Books like The Rise of the Network Society: The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, Volume I

I made the mistake of reading the third volume of this series first – and although Castells says it doesn’t really matter which volume you start with, now that I’ve almost finished all three, it seems to me that it is best to start at the start.At one point Castells tells us these books took 15 years of his life. And you can tell. This is such an enormous and ambitious project it gives me vertigo trying to imagine anyone would ever start it. The basic idea behind the three volumes is that we now live in a fundamentally new kind of society – a network society – and that has brought about significant changes in how our world works. Not merely superficial changes, but changes that can be said to have brought a kind of revolution affecting every aspect of our lives. In this first volume he describes the information revolution and how that has changed society, work, space and time. Like I said, the scope of this work is breathtaking. He gives an overview of the rise of computers, of the internet, of just-in-time production processes. But he also reminds us that this is a three volume work that he would have preferred to have been a one volume work – where all parts of it, like that of a computer network, are interconnected.A lot of books I’ve been reading lately have predicted the end of the age of work – almost invariably foreseeing a future that is both work free and dystopian. Castells says that such a future is unlikely given that work has done anything but disappear over the last few decades. In fact, with the increasing feminisation of the labour force – that is, with women entering the labour force in droves since the 1970s – the notion that work is disappearing is in direct contradiction to experience.Well, sort of. The problem is that none of these processes are simple, they are all complex and contradictory. The proportion of the population that works has grown – but there has also been a huge rise in part time workers, workers have also often been forced out of the labour market in their early 50s, and they often can’t enter the labour market until their late 20s. The nature of work has shifted too, as the industrial sector is replaced by the service sector in many advanced capitalist nations (and the difficulties in measuring the productivity of service industries is a particularly interesting section of this book). Work is also becoming precarious throughout all of our work lives. As another book I read recently said, capitalism prefers to pay employees at piece rates – and the rise of platforms like Uber make that all too obvious and terrifying for many of us. All the same, he doesn’t see work disappearing anytime soon.The change that technology is presenting may not be to put us all out of work, but rather to change the nature of work and thereby change the material conditions of our lives. A lot of the start of this book presents the history of both the computer and the internet. It is the internet that is the most important metaphor for how the world is changing, in that networks are key to understanding most of what has changed in our world. The internet was first developed by the military as communication and command infrastructure that could avoid being destroyed in a nuclear war. The idea was to create a system of nodes connected via multiple links to other nodes – meaning that if any, or even most, nodes were destroyed the network as a whole would still be viable and able to continue communication. This is not quite a non-hierarchical system – since the nodes have differential value depending on the number of connections they have with other nodes – but it does mean that no individual node is essential to the network as a whole and that the network itself is what is essential, rather than a ‘command centre’. The notion of centre and periphery becomes increasingly meaningless in a network, although, a node with few links to other nodes is perhaps the new definition of periphery.He provides an extended discussion on how the internet has changed human interactions, including sexual interactions, although, this was written in the days before Tinder and so on and so may have aged more than other parts of this book. But what is particularly interesting is his discussion of the impact of the internet on media. He says a couple of times, reversing McLuhan’s phrase, that the message is the medium. That is, that if you are attempting to communicate with young people about music, then the medium is likely going to be something that looks like MTV, while if you are seeking to communicate to people about a news event, the medium is likely to look a lot like CNN.There are 500 pages to this book, I’m really not going to be able to give you even a brief summary of even the most important themes – but I am going to have to mention the last two major chapters in the book: The Space of Flows and The Edge of Forever: Timeless Time. The space of flows chapter is pretty much what I came to this book for. Bauman refers to it in multiple of his books. The idea is that global capitalism is global only for a select few people – global in the proper sense of being largely disconnected from the local. And yet, Castells’ point is that since this new space exists, this kind of no-place, it shows us that a key aspect of the new world we have entered also exists. In book two of this collection he points out that an almost all of the ‘identity’ movements defining our age are intimately connected with this new ‘no-place’, with the global space of flows – and that generally these identity movements exist in opposition to the implications of that space, if not always. The space of flows defines our age, and such a space is inconceivable without the technological, computer and internet revolutions.The space of flows is contrasted with the space of place – essentially, the space of place is where we have mostly always lived in. These two spaces are not necessarily distinct – that is, they can exist in what appears to be otherwise the same space. He makes the point that world cities, such London, say, both continues to be a space of place for most people that live in them, and to be concurrently globally interconnected spaces within a space of flows. The space of flows is inhabited by people who, regardless of where they were born or brought up, look remarkably the same – they dress in their Hugo Boss suits and wear their Apple Watches and eat foods flown in from across the world so they can eat regardless of season. But it isn’t just that they dress in the same uniform (and as he also says, this is increasingly true of both men and women of this class), but rather that all aspects of their lives are increasingly the same. They live fluid lives between cities such that it hardly matters where they are at any one time – in Auckland or Mumbai, they are connected to everyone they need to be in Shanghai and LA. It isn’t that they just dress the same, but that the corporate buildings they inhabit (and the section in Chapter 6 called The Architecture of the End of History is a must read) can stand in China and yet they are very unlikely to pay any reference at all to the history of the local architecture – the word ‘postmodern’ was originally an architectural term. The space of flows is somewhat like an airport lounge – each one is pretty much identical to any other, the things that differentiate one from another (a kangaroo here, a plastic Eiffel Tower there) are much less interesting that what unites them all.The space of flows, like computer networks, is everywhere – except, also like computer networks, certain nodes are more important than others. Tokyo, Paris, Moscow, New York – but as with structuralist linguistics, the space of flows is composed of locations that fit within a system of differences. That is, no node is identical to any other node and it is the differentiation between nodes is what is essential. Just as no two words in any one language can have the exact same meaning – so two with locations in the networked space of flows.The other interesting part of this idea is that just like in the internet, no node is central and therefore essential to the network as a whole. This may be something London is about to learn. One of the things that differentiates London from other nodes is that it is the heart of a financial network – but with Brexit it is possible that London will be in effect turning its back on the major financial centres of Europe and consequently isolating itself from much that makes itself distinctive. It will be interesting to see how sustainable that will be – and how well such a cutting of connections can be done without fundamentally undermining the viability of the node – as I said before, it is the connections that make any node important, not only other more ‘intrinsic’ aspects of the node.Which is part of the reason why one of the predictions of the early phase of the computer network age has never really come to pass. We had assumed that with the development of the internet the part of space that would become less and less important would be ‘place’ in the particularly restricted sense of real estate location. If you are a company seeking to trim costs, surely it would be better to shift your office to the outskirts of a city, or out of cities altogether – maybe to a beach somewhere for ‘work-life balance’ – rather than continue to pay the ever-increasing rental of inner-city office space. Given that internet connectivity means you can work anywhere at any time…Except this hasn’t eventuated. In fact, the exact opposite has. Today over half of the people of the world live in cities – and this is for the first time in human history. Rather than computer networks making place irrelevant, they have done the opposite. And the reason comes back to the notion of nodes on a network. Global cities provide more connections and interconnections and it is in these that information blooms.This presents other problems too. The ‘global’ aspects of the city are in stark contradiction to the ‘local’ aspects – that is, global cities are always located in local cities – the space of flows is coextensive with the space of place. And this becomes a problem because global companies have no interest in paying local taxes, and have the means to avoid them, and do all they can to do so – but these global companies also want a significant proportion of the local city finances used to support the infrastructure that facilitates their ‘space of flows’. The contradiction here is generally borne by those of us left in the space of place.Time is also impacted – he discusses three forms of time: sequential time, timeless time and glacial time. Sequential time is basically what facilitated the industrial revolution – without a clock, factory work is impossible. Fordism requires things to occur one after another and Taylorism speeds up this process by scientifically analysing work processes and then reducing the time spent performing any particular one of them. Glacial time is the time that the environmental movement is hoping to reacquaint us with – the time in which we ought to be measuring our destruction of the world in, rather than in the blink of an eye we seem so keen to reduce our world to ashes in at present.Timeless time is the time of the new, networked world. It is not that sequence is no longer important in such a world, but rather that sequence alone no longer explains the causal relationships that exist in this world of flows, where much of what happens is asynchronous or at least disconnected from ‘local’ time.I’ve barely scratched the surface of what is covered in this book. One of the things that might put you off reading this is that even though this updated version is from 2010, this is already again getting out of date. But Castells answers this concern too. He says that he didn’t write this book to make predictions about the future nor to completely illuminate the present – but rather to show patterns that help to explain the new world in new ways. As such, the examples given are of almost secondary importance to the patterns they help to illuminate. That the particular examples have gone on doesn’t necessarily take away from the underlying pattern.This is a seriously interesting book – like I said, I’ve almost finished all three volumes now, and the scope of what is covered almost makes me laugh out loud that someone would think it was okay to tackle this. This is the sort of idea you might dream up when you have had far, far too much to drink, only to abandon the next morning in horrors of a hangover. I don’t agree with everything he says, parts of this strike me as quite conservative, but really, this book is unlike just about anything else I’ve ever read before.