Excerpts from a stimulating thoughtpiece by Gavin Clabaugh.

After introducing the joint aggregating and disaggregating effects of the internet, Gavin focuses on what he calls the third force.

Here’s how he introduces it:

“The third force is all about the network and it’s all about the collapse of time. It’s all about a new network of machines, sensors, monitors, and even some humans, that spend their days tasting the world, and talking to other machines about what they’ve tasted. Sometimes it’s frightening.

I once characterized the third force as the move “from sampling to monitoring.” I figured soon we wouldn’t need things like statistical sampling to measure our world. I argued that we were increasingly moving to “real-time” measurements to understand the world. The time and distance between action and feedback would disappear. It’s come true.

Day by day, step-by-step, we are closer and closer to having our grubby little metaphorical fingers on the pulse of the world, a live wire tapped straight into a global, wired, world nervous system —pulling out the real-time flow of public opinion, or market penetration, or product usage, or the number of parking spaces left in a parking garage.’

Social networking sites are an important ingredient in this, as it monitors us constantly:

“ part of social networking is about people being social, working together, and connecting for common purposes, sharing, barfing, mixing, and mashing and mapping. But, the true revolution is about network, and the true revolution is about the machines. It’s the machines that are social – and they are apparently real party animals, constant keggers.

Through their diligence, they’re delivering an increasingly real-time flow of data about the tiniest aspects of our world. They are the essence of the third force, my eleventh megatrend, the move from “sampling to monitoring.” These talkative, social machines are collapsing time, eliminating the distance between data collection, analysis, and reporting.”

This then is the third force:

“They’re the networkers feeding the machines that provide real-time data collection, real-time analysis and reporting, and innovative mashups between previously disconnected things, like pictures and maps, or voting records and campaign donations, or your membership, national or state voter files, census data, and, who knows, perhaps their petroleum purchasing habits. Together, we’re collapsing time.

This third force is all about collapsing the time between action and effect, between impact and reporting. Once collapsed, it’s about being able to mash that data up to show you new things, in new ways, or just so it lets you keep track of it a wee bit easier. It’s about turning data into information, and information into wisdom or foolishness, lightness or dark.

This third force is about our radical move from sampling our world in little bits and pieces to monitoring our lives in near-real-time, gulping it down in great big chunks, as it happens.”

But does this mean that we are powerless as individuals, just nodes in the machine?

I would like to dispute that, and point to our subjective power to become masters of our time, if we shift our awareness towards an integral conception and experience of time.

To explain what I mean, I’ll be quoting myself, from my P2P manuscript:

“Commons-based peer production and the associated work culture, the hacker ethic, also represent a milestone in the history of temporality. A quick reminder of the history of temporal experience according to our premodern-modern-postmodern scheme will show this. Tribal people and early agricultural civilizations lived in a cyclic time, following the rhythm of nature and of associated religious rituals. In many aspects it was an experience of an eternal now. Ancestors and mythical creators of the civilizations were deemed not to live in a distant and remote past, but in the same temporality. Agricultural civilizations started developing conceptions of long-term cycles, and they often came into cycles of progressive degeneration (as in the Hindu time scheme ending with the Kali Yuga, the end time of the Iron Age) that would then bring on a new cycle of cycles: the myth of eternal return. This would change with the advent of the monotheistic religions which in some sense prefigured modernity. Temporality became progressive, going from past to future, seen as an apocalyptic liberation. Modernity started viewing time in a calculating fashion, in discrete blocks which could be measured and managed, and the Judeo-Christian temporal line was transformed into the ideology of Progress. Time was essentially being made abstract, quantified and stripped of quality, spatialized. But with modernity came stress: human time became enslaved to the time of capitalist efficiency, to the time of the machines, to the cycles of commerce.

These trends find their apotheosis in our current postmodern times, where competition has become a matter of speed, where the economy becomes a 24/7 affair. We have described this state of hypercompetition, coupled with time-space condensation, and the extension of efficiency thinking to the private sphere, in our section on the hacker ethic, showing also its psychological unsustainability. Many of our contemporaries are now time-sick, imprisoned by very short term thinking, their time horizon collapsing. Another element associated with current time experience is the emergence of a collective world-time, collapsing into a single mass-lived experience through the role of the mass media. Paradigmatic was the first Gulf War incident, where millions of people where watching a missile go down on a Baghdad target.

We have often argued how current trends both exacerbate certain aspects of modernity, while at the same time counter-trends point to alternatives going beyond it. The same thing might be said about peer to peer temporality. If postmodernity brought us the supreme alienation of a permanent now collapsing other temporal necessities and experiences, infiltrating even our private time of intimacy, exhibiting a temporal imperialism, then peer to peer temporality shows the promise of an ‘integral time’.

We argued that CBPP projects offered a number of advantages such as the self-management of time. Classic industrial production described jobs in great detail, calculating every move (Taylorism) and controlled the debit of each worker (volume of production in the shortest possible time). In postmodernity, the focus is on the objectives and results, and on the deadlines in which they have to be achieved. For many workers today, their life is one of competing deadlines, and the hundreds of interruptions that stand in the way.

Cooperative CBPP projects traditionally reject such rigid schemes. While work on such projects can be fairly intense, and can be very ‘fast’ as well, this intensity emerges from the natural life rhythms of the collaborators. It is not imposed from the outside. It is rather the different subgroups which start to condition each other, the time spans are generated internally, more organically following the self-unfolding patters of the creative work. The human is no longer enslaved to time. There is in fact no clear connection between time spent on a project and its inherent quality , as many in the artistic world have experienced, and t his model is now expanding in other productive fields, as generic knowledge work is creative as well. Whereas in modernity, say the Fordist/Taylorist paradigm, the focus is on ‘quantity’, and in postmodernity the focus is still on embedding qualitative concerns into the straightjacket of high-pressure objectives and deadlines, in peer to peer, the focus is more exclusively on quality. ‘Work’ is about transforming something into a desired use value, and the success is measured in how well the use value has been created. The process follows a individual and collective self-unfolding in which the various subprojects condition each other, gradually coalescing into both a desired but also unforeseen outcome.

This shift in temporal experience also has political consequences, outlined by John Holloway in his Revolution without Power. Typical for modernity was that transformed Judeo-Christian underpinnings of socialist ideology had fused with the apocalyptic and utopian time sense, gave rise to the counter-time of the revolution, for the wait for a radical transformation or for the next reform. It was either the reformist time who did not change the ‘system as such’, or the revolutionary time which did everything for the system’s destruction. In both cases there was no integration between the present now and the desired future. Integral time points to another solution. Living in the now, in the refusal of contributing to the self-destruction of our civilization, can be combined by building the alternative as a continuing process .

This is a whole new temporal experience. We call it ‘integral time’ because it represents a autonomous mastery of time, where the different temporal experiences (cyclical, linear, etc…) become transparent and used ‘at the right time’. The time for intimacy, the time for rest and relaxation, the time for intellectual and spiritual renewal, all have their different rhythms, which can be acknowledged in CBPP projects, in a way that they cannot in the hypercompetitive for-profit world.”

The above quote is about the subjective transformation of our concept of time, but this has of course collective effects, and I mentioned John Holloway’s conception, about how this changes our views on how social change occurs.

It’s worth quoting him in the conclusion of this exploration of time:

John Holloway:

“Time is central to any consideration of power and counter power or anti-power. The traditional left is centred on waiting, on patience. The social democratic parties tell us “Wait until the next election, then we will come to power and things will be different?? The Leninist parties say “wait for the revolution, then we’ll take power and life will begin??. But we cannot wait. Capitalism is destroying the world and we cannot be patient. We cannot wait for the next long wave or the next revolutionary opportunity. We cannot wait until the time is right. We must revolt now, we must live now.

The traditional left operates with a capitalist concept of time. In this concept, capitalism is a continuum, it has a duration, it will be there until the day of revolution comes. It is this duration, this continuum that we have to break. How? By refusing. By understanding that capitalism does not have any duration independent of us. If capitalism exists today, it is not because it was created one hundred or two hundred years ago, but because we (the workers of the world, in the broadest sense) created it today. If we do not create it tomorrow, it will not exist. Capital depends on us for its existence, from one moment to the next. Capital depends on converting our doing into alienated work, on converting our life into survival. We make capitalism. The problem of revolution is not to abolish capitalism but to stop making it.

But there is also a second temporality. To give force to our refusal, we have to back it up with the construction of an alternative world. If we refuse to submit to capital, we must have some alternative way of living and this means the patient creation of other ways of organising our activity, our doing.

If the first temporality is that of innocence, this is the temporality of experience. This is the temporality of building our own power, our power-to, our power to do things in a different way. Building our own power-to is a very different thing from taking power or seizing power. If we organise ourselves to take power, to try to win state power, then inevitably we put ourselves into the logic of capitalist power, we adopt capitalist forms of organisation which impose separations, separations between leaders and masses, between citizens and foreigners, between public and private. If we focus on the state and the winning of state power, then inevitably we reproduce within our own struggles the power of capital. Building our own power-to involves different forms of organisation, forms which are not symmetrical to capital’s forms, forms which do not separate and exclude. Our power, then, is not just a counter-power, it is not a mirror-image of capitalist power, but an anti-power, a power with a completely different logic — and a different temporality.

The traditional temporality, the temporality of taking power, is in two steps: first wait and build the party, then there will be the revolution and suddenly everything will be different. The second temporality comes after the first one. The taking of power operates as a pivot, a breaking point in the temporality of the revolutionary process. Our temporality, the temporality of building our own anti-power is also in two steps, but the steps are exactly the opposite, and they are simultaneous. First: do not wait, refuse now, tear a hole, a fissure in the texture of capitalist domination now, today. And secondly, starting from these refusals, these fissures, and simultaneously with them, build an alternative world, a different way of doing things, a different sort of social relations between people. Here it cannot be a sudden change, but a long and patient struggle in which hope lies not in the next election or in the storming of the Winter Palace but in overcoming our isolation and coming together with other projects, other refusals pushing in the same direction. This means not just living despite capitalism, but living in-against-and-beyond capitalism. It means an interstitial conception of revolution.”