Excerpted from a 3-post dialogue with Felix Stadler on the nettime list.

A must read analysis of “where we are at”, by Brian Holmes:

“The Cold War military order ended along with the Keynesian-Fordist industrial paradigm way back in the 1970s. The crisis that is opening now (for the last three years) will spell the end of American-led, financially driven neoliberal globalization. Since that period can also be dubbed “Informationalism” I think does matter to nettime. The “immanent critique of the internet” is now talking place in the flesh on the streets of Cairo and Alexandria.

Beginning with the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, the focus of global warfare and the principle justification for the gigantic national arms-manufacturing complexes shifted from Asia (which had occupied that role during the Cold War) to the Middle East. US defeat in Vietnam officialized the shift. Meanwhile, the stunning victory of Egypt in the 1973 Israeli-Egyptian War, coupled with the first oil embargo, brought about a new reaction in the form of a strategic alliance between national militaries, arms manufacturers and oil extractors that is now visible to all as the ugly fist of Anglo-American imperialism. We are talking about a shift from the Cold War atomic-weapons conflict to the hot wars all aimed at maintaining control over the dwindling oil of the Middle East. Felix is right to say that Islamism replaced Communism as the threat required to maintain this military-industrial-extractive complex. That shift occured in the period from 1979 (Iranian Revolution) to 1981 (Anwar Sadat’s assassination, commonly attributed to the Muslim Brotherhood, but in fact done by the Egyptian Islamic Jihad now led by Ayman al-Zawahiri). With the monetary turn in the economy and the ascendancy of Reagan and Thatcher, that same period marked the beginning of the financially driven political-economic formula of neoliberalism, which went global after the fall of the Soviet Union’s hollow facade in 1989.

We all lived through the globalization boom in the 1990s, but most did not realize it was already marking the “financial autumn” (in Braudel’s famous phrase) of the American Century. Some of us did: we watched the Asian countries react to the 1997 financial crisis by refusing any new Western loans and ramping up their exports; we followed the deliberate engineering of the property/derivatives bubble after the industrial expansion of the 1990s collapsed in the year 2000; we were not surprised by the scope and severity of the 2008 krach, because we were well aware it had started in the summer of 2007. From this perspective it appears that the American system – or at the very least, the neoliberal version of it – is now on the way out. But the process is only beginning.
Throughout the era of US imperial dominance, the central issue has been opening the markets of subordinated countries to American (and more broadly, Western) trade, on American terms. This began at least as far back as the late 1920s, when the Ford Motor Co. was producing around two thirds of the cars sold in the world. However, the pattern of trade changed decisively in the 1970s, when the US started running very serious balance-of-trade deficits in manufactured goods including automobiles. Many people thought THAT was the beginning of the end. Instead the US continued to ramp up its exports of high-end engineering, of services and immaterial goods of all kinds, of legal frameworks, scientific paradigms and managerial brainpower, and finally, most decisively, of financial flows, which it did not so much supply itself as coordinate, with the help of Tokyo and the City of London, via the new electronic networks. The fiber-optic cable laid in the 1990s permitted the raising and allocation of speculative capital all over the world, giving rise to the tremendous burst of urbanization and indeed, of industrial development, that we have seen in and around the major global nodes since the late 1990s. This financially driven globalization culminated with the entry of China to the WTO in 2001. And indeed, in China it shows its true face: authoritarian state capitalism, information without democracy. The utopia whose promise so many of us felt in the 1990s has reversed into a nightmare. It is not over yet – but a major crisis began in 2007, and by 2008 it was already clear that the crisis would be geopolitical. The unipolar system of globalization has fallen apart. What I call “continental drift” has begun in earnest.

How will world development be coordinated in 10 or 15 years? No one yet knows. But it is known that the great promise of informationalism aka financialization was a lie and a failure. One the one hand it has maintained and even worsened the harshest domestic inequalities (witness Egypt); and on the other, with the deliberate cultivation of the Islamist enemy, it has produced a new form of super-empowered, laser-guided warfare and a process of intensive global policing whose hallmarks are satellite surveillance and assassination by unmanned drones (classic information technologies). Since 9/11 both these developments have made the new-look American imperium even more unpopular than the old one. First Latin America peeled away from what had been called the “Washington Consensus” (Thomas Friedman admiringly called it the “golden straightjacket” but no one wants to put it on anymore). Then, in the wake of the 2008 crisis, China began to assert itself as a fully autonomous and sovereign industrial power. And now, the people in the Middle East can no longer stand to be held in a state of arrested development (if not outright arrest for the slightest critique of their American-backed regimes). But I am sure this is only a beginning.

We are now going to face 10 or 15 years of economic and military chaos, while a new geopolitical order is worked out and a new industrial order emerges to face, for better or worse, the challenges of an ecologically transformed planet. Will this period of chaos entail a great war involving atomic weapons and centered on the Middle East? Will it see the militarization of China? Will it see the continued hardening of the class structure in the Western societies, with the spread of personal-security technologies and the proliferation of sealed borders? Will it see the generalization of GMO farming and the consequent destruction of arable land all over the earth? Or can all these negative trends be halted, in the face of their evident dead-end nature for most of the world population? Will a new ecologically conceived toolkit emerge out of the ruins of financial globalization? Will world development patterns be changed so as to allow everyone, everywhere, to find meaning in their lives by participating in the caretaking of human society?

These are the questions and let us be glad they are now at last coming explicitly on the table. Crisis is welcome, it interrupts the business-as-usual that inexorably makes things worse. My friend and collaborator Armin Medosch is right to insist on the mass intelligence of the Egyptians acting courageously in the street right now: it is impressive, it is beautiful, and even as it marks the beginning of the end of Informationalism it realizes part of the promise of the knowledge economy that neoliberal management killed and abandoned: because listen, remember, the people on the streets are in fact known to many in Egypt as “the digital generation.” That kind of intelligence, unfolding in many different forms and at different scales, is in my humbly visionary opinion what will provide the joy of the upcoming difficult years. What the “digital generation” has to invent is not the stiffening of a repressive hyper-technological order. What we have to invent, beyond what we used to think of as “ourselves,” is a way through chaos, a way beyond repression, a way out of planetary hegemonies: a chance to coexist in the twenty-first century.”