capital. High frequency trading is so effective that Virtu Financial made money 1,277 days out of 1,278 days of trading, results once thought to be impossible. ²³

Marx saw the compulsion for speed linked to the development of capitalism as a global system. He argued this created a unique time and space relationship. In the Grundrisse Marx wrote:

while capital must on one side strive to tear down every spatial barrier to intercourse, i.e. to exchange, and conquer the whole earth for the market, it strives on the other side to annihilate this space with time, i.e. to reduce to a minimum the time spent in motion from one place to another. The more developed the capital, therefore, the more extensive the market over which it circulates, which forms the spatial orbit of its circulation, the more does it strive for an even greater extension of the market and for greater annihilation of space by time. ²⁴

Remarkably, Marx’s phrase the ‘annihilation of space by time’ is a commonly used concept by computer industry technologists referring to the speed and connectivity of information technology tools. While Marx could never envision a market operating in microseconds across thousands of miles of geography, his perception of the internal driving logic of capitalism holds true for finance capital today. This reveals a fundamental impulse that impelled the use of information technology towards high-frequency trading and the establishment of global stock-markets operating in real time counted in nanoseconds.

While there is a network of a thousand or so algorithm programmers on Wall Street, their working groups are usually small, often five to six people. Brad Katsuyama, around whom the best seller Flash Boys is based, created a whole new stock-market with its own algorithm with just twenty-five employees. Algorithms are not just fast, but smart, so they can recognise a broker’s trading pattern, decide when to buy, how much to buy, and how much to pay. Programs making these decisions replaced thousands of traders with a single black box. But the space warehousing the servers expanded because the area around the box became so valuable, high-frequency traders would pay millions to co-locate in the same building. The closer the better. So the physical space next to the bank’s servers became highly desired. Each microsecond counts. The shorter the route taken by the connection between computers, and between the computers and the stock-markets, the less time it takes for the data to travel. The names given to the algorithms speak to the cutthroat nature of the competition – Ambush, Nighthawk, Raider, Dark Attack, Dagger and Slicer are some of the titles. Credit Suisse called its algorithm program Guerrilla, complete with an image of Che Guevara. ²⁵ The former chief technical officer at Goldman Sachs reported that, as early as 2006, its trading strategies were done by ‘50,000 servers just doing simulations’, and he noted many more have since been added. ²⁶

Trading at these speeds created a number of crucial one-second lag times. Algorithms can be programmed to read business text issued by Thomson Reuters and Business Wire. These are daily reports on earnings issued just as markets close at 4pm. But the algorithms employed by high-frequency trading can read these reports and trade within one second, bleeding over the closing time. ²⁷ The same problem emerged in the Foreign Exchange Market, which is a cross-border currency market of $5.3 trillion a day. Algorithm trading, which accounted for 20 per cent of all currency transactions in 2001, hit 74 per cent in 2013. ²⁸ London posts a daily benchmark rate that sets currency values at 4pm, known as ‘The Fix’. But traders at major banks have been colluding to push the price up or down at one second to 4pm, which they call ‘Banging the close’. Algorithms have become so efficient that the biggest banks dealing in the foreign exchange markets, such as Barclays and UBS, are increasing their electronic trading while laying-off thousands of workers. ²⁹

All the activities described above, front-running, bleeding over closing times, and banging the close are under investigation as unfair trading practices. Many major investors are incensed over what they see as fraudulent competition. But technology has always been about competitive leads, whether the English longbow or Ford’s assembly line. So, within the narrow amoral logic of Wall Street, the use of algorithms for self-enrichment by any means possible is a natural outgrowth of what traders like to call ‘animal spirits’. But unfair competition among capitalists is not my main concern; changes in the relations of production hold far greater implications. Profits are being acquired more on the power and speed of an algorithm, and less on the competitive advantage of a skilled and productive workforce. True, algorithms are written by skilled labour, but never in history could the work of five people produce a technology that, once in operation, would continue without human oversight and produce billions in profits. Consequently, financial tools are a difference in kind, working at speeds no person can ever match and without real-time human control and direction.

Such technological abilities have a cultural impact. Algorithms have become financial avatars doing battle at superhuman speeds, acting as alter ego stand-ins for Wall Street traders. The effects have produced the vicious, driven individualism that makes the shallow fantasies of Ayn Rand the ideological fountainhead for financial capitalists. Creating billions with almost no connection to labour elevates the individual to seemingly Atlas-like abilities. These are great men conquering the miracles of the free market. As Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein once proclaimed, we ‘do God’s work’. ³⁰ Of course the other side is disdain for the working class. Mitt Romney expressed this worldview when he labelled 47 per cent of Americans ‘takers’, while lauding hedge-fund capitalists like himself as ‘job creators’. Such an ideology justifies taking hundreds of millions, even billions, as an annual salary while advocating austerity for workers.

This one per cent dogma had near perfect expression in Chicago where Kenneth Griffin, CEO of the high frequency trading firm Citadel, had an income of $800 million in 2013. At the same time, the city’s mayor, Rahm Emanuel, was closing fifty-four public schools and laying off thousands of teachers. Between working at the Obama White House and becoming mayor, Emanuel collected millions working for hedge funds. Griffin became his personal friend and gave Emanuel $200,000 for his political campaign. Griffin then turned his attention to the governor’s race, donating $3.5 million to Republican Bruce Rauner, another finance millionaire. ³¹ Rauner actually called for a one-dollar reduction in the minimum wage the same month that public school administrators were pleading with parents to donate money to buy toilet paper for the children. Such is ‘God’s work’ in Chicago.

The masters of mega data

The heightened sense of individualism created by information technology in finance has its mirror reflection in the egocentric fascination of social networking. MySpace, Facebook, iPhone and YouTube all stress the individual user, in name and function. In a society that makes people feel small, alienated and lost, these are tools of individual reaffirmation. Your self-worth increases with every hit, as each additional response confirms how much you truly matter. If religion was an opiate for the pain of existence in the 1800s, social networking is the new drug masking today’s lack of meaning and power. This hyper-individualism reflects the worldview of an ego-driven ruling class. Capitalist cultural hegemony propagates the reign of the individual over the social. Or as Margaret Thatcher famously stated, ‘There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women.’ ³²

Our desire for the new tools of information and communication is consistent with Gramsci’s theory of ideological hegemony. Our consensual use leads to massive amounts of surveillance that are monetarised by those that control the big data networks as information is turned into profits. These tools have also been used to organise resistance and spread anti-capitalist ideas. Technology can be defined by the user. Just as a rifle’s purpose was determined by which side of the barricade you stood during the Paris Commune. But there are intricate connections in how information technology enforces the domination of the ruling class, whether on Wall Street, in Silicon Valley or the secret recesses of the National Security Agency.

The more people connecting, the more valuable a site grows as it centralises unending amounts of information. Consequently, the majority of work done by big data is the freely delivered information by millions of users organised into patterns by algorithms. As with high-frequency trading, the connection to actual labour is minimal. Our desires, reading habits, buying behaviour, political beliefs, voting patterns, what movies we like, what food we eat, what streets we travel, our network of friends and family, it all becomes transparent to the elites that own and control the technology. Jaron Lanier, an information technology insider from the beginning days of Silicon Valley, labels these systems ‘Siren Servers’. ³³ Lanier points out that, under the guise of freedom, the server’s algorithms organise people’s behaviour into predictable models. All those electronic suggestions you receive about what book to buy or what movie to watch are not coming from a salesperson, but a computer looking at your patterns. That algorithm is now directing your buying habits and channelling your intellect into well-worn paths, rather than new areas of discovery. Even your dating match-up is suggested by an algorithm, as are political campaign issues.

As Lanier observes, ‘A world that is open on the surface becomes more closed on a deeper level. You do not get to know what correlations have been calculated about you by Google, Facebook, an insurance company, or a financial entity, and that is the kind of data that influence your life the most in a networked world.’ ³⁴

The Gramscian dialectic of consent and coercion is at work when surveillance is sold as transparency, and transparency is presented as democratic access. The endgame is ‘there will be no more secrets, no more barriers to access; all the world will be opened up as if the planet were transformed into a crystal ball’. ³⁵ The irony of this Silicon Valley vision is that all big data corporations, from Google to Citadel, hold their information secret behind walls of encryption and proprietary intellectual property.

Dave Eggers’ science fiction work, The Circle, shows us the unfolding of this future. Some science fiction novels are set in distant centuries, some just around tomorrow’s corner. Eggers’ book looks like the house next door. The Circle is an information technology corporation that combines everything from Microsoft to Facebook, and its ultimate goal is exactly as Lanier describes above – the ability to gather all data, overcome secrecy, and create a transparent world. In Eggers’ world, surveillance is equated with open access to the truth. WikiLeaks, the Pentagon Papers and coming out of the gay closet are used as examples of transparency. And how can that be bad? As the oft-repeated information technology slogan goes, information wants to be free. At the Circle the company slogan is refined to, ‘Secrets Are Lies, Sharing Is Caring, Privacy Is Theft’. ³⁶ And do we not all desire such an open world when faced with government lies and financial corruption on a daily basis? Of course, The Circle is all about corporate control, not only of the market, but over our daily lives, the workplace environment and political process. A Gramscian plot played out over the social vision of information technology data barons.

‘Sharing is Caring’ is how Facebook characterised its massive psychological experiment on nearly 700,000 users. Facebook manipulated its news feeds to see if this could change reactions among its customers, or cause what it termed an ‘emotional contagion’. Facebook said it was all just to ‘learn how to provide a better service’, or, as one of their oft-repeated slogans says, ‘The goal of news feed is to deliver the right content to the right people at the right time’. ³⁷ But what the experiment shows is that Facebook can teach an algorithm to alter your behaviour, based on access to personal information. The political and social implications of such power are enormous. Do we really want a corporate-controlled algorithm deciding what is the ‘right content’ for you to read at the ‘right time’ in order to create a desired emotional response? Moreover, it does not take much imagination to extend these technological abilities to governmental applications.

Siren Servers can come in unexpected forms, such as Pandora, the free music program that turns your particular preferences into an algorithm of song choices. Pandora has 200 million users who have pushed like and dislike buttons 35 billion times. All this gets analysed into selling more products. As Eric Bieschke, chief scientist at Pandora stated, ‘It’s becoming quite apparent to us that the world of playing the perfect music to people and the world of playing perfect advertising to them are strikingly similar’. ³⁸ But Pandora has gone much further than turning our desire for music into a desire for more commodities. It realised that musical taste can indicate political beliefs, social concerns, religious convictions and other aspects of how we see the world. From these algorithms Pandora has developed a political ad-targeting system that has been used in campaigns for Congress and governor seats, and even a presidential campaign. Since Pandora users register with their zip codes, ads can go to specific districts using music to predict political affiliations. As Bieschke explained, ‘The advantage of using our own in-house data is that we have it down to the individual level, to the specific person who is using Pandora. We take all of these signals and look at correlations that lead us to come up with magical insights about somebody.’ ³⁹ Magical to the technologists at Pandora, but perhaps of greater concern to that unsuspecting person listening to Afrika Bambaata, Bruce Springsteen or Merle Haggard.

Although dressed up in liberatory rhetoric, the data masters of Silicon Valley share the same ideological worldview as their more crass brethren on Wall Street. In California, egocentric individualism is couched in countercultural spirituality. The Global Business Network has been a key Silicon Valley player promoting the ‘self-actualization’ of ‘remarkable people’. Presumably through self-development all will be obtained, from wealth to spiritual enlightenment. This is Horatio Alger and Ayn Rand whirled into a West Coast blender. Lanier explains how teachings by Singularity University have attracted many of his fellow technologists to believe in the construction of a ‘superintelligent AI’. This ‘sentient Internet’ would digitalise human intelligence so that the chosen few could live forever as an ‘algorithm inside the global brain’. As strange as this sounds, it is no stranger than Scientology. Lanier contends these ideas have ‘tremendous currency in Silicon Valley; these are guiding principles, not just amusements, for many of the most influential technologists … we are seeing a new religion, expressed through an engineering culture’. ⁴⁰ We might not take Lanier seriously, except that he has spent decades in these circles. He connects religious beliefs on achieving immortality to the rise of power over mega data by net-based monopolies. It is as if engineers are constructing a new deity, seeing themselves as a scientific priesthood doing ‘God’s work’. Perhaps delusional omnipotence comes with the ability to see all data, whether on Wall Street or Silicon Valley.

Less spiritual and more material are the tax avoidance strategies of information technology transnationals. Unlike physical assets such as assembly lines or blast furnaces, intellectual property can be kept anywhere. Consequently, information technology capitalists have globalised their property by housing it in low-tax countries such as Ireland, Singapore and Bermuda. This drops their tax rates to about 10 per cent. For all their rhetoric about ‘doing no evil’, they starve government of funds that would pay for education, health care and a cleaner environment. Not only do they keep their intellectual property abroad, but also the large majority of their profits. Again, these are tax-avoiding strategies. In the first quarter of 2014, Apple kept $88 billion abroad, $12 billion at home; Microsoft kept $91 billion abroad, only $9 billion at home; and Google had $58 billion abroad with $42 billion at home. Others following the same practice include Cisco, Oracle, eBay and Qualcomm. The US Joint Committee of Taxation estimates the loss of $96 billion over ten years. ⁴¹

When it comes to global assembly lines and offshoring, the information technology industry has aggressively pursued transnational networks. Apple is perhaps the best example, but the entire computer industry is building its technological utopia with sweatshop labour. One telling example is that 90 per cent of China’s high-technology exports are from foreign-owned corporations. ⁴² While Silicon Valley dreams of transforming the world, young men and women are jumping to their deaths off the Foxconn roof. Under capitalism, one man’s heaven is another man’s hell. Both their financial and manufacturing strategies situate the lords of Silicon Valley firmly inside the transnational capitalist class.

Another material outcome, evident in Silicon Valley as it is on Wall Street, is the reduction of socially necessary labour time, and therefore employment, to the creation of value. Software commodities that produce huge profits are most often designed by a small workforce of engineers. As described by Robert Reich, ‘In the emerging economy, there’s no longer any correlation between the size of a customer base and the number of employees necessary to serve them. In fact, the combination of digital technologies with huge network effects is pushing the ratio of employees to customers to new lows.’ ⁴³ The Facebook acquisition of Instagram, a company of thirteen people, for $1 billion illustrates Reich’s point. An even larger Facebook buyout, valued at $19 billion for WhatsApp, averaged $345 million for each of the company’s fifty-five employees. The consequence of such wealth, created by very small circles of associates, has large ideological impacts. It is no mystery why such relations of production produce a culture of egocentric individualism that pervades the rest of society.

Lastly, by making our lives transparent to the data barons of Siren Servers we also expose ourselves to the State’s national security apparatus. Silicon Valley executives wax elegant about promoting world freedom through the collection and dissemination of information, but for the National Security Agency it is a treasure trove of data and it wants every bit and bite of it. From the worldview of the security state, it is all about protecting our freedom by obtaining omnipotent control over information. Protecting our liberties by violating our personal freedoms may seem like a contradiction, but it can be easily rationalised as doing ‘God’s work’. Saving the innocent from the evil of terrorism is a high calling, demanding religious-like trust in the State and the sacrifice of privacy for the common good.

Edward Snowden helped expose our panopticon reality when he revealed the National Security Agency collected hundreds of millions of phone calls and emails, undermined encryption systems, intercepted mail to install spyware and modify routers and servers, and worked with telecommunications and internet corporations to access their massive collection of data. Google, Cisco, Microsoft, Verizon and other corporations have been subject to a significant amount of blowback and loss of global business. And they have complained loudly and publicly. Nevertheless, the National Security Agency’s new head, Admiral Rogers, reported ‘the majority of corporations that had long given the agency its technological edge and global reach were still working with it, though they had no interest in advertising the fact.’ ⁴⁴

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is also part of the push by government to make use of the new mega data abilities of information technology. The CIA has a $600 million contract with Amazon Web Services’ Cloud service to operate inside the Agency’s premises. Doug Wolfe, the CIA’s chief information officer, spoke about how the Agency wants to use commercial software applications and apply them to ‘mission space’. Of particular interest is software that can analyse massive amounts of data such as Amazon Web Services’ Kinesis and Redshift applications. ⁴⁵

Again we can turn to science fiction to think about our new realities. Here George Orwell gives us his panoptic vision in 1984,

There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate, they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live – did live, from habit that became instinct – in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized. ⁴⁶

The National Security Agency would argue that such a world is all for our safety, to make us more secure and comfortable as we partake in our daily liberties that it protects. It seeks our consent to approve the coercion of those who get out of line. But just what defines a violation is in the hands of the data masters, and so their threat becomes universal. Making the question ‘who watches the watchers’ pregnant with revolutionary implications.

Conclusion

Snowden’s revelations have begun a global debate over privacy, mega data and government abuse. As important as this is, it is only one part of a broader discussion on the social impact of technology. The speed and ability to gather and analyse mega data has helped to define the worldview and self-conception of the transnational capitalist class. Common threads run through the masters of finance, the state security apparatus and the heart of the information/communications industry itself. Since the tools of production help organise and mediate the relationship between labour and capital, they have always impacted culture and consciousness. Many factors go into defining class hegemony, but to understand how the content of hegemony is shaped in any historical period, the manner in which technology is used to create wealth is an important dynamic. The growing distance between socially necessary labour and wealth created by information technology is reflected in the neoliberal ideology of austerity and self-aggrandisement. These are not new to the capitalist class, but the form and language they take today are an outgrowth of the social relations built around modern technology. Our ability to deconstruct ideological hegemony depends on our understanding of its construction. Technology will not save humanity. In fact, the opposite is true. Humanity will save technology from its oppressive and deformed applications by the capitalist class.