Makers of the Modern Mind
The Information Revolution: A Marxist Analysis Areeq Hasan ’20 The restriction of information to the scope of the individual has as long been integral to the successful survivalistic tendencies of the human species as has been the breaching of data secured by competing individuals. Indeed, it is out of the struggle to dominate this very information gradient that the power structures intrinsic to human society have emerged, manifested as the Marxist notion of class struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. For millennia, the statistical range of this information gradient has remained similar given the statically classical nature of the collection and storage of data. Amid the current technological climate of rapidly increasing global interconnectedness and the real-time flow of information recursively supplying and demanding big-data storage solutions and data analysis mechanisms, however, human society appears to be approaching a revolution in information that is fundamentally altering social mechanics by means similar to the dialectic transformation of the global superstructure as propelled by elementary alterations in the societal base during the First Industrial Revolution. As a direct repercussion of this novel, nonlinear growth in the collection and storage of data, the bourgeoisie, as regulators of information flow, have become exponentially strengthened in their instrumentalization of information as a means of manipulating the proletariat who are constant generators of data, creating a divergence in the information gradient and, thus, socio-economic divide between the bourgeoisie and proletariat that ultimately provides a means to establish the conditions for a global revolution in hierarchical dynamics. In order to apply Marxism to interpolate the social sub-mechanisms constituting the revolution in information, the relevant postulates of Marxist social theory must first be established. The exploitative characterization of the bourgeoisie as a collective entity interested solely in material gain at the cost of the proletariat is directly stated in Marx’s Communist Manifesto, wherein he claims that the bourgeoisie “has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest” via “shameless, direct, brutal exploitation” of the proletariat (Marx 15-16). Despite the fact that, in a modern context, the bourgeoisie consists, in part, of the large private enterprises of the tech industry from Alphabet Inc. to Apple Inc. and Facebook Inc., hegemonic forces only showcase the direct benefits these companies 33
