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Alex Gourevitch—Become the Gods: A Response to Jensen Suther

This article is a response to a text by Jensen Suther that was published as part of the b2o review‘s “Finance and Fiction” dossier.

As is too often the case, when I agree with ninety percent of an argument, I spend all my time on the ten percent with which I disagree. I think learning to love the rich, even those as loathsome as the Roys, is a way to understanding the dynamic of love and domination in Succession. But there is a question of how to think about the personal and the impersonal in the show. We can get there indirectly, by way of comparison. I just read Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks and was talking to a friend about the comparison between Buddenbrooks and Succession. Two great works about dynastic succession, but with very different narrative trajectories. The connection between Buddenbrooks and Succession is in the portrayal of patriarchal domination. The institutional fact of succession – who will inherit the family business? – allows that domination to have objective content. Domination is not just an accidental fact of personal psychology, of a father’s ability to morally terrorize or manipulate, but a continual and institutionally stabilized relation. Someone must succeed to the office once occupied by another. The child must succeed the father, not just as father, but also as leader of the enterprise. The power the father has over the child is to confer the title, by which the child becomes something more than mere biological continuity.

In both Buddenbrooks and Succession, the domination appears at the personal level in the fact that the children fail to measure up to the paterfamilias. In Buddenbrooks, however, the children fail because of the spectral presence of the patriarch’s high moral virtue and its apparent connection to his economic success. The elder Buddenbrook, Johann, was a natural bourgeois. He lived a life of virtue without finding it mere subordination to duty. There is little sense that he had to stifle his basic impulses and inner vitality to the Protestant ethic. Instead he found it spiritually fulfilling, even nourishing. The second-generation Buddenbrooks, however, are inferior in their different ways. None can live as they naturally are. They each find themselves mentally and spiritually stifled, even physically crippled, by their duty to sustain the family in the image of their father’s sober, bourgeois propriety. The naturally impudent and daring daughter, Tony, slowly has the life crushed out of her by the failed attempts to be a good wife and good daughter. The more she tries to carry out her duties the more her life bends and shrinks, like an empty soda can slowly imploding under pressure. Christian, the middle-child, is decadent in mind and body, physically ailing away and economically dissolute: inconsistently employed and endlessly in debt. The eldest and natural successor, Thomas, has neither the will to adapt to the new business conditions nor the spiritual intensity to commit to being a lesser, but proper, businessman. Keeping the business alive means expanding it, but expanding it requires an enterprising spirit at odds with the decency and moderation that he mimics but does not feel. As the unsatisfied and bitter leader of the family enterprise, he is an unworthy successor who fails to sustain the life of his family: the business stagnates and declines while his son and sole heir dies. Buddenbrooks is, therefore, a novel about dynastic decay under a particular kind of social domination. The next generation’s lives are constrained by the unreachable moral example of the previous generation, in the context of a capitalist society that has turned more intensely competitive and, therefore, incompatible with bourgeois moral virtue. Were they to adapt to new conditions, they would violate the example of their father, but to hew to the family morality they must destroy their vitality.

Succession, however, is not about the same kind of decay because there is no real evolution. Buddenbrooks stretches over three generations, while Succession is almost relentlessly temporally constipated. There is no slow decline from the moral glories of the founding and growth of the enterprise. We start at the peak and are held there for three and a half seasons during which nothing happens. Nothing happens because Logan won’t let “It” happen. Some complain that this temporal stagnation is all in the service of glamorizing the billionaire lifestyle in the guise of prestige TV. All we’re left with is endless shots of private jets, family helicopters, and exclusive residences. But the sclerosis is part of the show’s aesthetic integrity. Logan does not loom over his children by the force of his moral example, like Johann Buddenbrook. Instead – as Jensen observes – Logan sees and despises each of them. He refuses to let them love him.

But it’s more than that. Logan uses the prospect of succession to ever further crush his children, playing each off the other to keep them all subordinate to him. The children are weak and grasping, not just because they cannot live up to his virtue, but because Logan himself has lost his way. His is a purposeless rule: winning for the sake of winning. “I fucking win!” he screams in the season 3 finale, when he has outmaneuvered his children. When his children ask him why he’s doing this, Logan can only say “because it fucking works.” The dynastic economic project is revealed for what it always was, an exercise in domination. But left with the evidence that his children don’t have the strength and guile to destroy him, he is left only with his will to power now turned inwards, on his own family.

The reason that the show moves in place, as it were, is because there is still a dynamic tension at the core of Logan’s conflict with his children: the dynasty he created cannot be maintained. He cannot allow a succession to take place because it would mean there is someone worthy of the office. But Logan’s domination of his own family is so complete that there are only children grasping at an inheritance, not worthy of succession. This is not succession as decay, à la Buddenbrooks, but succession as self-annihilation. It is fitting that the only way for a succession to take place, for some kind of historical movement to take place, is Logan dying. It was that or Logan destroying the company by selling it, whichever came first. As it happens, Logan’s will outlives his body. The GoJo deal goes through, Matsson takes over, and the Roy children find themselves outmaneuvered by each other. Roman, ever the truth-teller of the show, explains the result to Kendall: “We are bullshit…You are bullshit, I am bullshit, she is bullshit. It’s all fucking bullshit.” They are bullshit because, though willing to sacrifice each other for their ambition, they are never willing to go all the way, never even quite sure whether they want to succeed their father or want his approval. Shiv’s betrayal, which seals the sale to GoJo, is just the final proof. Matsson was the worthy successor because he was a killer. Even the Roy children know it. They repeatedly accuse Matsson of having killed their father by forcing Logan onto the plane in which he died his ignominious death. It is never clear whether they are more upset at their father’s death or at the dominance Matsson establishes by being responsible for Logan’s end.

Now I agree that one way to understand Succession is that it is not just a timeless tale of dynastic succession, but one in which that succession is disciplined by its social form: a special kind of social domination. This makes many of the popular comparisons inapt. Some have likened Succession to King Lear. It seems obvious. An increasingly unhinged, aging father tests the love of his three children by rules that make expression of that love impossible. Goneril and Regan’s praise for their father is insincere, not because we know their inner motives, but because of the structure imposed on their speech by Lear. By making their words a test of their worthiness to inherit part of the kingdom, he makes their voice his. Regardless of whether they mean what they say, they cannot mean it. The more they speak, the less they can say. Again, this is not about their true motives but about the conditions under which they speak, conditions determined by their father, who has bound expressions of love to inheritance. In Succession, Roman is the ultimate Goneril-Regan. When Roman pleads with his father, “don’t do this,” in the season 3 finale, Logan asks Roman what he has left. Roman’s pathetic “I don’t know…love?” is so hopeless that it is almost sincere, but also absurd. Love has as little place in a boardroom battle as when inheriting the kingdom. But there is no other conversation Logan understands, no other relation Logan can accept than the struggle to over-power others. The Cordelia option is the one the children left behind at the beginning of season 4: leave the business so that they can be a family. But Cordelia’s silence is not purer. It is just the other side of the domination relationship: she can only express her love for her father by not expressing it. Only further proof that it is the dominator who makes love inexpressible.

But the Lear comparison withers on further inspection. Lear’s madness is political. He divides the indivisible: a sovereign realm. He compounds the problem by then imagining he can choose his successors. The normal logic of succession, to which he refuses to submit, is that one child – the eldest – inherits it all, because that preserves the integrity of rule. Lear should have as little say as anyone else, yet he wants it all to depend on his will – one kingdom or many, that love should decide, and so on. He is subject to that impersonal political logic, yet wants it all to be personal. Logan Roy, however, is the patriarch of an altogether different enterprise: not the territorially-bound state but the globe-bestriding, multinational corporation. Not Leviathan but Behemoth.

The universal drama of Succession is mediated by the drama of that social logic – not just of billionaires, but billionaire capitalists, constrained by board-members and shareholders, debt payments and stock prices, conglomerates and subsidiaries. That is why I think Jensen is right to point to capitalist forms of domination in particular. But is this a story about mute compulsion? Where even the very wealthy are as much slaves as everyone else? And where, therefore, we have to root for their love – love them – because it is the only human and emancipatory response to the crushing logic of accumulation?

It’s true, there is a sense in which the characters are subject to a dynamic they cannot master and that they can only liberate themselves by escaping the social relations they are disciplined by. But I don’t think it’s primarily the silent logic of accumulation that constrains them.

Now I can imagine a counterargument something like the following. If mute compulsion isn’t the fundamental constraint, then what is? Succession is not itself a timeless logic because it takes different forms. Isn’t that the point of distinguishing between Lear, Buddenbrooks and Succession? Logan’s purposeless rule, of winning for the sake of winning, is as Jensen put it “a late capitalist twist on Lear’s madness.” So Logan has not lost his way in some ethical sense. His is no mere intellectual error. His purposeless rule is an internalization of production for the sake of production, or what Marx called “nothing more than the rationalized motive and aim of the hoarder.”

I don’t disagree, but there are limits to the mute compulsion reading of Succession. Mute compulsion is the impersonal form of social domination by capital. It is achieved through the discipline the market imposes externally on each of the actors. The clearest account of that domination we have is from volume 1 of Capital. The presentation of that domination as comprehensively impersonal requires assuming, as volume 1 does, that the paradigmatic form of ownership is one in which capital is dispersed across many capitalists. None are in any position to shape the market conditions that discipline them. They are price-takers, in modern parlance, because they are roughly equally situated. (While Marx does later show how capital naturally centralizes and concentrates, that is a natural development of the logic of accumulation that also modifies the nature of those constraints.) When capitalists are in that position vis-à-vis each other Marx does say they are just as much slaves as workers. They are slaves to capital because they are wholly subordinate to the logic of surplus-value extraction. Each particular intersubjective relation is subsumed by this wider social process: exchange-value rules use-value, value accumulation over love and friendship.

If Succession is an expression of that, we would want it to show us those moments of external discipline, in which characters are forced to adopt the standpoint of capital. And we do sometimes see it. The debt situation in season 1, Stuy Hosseini, proxy battles, desperate attempts to go private, cratering stock prices, hostile takeover threats, the deal with Matsson. Whether the characters want to or not, there are moments when characters must consciously adopt the standpoint of the value-maximizing capitalist, or find themselves and their lives dissolved. This reaches its peak in the first episode of the final season, in the question of whether they will all just cash out. Why not take the billions and be free? Not only do they decide to stay, but never is Kendall prouder than the moment when he gives the successful speech to shareholders on the new value proposition ‘Living Plus.’ He doesn’t want money, he wants to increase value. Cashing out is something close to spiritual death for each of them. But notice one weakness here with the mute compulsion story – they really can cash out. They aren’t petty capitalists, who will go under, and return to the ranks of the working class or whatever. There is nothing really forcing them away from the route Connor takes – spend vast amounts of money on their own vanity projects.

We might think there is a further form of domination, not external in the sense of market discipline, but social, in the sense of the form that all relations take. This is I think part of what Jensen is getting at. It is not a question of what they are forced to do, but how it is available for them to conceive themselves. Their psychology is already social. For instance, their conception of a family is as an empire not of property but of endlessly accumulating wealth. They can’t imagine the family bond without all being part of the company, making decisions together in the boardroom. They have no experience and no sense of love as its own, independent bond, because who they are as a family and who they are as a business, is inseparable. And that, itself, is product of the social form they are tied up in.

Now I’m not rejecting that completely. But I don’t quite see the social form of the ‘succession’ as so impersonally capitalist. It is dynastic. The dynastic succession of a commercial empire, not just an ordinary capitalist business. Waystar is a corporate behemoth able to use its economic power to shape and alter markets and to use its political power to anoint or destroy presidents. The Logan family is not subject to the routine discipline of those markets the way, say, a local dry-cleaner or restauranteur or barber is. Succession is also an expression of human power and freedom from within the logic of capitalism. It is an all-too-human form of domination, in which the particular whims of a particular agent – primarily but not only the patriarchal figure – has its own independent existence. And this shapes the dynamic of familial succession. Logan is only willing to hand off to someone like him. The only worthy successor is someone who is equally or even more dominant. And his children routinely wonder what to do with their power. They even seem to celebrate impulsiveness and capriciousness, because they imagine themselves to be exercising Machiavellian virtú just like their father. There is in some sense too much slack, not enough mute compulsion and discipline, which is why they are constantly trying to will themselves into their father’s position. They can never make up their mind and the structure won’t make it up for them.

So we might say that, while this is a very capitalist form of succession, it is not just a story about impersonal domination, but simultaneously about a highly personal form of domination because it takes place in our particular (Late? Postmodern? Financial?) capitalist society. There is so much wealth and so much market power that it appears like everything depends on the whim and caprice of the patriarch. And personal domination, in the sense of creating the world in one’s own, not just capital’s, image seems like an end in itself.

That also explains why the trap, the structural logic of the show, is that succession is impossible. Logan has related to his family as to everyone else, as subjects to be manipulated, controlled, dominated – not just used. But those who submit are unsuited to replacing him. Since his children love him, they try to be what he admires – power-seeking, dominant, risk-takers. But they are not really in it to dominate, they are in it for love, so they continuously fail. And Logan, meanwhile, is in it to win. Again, I am not sure we can really get what’s going on with this, without appreciating that the social form of succession is an expression not just of the standard mute compulsion of capital, but of the dynastic form of neoliberal, multinational corporate capitalism. That kind of capitalism creates zones of discretion that add a very personal element to the domination the children experience. It makes the prize they struggle for that much more dramatic, makes Logan seem that much more god-like, and the self-aggrandizement of each not purely delusional or psychologically stunted.

Which brings me to the politics of the show. Critics complained that we see almost no real people or any of the people doing the work. But that is the genius of the show. It happens in remote and inaccessible areas – private jets and helicopters, Caribbean villas and New York penthouses, Mediterranean yachts and Hampton estates. Even Connor’s private wedding boat has its own private room set aside for the siblings. Over time, the show’s hyper-attention to these exclusive forms of travel, leisure and business, is to make the drama into an Olympian power struggle among pagan gods. Those gods have all the familiar human weaknesses – they are vain and capricious, reckless and indifferent – but coupled to powers no ordinary human beings could have. They choose presidents and they get away with murder. A business (Vaulter) is gutted, whole floors of people unemployed, all because of a petty squabble between two brothers vying for their father’s approval in a boardroom. Or, perhaps the greatest superpower of all, they can just fly over hours-long snarls of plebeian traffic. The emptiness and sterility of most of the settings, the absence not just of anything dirty or even cluttering, but often of any ordinary people, is part of what enhances the sense that these are more than ordinary mortals. When the siblings show up in Sweden to negotiate with Matsson they do so on a literal mountaintop, like lesser Greek divinities locking horns with a Norse deity. Logan’s death was like the death of a Titan, the old gods giving way to the new.

Some commentators claim that this hyper-stylization glorified the rich, but that is too shallow a reading. The unreachability of the characters, intensified by the remoteness of the settings, was a proper representation of social power in our society. Our capitalist economy is immensely productive and has generated fabulous capacities for social cooperation. But it has done so in a way that makes it seem like, were it not for some foreign power like an employer or financier, we would not cooperate in this social enterprise at all. These immense capacities to shape our material world and determine the rules of cooperation are concentrated in a small number of hands, over whom we exercise little control. We cannot even recognize their social power as our own. It is alien to us. And so it is best represented as the distant powers of a few people who, for that reason, seem more than human. The majority work or don’t work, rest or don’t rest, at their pleasure.

If that world-shaping power is really a collective one, ours in the broadest national and international sense, then perhaps the real succession story is the one the show doesn’t tell. We are the disinherited. There is a brutal realism to Succession. Only the gods can hurt other gods. There is no Promethean moment. Nobody steals the Roy family’s fire, seizes their property, and brings their power down to earth. And that too is a truth, since nothing seems more remote these days than social transformation. In Greek mythology, the gods begin to die when the people stop worshipping them. In our time, the problem is not one of belief and worship but politics and action. So long as the vast majority does nothing to claim the power that is theirs, then it is not just Gregs all the way down, it is Matssons always on top. Yes, we should love the rich, but we should also want to become the gods. That would be the true succession.

Alex Gourevitch is an associate professor of political science at Brown University. He is the author of From Slavery to the Cooperative Commonwealth: Labor and Republican Liberty in the Nineteenth Century, and is currently working on a book about strikes.

October 5, 2023
Jensen Suther—Learning to Love the Rich in Succession

This article was published as part of the b2o review‘s “Finance and Fiction” dossier. The dossier includes a response to this article by Alex Gourevitch.

Immediately following the finale of the third season of HBO’s Succession—the recent prestige drama about a Murdoch-like media mogul and the struggle among his children over who will succeed him as CEO—screengrabs of a now-famous scene began circulating on social media. The still depicts Jeremy Strong’s emotionally battered Kendall Roy sitting on the ground outside the Italian wedding venue where his mother has just been remarried, his brother Roman (played by a very game Kieran Culkin) bending at the waist to grip his shoulders and his sister Siobhan (or “Shiv,” a role owned by Sarah Snook) lightly touching his head while looking on with evident feeling and concern. To highlight the artistry and painterly composition of the scene, someone had superimposed on the shot of the three Roy siblings a geometric representation of the golden ratio, a spiral within a rectangle. Employed most famously by Italian artist and inventor Leonardo da Vinci, the golden ratio can often be found in paintings from the Renaissance period and was integral to the development of the humanist idea of the harmony, balance, and innate value of the human form. While the Italian setting of the season and portrait-like character of the shot would seem to suggest that this is more than mere coincidence, it is hard to understand what sort of role such an anachronistic gesture could be playing in a series as cruel and as brutally anti-humanist as this one, in which profitability, efficiency and power are “the measure of all things”—rather than humanity, to cite the Renaissance favorite Protagoras. At best, it appears to be a smug, ironic nod to the inhumanity of the Roys; at worst, a case of prestige television freely appropriating from an illustrious phase of art history in order to increase said prestige.

Yet Succession has consistently centered the human figure—especially, with its snap zooms, the human face—and such cinematographic devices serve to remind us of what very little else in the series’ dialogue or its characters’ acts is able to: their own diminished humanity and value. Understood in this way, the series isn’t engaged in the passé postmodern project of exposing the fraudulence of humanism; its subversiveness rather lies in the way it teaches us to see the humanity in—and thus to love—the rich.

The series begins with Kendall, the eldest of the three full siblings, preparing to replace his elderly father Logan Roy (Brian Cox) as the CEO of their family company, Waystar Royco, a media and entertainment conglomerate that passingly resembles the Murdoch empire. Yet as the heir apparent is initiated into his role, is widely discussed in the media, and makes the cover of Forbes, Logan begins to suspect that Kendall lacks the “killer instinct,” as Shiv puts it later, that the job requires. A recovering addict with a depressive streak who craves his domineering father’s respect and approval, Kendall fails several implicit tests, like a trick invitation to Logan’s eightieth birthday in the middle of tense acquisition negotiations. Logan’s fateful—yet perhaps prudent—decision to cancel his retirement plans and not step aside is the series’ equivalent to the Big Bang: it births the twisted, post-Shakespearian universe of Succession, in which Kendall, Shiv, and Roman compete against one another for the chief role and thus for their father’s affections.

By the midpoint of the third season, some of the series’ former champions began to question the point of the endless machinations and to voice concerns about the kinds of sympathies Succession seems made to elicit from its viewers. Why, such commentators wondered, should we feel sorry that the Roys might lose their private jets? Why are their lives given such sumptuous, wide-screen treatment, and not the lives of those their actions destroy? In season one, Roman dangles a million-dollar check before the son of two immigrant staff members, a sum they are promised if the child can hit a homerun in the family’s annual softball game. He of course is outed, his family made to sign an NDA, and they make a brief final appearance just before the credits roll, when it is intimated that, in exchange for their silence, they were given the Patek Philippe watch Logan indifferently received from Shiv’s husband Tom (Matthew Macfadyen) for his birthday. If the actual victims are bit players, silenced and marginalized, then our empathy for Kendall or Roman would appear to reflect our ensnarement in a classical ideological trap: the sentimental identification with a character’s “universal” plight, such as a son’s failure to live up to his father’s expectations.

In his influential critique of Western theater, Brecht famously decries works that elicit this kind of empathic projection as bourgeois instruments for blocking reflection and anesthetizing thought.[i] Yet the problem is not just that the true victims are elided or relegated to the sidelines; refocusing the narrative on a different struggle would simply reproduce the same difficulty. Rather, what goes missing is “the idea of a man as a function of the environment and the environment as a function of man” (1992: 97). What is elided, in other words, is a sense of the historical specificity of the dramatic action, the social situation that prompts those acts or that struggle at this time. To cite Richard Wright, the point is not to create art “which even bankers’ daughters could read [or watch] and weep over and feel good about”[ii]; the point for Brecht is to create opportunities for understanding the broader systemic reasons that things are as they are. But doesn’t this precisely tell against the mission of Succession, to teach us to “love the rich”?

At least at first glance, the view of Succession as a show for “bankers’ daughters” is reinforced by the most prominent “critical theory” of the social function of television and by the way that the series is shaped in accordance with the constraints specific to the medium. In the early fifties, Theodor Adorno produced a series of articles on the status of television “as ideology,” based on studies he undertook as the research director of the Hacker Foundation in California.[iii] There is a certain ham-fistedness and predictability to Adorno’s analyses, which largely consist of readings of individual “plays” (“shows,” in our contemporary idiom) as stereotypical representations of everyday life meant to foster conformity. Yet Adorno does begin to sketch a critical theory specific to the medium in elaborating the notion of “pseudo-realism,” which pinpoints the way television substitutes a “pedantically maintained realism in all matters of direct sense perception” for representation of the objective, institutional tendencies responsible for producing our shared reality (1991: 170). This endows television with a unique capacity for smuggling in an ideology of “the normal” advantageous to the capitalist status quo. Adorno cites as a key example the way the medium “personalizes” irreducibly historical and political phenomena. For instance, in a series about a fascist dictator, totalitarianism is represented as the result of the “character defects of ambitious politicians,” the dictator’s fall as a product of the warm personalities of courageous resisters (2005a: 63). This reinforces our sense of society as an aggregate of egos, atoms swirling in a history-less void.

In the case of Succession, however, this procedure is inverted: the character defects of the rich are like wounds that pique the interest of the morbidly curious and compel them to ask: “how did it happen?” It is precisely by foregoing the prestige sociology of a show like The Wire and by exactingly observing the inner lives and family dynamics of so “undeserving” a subject that the lineaments of distinct historical types (the mogul, the operative, the CEO) are thrown into relief. As a brief, pivotal scene in season one’s emotionally harrowing “Austerlitz” shows, Logan himself is a product of abuse. Shortly after Kendall questions an allusion his father makes to the beatings he endured as a child in Quebec, the camera lingers on Logan’s scarred back during his morning swim in an infinity pool. Yet it would be a mistake to read this scene as aiming to simply elicit the kind of “empathic projection” targeted by Brecht. A hallmark of Succession is its use of handheld cameras to achieve a verité effect, which creator Jesse Armstrong first deployed in his dark comedic masterpiece Peep Show. The series’ verité style is a way of exploiting the “pseudo-realism” of television to bring what is fantastical, sky-scraper high, back down to earth and to shock us with the disclosure that, to cite Marx, “The capitalist is just as enslaved by the relationships of capitalism as is his opposite pole, the worker” (1976: 990). Logan may not live among us, but he does live as one of us, as deformed by the demands of a market society as anyone else. And as we will see, Succession teaches us to love the rich precisely by illuminating the late capitalist web in which we all are caught.

For Marx, the purpose of capitalist production is the accumulation of value, which is measured in labor time. The drive to accumulation is a matter not of individual greed or miserliness but of a social system that necessitates that one sell one’s labor or buy and employ the labor of others to survive. Succession thus rightly depicts our world as a world of masters and slaves: Shiv is to Logan what Tom is to Shiv; what Tom is to Shiv Greg (Nicholas Braun) is to Tom. And to incentivize his own “slave” to aid him in betraying his master, Shiv, Tom promises Greg “your own Greg.” What Greg’s presence is meant to reveal is that it is in fact Gregs all the way down. Yet it is also Gregs all the way up. It might seem that that degree of wealth (tens of billions) would free anyone so lucky from the “drive to accumulation.” Logan’s scars help dispel the illusion that, in a family tree splintered into various master-slave relations, he is the “master of the house” standing unfettered at the top. In a reflection on the way marriage under capitalism serves less as a partnership founded on romantic love than as “a community of interests,” Adorno notes that one might think that “marriage without ignominy” is still possible for the rich, those who are “spared the pursuit of interests.” But the privileged, he writes, “are precisely those in whom the pursuit of interests has become second nature—they would not otherwise uphold privilege” (2005b: 31). This is not only apparent from the several weddings (and divorces) depicted in Succession but also from Logan’s neurotic obsession with dynasty, which is less a matter of perpetuating his own line than a matter of perpetuating the line of monopoly capital itself, of which Logan is a mere “character-mask” or representative.

What Succession dramatizes is the way inter-capitalist competition engenders an intra-capitalist struggle: the struggle within the monopoly itself to ensure its own continuity and the maintenance of its dominance, both within and without. In “Authority and the Family,” Max Horkheimer argues that, “in the golden age of the bourgeois order,” the family functioned as a refuge from the growing antagonisms of a market society and as the lone space in which individuals could still be recognized as autonomous ends. Yet as Horkheimer explains, the family also functioned as an incubator for compliant subjects, obedient to the state and passive in the face of the market just as they were trained to be before the patriarch (1972: 114). In Logan, the distinction between the authority of the patriarch and that of the market collapses. Just as he is subject to market forces beyond his control, which compel him in the end to sell Waystar to the Swedish interloper Lukas Matsson (Alexander Skarsgård), so does he subject his wife and children to the principle of exchange, paying for the loyalty of his wives with Waystar shares and forcing the three siblings to compete against each other not just for his affections but for the position of CEO. Yet because Logan is himself the monopolist, his children become his own competitors. He exploits his own paternal authority to exert his dominance while still expecting one of them to succeed him. Not only is the family enclave irredeemably contaminated by market rationality; it can no longer fulfill its own mission of instilling the (limited) sense of autonomy Kendall and his siblings would require to effectively lead.

Every master is thus also a slave, and every slave is a would-be master. The “lean-in” feminist ideology that Shiv would mock and disdain and yet that she also lives and breathes renders her a slave to her own drive to maximal empowerment and “independence.” In her (successful) attempt to gaslight Tom into agreeing to a non-monogamous marriage, Shiv reasons that “we’ve torn everything else down […] Love is the last fridge magnet left.” Her wish is fulfilled when, in the season-three finale, her husband finally does as she asks and betrays their marriage to further his own career. Inversely, when Roman “accidentally” sends the dick pic he intended for Gerri (J. Cameron Smith) to Logan’s phone, it could be argued that Roman’s aim has never been truer: on the cusp of success and relative independence, he brings about the ideal scenario for expressing his masochistic tendencies, re-infantilizing himself in Logan’s eyes to ensure his own continued obedience to his true dom, “daddy.” It is the ultimate instance of topping from the bottom. Yet the series itself preempts facile psychoanalytic readings by way of Shiv and Roman’s meta-commentary on the Roy family “family romance.” In a bizarre, truly inspired stretch of dialogue in “Too Much Birthday” in season three, Roman makes so absurdly explicit his psychosexual motivations for competing with Shiv as to render them entirely worthless from the standpoint of the critic: “Turns out he loves it when I do the daddy dance […] He loves fucking me, and he just doesn’t want to fuck you anymore.” In the case of Succession, Oedipal and Electra complexes are not the keys to understanding but the very phenomena to be understood.

When Succession first premiered, it received a somewhat lukewarm reception because it seemed uncertain about its own generic identity and suffered from tonal problems. But this is by design. In the comedic Succession, our laughter registers our surprise at the ignobility of the nobles. That subversion of expectation is what makes us laugh, but it is also the source of the series’ tragedy—namely that the “good life” after which we all are striving is in actuality the bad one. It is a tragicomedy because the most refined and elite among us are deeply, pathologically, unrefined and broken. According to Henri Bergson, comedy consists in the incursion of the mechanical and autonomic into the realm of the living[iv]; hence the displacement of pseudo-realism in Succession by a Courbet-like realism of decay. In the opening episode of season two, a foul odor pervades the family’s summer home in the Hamptons, spoiling a lavish lunch spread; a later shot establishes a raccoon carcass as the culprit, which a rankled contractor stuffed in the chimney in retaliation for lack of payment. Later, in season three, Tom and Shiv try wine from their private vineyard, only to discover that it tastes of literal shit (Tom, euphemizing, notes its “earthy,” “agricultural,” bouquet). And finally, in accord with Kantorowitz’ famous notion of the “king’s two bodies” (2016), the public, invulnerable one (the monarch) and the private, material one (the man), Logan’s public persona lives parasitically on his ailing body, which suffers a stroke, succumbs to “piss madness” from a UTI, and is jeopardized by a near-heart attack following a walk with his estranged son Kendall and a concerned investor (2016). The clean, corporate spaces are regularly befouled by the Roys, as when Logan urinates on Kendall’s carpet and Roman ejaculates on the office window, suggesting that the “good life” is itself rotten, “bad,” with decadence often coinciding with literal decay.

Yet as the scene with which we began intimates, it is because the Roys themselves are capital’s slaves that they are worthy of our attention—worthy of our love. When Kendall confesses to his siblings that he was responsible for the death of the waiter at the end of the first season, it is, surprisingly, the darkly impish Roman who listens most attentively. Kendall is motivated to confess because he wants to be confirmed in his understanding of himself as a murderer, a reckless elite, but Roman contests this self-conception and tries to highlight the good intentions evident in Kendall’s acts—that he tried to save the waiter, that he acted as a hero. Kendall’s struggle to be known results in a shift in his own self-knowledge. In treating Kendall as a moral agent, Roman enables him, for the first time in the series, to actually be one rather than just play one. The scene inverts a moment from the season’s second episode, when Kendall had sought to sway his siblings to join his moral crusade against Logan’s stewardship of the company. Whereas Kendall’s self-deceived, self-aggrandizing proposal then proved less than palatable, here his vulnerable disclosure of his role in the death of the waiter at the end of season one amounts to an authentic appeal for community that only Shiv and Roman could satisfy. It is because Kendall has finally and truly given up on being Logan’s son that he is able to become a brother. A further result of Roman’s struggle in the prior scene to know his brother is that, in acknowledging what Roman knows, Kendall enables Roman to learn something about himself, namely that he can be trusted and is capable of love. Roman’s masochistic kink may be an attempt to master his feelings of inadequacy behind closed doors, but his severe allergy to any form of intimacy—especially with his romantic partners—reflects both his fear of being known and his fear of being the knower, one who must trust and one who must be trusted. In recognizing Roman’s capacity as a recognizer, Kendall thus enables his brother to be the sort of person who loves, as we will shortly see.

But the Utopian dream of their mutual coordination of the company, the flushing out of the fascists at the Fox News-like ATN, and the democracy-minded righting of the corporate ship, is short-lived. As we discover, Tom has betrayed Shiv to Logan on account of her multi-layered betrayal of Tom, enabling Logan to call the bluff of the Roy children and to block their veto of the Waystar sale. When an enraged Logan exclaims that their guns have “turned into sausages” and asks what leverage they have left, Roman repeats Kendall’s confessional gesture and, inelegantly but effectively, asks: “I don’t know—fucking love?” But this appeal for community falls on deaf ears; the struggle for recognition and mutual understanding in which Roman is now trying to engage is misread by Logan as “the Game” the family has been playing since the very first episode. Logan cannot bear the demand that is being made of him, the demand that he act out of love for his children, and so does not just refuse to reciprocate Roman’s gesture but casts doubt on the authenticity of what he has just expressed. This ultimate skeptical act, Logan’s insinuation that Roman is speaking in bad faith, is what undermines the recognitive edifice the siblings had begun to build, by undermining Roman’s new and fragile sense of self. The tragedy of the scene lies in the way that Roman loses his father by finally attempting to genuinely be his son and in the way Logan’s attempt to outmaneuver doom is what—it seems—will ultimately doom him. Logan is constitutionally unable to make the one non-strategic choice that might well destroy the company (and thus himself) but help make his children (and thus himself) a different, non-pecuniary kind of “whole.” As the episode and season draw to a close, the shot with which we began is inverted: Kendall and Shiv now stand over a devastated Roman. It is difficult to watch—all the more so because there is no sense of schadenfreude, no sense of a “rich asshole” getting what he deserves. What the use of such a “humanistic” frame is meant to teach us in such anxiety-provoking scenes, what we are meant to learn from this acknowledgement of us, the viewers, is precisely “how to love the rich.”

But surely, one might object, we also do have good reasons for hating the rich. While they may be dominated by the law of value, they are, after all, the beneficiaries of that law. Yet just as Adorno observes that “one must have tradition in oneself to hate it properly” (2005b: 52), so must one first learn to love the rich. It is only in recognizing the source of our shared domination that we come to understand the structural necessity of the domination of one class by another—and thus the “badness” of the rich. Over the course of Succession’s four seasons, it becomes increasingly clear that Logan’s children precisely aren’t “killers,” are too mutilated to do what needs to be done: to “succeed” Logan by moving on from Waystar and building something of their own or by toppling their father and running the business themselves. At the same time, it is also exactly what they are formed to do. In the final scene between the siblings in the fourth season, when Shiv chooses not to back Kendall as CEO but to back her estranged husband Tom, Kendall pleads with his sister not to betray him and delivers perhaps the most haunting line of the entire series: “I am like a cog built to fit only one machine. It’s the one thing I know how to do.” The metaphor captures the subsumption of acculturation, Bildung, growing up, under the drive to accumulation. Hence Kendall’s virtuosic—if morally repugnant—attempt to sell what in effect is a glorified retirement facility as a life-extending utopia (“Living+”), just to boost the Waystar valuation. Or Roman’s installation of the fascism-adjacent Mencken as president, just to insure his continued control of the family business. But the tragedy is that, while Kendall is built for this machine only, he is just thereby misshapen, deformed, unable to competently do the job. Time and again his desire to succeed his father as CEO has led him to jeopardize the very company he is supposed to lead. Meanwhile, Shiv blocks Kendall not only because she has negotiated a better deal for herself and because she’ll have a modicum of influence with Tom as CEO. Rather, Shiv cannot but block Kendall, because of the principle of competition Logan has instilled in his children. Shiv may be reasoning strategically, choosing self-interest over fraternal love, but the principle of self-interest has itself become an end in its own right or “highest good”—what Kant once identified as “radical evil” itself.

The ethical culpability and “badness” of the Roys—the principle of their unlovability—are what lend several of the most moving scenes in the series finale their pathos. When, for example, Shiv and Roman finally relent to Kendall’s desire to be CEO and crown him as “king” in their mother’s kitchen, the scene reads as a kind of “pre-oedipal fantasy.” There is a nostalgia in the scene for a reciprocity, fraternity, and satisfaction the siblings actually never knew—as the cold hearth (or empty refrigerator) of their mother’s home intimates. It isn’t a depiction of the “real” siblings, of their real feelings of love outside the corporate drama; it is the fantasy of a world without or prior to Logan—a world in which Kendall, Roman, and Shiv would not be who they are. This is also why, as the siblings watch a home movie of Logan having dinner with their half-brother Connor (Alan Ruck), the television acts as a “window” onto a reality they can never inhabit. Logan, for them, can only play “father” on TV, or as in Kendall’s “Living+” presentation, as a digitized ghost that finally gives Kendall the approval he has craved—but only because Kendall has paid a technician to manipulate his father’s words. We love the Roys, in a sense, because we are gripped by the tragedy of their inability to love one another. By the same token, it is only by learning to love the Roys that we “can hate them properly,” through a critique of the monopoly form of capital that necessitates the dynastic succession (and thus the existence of the Roys). Nowhere is the iniquity of the rich (and of their indomitable master) more on display than in the series’ final moments. As Lacan famously observed, the true father is the dead one because it is only as dead that the father is “internalized” and thereby able to fully realize his psychological function.[v] The end of Succession bears this out: Shiv has never been more her father’s daughter than when—in an act as loathsome as it is necessary—she destroys Logan’s son.

In its earlier seasons, in addition to objecting to the series’ overly sympathetic treatment of the rich, critics of Succession often complained that the show had run out of ideas and had nowhere left to go. While this proved untrue in the end, the series’ critics also weren’t exactly wrong. By way of conclusion, it’s worth noting the meta-televisual dimension of the series as reflected in its title, which designates the medium’s principle of motion: seriality or successiveness. In a lesser-known companion essay (“The Fact of Television”) to his justly famous, discipline-founding work on film, The World Viewed, Stanley Cavell attempts the deduction of this defining principle of the medium, alongside the principle that television is meant for “monitoring” rather than “viewing” (as in film). According to Cavell,

Serial procedure can be thought of as the establishing of a stable condition punctuated by repeated crises or events that are not developments of the situation requiring a single resolution, but intrusions or emergencies—or humor, or adventure, or talent, or misery—each of which runs a natural course and thereupon rejoins the realm of the uneventful; which is perhaps to say, serial procedure is undialectical. (1982: 89)

In watching television, we “monitor” the normal and the uneventful, the “way of the world,” which the serial format itself embodies. This is why, Cavell remarks, people often leave their TVs on in the background, not unlike the monitors utilized by security companies. What Cavell calls the “fear of television”—still encapsulated today in the common refrain that “I don’t even own a TV”—lies in the way it makes “intuitive the failure of [the world’s] survival of me,” in the way it seems to monitor the “growing uninhabitability of the world, the irreversible pollution of the earth” (1982: 95). If television captures the way the world stands outside me and is in some sense independent of me, what we fear is that the world it is monitoring is a world that will not survive us: the medium has itself become the fearful suggestion of the end of the company we keep. In the age of new media, Cavell’s analysis might seem quaint. But what is “doom scrolling” if not a fearful anticipation of “the failure of [the world’s] survival of me”?

Succession may have once appeared to be merely spinning its wheels, going nowhere, but it was arguably in just this respect that it fulfilled its medium’s mandate. What the series so grippingly “monitored” was the treadmill of capital itself, the way it spins its wheels, is going nowhere. Succession thereby relayed the submerged tragedy of this uneventful repetition. Yet it is also because it asked of us that we learn to love the Roys that we might begin to see that—despite what they themselves would have us believe—the realm of freedom is not a private enclave in the Hamptons, reachable only by helicopter.

References

Adorno, Theodor. 2005a. Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords. Translated by Henry Pickford. New York: Columbia University Press.

Adorno, Theodor. 1991. The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture. Edited by J.M. Bernstein. New York: Routledge.

Adorno, Theodor. 2005b. Minima Moralia: Reflections on Damaged Life. Translated by E.F.N. Jephcott. New York: Verso.

Armstrong, Jesse, et al. 2018-2023. Succession. HBO Entertainment, Gary Sanchez Productions, Hyperobject Industries, Project Zeus.

Brecht, Bertolt. 1992. Brecht on Theater: The Development of an Aesthetic. Edited and translated by John Willet. New York: Hill and Wang.

Cavell, Stanley. 1979. The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Cavell, Stanley. 1982. The Fact of Television. Daedelus 111, no. 4: 75-96.

Horkheimer, Max. 1972. Critical Theory: Selected Essays. Translated by Matthew J. O’Connell et al. New York: Continuum.

Kantorowicz, Ernst. 2016. The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Lacan, Jacques. 1992. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959-1960. Translated by Dennis Porter. New York: W.W. Norton.

Marx, Karl. 1976. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (Vol. I). Translated by Ben Fowkes. New York: Penguin Books.

Warren, Kenneth. 2016. “Rankine’s Elite Status.” Los Angeles Review of Books, January. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/reconsidering-claudia-rankines-citizen-an-american- lyric-a-symposium-part-ii/

Jensen Suther is a former Fulbright Scholar and received his PhD from Yale University. He is currently a Junior Fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in a range of academic and public-facing venues, including Modernism/modernity, Representations, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and the New Statesman. He is currently working on two books—Spirit Disfigured and Hegel’s Bio-Aesthetics—which explore Hegel’s legacy for Marxism in aesthetic, political, and philosophical contexts.

[i] See the well-known “Alienation Effects in Chinese Acting” in Brecht (1992).

[ii] Quoted in Warren (2016).

[iii] See “Prologue to Television” and “Television as Ideology” in Adorno (2005a).

[iv] As noted in Cavell 1979, 415.

[v] See, for instance, Lacan 1992, 309.

October 2, 2023
Charles Bernstein — Poem-A-Day, Poem-A-Day, Jiggety Zam: The Academy of American Poets Keeps Poetry Safe from Poetry

by Charles Bernstein

A poem of mine was selected for the “Poem-a-Day” series at the Academy of American Poets, which claims 300,000 readers. The producers of the show told me it was mandatory to submit an “About this Poem” statement along with an audio recording – “whether that statement is a full-blown exegesis or simply reportage on when and where the poem was written, or what compelled you to write the poem, etc., etc., is completely up to you.” (Audio of the poem itself was optional.) Because my possibly sardonic poem was about not substituting anything for the poem (a line could have been: “If you love the poem for what it’s about, then you don’t love the poem but what it’s about”), I wrote a sentence that echoed a series of related poems I’ve written (one of which even made it in the Norton Anthology of Poetry): “This commentary intentionally left blank.” I also attached an enhanced audio version of the line. The staff producers wrote back that what I sent did not meet their “standards.” Evidently, I misunderstood what “completely up to you” meant. Even so, I wrote a commentary explaining my point of view – why I preferred not to write an “about” statement –– and I attached an enhanced audio of this new commentary. I was informed by the producers that my audio would not be “accessible” to those who relied on the audio version of Poem-a-Day posts, even though my enhanced audio is entirely accessible, albeit slightly aesthetically challenging. The producers said they would make the needed audio themselves.

Just before publication, I received a proof with the opening — and key — sentences of my commentary redacted: without those sentences, the commentary lost its motivation and so its sense. The producers sent a recording of the poem followed by the mangled commentary. I couldn’t tell if the recording was done by a first-gen digital reader or a person imitating one. I had to act immediately as there was no time for back and forth. Within an hour I had made a new, “straight” recording of the poem, restoring only a version of the first redacted sentence of the original commentary, assuming, correctly, that this would meet Poets.Org standards, even if it still lobotomized my comment.

And that, well, was that.

In one of their emails, “The Academy” expressed its appreciation for my “being an important part of our work.” “We . . . would love” to sell you a membership. At a discount.

Making the purchase was left entirely up to me.

Here’s the rejected audio of the extended commentary, together with my initial audio and the redacted commentary (the four initial sentences deleted by the producers are crossed out):

MP3

~~This commentary intentionally left blank.~~

~~That’s the “about” statement I initially submitted. However, the editors told me this response didn’t “meet our standards.” My poem is about not meeting standards.~~ The kind of poetry I want doesn’t follow rules: it makes up its own rules. Perhaps my commentary needs a commentary? The poem is itself a series of commentaries. The idea of “blank” — letting the work stand for itself — is my commentary on the poem. In other words, if you love the poem for what it is about, you don’t love the poem but what it’s about. Or perhaps you could say the commentary is the poem and the poem the commentary. I get things all, well, Topsy-Turvy.

October 11, 2022
Tessel Veneboer — Penetration as Philosophy (Review of McKenzie Wark’s Philosophy for Spiders: on the Low Theory of Kathy Acker)
a review of McKenzie Wark’s Philosophy for Spiders: on the Low Theory of Kathy Acker (Duke University Press, 2021)

by Tessel Veneboer

In Philosophy for Spiders McKenzie Wark reads the novels of the punk avant-garde writer Kathy Acker as philosophical texts, or as the title proposes: as “low theory.” Low theory rejects the privileged terms of “high theory” and likes to remind the reader that the philosopher has a body. This theory “from below” often talks about sex and makes theoretical thinking a bodily task. Wark also finds this kind of thinking in Kathy Acker’s literary experimentation. Acker’s “null philosophy” comes from below – from the body and self of the author – while undoing that same self.

As scholar and writer, Wark has made significant contributions to the fields of media theory and cultural studies with Hacker Manifesto (2004), Molecular Red (2015) and Capital is Dead: is this something worse? (2019). More recently, she turned to gender theory and memoir writing with Reverse Cowgirl (2019) and now she has published this personal-critical reading of Acker’s experimental prose. Philosophy for Spiders comes with a content warning for “sex, violence, sexual violence and spiders” as well as a form warning: “this book has elements of memoir and criticism but is neither” (4). As the subtitle of the book suggests, Wark proposes to read Acker’s work as philosophy, more specifically as low theory, a term first used to describe the work of cultural theorist Stuart Hall and popularized by Jack Halberstam in The Queer Art of Failure (2011). Wark follows Acker in her view that perhaps she was not writing novels: “they’re big chunks of prose, but are they novels? More groups of stories. Some of them aren’t even that” (54). Rejecting a clear-cut division between the novel and a philosophical text allows Wark to read Acker’s prose as “philosophical treatises” (54). The reader might wonder what the low in low theory reacts to: is it the dominance of the “master discourse” of high theory, or does the complicated content of high theory make the genre inaccessible? Developing low theory as an aspirational genre, Wark longs for a kind of philosophy that emerges outside of a (patriarchal; and even matriarchal) tradition:

It is a philosophy without fathers (or even mothers), and so no more of their Proper Names will be mentioned. This philosophy for spiders is not a philosophy in which gentlemen discourse on the nature of the beautiful, the good, and the true. It is philosophy for those who were nameless as they had to spend their time working for the money. A philosophy not by those who could arise from their place to announce it, because their place was to be on their knees, their mouths full of cock. A theory in which otherwise quite tractable bad girls and punk boys go off campus and conduct base experiments in making sense and nonsense out of situations. “Recruited due to our good intentions, V and I’ve instead learned a brutal philosophy: ignorance of all rational facts and concepts; raging for personal physical pleasure; may the whole Western intellectual world go to hell.” (81)

Where Wark aims for a philosophy without “Proper Names” Acker turns to the literary and philosophical canon to think with and write through. Acker’s work refers to (but never cites) a wide range of canonical thinkers such as Jacques Lacan, Georges Bataille, Marquis de Sade, Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud who inspire her to question the primacy of rationality and the Cartesian subject. In one of her first novellas Kathy Acker writes: “I’m trying to get away from self-expression but not from personal life. I hate creativity” (Acker 1998, 86) and in her short story New York City in 1979 the character Janey “believes it is necessary to blast open her mind constantly and destroy every particle of memory that she likes” (Acker 1981, 6-7) Acker’s work rejects the idea that an author should have an original voice, which for her is a bourgeois conception of literature that only serves to support the capitalist “cult” of individuality. For Acker there is no creativity involved in creation. As Wark asserts, “the bourgeois writer is an acquisitive animal. A creature of power, ownership, and control. What it writes, it owns; that which writes is the kind of being that can own. Kathy was a different beast – or beasts” (5). Acker’s interest in anti-creativity stimulates her appropriation of “found” material such as canonical texts, overheard conversations and dreams – for Acker they are all as “real” as any other event. Throughout her work Acker compulsively recounts and repeats events from her life; her mother’s death, painful romantic encounters, unrequited crushes, dreams, gossip, and jobs she did. At the same time, Acker consistently lies about all of those aspects of her life – to the extent that even her date of birth is contested.[1] Treating events of her own life in a similar manner to the texts she plagiarizes, everything is part of Acker’s “anti-creative” project. Her work is sometimes seen as aggressively opposing meaning-making – thanks to her oft-cited mantra of “Get rid of meaning. Now eat your mind.” But Acker’s ambitious rewriting of the literary canon is not simply a postmodern displacement of meaning. Her literary experiments are concerned with procedure, method, and memory.

One of the ways Acker explored her interest in (and suspicion of) memory was writing “fake autobiography”: a rewriting of her life interwoven with found materials, like conversations she overheard and texts she copied. In her early text “Politics” (1972) for example, she collages conversations between her stripper-colleagues together with scripts she wrote for a live sex show on 42^nd Street with (clearly fictional) incestuous lesbian fantasies. In her biography of Acker Chris Kraus suggests that Kathy Acker’s numerous lies must be seen as a fundamental part of both her life and work. She even goes as far as to propose that her consistent lying was a condition for writing:

Because in a certain sense, Acker lied all the time. She was rich, she was poor, she was the mother of twins, she’d been a stripper for years, a guest editor of Film Comment magazine at the age of fourteen, a graduate student of Herbert Marcuse’s. She lied when it was clearly beneficial to her, and she lied even when it was not. […] But then again, didn’t she do what all writers must do? Create a position from which to write? (Kraus 2017, 14)

In Wark’s recounting of their shared past (Wark and Acker met in Australia in 1995 and embarked on a short affair) she is fully aware of Acker’s self-mythologizing tendencies. Wark fictionalizes their meeting and points to the gaps in her own memory as well as Acker’s habit to treat her life and her literature the same:

Not everything Kathy ever said to me was—strictly speaking—true. Particularly when we got to New York. It was as if we were inside a Kathy Acker book, written on flesh and city. […] I knew nothing about New York at the time. Anything Kathy told me could be true to me, was true to me. She showed me the New York of myth. We wandered from Central Park toward the East River, to Sutton Place. Sutton Place, she told me, was her childhood home. In the psychogeography of New York, it is certainly a place from which a Kathy Acker should hail. It is in countless movies, from How to Marry a Millionaire to Black Caesar. Lou Reed has a song that mentions not walking there. It’s in Catcher in the Rye; it’s in Great Expectations and My Life My Death by Pier Paolo Pasolini—by Kathy Acker—and some of her other books. (33)

Considering all the ways in which Acker put herself on the line in her work, her body as a performer, autobiographical material, her creation of the persona, makes it possible for Wark to read Acker’s life and work as a spider web of narratives, identities, and concepts. In the early 1970s Acker started publishing her first appropriative texts under the pseudonym “The Black Tarantula” and copying from the Marquis de Sade and a book of portraits of female serial killers. In her work Acker often puts everything she copies in the first person but she did not only steal from other texts, she also stole from her own life. Wark’s construction of a spider web of Ackers takes its cue from Martino Scioliona’s suggestion that Acker’s auto-plagiarism becomes a narrative web in which “Acker always recounted her own life story as if it, too, was a stolen text” (in Wark 2021, 5).

Weaving a web of Acker’s selves, Wark unwraps herself too, at least the selves that Acker made possible in their affair and in her texts. Wark met Acker in 1995 at a reading in Sydney. At the dinner after the reading the two writers connected and started a short affair. An email correspondence followed their meeting and was published in 2015 as I’m Very Into You: an intimate document of the flirty and intellectual emails they exchanged over a period of a few weeks. Both I’m Very Into You and the memoir part of Philosophy for Spiders reveal how Wark felt seen in her femininity in this meeting with Acker in the 1990s and how this might have informed her recent gender transition. In 1995 Wark wrote in an email to Acker: “There are reaches of me that I can only put in language as feminine, and those reaches exposed themselves to you, felt comfortable next to you sometimes. That doesn’t happen very often” and now in her Philosophy for Spiders Wark says she wanted to escape masculinity and that “reading Kathy again helped to transition” (7). Wark remembers: “who I was starting to be with Kathy. I was starting to be her girlfriend. That concept” (22). In search of more concepts, Wark (re)reads Acker’s complete body of work almost thirty years after their initial meeting in Australia. From Acker’s texts Wark assembles phrases and claims around different concepts like “love,” “capitalism” and “penetration.” In so doing Philosophy for Spiders sketches a web of Acker’s selves along with concepts Wark finds in Acker’s work, providing a glimpse into what might turn out to be a philosophical system.

Wark rightly points out that Acker’s texts are “studded with philosophical questions” (56) and that these questions predominantly center around desire, subjectivity, form, and the failure of language. Her novel Great Expectations (1982) is exemplary for how Acker’s philosophical mode, if we can detect one, rejects the linearity of logical thinking:

Stylistically: simultaneous contrasts, extravagancies, incoherences, half-formed misshapen thoughts, lousy spelling, what signifies what? What is the secret of this chaos? (Since there is no possibility, there’s play. Elegance and completely filthy sex fit together. Expectations that aren’t satiated.) Questioning is our mode.” (Acker 1982, 107)

Acker’s philosophical mode questions hierarchies of knowledge by asking the “big” questions of philosophy as if they were dumb questions. Moreover, this questioning mode is inherently tied to the body, and thus to sex and gender. In her essay “Seeing Gender” (1997 [1995]) Acker reflects on her writing practice and directly responds to the work of “high theorists” like Judith Butler and Luce Irigaray. In the essay she looks back on her writing practice, the (gender) politics of plagiarism, and her ambition to find what she called “the languages of the body.” In a typical Ackerian manner, she takes the figure of the young girl – in this essay she uses Alice from Alice in Wonderland –who has yet to discover the limits of her being and knowledge. As a child, the girl wanted to become a pirate – the only way to see the world – but since “I wasn’t a stupid child, I knew that I couldn’t.” Still, she knows what “the pirates know”, namely that in writing and being “I do not see, for there is no I to see” (Acker 1997, 159). Instead, “to see was to be an eye, not an I.” The essay progresses as a theoretical inquiry into gender and the body through Luce Irigaray’s This Sex Which Is Not One (1979) and Butler’s reading of that text in Bodies that Matter (1996). Acker’s ambitious quest for self-knowledge and knowledge of the world come together in her observation of the self: this conflation of the eye and the I, consistently destabilizing the second through the first. In Acker’s logic then, a feeling is a concept. This doesn’t mean that experiencing an emotion will directly lead to knowledge, but that to see is a way of knowing. Since Acker’s girls don’t have a language of their own, they can’t know themselves except through feelings. In Don Quixote (1986) Acker writes that “real teaching happens via feelings” (159) and “my feelings’re my brains” (17). Barred entrance to the world of knowledge, the “stupid” girl as philosopher can make sense of her own subjectivity through sensuality, not rationality. Quoting a letter from the Romantic poet John Keats from 1817, Acker reflects in Great Expectations:

Only sensations. What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth – whether it exists materially or not – for I have the same Idea of all our Passions as of Love they are all, in their sublime, creative of essential Beauty… The imagination may be compared to Adam’s dream – he awoke and found it truth. I am the more zealous in this affair, because I have never yet been able to perceive how anything can be known for truth by consecutive reasoning – and yet it must be. Can it be that even the greatest philosopher ever arrived at his goal without putting aside numerous objections? However it may be Oh, for a Life of Sensations rather than of Thoughts! (Acker 1982, 64)

Acker rewrites Keats but keeps his opposing two notions of truth here: the reasoned truth of the philosopher and the truth of the artist which, for Keats, can only emerge through sensations and passions, through the imagination. As Wark’s Acker web suggests, Acker is not interested in a mastering feelings with language, rather the opposite: “I feel I feel I feel I have no language, any emotion for me is a prison” (Acker 1982, 24).

Wark follows Acker in that she lets the intensity of their mutual crush precede the thinking. In the first chapters Wark serves the reader queer sex scenes before she turns to Acker’s philosophy. Both the story of their affair and Wark’s readings of Acker are tied to questions of gender and a dysphoric experience of the body. In “The City of Memory” Wark recalls:

In our room at the Gramercy, sometimes I was Kathy’s girl. I wanted to watch her strap himself into her cocks. The leather harness was all black straps and shiny buckles. Its odor an appealing blend of leather, lube, and sweat. Kathy did not want my help with it, but she took her time. Choosing cocks. Inserting a cock in the harness, another in his cunt. Strapping on the harness without either falling back out again. Even after a few drinks Kathy was deft at this. I Just lay back and admired her technique, his presence. (35)

Using this descriptive mode for a “phenomenology of the body” (81) allows Wark to narrate Acker’s genderqueerness too, underscored by the use of alternating he/she pronouns. Wark shows how remembering their encounter will always also be a rewriting of the meeting. Throughout the book Wark’s receptiveness and passivity are important–in bed but also in their shared thinking: “She had philosophical questions. I could only describe things” (22). In Philosophy for Spiders Wark connects Acker’s multiplication of the authorial self to gender and what she calls a “penetration theory” (92). Acker’s appropriative and autoplagiaristic writing becomes a practice of “selving: reproducing self-ness” (54). Wark shows how thinking about gender in terms of penetration destabilizes a coherent sense of the self as gendered. This is also a textual concern because reading and writing turn out to be processes of penetration too. In Reverse Cowgirl, Wark finds that “the great asymmetry of human being” is the division between the penetrators and the penetrated and this asymmetry allows for trans identifications:

If I could not know who I was from the world touching me from the outside, prodding ‘til I felt a self; then I would become one by being touched from the inside. Edward’s cock would press my insides against their boundaries, pushing what would become, when pressed, against skin from the inside, a being I could call, a being I could call I. This coming into being, this inside out subjectivity, would change things between us. (Wark 2020, 53)

Both the penetrator and the penetrated are “involuntary agents” but allow for different experiences of gender. In Reverse Cowgirl penetrative sex makes it possible for Wark to feel a “temporary non-masculinity” (Wark 2020, 176). In this space of “non-existence” the body comes first, negotiating power dynamics and identity through a relationality of being penetrated, penetrating and penetrable. Acker too was interested in penetration, particularly the penetrable body as a site of knowledge. In her experimentation Acker soughtliterary forms for “the languages of the body” (Acker 1997, 143) by way of masturbatory writing, bodybuilding and writing pornography. Foregrounding the body creates an articulation of gender as an asymmetry of sex rather than a binary position. This allows Wark to read the bodies in Acker’s work as “potentially trans:”

Just as the eye and I, or sensation and desire, differ, so too the fucker and the fucked. This asymmetry of sex might be just one of the zones in which to think about gender, although in the Acker-text the asymmetries of sex acts can arise in all sorts of ways out of all sorts of bodies. There’s no essential diagram of gendered bodies. In that sense all Acker bodies are potentially trans. (90)

Bodies are trans here to the extent that they are assumed as not-cis. Still, assuming that desire always destabilizes sexual difference doesn’t necessarily illuminate our understanding of what gender is, because as Wark writes in Reverse Cowgirl “there is never any symmetry to what wants” (26). To desire is to not know or understand that desire. Both in Reverse Cowgirl and in Philosophy for Spiders, Wark is interested in the way penetration potentiates a different experience of the body and self-consciousness: “being-penetrated creates a node around which every other difference— sensations, selves, genders—can disperse” (Wark 2021, 91).

In Acker’s logic, penetration centers the self and makes thinking possible. In Wark’s words, to be penetrable and penetrated is “to have an axis for sensation in the world” as opposed to those who do the penetrating. They “act as subjects in the world but they don’t react, they don’t let the world in much” which leads Wark to claim that to penetrate is “just not that interesting” (92). The question left unanswered here is: uninteresting for whom? And how are we expected to view Acker’s role of the penetrator in the sex scenes Wark describes? An obvious answer would be that switching positions allows access to both experiences but in this book being penetrated appears to be the privileged position because the penetrable body has access to a specific form of knowledge as it “comes to know itself, not its penetrator” (153).

For Acker, the question of penetration is a problem of language. In her early text Breaking through memories into desire (2019 [1973]) Acker asks: “Language. How do I, fucked, use the language? I don’t want to be doing this writing” (381) and in My Mother: Demonology (1993) Acker writes that “the more I try to describe myself, the more I find a hole” (in Wark, 154). A temporary centralized subject emerges in the destabilizing encounter of sexual penetration. This is where Wark finds a first philosophical concept in Acker’s work: a phenomenology of the body or what she calls Acker’s “phenomenology without the subject” (54).

Wark’s reading of Acker’s “languages of the body” as low theory raises the crucial question of how sex relates to knowledge. To theorize through sex is to choose confusion over rationality, non-knowledge over knowledge and to problematize the subject’s relation to knowledge. Sexuality clearly interests Acker, not necessarily because it precedes patriarchal discourse or cannot translate the experience of sexuality to language, but because sex does not affirm a self or one’s personal pleasures. For Acker, sex is a crucial site of negativity: her texts reveal the failure of language to express identity and introduces sex as a question of the (incoherence) of subjecthood. Sex is the moment in which the self is destabilized, displaced once more, and thus where knowledge breaks down.[2]

Acker’s recurring character Janey fails to be a sovereign subject in the patriarchal structures imposed on her. Her obsession with sex ruins her education as a proper young woman because rationalized knowledge is inaccessible to a “stupid” young girl like Janey. Her failure to know how to use language, how to behave properly, how to be, illustrates the typical young girl’s experience of inhabiting available structures of knowing and their limits. Stupidity in Acker’s work is not necessarily non-knowledge or absence of knowledge, it is more an investigation of the unknowability of the subject herself and the limits of her language. Avital Ronell has pointed out how Acker’s texts explore the emancipatory potential of stupidity.[3] Acker’s characters embrace stupidity in that they refuse knowledge in the form it is given to them. In her book Stupidity (2002) Ronell proposes to take stupidity seriously as a philosophical position because it does not “stand in the way of wisdom” (5) and asks how it can be turned into a productive category of thought and as a locus for the unmaking of language – one of Acker’s literary concerns too. Stupidity, Ronell writes, is a “political problem hailing from the father; it combines with conservative desires for stability, comfort, and authenticity, but it also opens up other spaces of knowing” (16). Wark makes a similar point:

A philosophy of emotions, like a philosophy of language or sensations, has to start from doubt, uncertainly, confusion – with nonknowledge. “My emotional limbs stuck out as if they were broken and unfixable.” (GE 58) And: “I don’t think I’m crazy. There’s just no reality in my head and my emotions fly all over the place.” (63)

The problem of the speaking subject in Acker’s work becomes a project of asking the “stupid” questions. This way, Acker’s project is concerned with a philosophical position from which to think “stupidly.” Reading Acker’s texts as philosophy should therefore not be a question of what ideological tendencies or feminist politics are being thought or taught, but a much narrower question: how to establish a thinking self without relying on the Cartesian model of the subject. Acker asks: “But what if I isn’t the subject, but the object?” (in Wark, 142).

As her literary experiments started to take shape in the early 1970s, Acker sought words and ideas to understand what she was doing. Considering her radical decentralizing approach to identity, Acker found a home in the thinkers of poststructuralism. But any attempt to uncover intentionality in her work is tricky because she successfully mystified her own methods and theoretical influences in interviews. In an interview with her publisher Sylvère Lotringer, Acker claims she started to understand her experimental writings strategies when she got to know poststructuralist thought through Lotringer’s publishing house Semiotext(e). Interestingly, Acker places herself on the same level as the French philosophers she admired and was even surprised they didn’t know her work:

I was like a death-dumb-and-blind person for years, I just did what I did but had no way of telling anyone about it, or talking about it. And then when I read ANTI-OEDIPUS and Foucault’s work, suddenly I had this whole language at my disposal. I could say, Hi! And that other people were doing the same thing. I remember thinking, why don’t they know me? I know exactly what they’re talking about. And I could go farther. (Acker 1991, 10)

Whether Acker really was not aware of “French theory” before meeting Lotringer is disputed by Chris Kraus, but the typically poststructuralist concern with identity and desire through the fragmentation or decentralization of the “I” is present from her earliest published work in the 1970s. In 1975 Acker did take her place among the philosophers: at the “Schizo-culture” conference Lotringer organized with French thinkers like Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Jean-François Lyotard as well as American artists and writers like Richard Foreman, Philip Glass, and Acker’s literary idol William Burroughs. Lotringer’s introduction of the “then unknown radical philosophies of post-’68 France” (as MIT Press retroactively describes the event) to the American avant-garde marked a shift in how Acker relates to theory in her work. Acker’s poststructuralist tendencies were a perfect fit for the academic zeitgeist and appear to have contributed to the “meteoric rise of her academic reputation” (Punday 2003). Her texts proved popular among academics who aimed to lay bare the ways in which Acker engaged with theory: in her rewriting of film scripts, one might find a reflection of Baudrillard’s ideas; her wild science fiction novel Empire of the Senseless must be the result of reading Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus. But as the Acker scholar Tyler Bradway recently pointed out, these theoretical readings of Acker “obscure her ultimate frustration with the way that these discourses, particularly deconstruction, made her writing too narrowly readable, rendering it ironically subordinate to and exemplary of an external master discourse” (Bradway 2017, 106). Still, Acker’s typically fragmented and “unreadable” texts continue to resist such theoretical interpretations – hence Wark’s interest in reading her as low theory.

To render the text unreadable, to think non-intelligibly, writing stupidly, obviously implies a questioning of the distinction between false and true knowledge. Embracing stupidity as a philosophical mode blurs the line between true and false statements, but also informs Acker’s ambition to develop a non-authoritarian use of language. In 1984 Acker writes in Art Forum:

I write. I want to write I want my writing to be meaningless I want my writing to be stupid. But the language I use isn’t what I want and make, it’s what’s given to me. Language is always a community. Language is what I know and is my cry.” (Acker 1984)

Writing the immediacy of thought through a nontransparent use of language – language as a “cry” rather than expressive of an idea – leads to a “false clarity” (Harper 1987) and in Acker’s case results in a logic that sounds consciously contradictory and finds a ground in excessive affect. Acker’s writing of sex and romantic crushes seems personal and very intimate but the feelings she describes are not “hers” in the way that they belong to Kathy Acker, they are taken from or inspired by the texts she reads while writing. Wark proposes that in Acker’s work, “emotions, feelings, affect, might be keys to a certain kind of understanding that is subjective but not necessarily individuated” and that “feelings can become concepts” (63). The question of desire and self-reflection in narrative is crucial for Acker. In Great Expectations (1982) Acker writes that “narrative is an emotional moving” and in Eurydice in the Underworld (1997) that “as if reality was emotional, I perceived solely by feeling” (in Wark, 63). Acker works consistently against the idea that feeling opposes knowing. We can “know” our feelings but the feelings are not pieces of knowledge themselves, at least not in the kind of “high theory for whom Plato is daddy” (Wark, 54).

To understand how Acker’s texts both work with and reject philosophy as high theory, it is worth considering her contribution to the Lotringer’s Schizo-culture conference, which was neither theoretical nor particularly literary. At the conference Acker presented translation exercises: Janey’s “Persian Poems” which would later become part of Janey’s education from age ten to fourteen in Blood and Guts in High School (1984). The translation exercise is short but unambiguous about Janey’s position as object: “to have Janey / to buy Janey / to want Janey / to see Janey / to come Janey / to beat up Janey” (1984, 84). In these evidently false translations Acker reaffirms her concern with how language constrains rather than liberates. The only possible agency for Acker’s recurring protagonist Janey is to surrender to the position of object. In these translation exercises and throughout Acker’s work, Janey is doomed to be the predicate of the sentence, the object to the subject. The first numbered lines are succeeded by a translated line that overflows, exceeding the initial format as it turns into a passionate address:

5. The streets are black. You haven’t fucked for a long time. You forget how incredibly sensitive you are. You hurt. Hurt hurt hurt hurt hurt. You meet the nicest guy in the world and you fall in love with him you do and you manage to get into his house and you stand before him. A girl who puts herself out on a line. A girl who asks for trouble and forgets that she has feelings and doesn’t even remember what fucking’s about or how she’s supposed to go about it because she wasn’t fucked in so long and now she’s naïve and stupid. So like a dope she sticks herself in front of the guy: here I am; understood: do you want me? No, thank you. She did it. There she is. What does she do now? Where does she go? She was a stupid girl: she went and offered herself, awkwardly, to someone who didn’t want her. That’s not stupid. The biggest pain in the world is feeling but sharper is the pain of the self.

6. Is there any fresh meat? (Acker 1984, 88-92)

The turn from the interpellating “you” to the descriptive “a girl” signals a shift from an intimate address to a distant observation of the girl’s being as defined by rejection. The “there she is” is characteristic of the way the figure of the girl features as an ontological negation throughout Acker’s work; she momentarily comes into being through an encounter with lack, in this case simple and clear rejection, and thus when she starts questioning her own desires. These painful desires reveal how feelings are a problem for Acker’s subject: “the biggest pain in the world is feeling but sharper is the pain of the self.” In Wark’s reading the only agency Acker’s girls have is their “amorality and ability to exploit their own desirability” (151):

Girls are, among other things, objects that power perceives as a thing to desire. As if they had no subjectivity. Rather than claiming to be subjects, girls in the Acker-web escape into unknowability, as far as power’s gaze is concerned. Their bodies may be penetrable, and that is the function assigned them as objects, but otherwise they can choose not to be known at all. The girl too is not an identity but an event, something produced by chance and fluid time. Lulu: “you can’t change me cause there’s nothing to change. I’ve never been.” (151)

Acker’s radical determinism about the symbolic absence of woman in language and literature generated a wide range of feminist interpretations of her work, particularly as being exemplary of écriture féminine by studying Acker’s experimental literary form as a critique of the male canon (which it undoubtedly is) and her sex writing as expressive of a female voice. Even if Acker’s texts themselves appear to reject academic interpretations, Acker herself was a fanatic reader of philosophy, including “French feminists” like Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva and Helène Cixous. As she writes in “Seeing Gender”, philosophy pointed her towards knowledge she had experienced intuitively herself, namely that “woman” does not exist: “She has no essence, for all that comes into being, according to Plato, partakes of form. I knew this as a child, before I had ever read Plato, Irigaray, Butler. That, as a girl, I was outside the world. I wasn’t. I had no name. For me, language was being.” (Acker 1997, 161) Acker’s concern with the linguistic “I” as a being that always lacks, and thus must copy if she is to speak, also reveals the role that sex plays to understand the failure of language.

Wark is not the first to suspect that Acker’s interest in the immediacy of language and sex can function as a form of theorizing. Martina Sciolino pointed out in 1990 that we might read Acker’s fiction as performative philosophy: “A writer of innovative narratives that converse with theorists as diverse in their constructions of desire as Georges Bataille and Andrea Dworkin, Acker creates fictions that are theories-in-performance” (Sciolino 1990, 438). Acker’s “theories-in-performance” reveal different ways in which lines can be drawn between the author and her theoretical material. To see how this kind of “performative philosophy” can function outside of an already established philosophical discourse, it might be helpful to turn to Chris Kraus again who reads the diaries of the French philosopher Simone Weil as philosophical investigations. For Kraus, the only condition for a text to be philosophical, to read these “personal” texts beyond memoir, is that the text must be concerned with rhetoric: “In Weil’s philosophy, just like in narrative or phone sex, it’s not the story that we’re really hearing, it is the fact and act of telling it” (Kraus 2004, 77).

Considering the significant reception of Acker’s texts in the world of “high theory” and Wark’s reaction to these readings through the concept of low theory, the question of the intentionality of Acker’s project lingers. It is complicated because, for Acker, the subject always emerges as a being of language for whom no “genuine” agency is possible; in Acker’s world agency is limited to being a receptacle. To do is always a being done to. In this sense, it might not be particularly helpful to look at the influence of theory on Acker’s work because it assumes a text outside of, or a “before” reading theory, while Acker’s writing practice itself is a reading practice as much as it is a writing practice.

Leslie Dick has observed how Acker’s writing functioned as an extension of her reading, that “her plagiarism was a way of reading, or re-reading, appropriating and customizing what she read, writing herself, so to speak, into the fabric of the original text” (Scholder et al. 2006, 1). Her writing consists of readings of texts that provoke her reaction, evoke a fantasy or stimulate her to rewrite the texts she is consuming. In this sense, her writing has always been a form of critical writing. In Learning for the Revolution (2011), Spencer Dew reads Acker’s work as instructive, labelling it a “pedagogical project,” and Martina Sciolino describes Acker’s work as “materially didactic” (437). Harper (1987) specifies Acker’s critical project further as “less a conscious political philosophy than a pursuit of the immediate the unregulated present” but argues that Acker “consciously participates in the poststructuralist project of the liberation of the signifier from fixed meaning” (47). In Philosophy for Spiders, Wark smartly avoids the question of intentionality by emphasizing the inseparability of reading and writing and how that relation creates subjectivity in the text. Wark frames this as a relation of passivity and, again, penetration:

The Acker-field is a sequence of books about—no, not about. They are not about anything. They don’t mean, they do. What do they do? Get rid of the self. Among other things. For writer but also reader. If you let them in. You have to want it to fuck you. It happens when there’s a hole. Rather than say one reads, one could say that one is booked. A body can be booked a bit like the way it can be fucked. A body uses its agency to give access to itself to another. A body lets go of its boundedness, its self, its selfishness, and through opening to sensation disappears into the turbulent real. (156)

For Wark the reader as well as the writer is a hole, ready to be penetrated by other texts. Not that the author has no agency at all but in writing she is also being written. This is how Acker’s philosophy can be understood in terms of stupidity and unknowledge; it rejects the idea that anything we think we know or want is “ours.” Acker’s naïve lyrical I is also a displacement of the position of the philosopher.

This penetrative relation between self and text is also what Wark scrutinizes with Acker’s words in Philosophy for Spiders. Wark’s reading of Acker is clearly this kind of “penetrated writing:” Wark herself does not emerge as a particularly original thinker here but instead lets Acker do the thinking. For Acker the impossibility to speak as an authentic self is at the center of her work and Wark’s proposition to let Acker talk to herself creates an interesting encounter of voices but is oftentimes awkward, especially when the reading lacks interpretative strength. Wark offers us Ackers on a plate but does not interpret this group of texts. The voices in Wark’s web of Ackers sometimes sound detached, as isolated sound bites. Wark appears to share the view of the artist Vanessa Place, who she cites early in the book: “citation is always castration: the author’s lack of authority made manifest by the phallus, presence of another authority” (7) but Wark does not really do the work of using the citations to create a different text. This makes it at times difficult to feel where Philosophy for Spiders is going with this mapping of concepts and raises the question what is exactly at stake in this low-theoretical reading of Acker. Is it to make way for other, more detailed, theoretical readings of Acker’s work, or for Wark to create a personal encounter with Acker’s texts? Both are of course possible and fair reasons to write the book, but the wide range of concepts and citations at times are puzzling when they are not brought together in a reading.

The sex scenes in the book offer a way to read the book: Wark’s reading of Acker lets itself be penetrated by Acker. The meeting of texts as the meeting of bodies:

Maybe gender is transitive in another sense. Between any two bodies is a difference. Maybe that difference is gender even when it is not, actually, gender. It’s what top and bottom imply, a difference. Maybe the genders could be transitive verbs, and can be applied in any situation where part of a person acts on another through that gender as an action: Kathy manned me. (29)

This difference that is not sexual difference leads Wark to formulate an “asymmetrical” theory of penetration which can be mapped onto gendered bodies: “the body penetrating is often (but not always) male and the body penetrated is often (but not always) female” (93). Wark’s interest in penetration and penetrability sounds almost instructive when she tells us that “everyone ought to know how to top: ethics” (22). The lesson for the reader here seems to be that these dynamics in sex reveal “gender as an action” which in turn affirms the action of passive and active in terms of feminine and masculine – at least Wark herself when Acker “manned” her. Wark’s reading of Acker’s texts as making space for transness relies on this evocation of the “dysphoric body” and its needs and desires, “a category that maybe overlaps a lot with the trans body but is not ever identical to it” (178). Wark develops three “philosophies” of Acker in the book. The first is a “null philosophy” centered around the question of the self. Wark finds this philosophy in Acker’s questions around emotions, memory, and exteriority. The second philosophy is the encounter with the other, with sections ranging from “library” and “rape” to “fathers” and “death.” The third philosophy that Wark discerns is concerned with capitalism and Acker’s questions around sex work, the commercialization of art, and Acker’s fame.

Acker’s legacy has had many faces. First as punk and transgressive in the NYC art and performance world, then the critical reception with poststructuralism in the 1980s and 1990s and today we are seeing another one of Acker’s afterlives in contemporary (auto)fiction, for which she functions as some sort of precursor, like in the works of Olivia Laing and Kate Zambreno.[4] Perhaps together with the publication of the emails I’m Very Into You these books stimulate the cultivation of Acker’s persona. In her blurb for Philosophy for Spiders, Sarah Schulman asserts that Wark’s “highly personal sex memoir evolves the growing ‘My Kathy’ genre in trans directions.” One recent publication in this supposed ‘My Kathy’ genre is Olivia Laing’s novel Crudo (2018), whose fictional narrator is called “Kathy” and bears some characteristics of what we know of Acker’s life but at the same time functions as a placeholder for Laing to talk about developments in her own personal life: her approaching marriage to an older well-known poet during a summer holiday in an Italian villa. This kind of autobiographical writing would undoubtedly be the classic bourgeois novel form for Acker, despite the appropriation of the voice of “Kathy.”[5] In The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination (2012) Schulman positions Acker as a central figure in an art scene that was “radically queer” and describes how Acker’s fiction “faded from view” due to gentrification: “[H]er context is gone. Not that she was a gay male icon, but rather that she was a founder and product of an oppositional class of artists, those who spoke back to the system rather than replicating its vanities” (Schulman 2012, 53). Even though Schulman is referring to a post-1980s gentrification, we might ask if the growing ‘My Kathy’ genre indicates a new kind of Acker reception. Now that Acker is no longer “fading from view” because of gentrification, might her renewed popularity point towards a new kind of gentrification? To see how Acker’s persona is being used today raises the question if she, as the typical transgressive and outcast writer, functions as some sort of token for radical literature in personal memoir and autofiction writing. And where can we situate Philosophy for Spiders in the web of Kathy Acker’s afterlives?

In the afterword Wark claims that she wants to “push her back in the direction of a minor literature – trans lit: the writing of and by and for trans people” (170). Not to retroactively label Acker’s person as trans, but to think of her texts as a writing “among those for whom being cis gendered is not their state, their homeland, their family, their fantasy” (170). Wark wants to make space for Acker in a genre she calls “trans girl lit.” Wark’s own autofictional undertaking in Reverse Cowgirl might give us a clue as to how an author can be the “involuntary agent” of her own writing when Wark, high on shrooms, reflects on the narrative web she has created à la Acker: “Reverse Cowgirl made sense to me, finally, as a sort of autofiction account of someone who was trans all along and did not know it yet. In this case, even the writer didn’t know the shape of the web she made” (175). Like in Acker’s appropriative writing, other people’s texts have authorial agency and Wark’s own life is reframed as a web of unconscious narrative turns. Penetrating or penetrated, neither the life story nor the texts are in the author’s hands.

Now that the reputation and position of Acker’s work is moving towards canonization and perhaps even gentrification, can we view Wark’s book indeed as a pushback against the canonization of Acker? Wark’s reading of Acker as “minor literature” provokes a shift in the reception of her work in two ways: to consider Acker as a theorist, which I’m sure will bring about various new Acker readings, as well as to pose the question of the “non-cisness” of Acker’s work.

As such, Wark’s move does secure Acker’s radical work from being completely assimilated into a literary world where bourgeois story lines, plot development and stable subject-positions still reign – even if Wark does this work in the very contemporary self-reflective autofictional mode. On a more theoretical level, Wark’s reading of Acker is slightly opaque in a style we might call “after Kathy Acker,” namely dealing with (philosophical) knowledge as a question of subjectivation and sex. The knowledge in the text does not belong to the author-philosopher or the reader when the theorist refuses to engage with her material in a straightforward top-bottom relationship. Perhaps “theory” as a label is even outdated. Wark writes, with Acker:

There’s no consistent and self-same subject that can be the author of theory from on high, and who could survey history, discover its hidden concept, and announce its destiny. “Since all acts, including expressive acts, are interdependent, paradise cannot be an absolute. Theory doesn’t work.” (138)

As “switchy philosophers” Wark and Acker want to be topped and penetrated by the texts they encounter but in so doing they do not get rid of mastery completely. It cannot be denied that in the top/bottom difference Wark explores, the bottom has power too and can even be a form of mastery in itself,[6] especially in this case, when producing a new text. This is perhaps how the genre of low theory can function as a form of mastery as well. Even if we accept that low theory is accessible and not pretentious like classic high theory, it imposes a reading that is hard to object to. Whereas the critical reader can oppose high theory with arguments, low theory does not allow for a similar debate because it already preempts theoretical objections. Using the terms of penetration theory we might say that low theory works with the power of the bottom. A seduction that can hardly be countered – surely not with theoretical arguments. And this seems to be what Wark has learned from Acker and Philosophy for Spiders shows in a smart way: to think about and with the penetrable body as a site of power and (self)knowledge. In Kathy Acker’s texts the lyrical I as theorist emerges as an inarticulate subject who cries stupid phrases and expresses illogical desires: a girl. And even if “theory doesn’t work,” Acker’s girls and Wark’s web of Ackers remind us that as long as there is feeling, there will be thinking.

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Tessel Veneboer is a PhD candidate in English Literature at Ghent University. She specializes in queer theory and experimental literature. She is currently working on a dissertation on Kathy Acker (supported by the Research Foundation Flanders).

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Notes

[1] Library of Congress gives her birth date as 1948 while most obituaries used 1944 as date of birth.

[2] In her book What is Sex (2017), philosopher Alenka Zupančič takes psychoanalysis as a philosophical problem and proposes that sex is the missing link between epistemology and ontology: “sex is messy because it appears at the point of the breaking down of the signifying consistency, or logic (its point of impossibility), not because it is in itself illogical and messy: its messiness is the result of the attempt to invent a logic at the very point of the impasse of such logic. Its “irrationality” is the summit of its efforts to establish a sexual rationale” (What IS Sex, 43).

[3] See “Kathy Goes to Hell: On the Irresolvable Stupidity of Acker’s Death” by Avital Ronell in Lust for Life: On the Writings of Kathy Acker (2006).

[4] See Olivia Laing’s Crudo (2018) and Kate Zambreno’s Screen Tests (2019).

[5] In an interview with Sylvère Lotringer Acker explains that she “always hated the bourgeois story-line because the real content of that novel is the property structure of reality. It’s about ownership. That isn’t my world-reality. My world isn’t about ownership. In my world people don’t even remember their names, they aren’t sure of their sexuality, they aren’t sure if they can define their genders.” (Acker 1991, 23).

[6] In Homos (1995) Leo Bersani shows how S/M relations demonstrate the power of the bottom over the top and as such S/M practices have “helped to empower a position traditionally associated with female sexuality” (82). In light of Wark’s “penetration theory” this would mean that the position of the bottom is not necessarily female or powerless because for Bersani “the reversibility of roles in S/M does allow everyone to get his or her moment in the exalted position of Masculinity (and, if everyone can be a bottom, no one owns the top or dominant position), but this can be a relatively mild challenge to social hierarchies of power” (86).

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Works Cited
- Acker, Kathy. Blood and Guts in High School. 1984. New York: Grove Press.
- —. Bodies of Work: Essays. 1997. London: Serpent’s Tail.
- —. Don Quixote. 1986. New York: Grove Press.
- —. Great Expectations. 1982. New York: Grove Press.
- —. Hannibal Lecter, My Father. 1991 New York: Semiotext(e).
- —. “Models of our present.” Art Forum. February 1984.
- —. My Mother: Demonology. 1993. New York: Grove Press.
- —. Portrait of an Eye. 1982. New York: Grove Press.
- Bersani, Leo. 1996. Homos. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
- Bradway, Tyler. 2017. Queer Experimental Literature: The Affective Politics of Bad Reading. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
- Gajoux, Justin. Ed. 2019. Acker 1971-1975. Paris: Editions Ismael.
- Harper, Glenn A. 1987. “The Subversive Power of Sexual Difference in The Work of Kathy Acker.” Substance 16, no. 3: 44-56.
- Kraus, Chris. 2017. After Kathy Acker: A Biography. London: Allen Lane.
- Punday, Daniel. 2003. Narrative After Deconstruction. Albany: State University of New York Press.
- Ronell, Avital. 2002. Stupidity. Champaign: University of Illinois Press.
- Scholder, Amy, Carla Harryman, Avital Ronell, eds. 2006. Lust for Life: On the Writings of Kathy Acker. London: Verso Books.
- Schulman, Sarah. 2012. The Gentrification of the Mind. Berkely: California University Press.
- Sciolino, Martina. 1990. “Kathy Acker and the Postmodern Subject of Feminism.” College English 52 (4), 437-445. http://aquila.usm.edu/fac_pubs/7342.
- Scott, Gail, Robert Glück, Camille Roy, eds. 2000. Biting the Error: Writers Explore Narrative. Toronto: Coach House Books.
- Wark, Mckenzie. 2020. Reverse Cowgirl. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e)
- Wark, Mckenzie. 2021. Philosophy for Spiders: on the Low Theory of Kathy Acker. Durham: Duke University Press.
August 12, 2022
Zachary Loeb — Where We’re Going, We’ll Still Probably Need Roads (Review of Paris Marx, Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong about the Future of Transportation)

a review of Paris Marx, Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong about the Future of Transportation (Verso, 2022)

by Zachary Loeb

You can learn a lot about your society’s relationship to technology by looking at its streets. Are the roads filled with personal automobiles or trolley-cars, bike lanes or occupied parking spaces, are there navigable sidewalks or is this the sort of place where a car is a requirement, does a subway rumble beneath the street or is the only sound the honking of cars stuck in traffic, are the people standing on the corner waiting for the bus or for the car they just booked through an app, or is it some kind of strange combination of many of these things simultaneously? The roadways we traverse on a regular basis can come to seem quite banal in their familiarity, yet they capture a complex tale of past decisions, current priorities, as well as a range of competing visions of the future.

Our streets not only provide us with a literal path by which to get where we are going, they also represent an essential space in which debates about where we are going as a society play out. All of which is to say, as we hurtle down the road towards the future, it is important to pay attention to the fight for control of the steering wheel, and it’s worth paying attention to the sort of vehicle in which we find ourselves.

In Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong about the Future of Transportation, Paris Marx analyzes the social forces that have been responsible for making our roads (and by extension our cities, towns, and suburbs) function the way they do, while providing particular emphasis on the groups and individuals trying to determine what the roads of the future will look like. It is a cutting assessment that examines the ways in which tech companies are seeking to take over the streets, and sidewalks, as well as the space above and below them: with gig-economy drivers, self-driving cars, new tunnels, delivery robots, and much else. To the extent that technological solutions are frequently touted as the only possible response to complex social/political/economic problems, Marx moves beyond the flashy headlines to consider what those technological solutions actually look like when the proverbial rubber hits the road. In Road to Nowhere the streets and sidewalks appear as sites of political contestation, and Marx delivers an urgent warning against surrendering those spaces to big tech. After all, as Marx documents, the lords of the information superhighway are leaving plenty of flaming debris along the literal highways.

The primary focus of Road to Nowhere is on the particular vision of mobility being put forth by contemporary tech companies, but Marx takes care to explore the industries and interests that had been enforcing their view of mobility long before anyone had ever held a smartphone. As Marx explains, the street and the city were not always the possession of the personal automobile, indeed the automobile was at one time “the dominant technology that ‘disrupted’ our society” (10). The introduction of the automobile saw these vehicles careening down streets that were once shared by many other groups, and as automobiles left destruction in their wake, the push for safety was one that was won by ostensibly protecting pedestrians by handing the streets over to the automobile. Marx connects the rise of the personal automobile to “a much longer trend of elites remaking the city to serve their interests” (11), and emphasizes how policies favoring automobiles undermined other ways of moving about cities (including walking and streetcars). As the personal automobile grew in popularity, and mass production made it a product available not only to the wealthy, physical spaces were further transformed such that an automobile became less and less of a luxury and more and more of a need. From the interstate highway system to the growth of suburbs to under-investment in public transit to the development of a popular mythos connecting the car to freedom—Marx argues that the auto-oriented society is not the inevitable result flowing from the introduction of the automobile, but the result of policies and priorities that gradually remade streets and cities in the automobile’s image.

Even as the automobile established its dominance in the mid-twentieth century, a new sort of technology began to appear that promised (and threatened) to further remake society: the computer. Pivoting for a moment away from the automobile, Marx considers the ideological foundations of many tech companies, with their blend of techno-utopian hopefulness and anti-government sentiment wherein “faith was also put in technology itself as the means to address social and economic challenges” (44). While the mythology of Silicon Valley often lauds the rebellious geek, hacking away in a garage, Marx highlights the ways in which Silicon Valley (and the computing industry more generally) owes its early success to a massive influx of government money. Cold War military funding was very good—indeed, essential—for the nascent computing sector. Despite the significance of government backing, Silicon Valley became a hotbed for an ideology that sneered at democratic institutions while elevating the computer (and its advocates) as the bringer(s) of societal change. Thus, the very existence of complex social/political/economic problems became evidence of the failures of democracy and proof of the need for high-tech solutions—this was not only an ahistorical and narrow worldview, but one wherein a group of mostly-wealthy, mostly-white, mostly-cis-male tech lovers saw themselves as the saviors society had been waiting for. And while this worldview was reified in various gadgets, apps, and platforms “as tech companies seek to extend their footprint into the physical world” this same ideology—alongside an agenda that places “growth, profits, and power ahead of the common good”—is what undergirds Silicon Valley’s mobility project (62).

One of the challenges in wrestling with tech companies’ visions is to not be swept away by the shiny high-tech vision of the future they disseminate. And one area where this can be particularly difficult is when it comes to electric cars. After all, amongst the climate conscious, the electric car appears as an essential solution in the fight against climate change. Yet, beyond the fact that “electric vehicles are not a new invention” (64), the electric car appears as an almost perfect example of the ways in which tech companies attempt to advance a seemingly progressive vision of the future while further entrenching the status quo. Much of the green messaging around electric vehicles “narrowly focuses on tailpipe emissions, ignoring the harms that pervades the supply chain and the unsustainable nature of auto-oriented development” (71). Too often the electric car appears as a way for individuals of means to feel that they are doing their part to “personal responsibility” their way out of climate change, even as the continued focus on the personal automobile blocks the transition towards public transit that is needed. Furthermore, the shift towards electric vehicles does not end destructive extraction, it just shifts the extraction from fossil fuels to minerals like copper, nickel, cobalt, lithium, and coltan. The electric car risks being a way of preserving auto-centric society, and this “does not solve how the existing transportation system fuels the climate crisis and the destruction of local environments all around the world” (88).

If personal ownership of a car is such a problem, perhaps the solution is to simply have an app on your phone that lets you summon a vehicle (complete with a driver) when you need one, right? Not so fast. Companies like Uber sold themselves to the public on a promise of making cars available when needed, especially for urban dwellers who did not necessarily have a car of their own. The pitch was one of increased mobility, where those in need of a ride could easily hire one, while cash-strapped car owners could have a new opportunity to earn a few extra bucks driving in the evenings. Far from solving congestion, empowering drivers, and increasing everyone’s mobility, “the Uber model adds vehicles to the road and creates more traffic, especially since the app incentivizes drivers to be active during peak times when traffic is already backed up” (99). Despite claims that their app based services would solve a host of issues, Uber (and its ilk) have added to urban congestion, failed to provide their drivers with a stable income, and have not truly increased the mobility options for underserved communities.

If gig-drivers wind up being such an issue, why not try to construct a world where drivers are not necessary? And thus, perhaps few ideas related to the future of mobility have as firm a grasp on the popular imagination as the idea of the self-driving car. A fantasy that seems straight out of science fiction. Albeit, with good reason. After all, what a science fiction writer can dream up, and what a special effects team can mock up for a movie, face serious obstacles in the real world. The story of tech companies and autonomous vehicles is one of grandiose hype (that often generates numerous glowing headlines), followed by significantly diminished plans once the challenges of introducing self-driving cars are recognized. While much of the infrastructure we encounter is built with automobiles in mind, autonomous cars require a variety of other sorts of not-currently existing infrastructure. Just as “automobiles required a social reconstruction in addition to a physical reconstruction, so too will autonomous vehicles” (125), and this will entail transforming infrastructure and habits that have been built up over decades. Attempts to introduce autonomous vehicles have revealed the clash between the tech company vision of the world and the complexities of the actually existing world—which is a major reason why many tech companies are quietly backing away from the exuberance with which they once hyped autonomous cars.

Well, if the already existing roads are such a challenge, why not think abstractly? Instead of looking at the road, look above the road and below the road! Thus, plans such as Boring’s proposed tunnels, and ideas about “flying cars,” seek to get around many of the challenges the tech industry is encountering in the streets by attempting to capitalize on seemingly unused space. At first glance, such ideas may seem like clear examples of the sort of “out of the box thinking” for which tech companies are famed, yet “the span of time between the initial bold claims of prominent tech figures and the general realization that they are fraudulent appears to be shrinking” (159). And once more, in contrast to the original framing that seeks to treat new tunnels and flying cars as emancipatory routes, what becomes clear is that these are just another area in which wealthy tech elites are fantasizing about ways of avoiding getting stuck in traffic with the hoi polloi.

Much of the history of the automobile that Marx recounts, involves pedestrians being deprived of more and more space, and this is a story that continues as new battles for the sidewalk intensify. As with other tech company interventions in mobility, micromobility solutions that cover sidewalks in scooters and bikes that are rentable via app, present themselves with a veneer of green accessibility. Yet littering cities with cheap bikes and scooters that wear out quickly while clogging the sidewalks, turn out to be just another service “designed to benefit the company” without genuinely assessing the mobility needs of particular communities (166). Besides, all of those sidewalk scooters are also finding that they need to compete for space with swarms of delivery robots that make sidewalks more difficult to use.

From the electric car to the app summoned chauffeur to the autonomous car to the flying car, tech companies have no shortage of high-tech ideas for the future of mobility. And yet, “the truth is that when we look at the world that is actually being created by the tech industry’s interventions, we find that the bold promises are in fact a cover for a society that is both more unequal and one where that inequality is even more fundamentally built into the infrastructure and services we interact with every single day” (185). While the built environment is filled with genuine mobility issues, the solutions put forward by tech companies ignore the complexity of how these issues came about in favor of techno-fixes designed to favor tech companies’ bottom lines while simultaneously feeding them new data streams to capitalize. The gleaming city envisioned by tech elites and their companies may be broadcast to all, but these cities are playgrounds for the wealthy tech elite, not for the rest of us.

The hope that tech companies will come along and sort everything out with some sort of nifty high-tech program speaks to a lack of faith in societies’ ability to tackle the complex issues they face. Yet, to make mobility work for everyone, what is essential is not to flee from politics, but to truly address politics. The tech companies are working to reshape our streets and cities to better fit their needs, but this demands that people counter by insisting that their streets and cities be made to actually meet people’s needs. Instead of looking to cities with roads clogged with Ubers and sidewalks blocked by broken scooters, we need to be paying attention to the cities that have devoted resources (and space) to pedestrians while improving and expanding public transit. The point is not to reject technology but to reject the tech companies’ narrow definition of what technology is and how it can be used, “we need to utilize technology where it can serve us, while ensuring power remains firmly in the hands of a democratic public” (223).

After all, “better futures are possible, but they will not be delivered through technological advancement alone” (225). We can no longer sit idle in the passenger seat, we need to take the wheel, and the wheels.

***

Contrary to its somewhat playful title, Road to Nowhere lays out a very clear case that Silicon Valley’s vision of the future of mobility is in fact a road to somewhere—the problem is that it’s not a good somewhere. While the excited pronouncements of tech CEOs (and the oft-uncritical coverage of those pronouncements) may evoke images of gleaming high tech utopias, a more critical and grounded assessment of these pipedreams reveals them to be unrealistic fantasies mixed with ideas that are designed to primarily meet the needs of tech CEOs over the genuine mobility needs of most people. As Paris Marx makes clear throughout the chapters of Road to Nowhere, it is essential to stop taking the plans of tech companies at face value and to instead do the discomforting work of facing up to the realities of these plans. The way our streets and cities have been built certainly present a range of very real problems to solve, but in the choice of which problems to address it makes a difference whether the challenges being considered are those facing a minimum-wage worker or a billionaire mogul furious about sitting in traffic. Or, to put it somewhat differently, there are flying cars in the movie Blade Runner, but that does not mean we should attempt to build that world.

Road to Nowhere: Silicon Valley and the Future of Mobility provides a thoughtful analysis and impassioned denunciation of Silicon Valley’s mobility efforts up to this point, and pivots from this consideration of the past and the present to cast doubt on Silicon Valley’s future efforts. Throughout the book, Marx writes with the same punchy eloquence that has made Marx such a lively host of the Tech Won’t Save Us podcast. And while Marx has staked out an important space in the world of contemporary tech critique thanks to that podcast, this book makes it clear that Marx is not only a dynamic interviewer of other critics, but a vital critic in their own right. With its wide-ranging analysis, and clear consideration of the route we find ourselves on unless we change course, Road to Nowhere presents an important read for those concerned with where Silicon Valley is driving us.

The structure of the book provides a clear argument that briskly builds momentum, and even as the chapters focus on certain specific topics they flow seamlessly from one to the next. Having started by providing a quick history of the auto-centric city, and the roots of Silicon Valley’s ideology, Marx’s chapters follow a clear path through mobility issues. If the problem is pollution, why not electric cars? If the problem is individual cars, even electric ones, why not make it easy to summon someone else’s car? If the problem is the treatment of the drivers of those cars, why not cars without drivers? If autonomous vehicles are unrealistic because of already existing infrastructure, why not wholly new infrastructure? If creating wholly new infrastructure (below and above ground) is more difficult than it may seem, what about flooding cities with cheap bikes? Part of what makes Road to Nowhere’s critique of Silicon Valley’s ideas so successful is that Marx does not get bogged down in just one of Silicon Valley’s areas of interest, and instead provides a critique that captures that it is not only a matter of Silicon Valley’s response to this or that problem, but that the issues is the way that Silicon Valley frames problems and envisions solutions. To the extent that the auto-centric world is reflective of a world that was remade in the shape of the automobile, Silicon Valley is currently hard at work attempting to remake the world in its own shape, and as Marx makes clear the needs of Silicon Valley companies and the needs of people trying to get around are not the same.

At the core of Marx’s analysis is a sense that the worldview of Silicon Valley is one that is no longer so easily confined to certain geographical boundaries in California. As the tech companies have been permitted to present themselves as the shiny saviors of society, that ideology has often overwhelmed faith in democratic solutions. Marx notes that “as the neoliberal political system gave up on bold policies in favor of managing a worsening status quo, they left the door open to techno-utopians to fill the void” (5). When people no longer believe that a democratic society can even maintain the bridges and roads, it opens up a space in which tech companies can drive into town and announce an ambitious project to remake the roads. Marx further argues, “too often, governments stand back and allow the tech industry to roll out whatever ideas its executives and engineers can dream up,” this belief if undergirded by a sense that “whatever tech companies want is inevitable…and that neither governments, traditional companies, nor even the public should stand in their way” (178). Part of the danger of this sense of inevitability is that it cedes the future of mobility to the tech companies, robbing the municipalities both of initiative and of the responsibility to meet the mobility needs of the people who live there. Granted, as the many failures Marx documents show, just because a tech company says that it will do something does not necessarily mean that it will be able to do it.

Published by Verso Books and written in a clear comprehensive voice, Road to Nowhere stands as an intervention into broad discussions about the future of mobility, particularly those currently taking place on the political left. Thus, even as many readers are likely to cheer at Marx’s skewering of Musk, it is likely that many of those same readers will chafe at the book’s refusal to treat electric cars as a solution. Sure, it’s one thing to lambast Elon Musk (and by extension Tesla), but to critique electric cars as such? Here Marx makes it very clear that we cannot be taken in by too neat techno-fixes, whether they are touted by a specific company (such as Tesla), or whether they are made about a certain class of technologies (electric cars). As Marx makes clear, all of the minerals in those electric cars come from somewhere, and what’s more the issues that we face (in terms of mobility and environmental ones) are not simply the result of one particular technology (such as the gas-powered car) but the way in which we have built our societies around certain technologies and the infrastructure that those technologies require. Therefore, the matter of mobility is about which questions we are willing to ask, and recognizing that we need to be asking a different set of questions.

Road to Nowhere is at its best when Marx does this work by moving past the particular tech companies to consider the deeper matters of the underlying technologies. Certainly, readers of the book will find plenty of consideration of Tesla and Uber (alongside their famous leaders), but the strength of Road to Nowhere is that the book does not act as though the problem is simply Tesla or Uber. Rather, Marx considers the way in which the problem forces us to think about automobiles themselves, about the long history of automobiles, and about the ways in which so much physical infrastructure has been built to prioritize the use of automobiles. This is, obviously, not to give Uber or Tesla a pass—but Marx does the essential work of emphasizing that this isn’t just about a handful of tech companies and their bombastic CEOs, this is a question about the ways in which societies orient themselves around particular sets of technologies. And Marx’s response is not a call for a return to some romanticized pastoral landscape, but is instead an argument in favor of placing the needs of people above the needs of technologies (and the people selling those technologies). Much of our built environment has been constructed around the automobile, what if we started building that environment around the needs of the human being?

The challenge of what it would mean to construct our cities around the needs of people, rather than the needs of profit (or the needs of machines), is not a new question. And while Marx briefly considers some past figures who have wrestled with this matter—such as Jane Jacobs and Murray Bookchin—it might have been worthwhile to spend a little more time engaging more fully with past critics. At risk of becoming too much of a caricature of myself as a reviewer, it does seem like an unfortunate missed opportunity in a book about technology and cities not to engage with the prominent technological critic Lewis Mumford whose oeuvre includes numerous books specifically on the topic of technology and cities (he won the National Book Award for his volume The City in History). And these matters of cities, speed, and vehicles have been topics with which many other critics of technology engaged in the twentieth century. Indeed, the rise of the auto-centric society has had its critics all along the way, and it could have been fascinating to engage with more of those figures. Marx certainly makes a strong case for the ways in which Silicon Valley’s designs on the city are informed by its particular ideology, but engaging more closely with earlier critics of technology could have opened up other spaces for considering broader problems about ideologies surrounding technology that predate Silicon Valley. Of course, it is unfair to criticize an author for the book they did not write, and the intention is not to take away from Marx’s important book—but contemporary criticism of technology has much to gain not just from the history of technology but from the history of technological criticism.

Road to Nowhere is a challenging book in the best sense of that word, for it discomforts the reader and pushes them to see the world around them in a new light. Marx achieves this particularly well by refusing to be taken in by easy solutions, and by recognizing that even as techno-fixes may be the standard offering from Silicon Valley, that a belief in such fixes permeates beyond just the pitches by tech firms. Nevertheless, Marx is also clear in recognizing that even as many of our problems flow from and have been exacerbated by technology, that technology needs to be seen as part of the solution. And here, Marx is deft at considering the way in which technology represents a much more robust and wide-ranging category than the too simplistic version that it is often reduced to when conversations turn to “tech.” Thus, the matter is nothing so ridiculous as conversations about being “pro-technology” or “anti-technology” but recognizing “that technology is not the primary driver in creating fairer and more equitable cities and transportation systems” what is necessary is “deeper and more fundamental change to give people more power over the decision that are made about their communities” (8). The matter is not just about technology (as such), but about the value systems embedded in particular sorts of technologies, and recognizing that certain sets of technologies are going to be better for achieving particular social goals. After all, “the technologies unleashed by Silicon Valley are not neutral,” (179) though the same is also very much true of the technologies that were unleashed before Silicon Valley. Constructing a different world thus requires us to consider not only how we can remake that world, but how we can remake our technologies. As Marx wonderfully puts it, “when we assume that technology can only develop in one way, we accept the power of the people who control that process, but there is no guarantee that their ideal world is one that truly works for everyone” (179).

You can learn a lot about your society’s relationship to technology by looking at its streets. And Road to Nowhere is a powerful reminder, that those streets do not have to look the way they do, and that we have a role to play in determining what future those streets are taking us towards.

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Zachary Loeb earned his MSIS from the University of Texas at Austin, an MA from the Media, Culture, and Communications department at NYU, and is currently a PhD candidate in the History and Sociology of Science department at the University of Pennsylvania. Loeb works at the intersection of the history of technology and disaster studies, and his research focusses on the ways that complex technological systems amplify risk, as well as the history of technological doom-saying. He is working on a dissertation on Y2K. Loeb writes at the blog Librarianshipwreck, and is a frequent contributor to The b2o Review Digital Studies section.

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August 1, 2022
A Space of Poetry: An Interview With Douglas Messerli

Read A Space of Poetry: An Interview With Douglas Messerli. This interview was conducted by Martin Nakell [March-June 2022].

Also see the boundary 2 special issue on Charles Bernstein (volume 48, issue 4); and, Douglas Messerli’s poems “Carried Away” (boundary 2: volume 14, issue 1/2) and “Scared Cows” (boundary 2: volume 26, issue 1).

July 25, 2022
Zachary Loeb — Is Big Data the Message? (Review of Natasha Lushetich, ed., Big Data—A New Medium?)

a review of Natasha Lushetich, ed. Big Data—A New Medium? (Routledge, 2021)

by Zachary Loeb

When discussing the digital, conversations can quickly shift towards talk of quantity. Just how many images are being uploaded every hour, how many meticulously monitored purchases are being made on a particular e-commerce platform every day, how many vehicles are being booked through a ride-sharing app at 3 p.m. on Tuesday afternoon, how many people are streaming how many shows/movies/albums at any given time? The specific answer to the “how much?” and “how many?” will obviously vary depending upon the rest of the question, yet if one wanted to give a general response across these questions it would likely be fair to answer with some version of “a heck of a lot.” Yet from this flows another, perhaps more complicated and significant question, namely: given the massive amount of information being generated by seemingly every online activity, where does all of that information actually go, and how is that information rendered usable and useful? To this the simple answer may be “big data,” but this in turn just serves to raise the question of what we mean by “big data.”

“Big data” denotes the point at which data begins to be talked about in terms of scale, not merely gigabytes but zettabytes. And, to be clear, a zettabyte represents a trillion gigabytes—and big data is dealing with zettabytes, plural. Beyond the sheer scale of the quantity in question, considering big data “as process and product” involves a consideration of “the seven Vs: volume” (the amount of data previously generated and newly generated), “variety” (the various sorts of data being generated), “velocity” (the highly accelerated rate at which data is being generated), “variability” (the range of types of information that make up big data), “visualization” (how this data can be visually represented to a user), “value” (how much all of that data is worth, especially once it can be processed in a useful way), and “veracity” (3) (the reliability, trustworthiness, and authenticity of the data being generated). In addition to these “seven Vs” there are also the “three Hs: high dimension, high complexity, and high uncertainty” (3). Granted, “many of these terms remain debatable” (3). Big data is both “process and product” (3), its applications vary from undergirding the sorts of real-time analysis that makes it possible to detect viral outbreaks as they are happening to the directions app that is able to suggest an alternative route before you hit traffic to the recommendation software (be it banal or nefarious) that forecast future behavior based on past actions.

To the extent that discussions around the digital generally focus on the end(s) results of big data, the means remain fairly occluded both from public view and from many of the discussants. And while big data has largely been accepted as an essential aspect of our digital lives by some, for many others it remains highly fraught.

As Natasha Lushetich notes, “in the arts and (digital) humanities…the use of big data remains a contentious issue not only because data architectures are increasingly determining classificatory systems in the educational, social, and medical realms, but because they reduce political and ethical questions to technical management” (4). And it is this contentiousness that is at the heart of Lushetich’s edited volume Big Data—A New Medium? (Routledge, 2021). Drawing together scholars from a variety of different disciplines ranging across “the arts and (digital) humanities,” this book moves beyond an analysis of what big data is to a complex considerations of what big data could be (and may be in the process of currently becoming). In engaging with the perils and potentialities of big data, the book (as its title suggests) wrestles with the question as to whether or not big data can be seen as constituting “a new medium.” Through engaging with big data as a medium, the contributors to the volume grapple not only with how big data “conjugates human existence” but also how it “(re)articulates time, space, the material and immaterial world, the knowable and the unknowable; how it navigates or alters, hierarchies of importance” and how it “enhances, obsolesces, retrieves and pushes to the limits of potentiality” (8). Across four sections, the contributors grapple with big data in terms of knowledge and time, use and extraction, cultural heritage and memory, as well as people.

“Patterning Knowledge and Time” begins with a chapter by Ingrid M. Hoofd that places big data in the broader trajectory of the university’s attempt to make the whole of the world knowable. Considering how “big data renders its object of analysis simultaneously more unknowable (or superficial) and more knowable (or deep)” (18), Hoofd’s chapter examines how big data replicates and reinforces the ways in which that which becomes legitimated as knowable are the very things that can be known through the university’s (and big data’s) techniques. Following Hoofd, Franco “Bifo” Berardi provocatively engages with the power embedded in big data, treating it as an attempt to assert computerized control over a chaotic future by forcing it into a predictable model. Here big data is treated as a potential constraint wherein “the future is no longer a possibility, but the implementation of a logical necessity inscribed in the present” (43), as participation in society becomes bound up with making one’s self and one’s actions legible and analyzable to the very systems that enclose one’s future horizons. Shifting towards the visual and the environmental, Abelardo Gil-Fournier and Jussi Parikka consider the interweaving of images and environments and how data impacts this. As Gil-Fournier and Parikka explore, as a result of developments in machine learning and computer vision “meteorological changes” are increasingly “not only observable but also predictable as images” (56).

The second part of the book, “Patterning Use and Existence” starts with Btihaj Ajana reflecting on the ways in which “surveillance technologies are now embedded in our everyday products and services” (64). By juxtaposing the biometric control of refugees with the quantified-self movement, Ajana explores the datafication of society and the differences (as well as similarities) between willing participation and forced participation in regimes of surveillance of the self. Highlighting a range of well-known gig-economy platforms (such as Uber, Deliveroo, and Amazon Mechanical Turk), Tim Christaens examines the ways that “the speed of the platform’s algorithms exceeds the capacities of human bodies” (81). While offering a thorough critique of the inhuman speed imposed by gig economy platforms/algorithms, Christaens also offers a hopeful argument for the possibility that by making their software open source some of these gig platforms could “become a vehicle for social emancipation instead of machinic subjugation” (90). While aesthetic and artistic considerations appear in earlier chapters, Lonce Wyse’s chapter pushes fully into this area through looking at the ways that deep learning systems create the sorts of works of art “that, when recognized in humans, are thought of as creative” (95). Wyse provides a rich, and yet succinct, examination of how these systems function while highlighting the sorts of patterns that emerge (sometimes accidentally) in the process of training these systems.

At the outset of the book’s third section, “Patterning cultural heritage and memory,” Craig J. Saper approaches the magazine The Smart Set as an object of analysis and proceeds to zoom in and zoom out to reveal what is revealed and what is obfuscated at different scales. Highlighting that “one cannot arbitrarily discount or dismiss particular types of data, big or intimate, or approaches to reading, distant or close” Saper’s chapter demonstrates how “all scales carry intellectual weight” (124). Moving away from the academic and the artist, Nicola Horsley’s chapter reckons with the work of archivists and the ways in which their intellectual labor and the tasks of their profession have been challenged by digital shifts. While archival training teaches archivists that “the historical record, on which collective memory is based, is a process not a product” (140) and in interacting with researchers archivists seek to convey that lesson, Horsley’s considers the ways in which the shift away from the physical archive and towards the digital archive (wherein a researcher may never directly interact with an archivist or librarian) means this “process” risks going unseen. From the archive to the work of art, Natasha Lushetich and Masaki Fujihata’s chapter explores Fujihata’s project BeHere: The Past in the Present and how augmented reality opens up the space for new artistic experience and challenges how individual memory is constructed. Through its engagement with “images obtained through data processing and digital frottage” the BeHere project reveals “new configurations of machinically (rather than humanly) perceived existents” and thus can “shed light on that which eludes the (naked) human eye” (151).

The fourth and final section of the volume, begins with Dominic Smith’s exploration of the aesthetics of big data. While referring back to the “Seven Vs” of big data, Smith argues that to imagine big data as a “new medium” requires considering “how we make sense of data” in regards to both “how we produce it” and “how we perceive it” (164). A matter which Smith explores through an analysis of “surfaces and depths” of oceanic images. Though big data is closely connected with sheer scale (hence the “big”), Mitra Azar observes that “it is never enough as it is always possible to generate new data and make more comprehensive data sets” (180). Tangling with this in a visual registry, Azar contrasts the cinematic point of view with that of the big data enabled “data double” of the individual (which is meant to stand in for that user). Considering several of his own artistic installations—Babel, Dark Matter, and Heteropticon—Simon Biggs examines the ways in which big data reveals “the everyday and trivial and how it offers insights into the dense ambient noise that is our daily lives” (192). In contrast to treating big data as a revelator of the sublime, Biggs discusses big data’s capacity to show “the infra-ordinary” and to show the value of seemingly banal daily details. The book concludes with Warren Neidich’s speculative gaze to what the future of big data might portend, couched in a belief that “we are at the beginning of a transition from knowledge-based economics to a neural or brain-based economy” (207). Surveying current big data technologies and the trajectories they may suggest, Neidich forecasts “a gradual accumulation of telepathic technocueticals” such that “at some moment a critical point might be reached when telepathy could become a necessary skill for successful adaptation…similar to being able to read in today’s society” (218).

In the introduction to the book, Natasha Lushetich grounds the discussion in a recognition that “it is also important to ask how big data (re)articulates time, space, the material and immaterial world, the knowable and the unknowable; how it navigates or alters, hierarchies of importance” (8), and over the course of this fascinating and challenging volume, the many contributors do just that.

***

The term big data captures the way in which massive troves of digitally sourced information are made legible and understandable. Yet one of the challenges of discussing big data is trying to figure out a way to make big data itself legible and understandable. In discussions around the digital, big data is often gestured at rather obliquely as the way to explain a lot of mysterious technological activity in the background. We may not find ourselves capable, for a variety of reasons, of prying open the various black boxes of a host of different digital systems but stamped in large letters on the outside of that box are the words “big data.” When shopping online or using a particular app, a user may be aware that the information being gathered from their activities is feeding into big data and that the recommendations being promoted to them come courtesy of the same. Or they may be obliquely aware that there is some sort of connection between the mystery shrouded algorithms and big data. Or the very evocation of “big” when twinned with a recognition of surveillance technologies may serve as a discomforting reminder of “big brother.” Or “big data” might simply sound like a non-existent episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation in which Lieutenant Commander Data is somehow turned into a giant. All of which is to say, that though big data is not a new matter, the question of how to think about it (which is not the same as how to use and be used by it) remains a challenging issue.

With Big Data—A New Medium?, Natasha Lushetich has assembled an impressive group of thinkers to engage with big data in a novel way. By raising the question of big data as “a new medium,” the contributors shift the discussion away from considerations focused on surveillance and algorithms to wrestle with the ways that big data might be similar and distinct from other mediums. While this shift does not represent a rejection, or move to ignore, the important matters related to issues like surveillance, the focus on big data as a medium raises a different set of questions. What are the aesthetics of big data? As a medium what are the affordances of big data? And what does it mean for other mediums that in the digital era so many of those mediums are themselves being subsumed by big data? After all, so many of the older mediums that theorists have grown so accustomed to discussing have undergone some not insignificant changes as a result of big data. And yet to engage with big data as a medium also opens up a potential space for engaging with big data that does not treat it as being wholly captured and controlled by large tech firms.

The contributors to the volume do not seem to be fully in agreement with one another about whether big data represents poison or panacea, but the chapters are clearly speaking to one another instead of shouting over each other. There are certainly some contributions to the book, notably Berardi’s, with its evocation of a “new century suspended between two opposite polarities: chaos and automaton” (44), that seem a bit more pessimistic. While other contributors, such as Christaens, engage with the unsavory realities of contemporary data gathering regimes but envision the ways that these can be repurposed to serve users instead of large companies. And such optimistic and pessimistic assessments come up against multiple contributions that eschew such positive/negative framings in favor of an artistically minded aesthetic engagement with what it means to treat big data as a medium for the creation of works of art. Taken together, the chapters in the book provide a wide-ranging assessment of big data, one which is grounded in larger discussions around matters such as surveillance and algorithmic bias, but which pushes readers to think of big data beyond those established frameworks.

As an edited volume, one of the major strengths of Big Data—A New Medium? is the way it brings together perspectives from such a variety of fields and specialties. As part of Routledge’s “studies in science, technology, and society” series, the volume demonstrates the sort of interdisciplinary mixing that makes STS such a vital space for discussions of the digital. Granted, this very interdisciplinary richness can serve to be as much benefit as burden, as some readers will wish there had been slightly more representation of their particular subfield, or wish that the particular scholarly techniques of a particular discipline had seen greater use. Case in point: Horsley’s contribution will be of great interest to those approaching this book from the world of libraries and archives (and information schools more generally), and some of those same readers will wish that other chapters in the book had been equally attentive to the work done by archive professionals. Similarly those who approach the book from fields more grounded in historical techniques may wish that more of the authors had spent more time engaging with “how we got here” instead of focusing so heavily on the exploration of the present and the possible future. Of course, these are always the challenges with edited interdisciplinary volumes, and it is a major credit to Lushetich as an editor that this volume provides readers from so many different backgrounds with so much to mull over. Beyond presenting numerous perspectives on the titular question, the book is also an invitation to artists and academics to join in discussion about that titular question.

Those who are broadly interested in discussions around big data will find much in this volume of significance, and will likely find their own thinking pushed in novel directions. That being said, this book will likely be most productively read by those who are already somewhat conversant in debates around big data/the digital humanities/the arts/and STS more generally. While contributors are consistently careful in clearly defining their terms and referencing the theorists from whom they are drawing, from Benjamin to Foucault to Baudrillard to Marx to Deleuze and Guattari (to name but a few), the contributors to this book couch much of their commentary in theory, and a reader of this volume will be best able to engage with these chapters if they have at least some passing familiarity with those theorists themselves. Many of the contributors to this volume are also clearly engaging with arguments made by Shoshana Zuboff in Surveillance Capitalism and this book can be very productively read as critique and complement to Zuboff’s tome. Academics in and around STS, and artists who incorporate the digital into their practice, will find that this book makes a worthwhile intervention into current discourse around big data. And though the book seems to assume a fairly academically engaged readership, this book will certainly work well in graduate seminars (or advanced undergraduate classrooms)—many of the chapter will stand quite well on their own, though much of the book’s strength is in the way the chapters work in tandem.

One of the claims that is frequently made about big data is that—for better or worse—it will allow us to see the world from a fresh perspective. And what Big Data—A New Medium? does is allow us to see big data itself from a fresh perspective.

_____

Zachary Loeb earned his MSIS from the University of Texas at Austin, an MA from the Media, Culture, and Communications department at NYU, and is currently a PhD candidate in the History and Sociology of Science department at the University of Pennsylvania. Loeb works at the intersection of the history of technology and disaster studies, and his research focusses on the ways that complex technological systems amplify risk, as well as the history of technological doom-saying. He is working on a dissertation on Y2K. Loeb writes at the blog Librarianshipwreck, and is a frequent contributor to The b2o Review Digital Studies section.

Back to the essay

June 9, 2022
David Gerard — Creationism on the Blockchain (review of George Gilder, Life After Google)
a review of George Gilder, Life After Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy (Regnery, 2018)

by David Gerard

George Gilder is most famous as a conservative author and speechwriter. He also knows his stuff about technology, and has a few things to say.

But what he has to say about blockchain in his book Life After Google is rambling, ill-connected and unconvincing — and falls prey to the fixed points in his thinking.

Gilder predicts that the Google and Silicon Valley approach — big data, machine learning, artificial intelligence, not charging users per transaction — is failing to scale, and will collapse under its own contradictions.

The Silicon Valley giants will be replaced by a world built around cryptocurrency, blockchains, sound money … and the obsolescence of philosophical materialism — the theory that thought and consciousness needs only physical reality. That last one turns out to be Gilder’s main point.

At his best, as in his 1990 book Life After Television, Gilder explains consequences following from historical materialism — Marx and Engels’ theory that historical events emerge from economic developments and changes to the mode of production — to a conservative readership enamoured with the obsolete Great Man theory of history.

(That said, Gilder sure does love his Great Men. Men specifically.)

Life After Google purports to be about material forces that follow directly from technology. Gilder then mixes in his religious beliefs as, literally, claims about mathematics.

Gilder has a vastly better understanding of technology than most pop science writers. If Gilder talks tech, you should listen. He did a heck of a lot of work on getting out there and talking to experts for this book.

But Gilder never quite makes his case that blockchains are the solutions to the problems he presents — he just presents the existence of blockchains, then talks as if they’ll obviously solve everything.

Blockchains promise Gilder comfort in certainty: “The new era will move beyond Markov chains of disconnected probabilistic states to blockchain hashes of history and futurity, trust and truth,” apparently.

The book was recommended to me by a conservative friend, who sent me a link to an interview with Gilder on the Hoover Institution’s Uncommon Knowledge podcast. My first thought was “another sad victim of blockchain white papers.” You see this a lot — people tremendously excited by blockchain’s fabulous promises, with no idea that none of this stuff works or can work.

Gilder’s particular errors are more interesting. And — given his real technical expertise — less forgivable.

Despite its many structural issues — the book seems to have been left in dire need of proper editing — Life After Google was a hit with conservatives. Peter Thiel is a noteworthy fan. So we may need to pay attention. Fortunately, I’ve read it so you don’t have to.

About the Author

Gilder is fêted in conservative circles. His 1981 book Wealth and Poverty was a favourite of supply-side economics proponents in the Reagan era. He owned conservative magazine The American Spectator from 2000 to 2002.

Gilder is frequently claimed to have been Ronald Reagan’s favourite living author — mainly in his own publicity: “According to a study of presidential speeches, Mr. Gilder was President Reagan’s most frequently quoted living author.”

I tried tracking down this claim — and all citations I could find trace back to just one article: “The Gilder Effect” by Larissa MacFarquhar, in The New Yorker, 29 May 2000.

The claim is one sentence in passing: “It is no accident that Gilder — scourge of feminists, unrepentant supply-sider, and now, at sixty, a technology prophet — was the living author Reagan most often quoted.” The claim isn’t substantiated further in the New Yorker article — it reads like the journalist was told this and just put it in for colour.

Gilder despises feminism, and has described himself as “America’s number-one antifeminist.” He has written two books — Sexual Suicide, updated as Men and Marriage, and Naked Nomads — on this topic alone.

Also, per Gilder, Native American culture collapsed because it’s “a corrupt and unsuccessful culture,” as is Black culture — and not because of, e.g., massive systemic racism.

Gilder believes the biological theory of evolution is wrong. He co-founded the Discovery Institute in 1990, as an offshoot of the Hudson Institute. The Discovery Institute started out with papers on economic issues, but rapidly pivoted to promoting “intelligent design” — the claim that all living creatures were designed by “a rational agent,” and not evolved through natural processes. It’s a fancy term for creationism.

Gilder insisted for years that the Discovery Institute’s promotion of intelligent design totally wasn’t religious — even as judges ruled that intelligent design in schools was promotion of religion. Unfortunately for Gilder, we have the smoking gun documents showing that the Discovery Institute was explicitly trying to push religion into schools — the leaked Wedge Strategy document literally says: “Design theory promises to reverse the stifling dominance of the materialist worldview, and to replace it with a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions.”

Gilder’s politics are approximately the polar opposite of mine. But the problems I had with Life After Google are problems his fans have also had. Real Clear Markets‘ review is a typical example — it’s from the conservative media sphere and written by a huge Gilder fan, and he’s very disappointed at how badly the book makes its case for blockchain.

Gilder’s still worth taking seriously on tech, because he’s got a past record of insight — particularly his 1990s books Life After Television and Telecosm.

Life After Television

Life After Television: The Coming Transformation of Media and American Life is why people take Gilder seriously as a technology pundit. First published in 1990, it was expanded in 1992 and again in 1994.

The book predicts television’s replacement with computers on networks — the downfall of the top-down system of television broadcasting and the cultural hegemony it implies. “A new age of individualism is coming, and it will bring an eruption of culture unprecedented in human history.” Gilder does pretty well — his 1990 vision of working from home is a snapshot of 2020, complete with your boss on Zoom.

You could say this was obvious to anyone paying attention — Gilder’s thesis rests on technology that had already shown itself capable of supporting the future he spelt out — but not a lot of people in the mainstream were paying attention, and the industry was in blank denial. Even Wired, a few years later, was mostly still just terribly excited that the Internet was coming at all.

Life After Television talks way more about the fall of the television industry than the coming future network. In the present decade, it’s best read as a historical record of past visions of the astounding future.

If you remember the first two or three years of Wired magazine, that’s the world Gilder’s writing from. Gilder mentored Wired and executive editor Kevin Kelly in its first few years, and appeared on the cover of the March 1996 edition. Journalist and author Paulina Borsook detailed Gilder’s involvement in Wired in her classic 2000 book Cyberselfish: A Critical Romp through the Terribly Libertarian Culture of High Tech, (also see an earlier article of the same name in Mother Jones) which critiques his politics including his gender politics at length, noting that “Gilder worshipped entrepreneurs and inventors and appeared to have found God in a microchip” (132-3) and describing “a phallus worship he has in common with Ayn Rand” (143).

The only issue I have with Gilder’s cultural predictions in Life After Television is that he doesn’t mention the future network’s negative side-effects — which is a glaring miss in a world where E. M. Forster predicted social media and some of its effects in The Machine Stops in 1909.

The 1994 edition of Life After Television goes in quite a bit harder than the 1990 edition. The book doesn’t say “Internet,” doesn’t mention the Linux computer operating system — which was already starting to be a game-changer — and only says “worldwide web” in the sense of “the global ganglion of computers and cables, the new worldwide web of glass and light.” (p23) But then there’s the occasional blinder of a paragraph, such as his famous prediction of the iPhone and its descendants:

Indeed, the most common personal computer of the next decade will be a digital cellular phone. Called personal digital assistants, among many other coinages, they will be as portable as a watch and as personal as a wallet; they will recognise speech and navigate streets, open the door and start the car, collect the mail and the news and the paycheck, connecting to thousands of databases of all kinds. (p20)

Gilder’s 1996 followup Telecosm is about what unlimited bandwidth would mean. It came just in time for a minor bubble in telecom stocks, because the Internet was just getting popular. Gilder made quite a bit of money in stock-picking, and so did subscribers to his newsletter — everyone’s a financial genius in a bubble. Then that bubble popped, and Gilder and his subscribers lost their shirts. But his main error was just being years early.

So if Gilder talks tech, he’s worth paying attention to. Is he right, wrong, or just early?

Gilder, Bitcoin and Gold

Gilder used to publish through larger generalist publishers. But since around 2000, he’s published through small conservative presses such as Regnery, small conservative think tanks, or his own Discovery Institute. Regnery, the publisher of Life After Google, is functionally a vanity press for the US far right, famous for, among other things, promising to publish a book by US Senator Josh Hawley after Simon & Schuster dropped it due to Hawley’s involvement with the January 6th capital insurrection.

Gilder caught on to Bitcoin around 2014. He told Reason that Bitcoin was “the perfect libertarian solution to the money enigma.”

In 2015, his monograph The 21st Century Case for Gold: A New Information Theory of Money was published by the American Principles Project — a pro-religious conservative think tank that advocates a gold standard and “hard money.”

This earlier book uses Bitcoin as a source of reasons that an economy based on gold could work in the 21st century:

Researches in Bitcoin and other digital currencies have shown that the real source of the value of any money is its authenticity and reliability as a measuring stick of economic activity. A measuring stick cannot be part of what it measures. The theorists of Bitcoin explicitly tied its value to the passage of time, which proceeds relentlessly beyond the reach of central banks.

Gilder drops ideas and catch-phrases from The 21st Century Case for Gold all through Life After Google without explaining himself — he just seems to assume you’re fully up on the Gilder Cinematic Universe. An editor should have caught this — a book needs to work as a stand-alone.

Life After Google’s Theses

The theses of Life After Google are:
- Google and Silicon Valley’s hegemony is bad.
- Google and Silicon Valley do capitalism wrong, and this is why they will collapse from their internal contradictions.
- Blockchain will solve the problems with Silicon Valley.
- Artificial intelligence is impossible, because Gödel, Turing and Shannon proved mathematically that creativity cannot result without human consciousness that comes from God.
This last claim is the real point of the book. Gilder affirmed that this was the book’s point in an interview with WND.

I should note, by the way, that Gödel, Turing and Shannon proved nothing of the sort. Gilder claims repeatedly that they and other mathematicians did, however.

Marxism for Billionaires

Gilder’s objections to Silicon Valley were reasonably mainstream and obvious by 2018. They don’t go much beyond what Clifford Stoll said in Silicon Snake Oil in 1995. And Stoll was speaking to his fellow insiders. (Gilder cites Stoll, though he calls him “Ira Stoll.”) But Gilder finds the points still worth making to his conservative audience, as in this early 2018 Forbes interview:

A lot of people have an incredible longing to reduce human intelligence to some measurable crystallization that can be grasped, calculated, projected and mechanized. I think this is a different dimension of the kind of Silicon Valley delusion that I describe in my upcoming book.

Gilder’s scepticism of Silicon Valley is quite reasonable … though he describes Silicon Valley as having adopted “what can best be described as a neo-Marxist political ideology and technological vision.”

There is no thing, no school of thought, that is properly denoted “neo-Marxism.” In the wild, it’s usually a catch-all for everything the speaker doesn’t like. It’s a boo-word.

Gilder probably realises that it comes across as inane to label the ridiculously successful billionaire and near-trillionaire capitalists of the present day as any form of “Marxist.” He attempts to justify his usage:

Marx’s essential tenet was that in the future, the key problem of economics would become not production amid scarcity but redistribution of abundance.

That’s not really regarded as the key defining point of Marxism by anyone else anywhere. (Maybe Elon Musk, when he’s tweeting words he hasn’t looked up.) I expect the libertarian post-scarcity transhumanists of the Bay Area, heavily funded by Gilder’s friend Peter Thiel, would be disconcerted too.

“Neo-Marxism” doesn’t rate further mention in the book — though Gilder does use the term in the Uncommon Knowledge podcast interview. Y’know, there’s red-baiting to get in.

So — Silicon Valley’s “neo-marxism” sucks. “It is time for a new information architecture for a globally distributed economy. Fortunately, it is on its way.” Can you guess what it is?

You’re Doing Capitalism Wrong

Did you know that Isaac Newton was the first Austrian economist? I didn’t. (I still don’t.)

Gilder doesn’t say this outright. He does speak of Newton’s work in physics, as a “system of the world,” a phrase he confesses to having lifted from Neal Stephenson.

But Gilder is most interested in Newton’s work as Master of the Mint — “Newton’s biographers typically underestimate his achievement in establishing the information theory of money on a firm foundation.”

There is no such thing as “the information theory of money” — this is a Gilder coinage from his 2015 book The 21st Century Case for Gold.

Gilder’s economic ideas aren’t quite Austrian economics, but he’s fond of their jargon, and remains a huge fan of gold:

The failure of his alchemy gave him — and the world — precious knowledge that no rival state or private bank, wielding whatever philosopher’s stone, would succeed in making a better money. For two hundred years, beginning with Newton’s appointment to the Royal Mint in 1696, the pound, based on the chemical irreversibility of gold, was a stable and reliable monetary Polaris.

I’m pretty sure this is not how it happened, and that the ascendancy of Great Britain’s pound sterling had everything to do with it being backed by a world-spanning empire, and not any other factor. But Gilder goes one better:

Fortunately the lineaments of a new system of the world have emerged. It could be said to have been born in early September 1930, when a gold-based Reichsmark was beginning to subdue the gales of hyperinflation that had ravaged Germany since the mid-1920s.

I am unconvinced that this quite explains Germany in the 1930s. The name of an obvious and well-known political figure, who pretty much everyone else considers quite important in discussing Germany in the 1930s, is not mentioned in this book.

The rest of the chapter is a puréed slurry of physics, some actual information theory, a lot of alleged information theory, and Austrian economics jargon, giving the impression that these are all the same thing as far as Gilder is concerned.

Gilder describes what he thinks is Google’s “System of the World” — “The Google theory of knowledge, nicknamed ‘big data,’ is as radical as Newton’s and as intimidating as Newton’s was liberating.” There’s an “AI priesthood” too.

A lot of people were concerned early on about Google-like data sponges. Here’s Gilder on the forces at play:

Google’s idea of progress stems from its technological vision. Newton and his fellows, inspired by their Judeo-Christian world view, unleashed a theory of progress with human creativity and free will at its core. Google must demur.

… Finally, Google proposes, and must propose, an economic standard, a theory of money and value, of transactions and the information they convey, radically opposed to what Newton wrought by giving the world a reliable gold standard.

So Google’s failures include not proposing a gold standard, or perhaps the opposite.

Open source software is also part of this evil Silicon Valley plot — the very concept of open source. Because you don’t pay for each copy. Google is evil for participating in “a cult of the commons (rooted in ‘open source’ software)”.

I can’t find anywhere that Gilder has commented on Richard M. Stallman’s promotion of Free Software, of which “open source” was a business-friendly politics-washed rebranding — but I expect that if he had, the explosion would have been visible from space.

Gilder’s real problem with Google is how the company conducts its capitalism — how it applies creativity to the goal of actually making money. He seems to consider the successful billionaires of our age “neo-Marxist” because they don’t do capitalism the way he thinks they should.

I’m reminded of Bitcoin Austrians — Saifedean Ammous in The Bitcoin Standard is a good example — who argue with the behaviour of the real-life markets, when said markets are so rude as not to follow the script in their heads. Bitcoin maximalists regard Bitcoin as qualitatively unique, unable to be treated in any way like the hodgepodge of other things called “cryptos,” and a separate market of its own.

But the real-life crypto markets treat this as all one big pile of stuff, and trade it all on much the same basis. The market does not care about your ideology, only its own.

Gilder mixes up his issues with the Silicon Valley ideology — the Californian Ideology, or cyberlibertarianism, as it’s variously termed in academia — with a visceral hatred of capitalists who don’t do capitalism his way. He seems to despise the capitalists who don’t do it his way more than he despises people who don’t do capitalism at all.

(Gilder was co-author of the 1994 document “Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age” that spurred Langdon Winner to come up with the term “cyberlibertarianism” in the first place.)

Burning Man is bad because it’s a “commons cult” too. Gilder seems to be partially mapping out the Californian Ideology from the other side.

Gilder is outraged by Google’s lack of attention to security, in multiple senses of the word — customer security, software security, military security. Blockchain will fix all of this — somehow. It just does, okay?

Ads are apparently dying. Google runs on ads — but they’re on their way out. People looking to buy things search on Amazon itself first, then purchase things for money — in the proper businesslike manner.

Gilder doesn’t mention the sizable share of Amazon’s 2018 income that came from sales of advertising on its own platform. Nor does Gilder mention that Amazon’s entire general store business, which he approves of, posted huge losses in 2018, and was subsidised by Amazon’s cash-positive business line, the Amazon Web Services computing cloud.

Gilder visits Google’s data centre in The Dalles, Oregon. He notes that Google embodies Sun Microsystems’ old slogan “The Network is the Computer,” coined by John Gage of Sun in 1984 — though Gilder attributes this insight to Eric Schmidt, later of Google, based on an email that Schmidt sent Gilder when he was at Sun in 1993.

All successful technologies develop on an S-curve, a sigmoid function. They take off, raise in what looks like exponential growth … and then they level off. This is normal and expected. Gilder knows this. Correctly calling the levelling-off stage is good and useful tech punditry.

Gilder notes the siren call temptations of having vastly more computing power than anyone else — then claims that Google will therefore surely fail. Nothing lasts forever; but Gilder doesn’t make the case for his claimed reasons.

Gilder details Google’s scaling problems at length — but at no point addresses blockchains’ scaling problems: a blockchain open to all participants can’t scale and stay fast and secure (the “blockchain trilemma”). I have no idea how he missed this one. If he could see that Google has scaling problems, how could he not even mention that public blockchains have scaling problems?

Gilder has the technical knowledge to be able to understand this is a key question, ask it and answer it. But he just doesn’t.

How would a blockchain system do the jobs presently done by the large companies he’s talking about? What makes Amazon good when Google is bad? The mere act of selling goods? Gilder resorts entirely to extrapolation from axioms, and never bothers with the step where you’d expect him to compare his results to the real world. Why would any of this work?

Gilder is fascinated by the use of Markov chains to statistically predict the next element of a series: “By every measure, the most widespread, immense, and influential of Markov chains today is Google’s foundational algorithm, PageRank, which encompasses the petabyte reaches of the entire World Wide Web.”

Gilder interviews Robert Mercer — the billionaire whose Mercer Family Foundation helped bankroll Trump, Bannon, Brexit, and those parts of the alt-right that Peter Thiel didn’t fund.

Mercer started as a computer scientist. He made his money on Markov-related algorithms for financial trading — automating tiny trades that made no human sense, only statistical sense.

This offends Gilder’s sensibilities:

This is the financial counterpart of Markov models at Google translating languages with no knowledge of them. Believing as I do in the centrality of knowledge and learning in capitalism, I found this fact of life and leverage absurd. If no new knowledge was generated, no real wealth was created. As Peter Drucker said, ‘It is less important to do things right than to do the right things.’

Gilder is faced with a stupendously successful man, whose ideologies he largely concurs with, and who’s won hugely at capitalism — “Mercer and his consort of superstar scholars have, mutatis mutandis, excelled everyone else in the history of finance” — but in a way that is jarringly at odds with his own deeply-held beliefs.

Gilder believes Mercer’s system, like Google’s, “is based on big data that will face diminishing returns. It is founded on frequencies of trading that fail to correspond to any real economic activity.”

Gilder holds that it’s significant that Mercer’s model can’t last forever. But this is hardly a revelation — nothing lasts forever, and especially not an edge in the market. It’s the curse of hedge funds that any process that exploits inefficiencies will run out of other people’s inefficiencies in a few years, as the rest of the market catches on. Gilder doesn’t make the case that Mercer’s trick will fail any faster than it would be expected to just by being an edge in a market.

Ten Laws of the Cryptocosm

Chapter 5 is “Ten Laws of the Cryptocosm”. These aren’t from anywhere else — Gilder just made them up for this book.

“Cryptocosm” is a variant on Gilder’s earlier coinage “Telecosm,” the title of his 1996 book.

Blockchain spectators should be able to spot the magical foreshadowing term in rule four:

The fourth rule is “Nothing is free. This rule is fundamental to human dignity and worth. Capitalism requires companies to serve their customers and to accept their proof of work, which is money. Banishing money, companies devalue their customers.

Rules six and nine are straight out of The Bitcoin Standard:

The sixth rule: ‘Stable money endows humans with dignity and control.’ Stable money reflects the scarcity of time. Without stable money, an economy is governed only by time and power.

The ninth rule is ‘Private keys are held by individual human beings, not by governments or Google.’ … Ownership of private keys distributes power.

In a later chapter, Gilder critiques The Bitcoin Standard, which he broadly approves of.

Gödel’s Incompetence Theorem

Purveyors of pseudoscience frequently drop the word “quantum” or “chaos theory” to back their woo-mongering in areas that aren’t physics or mathematics. There’s a strain of doing the same thing with Gödel’s incompleteness theorems to make remarkable claims in areas that aren’t maths.

What Kurt Gödel actually said was that if you use logic to build your mathematical theorems, you have a simple choice: either your system is incomplete, meaning you can’t prove every statement that is true, and you can’t know which of the unproven statements are true — or you introduce internal contradictions. So you can have holes in your maths, or you can be wrong.

Gödel’s incompleteness theorems had a huge impact on the philosophy of mathematics. They seriously affected Bertrand Russell’s work on the logicism programme, to model all of mathematics as formal logic, and caused issues for Hilbert’s second problem, which sought a proof that arithmetic is consistent — that is, free of any internal contradictions.

It’s important to note that Gödel’s theorems only apply in a particular technical sense, to particular very specific mathematical constructs. All the words are mathematical jargon, and not English.

But humans have never been able to resist a good metaphor — so, as with quantum physics, chaos theory and Turing completeness, people seized upon “Gödel” and ran off in all directions.

One particular fascination was what the theorems meant for the idea of philosophical materialism — whether interesting creatures like humans could really be completely explained by ordinary mathematics-based physics, or if there was something more in there. Gödel himself essayed haltingly in the direction of saying he thought there might be more than physics there — though he was slightly constrained by knowing what the mathematics actually said.

Compare the metaphor abuse surrounding blockchains. Deploy a mundane data structure and a proof-of-work system to determine who adds the next bit of data, and thus provide technically-defined, constrained and limited versions of “trustlessness,” “irreversibility” and “decentralisation.” People saw these words, and attributed their favoured shade of meaning of the plain-language words to anything even roughly descended from the mundane data structure — or that claimed it would be descended from it some time in the future.

Gilder takes Gödel’s incompleteness theorems, adds Claude Shannon on information theory, and mixes in his own religious views. He asserts that the mathematics of Shannon’s information theory and Gödel’s incompleteness theorems prove that creativity can only come from a human consciousness, created by God. Therefore, artificial intelligence is impossible.

This startling conclusion isn’t generally accepted. Torkel Franzén’s excellent Gödel’s Theorem: An Incomplete Guide to Its Use and Abuse, chapter 4, spends several pages bludgeoning variations on this dumb and bad idea to death:

there is no such thing as the formally defined language, the axioms, and the rules of inference of “human thought,” and so it makes no sense to speak of applying the incompleteness theorem to human thought.

If something is not literally a mathematical “formal system,” Gödel doesn’t apply to it.

The free Google searches and the fiat currencies are side issues — what Gilder really loathes is the very concept of artificial intelligence. It offends him.

Gilder leans heavily on the ideas of Gregory Chaitin — one of the few mathematicians with a track record of achievement in information theory who also buys into the idea that Gödel’s incompleteness theorem may disprove philosophical materialism. Of the few people convinced by Chaitin’s arguments, most happen to have matching religious beliefs.

It’s one thing to evaluate technologies according to an ethical framework informed by your religion. It’s quite another to make technological pronouncements directly from your religious views, and to claim mathematical backing for your religious views.

Your Plastic Pal Who’s Fun to Be With

Chapter 7 talks about artificial intelligence, and throwing hardware at the problem of machine learning. But it’s really about Gilder’s loathing of the notion of a general artificial intelligence that would be meaningfully comparable to a human being.

The term “artificial intelligence” has never denoted any particular technology — it’s the compelling science-fictional vision of your plastic pal who’s fun to be with, especially when he’s your unpaid employee. This image has been used through the past few decades to market a wide range of systems that do a small amount of the work a human might otherwise do.

But throughout Life After Google, Gilder conflates the hypothetical concept of human-equivalent general artificial intelligence with the statistical machine learning products that are presently marketed as “artificial intelligence.”

Gilder’s next book, Gaming AI: Why AI Can’t Think but Can Transform Jobs (Discovery Institute, 2020), confuses the two somewhat less — but still hammers on his completely wrong ideas about Gödel.

Gilder ends the chapter with three paragraphs setting out the book’s core thesis:

The current generation in Silicon Valley has yet to come to terms with the findings of von Neumann and Gödel early in the last century or with the breakthroughs in information theory of Claude Shannon, Gregory Chaitin, Anton Kolmogorov, and John R. Pierce. In a series of powerful arguments, Chaitin, the inventor of algorithmic information theory, has translated Gödel into modern terms. When Silicon Valley’s AI theorists push the logic of their case to explosive extremes, they defy the most crucial findings of twentieth-century mathematics and computer science. All logical schemes are incomplete and depend on propositions that they cannot prove. Pushing any logical or mathematical argument to extremes — whether ‘renormalized’ infinities or parallel universe multiplicities — scientists impel it off the cliffs of Gödelian incompleteness.

Chaitin’s ‘mathematics of creativity’ suggests that in order to push the technology forward it will be necessary to transcend the deterministic mathematical logic that pervades existing computers. Anything deterministic prohibits the very surprises that define information and reflect real creation. Gödel dictates a mathematics of creativity.

This mathematics will first encounter a major obstacle in the stunning successes of the prevailing system of the world not only in Silicon Valley but also in finance.

There’s a lot to unpack here. (That’s an academic jargon phrase meaning “yikes!”) But fundamentally, Gilder believes that Gödel’s incompleteness theorems mean that artificial intelligence can’t come up with true creativity. Because Gilder is a creationist.

The only place I can find Chaitin using a phrase akin to “mathematics of creativity” is in his 2012 book of intelligent design advocacy, Proving Darwin: Making Biology Mathematical, which Gilder cites. Chaitin writes:

To repeat: Life is plastic, creative! How can we build this out of static, perfect mathematics? We shall use postmodern math, the mathematics that comes after Gödel, 1931, and Turing, 1936, open not closed math, the math of creativity, in fact.

Whenever you see Gilder talk about “information theory,” remember that he’s using the special creationist sense of the term — a claim that biological complexity without God pushing it along would require new information being added, and that this is impossible.

Real information theory doesn’t say anything of the sort — the creationist version is a made-up pseudotheory, developed at the Discovery Institute. It’s the abuse of a scientific metaphor to claim that a loose analogy from an unrelated field is a solid scientific claim.

Gilder’s doing the thing that bitcoiners, anarchocapitalists and neoreactionaries do — where they ask a lot of the right questions, but come up with answers that are completely on crack, based on abuse of theories that they didn’t bother understanding.

Chapter 9 is about libertarian transhumanists of the LessWrong tendency, at the 2017 Future Of Life conference on hypothetical future artificial intelligences, hosted by physicist Max Tegmark.

Eliezer Yudkowsky, the founder of LessWrong, isn’t named or quoted, but the concerns are all reheated Yudkowsky: that a human-equivalent general artificial intelligence will have intelligence but not human values, will rapidly increase its intelligence, and thus its power, vastly beyond human levels, and so will doom us all. Therefore, we must program artificial intelligence to have human values — whatever those are.

Yudkowsky is not a programmer, but an amateur philosopher. His charity, the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI), does no programming, and its research outputs are occasional papers in mathematics. Until recently, MIRI was funded by Peter Thiel, but it’s now substantially funded by large Ethereum holders.

Gilder doesn’t buy Yudkowsky’s AI doomsday theory at all — he firmly believes that artificial intelligence cannot form a mind because, uh, Gödel: “The blind spot of AI is that consciousness does not emerge from thought; it is the source of it.”

Gilder doesn’t mention that this is because, as a creationist, he believes that true intelligence lies in souls. But he does say “The materialist superstition is a strange growth in an age of information.” So this chapter turns into an exposition of creationist “information theory”:

This materialist superstition keeps the entire Google generation from understanding mind and creation. Consciousness depends on faith—the ability to act without full knowledge and thus the ability to be surprised and to surprise. A machine by definition lacks consciousness. A machine is part of a determinist order. Lacking surprise or the ability to be surprised, it is self-contained and determined.

That is: Gilder defines consciousness as whatever it is a machine cannot have, therefore a machine cannot achieve consciousness.

Real science shows that the universe is a singularity and thus a creation. Creation is an entropic product of a higher consciousness echoed by human consciousness. This higher consciousness, which throughout human history we have found it convenient to call God, endows human creators with the space to originate surprising things.

You will be unsurprised to hear that “real science” does not say anything like this. But that paragraph is the closest Gilder comes in this book to naming the creationism that drives his outlook.

The roots of nearly a half-century of frustration reach back to the meeting in Königsberg in 1930, where von Neumann met Gödel and launched the computer age by showing that determinist mathematics could not produce creative consciousness.

You will be further unsurprised to hear that von Neumann and Gödel never produced a work saying any such thing.

We’re nine chapters in, a third of the way through the book, and someone from the blockchain world finally shows up — and, indeed, the first appearance of the word “blockchain” in the book at all. Vitalik Buterin, founder of Ethereum and MIRI’s largest individual donor, attends Tegmark’s AI conference: “Buterin succinctly described his company, Ethereum, launched in July 2015, as a ‘blockchain app platform.’”

The blockchain is “an open, distributed, unhackable ledger devised in 2008 by the unknown person (or perhaps group) known as ‘Satoshi Nakamoto’ to support his cryptocurrency, bitcoin.” This is the closest Gilder comes at any point in the book to saying what a blockchain in fact is.

Gilder says the AI guys are ignoring the power of blockchain — but they’ll get theirs, oh yes they will:

Google and its world are looking in the wrong direction. They are actually in jeopardy, not from an all-powerful artificial intelligence, but from a distributed, peer-to-peer revolution supporting human intelligence — the blockchain and new crypto-efflorescence … Google’s security foibles and AI fantasies are unlikely to survive the onslaught of this new generation of cryptocosmic technology.

Gilder asserts later in the book:

They see the advance of automation, machine learning, and artificial intelligence as occupying a limited landscape of human dominance and control that ultimately will be exhausted in a robotic universe — Life 3.0. But Charles Sanders Peirce, Kurt Gödel, Alonzo Church, Alan Turing, Emil Post, and Gregory Chaitin disproved this assumption on the most fundamental level of mathematical logic itself.

These mathematicians still didn’t do any such thing.

Gilder’s forthcoming book Life after Capitalism (Regnery, 2022), with a 2021 National Review essay as a taster, asserts that his favoured mode of capitalism will reassert itself. Its thesis invokes Gilder’s notions of what he thinks information theory says.

How Does Blockchain Do All This?

Gilder has explained the present-day world, and his problems with it. The middle section of the book then goes through several blockchain-related companies and people who catch Gilder’s attention.

It’s around here that we’d expect Gilder to start explaining what the blockchain is, how it works, and precisely how it will break the Google paradigm of big data, machine learning and artificial intelligence — the way he did when talking about the downfall of television.

Gilder doesn’t even bother — he just starts talking about bitcoin and blockchains as Google-beaters, and carries through on the assumption that this is understood.

But he can’t get away with this — he claims to be making a case for the successor to the Google paradigm, a technological case … and he just doesn’t ever do so.

By the end of this section, Gilder seems to think he’s made his point clear that Google is having trouble scaling up — because they don’t charge a micro-payment for each interaction, or something — therefore various blockchain promises will win.

The trouble with this syllogism is that the second part doesn’t follow. Gilder presents blockchain projects he thinks have potential — but that’s all. He makes the first case, and just doesn’t make the second.

Peter Thiel Hates Universities Very Much

Instead, let’s go to the 1517 Fund — “led by venture capitalist-hackers Danielle Strachman and Mike Gibson and partly financed by Peter Thiel.” Gilder is also a founding partner.

Gilder is a massive Thiel fan, calling him “the master investor-philosopher Peter Thiel”:

Thiel is the leading critic of Silicon Valley’s prevailing philosophy of ‘inevitable’ innovation. [Larry] Page, on the other hand, is a machine-learning maximalist who believes that silicon will soon outperform human beings, however you want to define the difference.

Thiel is a fan of Gilder, and Life After Google, in turn.

The 1517 Fund’s name comes from “another historic decentralization” — 31 October 1517 was the day that Martin Luther put up his ninety-five theses on a church door in Wittenberg.

The 1517 team want to take down the government conspiracy of paperwork university credentials, which ties into the fiat-currency-based system of the world. Peter Thiel offers Thiel Fellowships, where he pays young geniuses not to go to college. Vitalik Buterin, founder of Ethereum, got a Thiel Fellowship.

1517 also invests in the artificial intelligence stuff that Gilder derided in the previous section, but let’s never mind that.

The Universidad Francisco Marroquín in Guatemala is a university for Austrian and Chicago School economics. Gilder uses UFM as a launch pad for a rant about US academia, and the 1517 Fund’s “New 95” theses about how much Thiel hates the US university system. Again: they ask some good questions, but their premises are bizarre, and their answers are on crack.

Fictional Evidence

Gilder rambles about author Neal Stephenson, who he’s a massive fan of. The MacGuffin of Stephenson’s 1999 novel Cryptonomicon is a cryptographic currency backed by gold. Stephenson’s REAMDE (2011) is set in a Second Life-style virtual world whose currency is based on gold, and which includes something very like Bitcoin mining:

Like gold standards through most of human history — look it up — T’Rain’s virtual gold standard is an engine of wealth. T’Rain prospers mightily. Even though its money is metafictional, it is in fact more stable than currencies in the real world of floating exchange rates and fiat money.

Thus, fiction proves Austrian economics correct! Because reality certainly doesn’t — which is why Ludwig von Mises repudiated empirical testing of his monetary theories early on.

Is There Anything Bitcoin Can’t Do?

Gilder asserts that “Bitcoin has already fostered thousands of new apps and firms and jobs.” His example is cryptocurrency mining, which is notoriously light on labour requirements. Even as of 2022, the blockchain sector employed 18,000 software developers — or 0.07% of all developers.

“Perhaps someone should be building an ark. Or perhaps bitcoin is our ark — a new monetary covenant containing the seeds of a new system of the world.” I wonder why the story of the ark sprang to his mind.

One chapter is a dialogue, in which Gilder speaks to an imaginary Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin’s pseudonymous creator, about how makework — Bitcoin mining — can possibly create value. “Think of this as a proposed screenplay for a historic docudrama on Satoshi. It is based entirely on recorded posts by Satoshi, interlarded with pleasantries and other expedients characteristic of historical fictions.”

Gilder fingers cryptographer Nick Szabo as the most likely candidate for Bitcoin’s pseudonymous creator, Satoshi Nakamoto — “the answer to three sophisticated textual searches that found Szabo’s prose statistically more akin to Nakomoto’s than that of any other suspected Satoshista.”

In the blockchain world, any amazing headline that would turn the world upside-down were it true is unlikely to be true. Gilder has referenced a CoinDesk article, which references research from Aston University’s Centre for Forensic Linguistics.

I tracked this down to an Aston University press release. The press release does not link to any research outputs — the “study” was an exercise that Jack Grieve at Aston gave his final-year students, then wrote up as a splashy bit of university press-release-ware.

The press release doesn’t make its case either: “Furthermore, the researchers found that the bitcoin whitepaper was drafted using Latex, an open-source document preparation system. Latex is also used by Szabo for all his publications.” LaTeX is used by most computer scientists anywhere for their publications — but the Bitcoin white paper was written in OpenOffice 2.4, not LaTeX.

This press release is still routinely used by lazy writers to claim that Szabo is Satoshi, ’cos they heard that linguistic analysis says so. Gilder could have dived an inch below the surface on this remarkable claim, and just didn’t.

Gilder then spends a chapter on Craig Wright, who — unlike Szabo — claims to be Satoshi. This is based on Andrew O’Hagan’s lengthy biographical piece on Wright, “The Satoshi Affair” for the London Review of Books, reprinted in his book The Secret Life: Three True Stories. This is largely a launch pad for how much better Vitalik Buterin’s ideas are than Wright’s.

Blockstack

We’re now into a list of blockchainy companies that Gilder is impressed with. This chapter introduces Muneeb Ali and his blockchain startup, Blockstack, whose pitch is a parallel internet where you own all your data, in some unspecified sense. Sounds great!

Ali wants a two-layer network: “monolith, the predictable carriers of the blockchain underneath, and metaverse, the inventive and surprising operations of its users above.” So, Ethereum then — a blockchain platform, with applications running on top.

Gilder recites the press release description of Blockstack and what it can do — i.e., might hypothetically do in the astounding future.

Under its new name, Stacks, the system is being used as a platform for CityCoins — local currencies on a blockchain — which was started in the 2021 crypto bubble. MiamiCoin notably collapsed in price a few months after its 2021 launch, and the city only didn’t show a massive loss on the cryptocurrency because Stacks bailed them out on their losses.

Brendan Eich and Brave

Brendan Eich is famous in the technical world as one of the key visionaries behind the Netscape web browser, the Mozilla Foundation, and the Firefox web browser, and as the inventor of the JavaScript programming language.

Eich is most famous in the non-technical world for his 2008 donation to Proposition 8, to make gay marriage against the California constitution. This donation came to light in 2012, and made international press at the time.

Techies can get away with believing the most awful things, as long as they stay locked away in their basement — but Eich was made CEO of Mozilla in 2014, and somehow the board thought the donation against gay marriage wouldn’t immediately become 100% of the story.

One programmer, whose own marriage had been directly messed up by Proposition 8, said he couldn’t in good conscience keep working on Firefox-related projects — and this started a worldwide boycott of Mozilla and Firefox. Eich refused to walk back his donation in any manner — though he did promise not to actively seek to violate California discrimination law in the course of his work at Mozilla, so that’s nice — and quit a few weeks later.

Eich went off to found Brave, a new web browser that promises to solve the Internet advertising problem using Basic Attention Tokens, a token that promises a decentralised future for paying publishers that is only slightly 100% centralised in all functional respects.

Gilder uses Eich mostly to launch into a paean to Initial Coin Offerings — specifically, in their rôle as unregistered penny stock offerings. Gilder approves of ICOs bypassing regulation, and doesn’t even mention how the area was suffused with fraud, nor the scarcity of ICOs that delivered on any of their promises. The ICO market collapsed after multiple SEC actions against these blatant securities frauds.

Gilder also approves of Brave’s promise to combat Google’s advertising monopoly, by, er, replacing Google’s ads with Brave’s own ads.

Goodbye Digital

Dan Berninger’s internet phone startup Hello Digital is, or was, an enterprise so insignificant it isn’t in the first twenty companies returned by a Google search on “hello digital”. Gilder loves it.

Berninger’s startup idea involved end-to-end non-neutral precedence for Hello Digital’s data. And the US’s net neutrality rules apparently preclude this. Berninger sued the FCC to make it possible to set up high-precedence private clearways for Hello Digital’s data on the public Internet.

This turns out to be Berninger’s suit against the FCC to protest “net neutrality” — on which the Supreme Court denied certiorari in December 2018.

Somehow, Skype and many other applications managed enormously successful voice-over-internet a decade previously on a data-neutral Internet. But these other systems “fail to take advantage of the spontaneous convergence of interests on particular websites. They provide no additional sources of revenue for Web pages with independent content. And they fail to add the magic of high-definition voice.” Apparently, all of this requires proprietary clearways for such data on the public network? Huge if true.

Gilder brings up 5G mobile Internet. I think it’s supposed to be in Google’s interests? Therefore it must be bad. Nothing blockchainy here, this chapter’s just “Google bad, regulation bad”.

The Empire Strikes Back

Old world big money guys — Jamie Dimon, Warren Buffett, Charlie Munger, Paul Krugman — say Bitcoin is trash. Gilder maintains that this is good news for Bitcoin.

Blockchain fans and critics — and nobody else — will have seen Kai Stinchcombe’s blog post of December 2017, “Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain.” Stinchcombe points out that “after years of tireless effort and billions of dollars invested, nobody has actually come up with a use for the blockchain — besides currency speculation and illegal transactions.” It’s a good post, and you should read it.

Gilder spends an entire chapter on this blog post. Some guy who wrote a blog post is a mid-level boss in this book.

Gilder concedes that Stinchcombe’s points are hard to argue with. But Stinchcome merely being, you know, right, is irrelevant — because, astounding future!

Stinchcombe writes from the womb of the incumbent financial establishment, which has recently crippled world capitalism with a ten-year global recession.

One day a bitcoiner will come up with an argument that isn’t “but what about those other guys” — but today is not that day.

At Last, We Escape

We’ve made it to the last chapter. Gilder summarises how great the blockchain future will be:

The revolution in cryptography has caused a great unbundling of the roles of money, promising to reverse the doldrums of the Google Age, which has been an epoch of bundling together, aggregating, all the digital assets of the world.

Gilder confidently asserts ongoing present-day processes that are not, here in tawdry reality, happening:

Companies are abandoning hierarchy and pursuing heterarchy because, as the Tapscotts put it, ‘blockchain technology offers a credible and effective means not only of cutting out intermediaries, but also of radically lowering transaction costs, turning firms into networks, distributing economic power, and enabling both wealth creation and a more prosperous future.’

If you read Don and Alex Tapscott’s Blockchain Revolution (Random House, 2016), you’ll see that they too fail to demonstrate any of these claims in the existing present rather than the astounding future. Instead, the Tapscotts spend several hundred pages talking about how great it’s all going to be potentially, and only note blockchain’s severe technical limitations in passing at the very end of the book.

We finish with some stirring blockchain triumphalism:

Most important, the crypto movement led by bitcoin has reasserted the principle of scarcity, unveiling the fallacy of the prodigal free goods and free money of the Google era. Made obsolete will be all the lavish Google prodigies given away and Google mines and minuses promoted as ads, as well as Google Minds fantasizing superminds in conscious machines.

Bitcoin promoters routinely tout “scarcity” as a key advantage of their Internet magic beans — ignoring, as Gilder consistently does, that anyone can create a whole new magical Internet money by cut’n’paste, and they do. Austrian economics advocates had noted that issue ever since it started happening with altcoins in the early 2010s.

The Google era is coming to an end because Google tries to cheat the constraints of economic scarcity and security by making its goods and services free. Google’s Free World is a way of brazenly defying the centrality of time in economics and reaching beyond the wallets of its customers directly to seize their time.

The only ways in which the Google era has been shown to be “coming to an end” is that their technologies are reaching the tops of their S-curves. This absolutely counts as an end point as Gilder describes technological innovation, and he might even be right that Google’s era is ending — but his claimed reasons have just been asserted, and not at all shown.

By reestablishing the connections between computation, finance, and AI on the inexorable metrics of time and space, the great unbundling of the blockchain movement can restore economic reality.

The word “can” is doing all the work there. It was nine years at this book’s publication, and thirteen years now, and there’s a visible lack of progress on this front.

Everything will apparently decentralise naturally, because at last it can:

Disaggregated will be all the GAFAM (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft conglomerates) — the clouds of concentrated computing and commerce.

The trouble with this claim is that the whole crypto and blockchain middleman infrastructure is full of monopolies, rentiers and central points of failure — because centralisation is always more economically efficient than decentralisation.

We see recentralisation over and over. Bitcoin mining recentralised by 2014. Ethereum mining was always even more centralised than Bitcoin mining, and almost all practical use of Ethereum has long been dependent on ConsenSys’ proprietary Infura network. “Decentralisation” has always been a legal excuse to say “can’t sue me, bro,” and not any sort of operational reality.

Gilder concludes:

The final test is whether the new regime serves the human mind and consciousness. The measure of all artificial intelligence is the human mind. It is low-power, distributed globally, low-latency in proximity to its environment, inexorably bounded in time and space, and creative in the image of its creator.

Gilder wants you to know that he really, really hates the idea of artificial intelligence, for religious reasons.

Epilogue: The New System of the World

Gilder tries virtual reality goggles and likes them: “Virtual reality is the opposite of artificial intelligence, which tries to enhance learning by machines. Virtual reality asserts the primacy of mind over matter. It is founded on the singularity of human minds rather than a spurious singularity of machines.”

There’s a bit of murky restating of his theses: “The opposite of memoryless Markov chains is blockchains.” I’m unconvinced this sentence is any less meaningless with the entire book as context.

And Another Thing!

“Some Terms of Art and Information for Life after Google” at the end of the book isn’t a glossary — it’s a section for idiosyncratic assertions without justification that Gilder couldn’t fit in elsewhere, e.g.:

Chaitin’s Law: Gregory Chaitin, inventor of algorithmic information theory, ordains that you cannot use static, eternal, perfect mathematics to model dynamic creative life. Determinist math traps the mathematician in a mechanical process that cannot yield innovation or surprise, learning or life. You need to transcend the Newtonian mathematics of physics and adopt post-modern mathematics — the mathematics that follows Gödel (1931) and Turing (1936), the mathematics of creativity.

There doesn’t appear to be such a thing as “Chaitin’s Law” — all Google hits on the term are quotes of Gilder’s book.

Gilder also uses this section for claims that only make sense if you already buy into the jargon of goldbug economics that failed out in the real world:

Economic growth: Learning tested by falsifiability or possible bankruptcy. This understanding of economic growth follows from Karl Popper’s insight that a scientific proposition must be framed in terms that are falsifiable or refutable. Government guarantees prevent learning and thus thwart economic growth.

Summary

Gilder is sharp as a tack in interviews. I can only hope to be that sharp when I’m seventy-nine. But Life After Google fails in important ways — ways that Regnery bothering to bless the book with an editorial axe might have remedied. Gilder should have known better, in so many directions, and so should Regnery.

Gilder keeps making technological and mathematical claims based directly on his religious beliefs. This does none of his other ideas any favours.

Gilder is sincere. (Apart from that time he was busted lying about intelligent design not being intended to promote religion.) I think Gilder really does believe that Gödel’s incompleteness theorems and Shannon’s information theory, as further developed by Chaitin, mathematically prove that intelligence requires the hand of God. He just doesn’t show it, and nor has anyone else — particularly not any of the names he drops.

This book will not inform you as to the future of the blockchain. It’s worse than typical ill-informed blockchain advocacy text, because Gilder’s track record means we expect more of him. Gilder misses key points he has no excuse for missing.

The book may be of use in its rôle as some of what’s informing the technically incoherent blockchain dreams of billionaires. But it’s a slog.

Those interested in blockchain — for or against — aren’t going to get anything useful from this book. Bitcoin advocates may see new avenues and memes for evangelism. Gilder fans appear disappointed so far.

_____

David Gerard is a writer, technologist, and leading critic of bitcoin and blockchain. He is the author of Attack of the 50-Foot Blockchain: Bitcoin, Blockchain, Ethereum and Smart Contracts (2017) and Libra Shrugged: How Facebook Tried to Take Over the Money (2020), and blogs at https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/.

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April 29, 2022
Alexander R. Galloway — Big Bro (Review of Wendy Hui Kyun Chun, Discriminating Data Correlation, Neighborhoods, and the New Politics of Recognition)

a review of Wendy Hui Kyun Chun, Discriminating Data Correlation, Neighborhoods, and the New Politics of Recognition (MIT Press, 2021)

by Alexander R. Galloway

I remember snickering when Chris Anderson announced “The End of Theory” in 2008. Writing in Wired magazine, Anderson claimed that the structure of knowledge had inverted. It wasn’t that models and principles revealed the facts of the world, but the reverse, that the data of the world spoke their truth unassisted. Given that data were already correlated, Anderson argued, what mattered was to extract existing structures of meaning, not to pursue some deeper cause. Anderson’s simple conclusion was that “correlation supersedes causation…correlation is enough.”

This hypothesis — that correlation is enough — is the thorny little nexus at the heart of Wendy Chun’s new book, Discriminating D ata. Chun’s topic is data analytics, a hard target that she tackles with technical sophistication and rhetorical flair. Focusing on data-driven tech like social media, search, consumer tracking, AI, and many other things, her task is to exhume the prehistory of correlation, and to show that the new epistemology of correlation is not liberating at all, but instead a kind of curse recalling the worst ghosts of the modern age. As Chun concludes, even amid the precarious fluidity of hyper-capitalism, power operates through likeness, similarity, and correlated identity.

While interleaved with a number of divergent polemics throughout, the book focuses on four main themes: correlation, discrimination, authentication, and recognition. Chun deals with these four as general problems in society and culture, but also interestingly as specific scientific techniques. For instance correlation has a particular mathematical meaning, as well as a philosophical one. Discrimination is a social pathology but it’s also integral to discrete rationality. I appreciated Chun’s attention to details large and small; she’s writing about big ideas — essence, identity, love and hate, what does it mean to live together? — but she’s also engaging directly with statistics, probability, clustering algorithms, and all the minutia of data science.

In crude terms, Chun rejects the — how best to call it — the “anarcho-materialist” turn in theory, typified by someone like Gilles Deleuze, where disciplinary power gave way to distributed rhizomes, schizophrenic subjects, and irrepressible lines of flight. Chun’s theory of power isn’t so much about tessellated tapestries of desiring machines as it is the more strictly structuralist concerns of norm and discipline, sovereign and subject, dominant and subdominant. Big tech is the mechanism through which power operates today, Chun argues. And today’s power is racist, misogynist, repressive, and exclusionary. Power doesn’t incite desire so much as stifle and discipline it. In other words George Orwell’s old grey-state villain, Big Brother, never vanished. He just migrated into a new villain, Big Bro, embodied by tech billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg or Larry Page.

But what are the origins of this new kind of data-driven power? The reader learns that correlation and homophily, or “the notion that birds of a feather naturally flock together” (23), not only subtend contemporary social media platforms like Facebook, but were in fact originally developed by eugenicists like Francis Galton and Karl Pearson. “British eugenicists developed correlation and linear regression” (59), Chun notes dryly, before reminding us that these two techniques are at the core of today’s data science. “When correlation works, it does so by making the present and future coincide with a highly curated past” (52). Or as she puts it insightfully elsewhere, data science doesn’t so much anticipate the future, but predict the past.

If correlation (pairing two or more pieces of data) is the first step of this new epistemological regime, it is quickly followed by some additional steps. After correlation comes discrimination, where correlated data are separated from other data (and indeed internally separated from themselves). This entails the introduction of a norm. Discriminated data are not simply data that have been paired, but measurements plotted along an axis of comparison. One data point may fall within a normal distribution, while another strays outside the norm within a zone of anomaly. Here Chun focuses on “homophily” (love of the same), writing that homophily “introduces normativity within a supposedly nonnormative system” (96).

The third and fourth moments in Chun’s structural condition, tagged as “authenticity” and “recognition,” complete the narrative. Once groups are defined via discrimination, they are authenticated as a positive group identity, then ultimately recognized, or we could say self-recognized, by reversing the outward-facing discriminatory force into an inward-facing act of identification. It’s a complex libidinal economy that Chun patiently elaborates over four long chapters, linking these structural moments to specific technologies and techniques such as Bayes’ theorem, clustering algorithms, and facial recognition technology.

A number of potential paths emerge in the wake of Chun’s work on correlation, which we will briefly mention in passing. One path would be toward Shane Denson’s recent volume, Discorrelated Images, on the loss of correlated experience in media aesthetics. Another would be to collide Chun’s critique of correlation in data science with Quentin Meillassoux’s critique of correlation in philosophy, notwithstanding the significant differences between their two projects.

Correlation, discrimination, authentication, and recognition are the manifest contents of the book as it unfolds page by page. At the same time Chun puts forward a few meta arguments that span the text as a whole. The first is about difference and the second is about history. In both, Chun reveals herself as a metaphysician and moralist of the highest order.

First Chun picks up a refrain familiar to feminism and anti-racist theory, that of erasure, forgetting, and ignorance. Marginalized people are erased from the archive; women are silenced; a subject’s embodiment is ignored. Chun offers an appealing catch phrase for this operation, “hopeful ignorance.” Many people in power hope that by ignoring difference they can overcome it. Or as Chun puts it, they “assume that the best way to fight abuse and oppression is by ignoring difference and discrimination” (2). Indeed this posture has been central to political liberalism for a long time, in for instance John Rawls’ derivation of justice via a “veil of ignorance.” For Chun the attempt to find an unmarked category of subjectivity — through that frequently contested pronoun “we” — will perforce erase and exclude those structurally denied access to the universal. “[John Perry] Barlow’s ‘we’ erased so many people,” Chun noted in dismay. “McLuhan’s ‘we’ excludes most of humanity” (9, 15). This is the primary crime for Chun, forgetting or ignoring the racialized and gendered body. (In her last book, Updating to Remain the Same, Chun reprinted a parody of a well-known New Yorker cartoon bearing the caption “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” The posture of ignorance, of “nobody knowing,” was thoroughly critiqued by Chun in that book, even as it continues to be defended by liberals).

Yet if the first crime against difference is to forget the mark, the second crime is to enforce it, to mince and chop people into segregated groups. After all, data is designed to discriminate, as Chun takes the better part of her book to elaborate. These are engines of difference and it’s no coincidence that Charles Babbage called his early calculating machine a “Difference Engine.” Data is designed to segregate, to cluster, to group, to split and mark people into micro identities. We might label this “bad” difference. Bad difference is when the naturally occurring multiplicity of the world is canalized into clans and cliques, leveraged for the machinations of power rather than the real experience of people.

To complete the triad, Chun has proposed a kind of “good” difference. For Chun authentic life is rooted in difference, often found through marginalized experience. Her muse is “a world that resonates with and in difference” (3). She writes about “the needs and concerns of black women” (49). She attends to “those whom the archive seeks to forget” (237). Good difference is intersectional. Good difference attends to identity politics and the complexities of collective experience.

Bad, bad, good — this is a triad, but not a dialectical one. Begin with 1) the bad tech posture of ignoring difference; followed by 2) the worse tech posture of specifying difference in granular detail; contrasted with 3) a good life that “resonates with and in difference.” I say “not dialectical” because the triad documents difference changing position rather than the position of difference changing (to paraphrase Catherine Malabou from her book on Changing Difference). Is bad difference resolved by good difference? How to tell the difference? For this reason I suggest we consider Discriminating Data as a moral tale — although I suspect Chun would balk at that adjective — because everything hinges on a difference between the good and the bad.

Chun’s argument about good and bad difference is related to an argument about history, revealed through what she terms the “Transgressive Hypothesis.” I was captivated by this section of the book. It connects to a number of debates happening today in both theory and culture at large. Her argument about history has two distinct waves, and, following the contradictory convolutions of history, the second wave reverses and inverts the first.

Loosely inspired by Michel Foucault’s Repressive Hypothesis, Chun’s Transgressive Hypothesis initially describes a shift in society and culture roughly coinciding with the Baby Boom generation in the late Twentieth Century. Let’s call it the 1968 mindset. Reacting to the oppressions of patriarchy, the grey-state threats of centralized bureaucracy, and the totalitarian menace of “Nazi eugenics and Stalinism,” liberation was found through “‘authentic transgression’” via “individualism and rebellion” (76). This was the time of the alternative, of the outsider, of the nonconformist, of the anti-authoritarian, the time of “thinking different.” Here being “alt” meant being left, albeit a new kind of left.

Chun summons a familiar reference to make her point: the Apple Macintosh advertisement from 1984 directed by Ridley Scott, in which a scary Big Brother is dethroned by a colorful lady jogger brandishing a sledge hammer. “Resist, resist, resist,” was how Chun put the mantra. “To transgress…was to be free” (76). Join the resistance, unplug, blow your mind on red pills. Indeed the existential choice from The Matrix — blue pill for a life of slavery mollified by ignorance, red pill for enlightenment and militancy tempered by mortal danger — acts as a refrain throughout Chun’s book. In sum the Transgressive Hypothesis “equated democracy with nonnormative structures and behaviors” (76). To live a good life was to transgress.

But this all changed in 1984, or thereabouts. Chun describes a “reverse hegemony” — a lovely phrase that she uses only twice — where “complaints against the ‘mainstream’ have become ‘mainstreamed’” (242). Power operates through reverse hegemony, she claims, “The point is never to be a ‘normie’ even as you form a norm” (34). These are the consequences of the rise of neoliberalism, fake corporate multiculturalism, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher but even more so Bill Clinton and Tony Blaire. Think postfordism and postmodernism. Think long tails and the multiplicity of the digital economy. Think woke -washing at CIA and Spike Lee shilling cryptocurrency. Think Hypernormalization, New Spirit of Capitalism, Theory of the Young Girl, To Live and Think Like Pigs. Complaints against the mainstream have become mainstreamed. And if power today has shifted “left,” then — Reverse Hegemony Brain go brrr — resistance to power shifts “right.” A generation ago the Q Shaman would have been a leftwing nut nattering about the Kennedy assassination. But today he’s a right wing nut (alas still nattering about the Kennedy assassination).

“Red pill toxicity” (29) is how Chun characterizes the responses to this new topsy-turvy world of reverse hegemony. (To be sure, she’s only the latest critic weighing in on the history of the present; other well-known accounts include Angela Nagle’s 2017 book Kill All Normies, and Mark Fisher’s notorious 2013 essay “Exiting the Vampire Castle.”) And if libs, hippies, and anarchists had become the new dominant, the election of Donald Trump showed that “populism, paranoia, polarization” (77) could also reemerge as a kind of throwback to the worst political ideologies of the Twentieth Century. With Trump the revolutions of history — ironically, unstoppably — return to where they began, in “the totalitarian world view” (77).

In other words these self-styled rebels never actually disrupted anything, according to Chun. At best they used disruption as a kind of ideological distraction for the same kinds of disciplinary management structures that have existed since time immemorial. And if Foucault showed that nineteenth-century repression also entailed an incitement to discourse, Chun describes how twentieth-century transgression also entailed a novel form of management. Before it was “you thought you were repressed but in fact you’re endlessly sublating and expressing.” Now it’s “you thought you were a rebel but disruption is a standard tactic of the Professional Managerial Class.” Or as Jacques Lacan said in response to some young agitators in his seminar, vous voulez un maître, vous l’aurez. Slavoj Žižek’s rendering, slightly embellished, best captures the gist: “As hysterics, you demand a new master. You will get it!”

I doubt Chun would embrace the word “hysteric,” a term indelibly marked by misogyny, but I wish she would, since hysteria is crucial to her Transgressive Hypothesis. In psychoanalysis, the hysteric is the one who refuses authority, endlessly and irrationally. And bless them for that; we need more hysterics in these dark times. Yet the lesson from Lacan and Žižek is not so much that the hysteric will conjure up a new master out of thin air. In a certain sense, the lesson is the reverse, that the Big Other doesn’t exist, that Big Brother himself is a kind of hysteric, that power is the very power that refuses power.

This position makes sense, but not completely. As a recovering Deleuzian, I am indelibly marked by a kind of antinomian political theory that defines power as already heterogenous, unlawful, multiple, anarchic, and material. However I am also persuaded by Chun’s more classical posture, where power is a question of sovereign fiat, homogeneity, the central and the singular, the violence of the arche, which works through enclosure, normalization, and discipline. Faced with this type of power, Chun’s conclusion is, if I can compress a hefty book into a single writ, that difference will save us from normalization. In other words, while Chun is critical of the Transgressive Hypothesis, she ends up favoring the Big-Brother theory of power, where authentic alternatives escape repressive norms.

I’ll admit it’s a seductive story. Who doesn’t want to believe in outsiders and heroes winning against oppressive villains? And the story is especially appropriate for the themes of Discriminating Data: data science of course entails norms and deviations; but also, in a less obvious way, data science inherits the old anxieties of skeptical empiricism, where the desire to make a general claim is always undercut by an inability to ground generality.

Yet I suspect her political posture relies a bit too heavily on the first half of the Transgressive Hypothesis, the 1984 narrative of difference contra norm, even as she acknowledges the second half of the narrative where difference became a revanchist weapon for big tech (to say nothing of difference as a bonafide management style). This leads to some interesting inconsistencies. For instance Chun notes that Apple’s 1984 hammer thrower is a white woman disrupting an audience of white men. But she doesn’t say much else about her being a woman, or about the rainbow flag that ends the commercial. The Transgressive Hypothesis might be the quintessential tech bro narrative but it’s also the narrative of feminism, queerness, and the new left more generally. Chun avoids claiming that feminism failed; but she’s also savvy enough to avoid saying that it succeeded. And if Sadie Plant once wrote that “c ybernetics is feminization,” for Chun it’s not so clear. According to Chun the cybernetic age of computers, data, and ubiquitous networks still orients around structures of normalization: masculine, white, straight, affluent and able-bodied. Resistant to such regimes of normativity, Chun must nevertheless invent a way to resist those who were resisting normativity.

Regardless, for Chun the conclusion is clear: these hysterics got their new master. If not immediately they got it eventually, via the advent of Web 2.0 and the new kind of data-centric capitalism invented in the early 2000s. Correlation isn’t enough — and that’s the reason why. Correlation means the forming of a general relation, if only the most minimal generality of two paired data points. And, worse, correlation’s generality will always derive from past power and organization rather than from a reimagining of the present. Hence correlation for Chun is a type of structural pessimism, in that it will necessarily erase and exclude those denied access to the general relation.

Characterized by a narrative poignancy and an attention to the ideological conditions of everyday life, Chun highlights alternative relations that could hopefully replace the pessimism of correlation. Such alternatives might take the form of a “potential history” or a “critical fabulation,” phrases borrowed from Ariella Azoulay and Saidiya Hartman, respectively. For Azoulay potential history means to “‘give an account of diverse worlds that persist’”; for Hartman, critical fabulation means “to see beyond numbers and sources” (79). A slim offering covering a few pages, nevertheless these references to Azoulay and Hartman indicate an appealing alternative for Chun, and she ends her book where it began, with an eloquent call to acknowledge “a world that resonates with and in difference.”

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Alexander R. Galloway is a writer and computer programmer working on issues in philosophy, technology, and theories of mediation. Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University, he is author of several books and dozens of articles on digital media and critical theory, including Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization (MIT, 2006), Gaming: Essays in Algorithmic Culture (University of Minnesota, 2006); The Interface Effect (Polity, 2012), Laruelle: Against the Digital (University of Minnesota, 2014), and most recently, Uncomputable: Play and Politics in the Long Digital Age (Verso, 2021).

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January 10, 2022
Hannah Zeavin — Glasses for the Voice (Review of Jonathan Sterne, Diminished Faculties: A Political Phenomenology of Impairment)

a review of Jonathan Sterne, Diminished Faculties: A Political Phenomenology of Impairment (Duke UP, 2022)

by Hannah Zeavin

Somewhere between 500,000 and over 1 million Americans, and many more people worldwide, are now living with some form of post-viral symptomatology from COVID-19—or “Long COVID.” In a pandemic first and pervasively represented by elderly death or “mild” cases no worse than the flu, there are, in reality, three true outcomes after contracting the virus, one of which includes long-term illness, impairment, and disability. These “long haulers” are discovering what disability activists have long known and fought against: accommodation and access are not readily forthcoming, insurance is a nightmare, and people of color and women are much less likely to have their symptoms taken seriously enough to lead to a medical diagnosis. And medical diagnosis, if received, is fraught, too. If 1 in 4 Americans is already disabled, we have been and continue to be living through what some are calling a mass disabling event, akin to a war. This situation is not limited to the circulation of a virus and its aftermath in individual persons and bodies; it extends to the conditions past and present that have produced its lethality: capitalism and its attendants, including medical redlining, environmental racism, settler-colonialism.

Jonathan Sterne’s Diminished Faculties: A Political Phenomenology of Impairment arrives then just in time to complicate that history via the experience of impairment (as well as its kin experiences and identities, illness and disability). As Sterne writes, “The semantic ambiguity among impairment, disability, and illness remains a constitutive feature of all three categories. They move through the same space and bump into one another, sometimes overlapping, sometimes repelling. All three are conditioned by a divergence from medical or social norms. All three are conditioned by an ideology of ability and a preference for ability and health.” Sterne’s book doesn’t just map the experiences of impairment, he also troubles the binary of disabled and able body/mind. By thinking about impairment and faculties, Sterne upends our received notion that we, somehow, are in control of our senses (or our minds, our limbs). Instead, some forms of impairment are accepted, even become norms, while others present as problems. Sterne’s book is about many kinds of impairment, and their intersections in subjects who are understood to be normative nonetheless or even because they’re impaired; what we think of as normal (gradual hearing loss as we work, listen to music, age) versus what is marked off as different and constitutes an unquestioned disability (e.g., childhood deafness following viral illness).

Early in the book, Sterne quotes the disability studies adage, “you will someday join us.” This definitive book is also Sterne’s personal story of living in the matrixes of illness, impairment, and disability, in the materiality of their experience as well as the cultures that contain and produce those experiences. Rather than presenting a work at the end of learning, deleting all the traces of theorization up until the point of arrival, Sterne fully tells the story of how he “joined”: from study groups to blog posts, across changes in understanding and bodily experience. Diminished Faculties therefore provides a rigorous, moving account of the experience of the normal and the pathological, the accounted-for body both disabled and abled, and the one shoved to the margins. Sterne also offers his reader the account of impairment via a political phenomenology grounded in his own story while moving slowly and responsibly beyond it to reconceive impairment theory as a theory of labor, of media, and fundamentally, of political experience.

Sterne is a preeminent voice in Media Studies, and the author of The Audible Past (Duke UP, 2003) and MP3: The Meaning of a Format (Duke UP, 2012). Diminished Faculties is his first book in nearly a decade, the third in a series of works that have shaped and reshaped sound studies, and the first to center his own history.

While in this way, Diminished Faculties is moving beyond his previous books to auto-theory, If The Audible Past begins with the “Hello” of the telephone, Diminished Faculties takes on another, amplified greeting. In 2009, Sterne was diagnosed with an aggressive case of thyroid cancer; the surgery to remove his tumor (the size of a pomegranate, as demonstrated in a drawing from S. Lochlann Jain) paralyzed one of his two vocal cords. Normal vocal cord functioning looks like, as Sterne puts it elsewhere “a monkey crashing cymbals”; a normative voice depends on that coordinated cooperation between halves. And as he tells us, his voice may sound better, whatever that really means, to his listener (smokey and rich) on one of his worst days. But Sterne also talks for a living—teaching and delivering research-and his voice blows out, he gets exhausted. As Sterne began vocal therapy, he started to use a personal amplification device that hangs from his neck, which he has termed his “dork-o-phone.” Staying with the example of what gets made visible as impairment, Sterne tells the story of someone coming to a house party, pointing to his chest and saying, “What the fuck is that?” Sterne replies: “Glasses for my voice.” This book tries, in part, to account for this importunate reaction, reconciling a moment of surprise or frustration or intolerance with the fact that impairment is everywhere, and tracking what that reaction does to the subject who is marked as other. As Sterne writes, “Think of all the moving parts in that scenario: a subject whose body cannot match its will; but also auditors struggling to align themselves with whatever techniques the speaker is using. Everyone is trying; nobody is quite succeeding.”

This is one way of naming the book’s method: “think of all the moving parts.” Each of its chapters weaves disability studies, auto-theory, history of science, and media history, turning the levels up or down on any particular input and frame. Diminished Faculties ushers the reader through these interlinked hermeneutics toward a redescription of impairment in the long 20^th century.

The first chapter, “Degrees of Muteness,” offers a deep consideration of the uses of phenomenology, and its methods for describing experience, centered on Sterne’s diagnosis, surgery, and its aftermath. As Sterne writes, “this book begins with consciousness of unconsciousness (or is it unconsciousness of consciousness?)” Here he also introduces a media theory of acquired impairment, arguing that, “the concept of impairment is itself also a media concept. The contemporary concept of normal hearing emerged out of the idea of communication impairments and from a very specific time and place.” He moves from this study of a phenomenology of impairment into its deployment, to consider his own voice, or voices v (spoken, amplified, written, authorial). Via his personal amplification device, which he has named the “dork-o-phone,” Sterne takes this object to think with to give us a history and experience of assistive technology and design as it interacts with other infrastructures.

Sterne then moves from political phenomenology to breaking the normative form of a book by inserting the written guide for an imaginary exhibition “In Search of New Vocalities.” The exhibition is accessible, designed for bodies coming from places imaginary and real, an act of care in the scene of art going, if only in the mind. The tone of the book shifts once more for the concluding two chapters towards something more familiar from Sterne’s earlier books, here centered more squarely in STS and Disability studies.

Chapter four is a theorization of Sterne’s identification of “aural scarification” and what he calls normal impairments. In this chapter, Sterne joins recent accounts of the built environment—and here he focuses on our sonic environment—that argue that disability itself reveals aspects of society that hurt everyone, however unevenly. Sara Hendren’s What Can a Body Do? (Riverhead, 2020) shows how the curb on the sidewalk, for example, makes city infrastructures impassable for wheelchair users—but also say, mothers pushing strollers, travelers with suitcases, skateboarders and so on. Add a curb cut and suddenly movement is much more possible in urban spaces for many—not just the conventionally disabled. On the other hand, sometimes access for disabled users is granted almost by accident. Sterne provides another example: closed captioning. Initially, closed captioning was resisted by major broadcast networks precisely because it was expensive and obtrusive—and would only help a small minority. Then other spaces changed and hearing users needed to be able to see what they would otherwise listen to, in airport bars, in hospital waiting rooms, at the gym. Suddenly, D/deaf users got the captions they needed—but only because abled users wanted the same technology. Sterne calls this “crip washing”; the scholar and critic Mara Mills calls this an “assistive pretext.”

Sterne adds to this account that we live in a physical world that is in fact designed for people who are a little bit hearing impaired. Our entire infrastructure is loud: airplanes, bathroom hand dryers, music, whether live or in ear buds. Sterne shows that it is better not to hear perfectly and we hear less well because we interact with this environment; being alive leads to impairment even if we start without it (“you will someday join us”). Throughout Diminished Faculties, Sterne troubles the binary of disabled and abled body/mind by putting disability into a constellation with impairment and illness. By thinking about impairment and faculties, Sterne argues that some forms of impairment are accepted, even become norms, while others are marked as problems, which separates it as a term even as it overlaps with disability. What then is an impairment if we expect it, if it is normal, and it can be disappeared through design? Why are other impairments made visible through these same processes? Considering impairment and disability as a norm is a revision that Sterne requires of his reader, broadening our working understanding of the built environment.

The concluding chapter of the book offers a deft theory and history of fatigue and rest. Opening with theorizations of how we manage fatigue in relation to labor, from Taylorism to energy quantified by “spoons” as theorized by Christine Miserandino, Sterne moves his account of fatigue through and beyond a depletion model. He asks whether we can think of fatigue as something other than a loss, a depletion of energy? He argues that rather than a lack of energy, fatigue is a presence. Sterne reminds his reader throughout that fatigue is so difficult to capture phenomenologically precisely because if it is too overtly present, he couldn’t write it down, if not present enough, he could not articulate the experience of fatigue from within. In this moment, Sterne returns to political phenomenology—including its limits. There are certain experiences, extreme fatigue being one of them—that are sometimes simply not accessible in the moment of writing.

Impairment and fatigue are both concepts from media and the mediation of the body in society, and here are richly positioned within a history of technology and from disability studies. The two commingle, as Sterne deftly shows, to produce our lived experience of body in situ. Along the way, Sterne gives us additional experiences: an account of himself, an exhibition, and a theory to use (and a manual for how we might do it), turn to account, and even dispose of. Diminished Faculties is a lyric, genre-bending book, that is forcefully argued, rendered beautifully, and will open the path for further research. It is deeply generous both to reader and future scholar, as Sterne’s work always is. But additionally, this is a book that so many have needed, and need now, a way of situating the present emergency in a much longer, political history.

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Hannah Zeavin teaches in the History and English Departments at UC Berkeley. She is the author of The Distance Cure: A History of Teletherapy (2021, MIT Press). Other work is forthcoming or out from differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, Dissent, The Guardian, n+1, Technology & Culture, and elsewhere.

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December 11, 2021