Chomsky on Anarchism.pdf - Zine Library

CHOMSKY ON ANARCHISM
their spare time-young girls usually-what they do fo r fun is window shopping.
I mean, if they want to do it you can't say don't do it-but what this tells
you about how people's consciousness has been modified by "off-job control"
is pretty frightening.
Linked to that as well, one of the things that I think is striking when you
look at the history of anarchism, is that at its most popular it was almost an
organic movement answering community needs, the Jewish anarchists in
New Yo rk in the 1890s, Spain obviously, Argentina as you mentioned,
France. Isn't community also being destroyed by things such as technology,
where now there are more communities in cyberspace than maybe the type
of community where you or I grew up? Myself in a coal mining community
where you knew everyone and everyone knew you. Yes, there were tensions,
but you had that sense of relationships, Isn't that going rather quickly and
isn't technology helping that go'
In my view technology is a pretty neutral instrument. It could go in that
direction or it could go in an opposite direction. Technology could in fact be
used to help the workforce in a factory run it without any managers, by providing
people at the workbench with real-time mformation that would enable
them to join with others in making sensible decisions. That's another lise of
technology. Of course that technology doesn't get developed. In fact there are
very interesting studies about how it does work. One of the most interesting
studies was done by David Noble, who used to be here (at MIT), but he was
a bit too radical. He did terrific work. One of the main topics he studied was
called Numerical Control-computer controlled machine tool productionthat
kind of thing. That was developed in the military system at public cost,
bur it was designed so one way of using it could have been to eliminate managerial
roles and put decision-making into the hands of skilled mechanics who
knew what they were doing, and were usually people who knew more than
those people in the offices upstairs. I'm sure it was (rue in the coaJ mining
work. So put the decision-making into their hands and the technology could
have been designed to do thar. Studies were done showing that that would
even increase profits. But it was done the opposite way, in ways that increase
levels of management control, which is highly inefficient, to deskill mechanics
and to turn them into robots who just push buttons. Well, that is a choice as
to how to use technology and it's a kind of class warfare, but it has nothing to
do with the inherent nature of technology. However, the point you make is an
interesting one. I don't know what will come of it but it is true that there are
virtual communities which are very real. I mean, I would say that I've never
seen 95 percent of my close friends. We just interact all the time on the internet.
And, at my age it seems perfectly reasonable, but when I see my grandchildren
do it, I don't like it. I think they need to learn things about face-toface
communication.
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