Fourth Industrial Revolution: Did somebody say revolution?

Cetshwayo Mabhena

The word revolution constitutes a huge claim. It is also some strong language, politically. To name and claim a revolution is essentially to state that the order of things as we know them has changed. Mathematically revolution suggests a total rotation and change of position of an object. Philosophically revolution refers to what Niccolo Machiavelli classically named as “change to the order of things” for the better, and which Michel Foucault popularised in a description of the state of political things, conditions and experiences, in our fast changing world.

The order of things is what has come to be called “status quo” or the “establishment” in present political language and expression.

The promise of a revolution is essentially a political statement and statement of optimism in so far as all revolutions claim and propose a new “order of things” and utopia, which is a paradisal departure from the old order or the status quo. Opponents or enemies of a revolution are loosely called reactionaries at best, sellouts at the worst and traitors at the worst of the worst. Reactionaries are normally corrected and rehabilitated, sellouts are punished and traitors are hanged or crucified. In revolutionary sensibility, traitors are the true anti-christs that knowingly and intentionally betray a great cause. It is in the nature of revolutions that they are not vegetarians; they eat meat, and most times the meat of the revolutionaries themselves.

My reflection today is on what has come to be signified and claimed as the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Which is a world revolution, and a modernity on its own that, like the Enlightenment of the old west, is supposed to deliver us from darkness to light, and liberate all corners of the world from the old era and deliver us to a new one. The claimants and proponents of this much-vaunted revolution base it, like all previous industrial revolutions, on technological developments in the world. In other words, technological inventions and developments, are leading the world into a certain kind of utopia and as such, paradisal experience and conditions.

In my own social circle, I have been a witness to the power of technology and miracle of innovation. During Level Five Covid-19 Lockdown, in the outskirts and bushy armpits of Pretoria where my own and myself circulate we were starved of alcohol. We were so starved that a drop of the banned fluid became a cause for celebration. We even tried brewing our own beverages. My neighbour and I would meet by the fences of our small holdings, his cigarrete in the mouth and my smoking pipe in my lips, puffing at another banned substance, and cry about and for alcohol. One of the teary days, he phoned a friend of his, another Boer buddy in his network and enquired about the possibility of us getting rescued with a bottle of some Gin or any strong drink for our wretched souls. We did not get a bottle of Gin or any other strong drink but a small drone landed with two six packs of Carling Black Label. For a moment, our wretched souls were indeed beneficiaries of a technological revolution and were grateful for it, even as we were bending the law a little. One can only wonder then what some real and evil law breakers might transport around with drones. Clearly, some powerful individuals that can afford drones can even smuggle all sorts of contraband across borders and seas well outside the perimeters of national and international eyes and laws.

Questioning a revolution

That the Fourth Industrial Revolution presents a monumental development within modernity cannot be doubted. It is a world civilizational leap forward of biblical proportions. Therefore, it takes a measure of some dissidence and pessimism to question it as a revolution. The first question might be, whose revolution is it, if it is indeed a revolution. This is because for Africa; for instance, the blurring of the lines between the human and the virtual that Artificial Intelligence (AI) presents is a real Dickensian philosophical dilemma. Thus, ‘it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way.’ This great world and civilizational revolution might after all have a darker and underside to it. All revolutions have their victors and their victims, heroes and those that become the debris of history if they are not consumed by the revolution itself.

True is the folk wisdom that every approaching light at the end of the dark tunnel may be a monstrous train coming to crush and not to carry human society forward. The First Industrial Revolution stretched, arguably from 1760 to 1840 and left humanity gifted with such inventions as the transcontinental railroad train.

It is rememberable that later on in those old years one Cecil John Rhodes intended to build a railroad that would stretch from Cape to Cairo and from Cairo to the ends of the earth, in the West. Rhodes’s dream was to transport anything valuable from Africa to Europe. The Second Industrial Revolution commenced in the 19th Century and amongst other developments, it made mass industrial production a reality and the airplane part of the furnitures of human invention. With every industrial revolution, man seems to actually conquer nature and approach the heavens themselves in glory.

Airplanes and trains were a great invention but they did make colonialism easy and convenient for the conquerors.

The Third Industrial Revolution began in the 1960s and its signature was making computing part of the commonsense of the world and the human at large. Computing as a technological development was and is still pure magic, and witchcraft itself. The benefits of computing, however, have not been evenly distributed just as the evils of it have been isolated to the usual victims of the present world order, the poor at a world scale, Africans and other wretched of the earth.

For Africa in particular, all the industrial revolutions were not, with all their evident benefits, separable from the modernisation and civilising, slavish, imperial and colonial missions that compelled Walter Rodney to canonically meditate, politically and economically, ‘how Europe underdeveloped Africa.’ In the present, a decolonial theorist; Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni has asked the stubborn question ‘can Africans create African futures within a modern world system structured by global coloniality?’

Decolonising the Fourth Industrial Revolution, I argue, is not escaping or resisting the positive changes but advocating and practicing a critical and human-centric embrace. Scholars have noted how robots will increasingly remove humans from employments and livelihoods, how wars will become more deadly, and how existing inequalities within and between countries will be magnified. Some political alarmists have even argued that from automated sex toys to efficient robots, machines will finally expel humanity from the earth. In time and in place, every revolution has been both a dream and nightmare.

From a decolonial perspective of the Philosophy of Liberation that centres the human, the natural environment, peace and freedom, I posit to argue that Africa, politically and intellectually, should cultivate preparedness to seize and own the dream and overcome the nightmare of the Revolution. Like war that is too important to be left to politicians and soldiers the 4IR is too grave to be left to scientists, corporates and pessimists.

Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena writes from KwaMabusabesala village, Siyabuswa, in Mpumalanga, South Africa. Contacts: [email protected].