Symbolic Analysts.

Deutsche Telekom, Overview of Current Cyber Attacks, 2013 (via The New Aesthetic)

Essentially, three broad categories of work are emerging, corresponding to the three different competitive positions in which Americans find themselves. The same three categories are taking shape in other nations. Call them routine production services, in-person services, and symbolic-analytical services. 

(...)

Routine production services entail the kinds of repetitive task performed by the old foot soldiers of American capitalism in the high-volume enterprise. They are done over and over - one step in a sequence of steps for producing finished products tradeable in world commerce. Although often thought of as traditional blue-collar jobs, they also include routine supervisory jobs performed by low- and mid-level managers - foremen, line managers, clerical supervisors, and section chiefs - involving repetitive checks on subordinates' work and the enforcement of standard operating procedures.

Routine production services are found in many places within a modern economy apart from older, heavy industries (which, like elderly citizens, have been given the more delicate, and less terminal, appelation: 'mature'). They are found even amid the glitter and glitz of high technology. Few tasks are more tedious and repetitive, for example, than stuffing computer circuit boards or devising routine coding for computer software programs.

Indeed, contrary to prophets of the 'information age' who buoyantly predicted an abundance of high-paying jobs even for people with the most basic of skills, the sobering truth is that many information-processing jobs fit easily into this category. The foot soldiers of the information economy are hordes of data processors stationed in 'back offices' at computer terminals linked to worlwide information banks. They routinely enter data into computers or take it out again - records of credit card purchases and payments, credit reports, checks that have cleared, customer accounts, customer correspondence, payroll, hospital billings, patient records, medical claims, court decisions, subscriber lists, personnel, library catalogues, and so forth. The 'information revolution' may have rendered some of us more productive, but it has also produced hige piles of raw data which must be processed in much the same monotonous way that assembly-line workers and, before them, textile workers processed piles of other raw materials.

Routine producers typically work in the company of many other people who do the same thing, usually within large enclosed spaces. They are guided on the job by standard procedures and codified rules, and even their overseers are overseen, in turn, by people who routinely monitor - often with the aid of computers - how much they do and how accurately they do it. Their wages are based either on the amount of time they put in or on the amount of work they do.

Routine producers usually must be able to read and to perform simple computations. But their cardinal virtues are reliability, loyalty, and the capacity to take directions. Thus does a standard American education, based on the traditional premises of American education, normally suffice.

(...)

In-person services, the second kind of work that Americans do, also entail simple and repetitive tasks. And like routine production services, the pay of in-person servers is a function of hours worked or amount of work performed; they are closely supervised (as are their supervisors), and they need not have acquired much education (at most, a high school diploma, or its equivalent, and some vocational training).

The big difference between in-person servers and routine producers is that these services must by provided person-to-person and thus are not sold worldwide. (...) In-person servers are in direct contact with the ultimate beneficiaries of their work; their immediate objects are specific customers rather than streams of metal, fabric, or data. In-person servers work alone or in small teams. Included in this category are retail sales workers, waiters and waitresses, hotel workers, janitors, cashiers, hospital attendants and orderlies, nursing-home aides, child-care workers, house cleaners, home health-care aides, taxi drivers, secretaries, hairdressers, auto mechanics, sellers of residential real estate, flight attendants, physical therapists, and - among the fastest-growing of all - security guards.

In-person servers are supposed to be as punctual, reliable, and tractable as routine production workers. But many in-person servers share one additional requirement : They must also have a pleasant demeanor. They must smile and exude confidence and good cheer, even when they feel morose. They must be courteous and helpful, even to the most obnoxious of patrons. Above all, they must make others feel happy and at ease. It should come as no surprise that, traditionnaly, most in-person servers have been women. The cultural stereotype of women as nurturers - as mommies - has opened countless in-person service jobs to them.

By 1990, in-person services accounted for about 30 percent of the jobs performed by Americans, and their numbers were growing rapidly (...) In the United-States during the 1980s, well over 3 million new in-person service jobs were created in fast-food outlets, bars, and restaurants. This was more than the total number of routine production jobs still existing in America by the end of the decade in the automobile, steelmaking, and textile industries combined.

Symbolic-analytic services, the third job category, include all the problem-solving, problem-identifying, and strategic-brokering activities we have examined in previous chapters. Like routine production services (but unlike in-person services), symbolic-analytical services can be traded worldwide and thus must compete with foreign providers even in the American market. But they do not enter world commerce as standardized things. Traded instead are the manipulations of symbols - data, words, oral and visual representations.

Included in this category are the problem-solving, -identifying and brokering of many people who call themselves research scientists, design engineers, software engineers, civil engineers, biotechnology engineers, sound engineers, public relations executives, investment bankers, lawyers, real estate developers, and even a few creative accountants. Also included is much of the work done by management consultants, armaments consultants, architectural consultants, management information specialists, organization development specialists, strategic planners, corporate headhunters, and systems analysts. Also: advertising executives and marketing strategists, art directors, architects, cinematographers, film editors, production designers, publishers, writers and editors, journalists, musicians, television and film producers, and even university professors.

Symbolic analysts solve, identify, and broker problems by manipulating symbols. Theysimplify reality into abstract images that can be rearranged, juggled, experimented with, communicated to other specialists, and then, eventually, transformed back into reality. These manipulations are done with analytic tools, sharpened by experience. The tools may be mathematical algorithms, legal arguments, financial gimmicks, scientific principles, psychological insights about how to persuade or to amuse, systems of induction or deduction, or any other set of techniques for doing conceptual puzzles.

Some of these manipulations reveal how to more efficiently deploy resources or shift assets, or otherwise save time and energy. Other manipulations yield new inventions - technological marvels, innovative legal arguments, new advertising ploys for convincing people that certain amusements have become life necessities. Still other manipulations - of sounds, words, pictures - serve to entertain their recipients, or cause them to reflect more deeply on their lives or on the human condition. Others grab money from people too slow or naïve to protect themselves by manipulating in response.

Like routine producers, symbolic analysts rarely come into direct contact with the ultimate beneficiaries of their work. But other aspects of their work life are quite different from that experienced by routine producers. Symbolic analysts often have partners or associates rather than bosses or supervisors. Their incomes may vary from time to time, but are not directly related to how much time they put in or the quantity of work they put out. Income depends, rather, on the quality, originality, cleverness, and occasionally, speed with which they solve, identify, or broker new problems. Their careers are not linear or hierarchical; they rarely proceed along well-defined paths to progressively higher levels of responsiblity and income. In fact, symbolic analysts may take on vast responsibilities and command inordinate wealth at rather young ages. Correspondingly, they may lose authority and income if they are no longer able to innovate by building on their cumulative expericen, even if they are quite senior.

Symbolic analysts often work alone or in small teams, which may be connected to larger organizations, including worldwide webs. Teamwork is often critical. Since neither problems nor solutions can be defined in advance, frequent and informal conversations help ensure that insights and discoveries are put to their best uses and subjected to quick, critical evaluation.

When not conversing with their their teammates, symbolic analysts sit before computer terminals - examining words and numbers, moving them, altering them, trying out new words and numbers, formulating and testing hypotheses, designing and strategizing. They also spend long hours in meetings or on the telephone, and even longer hours in jet planes and hotels - advising, making presentations, giving briefings, doing deals. Periodically, they issue reports, plans, designs, drafts, memoranda, layouts, renderings, scripts, or projections - which in turn, precipitate more meetings to clarify what has been proposed and to get agreements on how it will be implemented, by whom, and for how much money. Final production is often the easiest part. The bulk of the time and cost (and, thus, real value) comes in conceptualizing the problem, devising a solution, and planning its execution.

Most symbolic analysts have graduated from four-year colleges or universities ; many have graduate degrees as well. The vast majority are white males, but the proportion of white females is growing, and there is a small, but slowly increasing, number of blacks and Hispanics among them. All told, symbolic analysis currently accounts for no more than 20 percent of American jobs. The proportion of American workers who fit this category has increased substantially since the 1950s (by my calculation, no more than 8 percent of American workers could be classified as symbolic analysts at midcentury), but the pace slowed considerably in the 1980s - even though certain symbolic-analytical jobs, like law and investment banking, mushroomed.

Robert Reich, The Three Jobs of the Future in Frank Webster (ed.), The Information Society Reader, Routledge, 2003, p.205-209.

Comprehensive Design.

Non attributed, Buckminster Fuller, s.d.

Fuller, like Emerson, saw the material world as the reflection of an otherwise intangible system of rules. But unlike Emerson and the Transcendentalists, Fuller linked that system of rules not only to the natural world, but also to the world of industry. During World War I, Fuller had watched his four-year-old daughter Alexandra die of infantile paralysis, contracted in part, he believed, because the family’s home was badly built. At the time, he was working as a contractor with the navy. Earlier, as a junior officer, he had seen how, with proper coordination, extraordinary industrial resources could be mustered to solve military problems. In his view, his daughter had died directly from a disease but indirectly from a failure to distribute the world’s resources appropriately (1). This conviction grew during World War II and the early years of the cold war, when once again Fuller saw the full scope of industrial production at work, as well as the inequality with which the world’s resources were distributed. What humankind required, he came to believe, was an individual who could recognize the universal patterns inherent in nature, design new technologies in accord with both these patterns and the industrial resources already created by corporations and the military, and see that those new technologies were deployed in everyday life.

In a 1963 volume called Ideas and Integrities, a book that would have a strong impact on USCO and Stewart Brand, Fuller named this individual the “Comprehensive Designer” (2). According to Fuller, the Comprehensive Designer would not be another specialist, but would instead stand outside the halls of industry and science, processing the information they produced, observing the technologies they developed, and translating both into tools for human happiness. Unlike specialists, the Comprehensive Designer would be aware of the system’s need for balance and the current deployment of its resources. He would then act as a “harvester of the potentials of the realm,” gathering up the products and techniques of industry and redistributing them in accord with the systemic patterns that only he and other comprehensivists could perceive. To do this work, the Designer would need to have access to all of the information generated within America’s burgeoning technocracy while at the same time remaining outside it. He would need to become “an emerging synthesis of artist, inventor, mechanic, objective economist and evolutionary strategist” (3). Constantly poring over the population surveys, resource analyses, and technical reports produced by states and industries, but never letting himself become a full-time employee of any of these, the Comprehensive Designer would finally see what the bureaucrat could not : the whole picture.

Being able to see the whole picture would allow the Comprehensive Designer to realign both his individual psyche and the deployment of political power with the laws of nature. In contrast to the bureaucrat, who, so many critics of technocracy had suggested, had been psychologically broken down by the demands of his work, the Comprehensive Designer would be intellectually and emotionally whole. Neither engineer nor artist, but always both simultaneously, he would achieve psychological integration even while working with the products of technocracy. Likewise, whereas bureaucrats exerted their power by means of political parties and armies and, in Fuller’s view, thus failed to properly distribute the world’s resources, the Comprehensive Designer would wield his power systematically. That is, he would analyze the data he had gathered, attempt to visualize the world’s needs now and in the future, and then design technologies that would meet those needs. Agonistic politics, Fuller implied, would become irrelevant. What would change the world was “comprehensive anticipatory design science” (4).

Both Stewart Brand and the members of USCO were steeped in Fuller’s writings by the mid-1960s. Brand would go on to write to Fuller, to attend his lectures, and, in the first edition of the Whole Earth Catalog, to claim that “the insights of Buckminster Fuller are what initiated this catalog”. In retrospect, it is easy to understand Fuller’s appeal to cold war American youth. Like McLuhan, he simultaneously embraced the pleasures and power associated with the products of technocracy and offered his audiences a way to avoid becoming technocratic drones. Moreover, according to Fuller the proper deployment of information and technology could literally save the human species from annihilation. As he put it in Ideas and Integrities, “If man is to continue as a successful pattern-complex function in universal evolution, it will be because the next decades will have witnessed the artist-scientist’s spontaneous seizure of the prime design responsibility and his successful conversion of the total capability of tool-augmented man from killingry to advanced living-adequate for all humanity” (5). In Fuller’s view, the Comprehensive Designer not only did not need to don a gray flannel suit when he went to work ; he actually needed to become an artist and an intellectual migrant. To a generation preoccupied with the fear of becoming lockstep corporate adults on the military model of Brand’s imagined Soviet Army, Buckminster Fuller offered a marvelously playful alternative.

Fuller’s vision of the Comprehensive Designer carried with it, nonetheless, intellectual frameworks and social ideals formulated at the core of military research culture. Foremost among these was Fuller’s notion of the world as an information system. In his numerous autobiographical writings, Fuller traces the origins of his ideas about the world as a system to his Transcendental lineage and especially to his time on board ships - which he considered closed systems - when he was a naval officer. Yet his writings also bear the imprint of cold war-era military-industrial information theory. For Fuller, as for Wiener and the systems analysts of later decades, the material world consisted of information patterns made manifest. The patterns could be modeled and manipulated by information technologies, notably the computer. The computer in turn could suffice as a model for the human being. After all, although Fuller’s Comprehensive Designer promises to be psychologically integrated as specialists are not, that integration depends on the Designer’s ability to process vast quantities of information so as to perceive social and technological patterns. Fuller’s Comprehensive Designer is, from a functional point of view at least, an information processor, and as such he is a descendent of cold war psychology and systems theory as much as a child of Fuller’s own imagination.

Even Fuller’s work style echoes the collaborative ethos of World War II research. According to Fuller and, later, his countercultural admirers, the Comprehensive Designer came by his comprehensive viewpoint only by stepping away from the industrial and military institutions in which specialists had long been trapped. Only the freestanding individual “could find the time to think in a cosmically adequate manner,” he explained. Fuller himself lived accordingly : for most of his career, he migrated among a series of universities and colleges, designing projects, collaborating with students and faculty - and always claiming the rights to whatever the collaborations produced (6). In his writings, Fuller offered his travels as a model of the proper behavior for a Comprehensive Designer and suggested that such a life was genuinely new. Yet a quick glance back at MIT’s Rad Lab in World War II would have reminded Fuller’s audiences that interdisciplinary migration and multi-institutional collaboration were key features of the military research world.

Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, University of Chicago Press, 2006, p.56-58.

Notes.

1. Fuller, R. Buckminster, Ideas and Integrities : A Spontaneous Autobiographical Disclosure, Englewood Cliffs, NJ : Prentice Hall, 1963, 35-43.

2. Ibid, 173.

3. Ibid, 176.

4. Ibid, 63.

5. Brand, Stewart, Buckminster Fuller in Whole Earth Catalog, edited by Stewart Brand, 3, Menlo Park, CA : Portola Institute, 1968, 249.

6. Fuller quoted in Fuller, R. Buckminster & Snyder, Robert, R. Buckminster Fuller : An Autobiographical Monologue Scenario Documented and Edited by Robert Snyder, New York : St. Martin's Press, 1980, 38. By the early 1960s, Fuller was traveling more than two-thirds of every year. Kenner, Hugh, Bucky : A Guided Tour of Buckminster Fuller, New York : Morrow, 1973, 290.

Californian Ideology.

Foster + Partners, Apple Headquarters, 2011.

Foster + Partners, Apple Headquarters, 2011.

Foster & Partners, Apple Headquarters, 2011.

At the end of the twentieth century, the long predicted convergence of the media, computing and telecommunications into hypermedia is finally happening (1). Once again, capitalism's relentless drive to diversify and intensify the creative powers of human labour is on the verge of qualitatively transforming the way in which we work, play and live together. By integrating different technologies around common protocols, something is being created which is more than the sum of its parts. When the ability to produce and receive unlimited amounts of information in any form is combined with the reach of the global telephone networks, existing forms of work and leisure can be fundamentally transformed. New industries will be born and current stock market favourites will be swept away. At such moments of profound social change, anyone who can offer a simple explanation of what is happening will be listened to with great interest. At this crucial juncture, a loose alliance of writers, hackers, capitalists and artists from the West Coast of the USA have succeeded in defining a heterogeneous orthodoxy for the coming information age : the Californian Ideology. 

This new faith has emerged from a bizarre fusion of the cultural bohemianism of San Francisco with the hi-tech industries of Silicon Valley. Promoted in magazines, books, tv programmes, Web sites, newsgroups and Net conferences, the Californian Ideology promiscuously combines the free-wheeling spirit of the hippies and the entrepreneurial zeal of the yuppies. This amalgamation of opposites has been achieved through a profound faith in the emancipatory potential of the new information technologies. In the digital utopia, everybody will be both hip and rich. Not surprisingly, this optimistic vision of the future has been enthusiastically embraced by computer nerds, slacker students, innovative capitalists, social activists, trendy academics, futurist bureaucrats and opportunistic politicians across the USA. As usual, Europeans have not been slow in copying the latest fad from America. While a recent EU Commission report recommends following the Californian 'free market' model for building the 'information superhighway', cutting-edge artists and academics eagerly imitate the 'post- human' philosophers of the West Coast's Extropian cult (2). With no obvious rivals, the triumph of the Californian Ideology appears to be complete. 

See here and there.

Richard Barbrook & Andy Cameron, The Californian Ideology in Mute, issue n°3, 1995. 

Notes. 

1. For over 25 years, experts have been predicting the imminent arrival of the information age. See Alain Touraine, La Société Post-Industrielle, Paris, 1969 ; Zbigniew Brzezinski, Between Two Ages : America's Role in the Technetronic Era, New York, 1970 ; Daniel Bell, The Coming of the Post-Industrial Society, New York, 1973 ; Alvin Toffler, The Third Wave, London, 1980 ; Simon Nora and Alain Minc, The Computerisation of Society, Cambridge, 1980 & Ithiel de Sola Pool, Technologies of Freedom, Harvard, 1983. 

2. See Martin Bangemann, Europe and the Global Information Society, Brussels, 1994 (available through http://www.echo.lu/) and the programme and abstracts of the Warwick University's "Virtual Futures 95 Conference".