What’s the matter with high-tech West Virginia?

A recent article in Le Monde Diplomatique entitled "What’s the matter with West Virginia?", http://mondediplo.com/2004/10/02usa (picking up on themes in Thomas Frank’s recent book, "What’s the Matter with Kansas?") wonders why so many voters so hard up economically would still back Bush. The author’s answer is their attachment to right-wing positions on social issues combined with the contempt of liberal elites for the downtrodden.
Around the same time (and while debates over this thesis were raging on some progressive email lists), the state of West Virginia announced it would sponsor a public computing grid accessible to researchers and businesses through the Global Grid Exchange.
The project, "which will function as a supercomputer at a fraction of the cost, is a joint effort of the state, the West Virginia High Technology Consortium, Verizon and Hewlett Packard.… ‘this grid in the hands of West Virginia companies and researchers will give them the capacity for innovation and greater potential for new products in the state of West Virginia as well as an influx of research dollars into the state,’ Amy Beaudry, a spokeswoman for the high tech consortium, said Wednesday…. The grid will link computers in academic institutions, government offices and home personal computers that have excess capacity to advance work in such fields as biometrics and cancer research. Officials believe the grid will spark economic development initiatives within the state. Although universities and organizations like NASA have had computer clusters for years, researchers and businesses not connected with those institutions have had to go through an extensive process to gain access. ‘A West Virginia engineer or researcher will be able from their desk top to get access to math computing power on demand… The potential is staggering.’" (Associated Press report.)
So two pictures are simultaneously painted of the state in the media: a benighted, ignorant voting base, and a state government brilliantly taking advantage of the latest in supercomputing innovations.
What’s wrong with this picture?
On the one hand, it ignores the complexity of political views among West Virginia’s workers. For one thing it’s not clear why miners losing jobs and benefits, WalMart workers with low wages and no benefits, and aspiring teachers who can only pay for their college degree by going to Iraq (think Jessica Lynch), should be expected to be gung-ho for a Democratic candidate who has studiously avoided promising any change in their economic fortunes. Nor is it clear why such indifference is a sign of ignorance, as opposed to informed self-interest. (The author of the "What’s Wrong" article notes: "Before John Kerry starts taking advice from President Bill Clinton he should recall that it was Clinton’s mix of free market economics with pseudo-progressive social measures that made the Democrats into a minority party.")
On the other hand we have a state elite whose response to these workers’ woes is to ignore it, to write them off as relic of the state’s past, and instead to spend state development money on a computing grid which will produce a tiny handful of jobs requiring education far beyond that achieved by any of the workers just mentioned. (Well, OK, perhaps some of them can work as janitors in the small companies the grid spins off).
How’s this relevant to a page about computers and socialism? Here’s how:
The state government’s preference for this form of development, and for investing in this form and use of technology, comes first and foremost from its belief that profit solves all problems (in the short term for itself and in the sweet bye-and-bye for workers). But this preference results in a technological idiocy on a greater scale, and more damaging socially, than the alleged stupidities of the state’s voters.
This is another example of the combined and uneven development of information technology: that is, the most advanced data gathering and analysis techniques in a region with some of the worst social and economic conditions in the country. And the social crime, displaying the idiocy of the state’s elite, is that the advanced techniques won’t be used to address that backwardness.
No doubt the public grid will lead to some very worthwhile scientific research (as well as some totally pointless research geared to boosting profits for pharmaceutical companies and other vultures). But why not take a step back and use this grid to do the math the state has skipped over: that is, matching resources to people’s needs. Describing the new grid, the state spokesperson said "the potential is staggering.’" You got that right – but not for the reasons she thinks.
It’s no secret, and it doesn’t take even a pocket calculator to do the math, that for over a century the number of dollars flowing out of the state in value produced by miners (and more recently by retail workers), and into the pockets of mining and other companies, far exceeded what would have been necessary to provide decent jobs, education, health care, housing, etc. for all the state’s residents.
The state spokesperson praises the grid because with it "a West Virginia engineer or researcher will be able from their desk top to get access to math computing power on demand…" Even without the supercomputing power of the new grid, a far more socially useful grid is already feasible which could do the math so studiously avoided for so long:
Let’s say the state’s unions and community groups created a website on the state’s economy and promoted its use by members at union and group headquarters as well from their home computers. On it would be links to the public annual reports of any corporation doing business in the state. On it would also be links to state and Federal websites with figures on the state’s population, employment, housing, schools, etc.
Then taking data from these already available, already public websites, some simple calculations are run showing the resources needed to meet residents’ needs, and the results are matched with the products and profits of the above-mentioned corporations (I would add a historical component to this calculation, showing the reparations due the state for the profits exported from it over the years).
Not a particularly daunting project. The real problem is not technical, but social: getting access to the resources which the calculations show are required. That of course presumes stronger unions fighting for better contracts, for legislation boosting benefits and creating public works jobs, etc.
And to take it the last mile: such calculations, performed on a daily basis, would be the basis for socialist planning (although at that point the grid would have to be extended nationwide (or further)).
Which brings us back to the problem of combined and uneven development of information, i.e. the fact that we let the social idiots of the ruling class run our economy and society, creating this kind of criminal mismatch of technology and social need.